Criminal lineups use drivers’ photos. “Ever been in a criminal lineup?
Maybe you haven’t, but the picture on your driver’s license might have, and could be in the future.
Legislation to restrict law enforcement’s use of face-recognition technology shed new light Tuesday on the practice, which surprised many people.
Law enforcement routinely scans the state’s driver’s license photographs to find look-alikes for criminal photo lineups.” Denver Post
Slyck is a compendium of news from the P2P filesharing universe… [via Red Rock Eaters]
Family resemblance may be in eyes of beholder: “Perceptions that a child resembles a parent may be based on an assumption the two are genetically related rather than a strong similarity in features, Italian researchers report.” Reuters Health In my family we have known this ever since we adopted our daughter four years ago…
I’m apparently a “net snowboarder”, a “minuteman of the digital revolution”. MIT Tech Review
The secret contingency plan for the use of nuclear weapons against at least seven nations — Russia, China, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Syria and Libya — in some battlefield situations is the most alarming and enraging evidence of the Dr. Strangelove mentality loose in the Bush dysadministration.
The secret report, which was provided to Congress on Jan. 8, says the Pentagon needs to be prepared to use nuclear weapons against China, Russia, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya and Syria. It says the weapons could be used in three types of situations: against targets able to withstand nonnuclear attack; in retaliation for attack with nuclear, biological or chemical weapons; or “in the event of surprising military developments.” LA Times
Even more than the national missile defense plan against which I’ve been railing since Bush forces took the White House, this indicates that there are no longer any inhibitions against first use of nuclear weapons and ‘thinking the unthinkable’ — crossing the line from maintaining a nuclear arsenal only as a deterrent, paradoxically for the sole purpose of assuring it would never be used, to actually considering the use of nuclear weapons acceptable in some, any, circumstances. What is important is that the American people understand the significance of this fundamental shift and make an informed decision about whether they want to continue to be governed by a cabal of nuclear blackmailers. Organized ways of disseminating the outrage and alarm of people who share my concern are desperately necessary. I have wondered if the weblogging community could be an instrumental part of such a hue and cry.
A March 2002 Wired article last month (which won’t be available online until March 12th) had both comforted and worried me on the nuclear warfighting score already. The article began by noting that the technical knowledge about designing, building and maintaining working nuclear weapons was disappearing as a generation of weapons scientists and engineers retired. Much of their knowledge has never been written down but only passed by word of mouth; and no actual weapons tests (only computer simulations) have been run since the Nuclear Test Ban treaty. But, sadly, a new set of training programs at Lawrence Livermore, Sandia and Dugway to preserve and expand on the knowledge is graduating its first class, mentored by some of the earlier generation before they depart. These Young Republican physicists seem to have a particular interest in designing — and finding a way to test again — usable tactical and low-yield battlefield nuclear weapons. In tandem with this is an attempt to build a computerized database linking all the scattered secrets relating to nuclear weapons development. Now of course I don’t advocate anything illegal here, but it would seem to me that it would be difficult to blame some macho hacker who thought that disrupting this database would be a particularly difficult and righteous challenge…
Getting serious online: A new study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project concludes that, ” As Americans gain experience, they use the web more at work, write emails with more significant content, perform more online transactions, and pursue more serious activities.”
Social Network Explorer version of FmH; try it out.
In my common book, I include without attribution the sort-of-bumper-sticker-and-teeshirt-aphorism “Dance like no one’s watching, and love like it’s never gonna hurt.” A friend of mine checking out my site noticed, and wrote to tell me it’s from a 1988 lyric from singer-songwriter Guy Clark. Since my reaction was that Clark had probably grabbed it from somewhere else, I embarked on a Google search to see if I could get a bead on its provenance . I haven’t pursued it too far, though; it turns out that there are about 558,000 indexed hits on the phrase “Dance like no one’s watching…” in Google! What is perhaps most amazing is that most of them seem to be to found embedded in this saccharin meditation which is posted over and over again, unattributed (warning: often accompanied by a Windham-Hill-like soundtrack). And they say the real danger is that the Internet is degenerating into a commercial vehicle! [thanks, Rich]
Diary of a hospital application reader: “Medical students endure four years of intense schooling, during which the limitless mysteries of the human body appear as either A, B, C or D. After years of measuring one’s progress with multiple choice exams, how is a person to approach the alien task of self-expression?” Salon
IE and Outlook run malicious commands without scripting: “An attacker can run arbitrary commands on Windows machines with a simple bit of HTML, an Israeli security researcher has demonstrated. The exploit will work with IE, Outlook and OutlooK Express even if active scripting and ActiveX are disabled in the browser security settings.
The problem here is data binding, an old ‘feature’ going back to IE4 in which a data source object (DSO) is bound to HTML.” The Register US
Social Network Explorer version of FmH; try it out.
