07.31.11

Links White Spaces, Police Hacking, Pollution and Censorship

Posted in Site News at 5:22 pm by Guest Editorial Team

Reader’s Picks

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Lessons of Tennessee coal ash disaster lost in Washington politics

    An Inspector General’s review done in response to the 2008 coal ash disaster at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston plant in eastern Tennessee has turned up widespread groundwater contamination from coal ash disposal sites at the company’s power plants around the South, with some of the pollution exceeding standards set to protect human health. … some in Congress are trying to scuttle the Environmental Protection Agency’s effort to regulate coal ash as hazardous waste

  • Senator using skewed numbers on oil industry safety record

    the amount of oil spilled in the Gulf of Mexico is likely closer to 471,721 barrels (19.8 million gallons) — or more than two and a half times the figure Landrieu likes to use … her number differs from API’s by just one barrel … the oil spill also resulted in 11 deaths. BOEMRE data for Gulf oil and gas operations from 1956 through 1990 shows more than 420 fatalities.

    The same senator is also fighting EPA pollution controls on coal plants.

  • Feds’ own data raise questions about effort to blame Gulf fishermen for sea turtle death spike

    The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that about 600 turtles washed up dead on Gulf Coast beaches last year and another 400 so far this year — an alarmingly high number compared to the usual 100 or so strandings per year. [NOAA, a division of the Department of Commerce blamed shrimpers and has been under counting] … Kuhns and other Gulf fishers say there’s a more likely suspect for the turtle deaths: BP’s Gulf oil spill. … “This ongoing policy of making natural resource and safety decisions based on the presence or lack of visible oil totally disregards known toxicological science,” she says. “It enables NOAA and others to relieve BP of a large part of its natural resource damage recovery responsibilities to the citizens of the United States of America.”

    With oil killing turtles and dolphins, it’s a good idea to avoid the things they eat and swim in.

  • Using a Civil War-era law to hold BP accountable in the Gulf

    one year after BP shut off the gusher of oil into the Gulf, Congress still has not passed whistleblower provisions for any of the laws that govern offshore drilling (mainly the Outer Continental Shelf Act, the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 and the Endangered Species Act). Additionally, Congress has not passed amendments to the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act that will protect and encourage federal employees to speak up for safety and compliance. … [but] They may be able to achieve whistleblower protection under the strongest whistleblower law in the United States — the False Claims Act (FCA).

  • Landmark TVA pollution settlement will help the South breathe easier

    The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates the deal will prevent as many as 3,000 premature deaths, 2,000 heart attacks and 21,000 asthma attacks each year, saving up to $27 billion in annual health costs.

  • Are Chemicals Making Us Fat?

    Medical science now clearly repudiates such a position and environmental contamination is emerging as a significant contributor to the obesity/diabetes epidemic. … these studies merely confirm hundreds of previous studies regarding the far-reaching health impacts of endocrine-disrupting/obesogen chemicals at blood levels most of us and our children live with right now. Many obesogens appear to increase levels of cholesterol and trigger cancer as well. For the first time in 200 years, children now have a shorter life expectancy than their parents, primarily due to obesity and diabetes. … the obesity epidemic [also] involves family pets, wild animals living in close proximity to humans and animals housed in research centers

  • The idea of drinking 8 glasses a day of water is medically bogus and promoted by water companies. [source article]

    If you drink bottled water that’s high in endocrine disruptors, you may be hurting yourself.

  • Michael Bloomberg got New Yorkers to quit smoking. Can he shut down coal?

  • The trash vortex in the North Pacific is now twice as large as the continental US, may hold 100 million tons of plastic and is growing at an alarming rate.

    the slowly rotating mass of rubbish-laden water poses a risk to human health, too. Hundreds of millions of tiny plastic pellets, or nurdles – the raw materials for the plastic industry – are lost or spilled every year, working their way into the sea. These pollutants act as chemical sponges attracting man-made chemicals such as hydrocarbons and the pesticide DDT. They then enter the food chain. “What goes into the ocean goes into these animals and onto your dinner plate. It’s that simple.”

    See also Plastic found in 9% of North Pacific fish.

  • Phosphate: A Critical Resource
    Misused and Now Running Low

    Most of us, most days, will eat some food grown on fields fertilized by phosphate rock from this mine. And there is no substitute. … It mostly flows down sewers and agricultural drains into rivers and lakes, where it feeds the growth of toxic cyanobacteria and consumes oxygen, creating eutrophication and “dead zones.” … Composting crop residues would be a good way of recycling this valued nutrient back into the soil … we should give top priority to recycling our urine, which contains more than half of all the phosphorus that we excrete.

    Organic farmers have been telling us this for decades.

• Censorship

  • AptiQuant Threatened With A Lawsuit By Loyal Internet Explorer Users.

    Leonard Howard, the CEO of the company said that he has been receiving hate mail from IE users since yesterday. He said, “I just want to make it clear that the report released by my company did not suggest that if you use IE that means you have a low IQ, but what it really says is that if you have a low IQ then there are high chances that you use Internet Explorer.” He further went on to say that the company did not feel threatened at all by the lawsuit threats

    Hate mail and lawsuits seem to follow anyone who says anything critical of Microsoft or Windows. It is too bad that they did not publish the OS data too, but they might have cooked up the whole thing as a publicity stunt with Microsoft to move people off XP.

  • China censored media and blog coverage of a wreck of one of their impressive high speed rail trains.

    No calling into doubt, no development [of further issues], no speculation, and no dissemination [of such things] on personal microblogs!

  • The coal industry and lawmakers threaten to punish the University of Wyoming for a sculpture that links the burning of coal, through global heating, to the infestation that is destroying most of the pine forests.

  • Photographers tortured and jailed in Georgia

• Privacy

  • Software Designer Reports Error in Anthony Trial

    He found both reports were inaccurate (although NetAnalysis came up with the correct result), in part because it appears both types of software had failed to fully decode the entire file, due to its complexity. … Mr. Bradley’s findings were not presented to the jury and the record was never corrected, he said. Prosecutors are required to reveal all information that is exculpatory to the defense.

    It is disturbing but not surprising that prosecutors who could lie to a jury would also rely on non free software [1, 2] to build evidence for a murder trail. IE is also the easiest browser to turn against it’s user, “In some cases (such as Internet Explorer) HstEx / NetAnalysis does not need the full Internet history file, it can recover individual live and deleted records.”

  • Murdoch’s business is associated with cracking people’s computers as well as listening to their phones.

    See also this earlier story about an email nasty and this story about private investigator Jonathan Rees cracking public official’s computers to spy on their banking. A random blogger puts it well:

    our Metropolitan Police Force is undergoing THREE, not one but three, investigations into accusations of corruption … Operation Weeting: deals with the N.O.T.W. phone hacking scandal, Operation Elvedon: deals with payment received by Met from above, Operation Tuleta: deals with accusations of computer crime in association with the phone hacking scandal

    Browser addons will warn or block if you are visiting a Murdoch site. The list includes National Geographic.

• Civil Rights

  • Extreme Alabama immigration law heads to court

    The Alabama law, which would go into effect Sept. 1, essentially turns educators, business owners, landlords and citizens into immigration officers, and punishes anyone caught hiring, housing or even giving a car ride to an undocumented person in the state. Most disturbing to some is that the legislation targets children [who are denied education].

  • On Not Freaking Out With Fear: An Un-American Response to the Oslo Attack

    the Norwegian response to the Oslo attack is so glaringly un-American even though its core premise — a brave refusal to sacrifice liberty and transparency in the name of fear and security — was once the political value Americans boasted of exhibiting most. … Oslo Mayor Fabian Stang, when asked whether greater security measures were needed, sternly rejected that notion: “I don’t think security can solve problems. We need to teach greater respect.”

    See also, We Must – and Will – Meet Terror with More Democracy, Not Less

  • Politicians from Germany, Finland and Estonia are using the Oslo shootings as an excuse for expanded internet surveillance.

  • A flight from Mexico to Spain was turned around by the US because one of the passengers was on a US blacklist.

  • Palestinians are routinely tear gassed and stun bombed as a form of collective punishment for protests. Their olive trees are burned and and wells destroyed with government support.

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Congress Goes After WiFi

    Congress is considering a sleazy change in FCC rules to let mobile phone companies buy parts of the TV spectrum, forbidding use for WiFi.

  • Tech Firms Call on Lawmakers to Preserve Unlicensed Spectrum Use

    Their concerns stem from a provision in draft legislation by Republicans on the Energy and Commerce Committee that critics worry would limit the use of white spaces, the unlicensed spectrum between television channels. The GOP spectrum bill would require the Federal Communications Commission to auction the right to unlicensed spectrum; critics say that could kill the emerging market for the use of white spaces.

  • Super Wi-Fi Has 100km Range, Is Coming to Save the Day

    This new wireless networking standard promises speeds up to 22Mbps to devices as far as 100-kilometers (roughly 62-miles) away from the nearest transmitter. This new band of Wi-Fi on steroids comes through the patch of “white space” frequencies that were previously used to analog television broadcasts.

  • IEEE Sets Standard for ‘White Spaces’

    SuperWiFi could replace existing 3G and 4G mobile broadband services for many users, if it turns out to be cheaper and faster. After all, if companies start selling SuperWiFi access points for use in homes, people can simply stay connected to their own home wireless network even as they go about their business throughout the city.

  • Bell Labs, Rice University test white-space network hardware

  • [FM Radio] White Space Trial Starts in England‎

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • 12 organizations say VP8 infringes patents

    MPEG LA declined to name the companies or patents involved. … Google reiterated its hope to create a royalty-free Web video technology, “… The vast majority of the industry supports free and open development”

  • Copyrights

    • Thousands of scientific papers uploaded to the Pirate Bay [from JSTOR]

      … the copyright to which has long since expired. … a protest directed both at the recent indictment of programmer Aaron Swartz for data theft as well as the scientific publishing model in general. … If I can remove even one dollar of ill-gained income from a poisonous industry which acts to suppress scientific and historic understanding, then whatever personal cost I suffer will be justified .

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