A Farewell to Arms

God, Voltaire said, is on the side of the big battalions.
Not any more, He ain't. Nor on the side of the richest or even - and this may surprise you - the most extravagantly well wired. Information technology is famously a great equalizer, a new hand that can tip the scales of power. And for those on the ramparts of the world's sole superpower, the digital winds are blowing an icy chill through the post-Cold War's triumphant glow.

Consider this litany. From former National Security Agency director John McConnell: "We're more vulnerable than any other nation on earth." Or former CIA deputy director William Studeman: "Massive networking makes the US the world's most vulnerable target" ("and the most inviting," he might have added). Or former US Deputy Attorney General Jaime Gorelick: "We will have a cyber equivalent of Pearl Harbor at some point, and we do not want to wait for that wake-up call."

By John Carlin
More.

NVDL: Die Hard 4 is based on the premise of this article. Interesting, improbably but certainly possible.

International Hunt for Missing Backpacker Harnesses Blog Power

When backpacker Nicole Vienneau set out last year to travel from West Africa to Turkey by way of the Middle East, her family at home in Toronto was confident her 15 years' experience traveling to far-flung places would stand her in good stead.
But when Nicole, 32, failed to make her usual fortnightly phone call home in April, her brother Matthew's LiveJournal posts began to strike a grave note. Frantic and thousands of miles away, Matthew Vienneau typed out a desperate plea for help from readers in the region of Syria where she was last seen.

FindMadeleine.com has proved similarly instrumental in the controversial case of four-year-old Madeleine McCann, the British toddler who disappeared in Portugal in May while on vacation with her parents. The girl's father regularly updates a diary on the site to keep his daughter's plight in the public eye -- and to keep the public in the loop.

From Wired.com

NVDL: What's scary is this okes sister was never found, despite all the behind the scenes work. Proves the point that the most dangerous predatory by far, is another human being.

Road Testing BMW's Hydrogen 7

Wired magazine succumbs here to the 'Technology Will Save Us' daydream. While no one can fault a car running on hydrogen as a nice innovation, you can throw a few cream cakes at these guys for failing to think a little further: how to set up hydrogen infrastructure into current service station infrastructure.

It's been said that to transport similar amounts of energy, you'd need 21 tanker sized trucks filled with liquid hydrogen for every gasoline truck . Experts have said that the mere raised rate of having so many fuel tankers on the road (IE mobile bombs) negates the practicality involved. The risk would simply be too great, both politically and otherwise. That's the bottom line here: it's just so far from practical as to be absurd.

The automaker's approach is markedly different than the more familiar concept of
hydrogen-powered fuel cells, where energy is stored before it is converted into
electricity. By contrast, BMW's Hydrogen 7 is powered by pumping hydrogen into a
combustion engine and igniting it. The engine can burn both hydrogen and
gasoline, and switches between the two at the flick of a switch.

Burning hydrogen is more efficient than converting it into electricity, making it the more practical choice for hydrogen-fueled cars now, according to BMW.

One major challenge is how to keep the hydrogen cooled to minus 253 degrees Celsius (minus 423 degrees Fahrenheit) so it remains in liquid form without boiling off. Despite the double-walled, stainless-steel tank that stores the liquid in high-vacuum conditions with aluminum reflective foil, the liquid hydrogen in the 8-kilogram fuel tank begins to boil after 17 hours if the car remains parked. The tank empties completely after 10 to 12 days.

Hydrogen ain't an energy source. Sorry. You've got to get it (as in extract it) out of the atmosphere. Generally electricity is used in this process, and the amount of energy required to separate the atoms is just way to energy intensive. Guys, please stop wasting your time on hydrogen. Rather apply energies to developing a plu and play car, or better yet, resuscitate railway and streetcar networks.

Read also: The Hydrogen Hoax

The Long Emergency

Internet Porn: Worse Than Crack? (WIRED)

NVDL: Read my article: Do Pornstars Go to Heaven?

by Ryan Singel
Internet pornography is the new crack cocaine, leading to addiction, misogyny, pedophilia, boob jobs and erectile dysfunction, according to clinicians and researchers testifying before a Senate committee Thursday.

Witnesses before the Senate Commerce Committee's Science, Technology and Space Subcommittee spared no superlative in their description of the negative effects of pornography.

Mary Anne Layden, co-director of the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Cognitive Therapy, called porn the "most concerning thing to psychological health that I know of existing today."

"The internet is a perfect drug delivery system because you are anonymous, aroused and have role models for these behaviors," Layden said. "To have drug pumped into your house 24/7, free, and children know how to use it better than grown-ups know how to use it -- it's a perfect delivery system if we want to have a whole generation of young addicts who will never have the drug out of their mind."

Pornography addicts have a more difficult time recovering from their addiction than cocaine addicts, since coke users can get the drug out of their system, but pornographic images stay in the brain forever, Layden said.

Jeffrey Satinover, a psychiatrist and advisor to the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality echoed Layden's concern about the internet and the somatic effects of pornography.

"Pornography really does, unlike other addictions, biologically cause direct release of the most perfect addictive substance," Satinover said. "That is, it causes masturbation, which causes release of the naturally occurring opioids. It does what heroin can't do, in effect."

The internet is dangerous because it removes the inefficiency in the delivery of pornography, making porn much more ubiquitous than in the days when guys in trench coats would sell nudie postcards, Satinover said.

Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kansas), the subcommittee's chairman, called the hearing the most disturbing one he'd ever seen in the Senate. Brownback said porn was ubiquitous now, compared to when he was growing up and "some guy would sneak a magazine in somewhere and show some of us, but you had to find him at the right time."

The hearing came just days after a controversy over a sexually suggestive Monday Night Football ad that has many foreseeing a crackdown on indecency by the Federal Communications Commission.

It is unclear what the consequences of Thursday's hearing will be since it was not connected to any pending or proposed legislation.

Brownback, a conservative Christian, is also scheduled to be rotated off the sub-committee in the next session.

When Brownback asked the panelists for suggestions about what should be done, the responses were mild, considering their earlier indictment of pornography. Several suggested that federal money be allocated to fund brain-mapping studies into the physical effects of pornography.
Judith Reisman of the California Protective Parents Association suggested that more study of "erototoxins" could show how pornography is not speech-protected under the First Amendment.

The panelists all agreed that the government should fund health campaigns to educate the public about the dangers of pornography. The campaign should combat the messages of pornography by putting signs on buses saying sex with children is not OK, said Layden.

However, as the panelists themselves acknowledged, there is no consensus among mental health professionals about the dangers of porn or the use of the term "pornography addiction."

Many psychologists and most sexologists find the concepts of sex and pornography addiction problematic, said Carol Queen, staff sexologist for the San Francisco-based, woman-owned Good Vibrations.

Queen questioned the validity of the panel for not including anyone who thinks "pornography is not particularly problematic in most people's lives."

Queen acknowledges she can name people who have compulsive and destructive behavior centered on pornography, but argues that can happen with other activities, such as gambling and shopping.

Queen also criticized the methodology behind research showing that pornography stimulates the brain like drugs do, saying the research needs to take into account how sex itself stimulates the brain.

"There's no doubt the brain lights up when sexually aroused," Queen said.

Queen too would like to see more money devoted to research on sex, but thinks it is unlikely that researchers on either side of the divide are likely to receive large grants any time soon.

Studies intended to show the harmful effects of pornography must contend with ethical rules prohibiting harm to human subjects, while sex researchers have a hard time getting any funding, unless their study is specifically HIV-related, according to Queen.

NSA's Lucky Break: How the U.S. Became Switchboard to the World

From Wired.com:

A lucky coincidence of economics is responsible for routing much of the world's internet and telephone traffic through switching points in the United States, where, under legislation introduced this week, the U.S. National Security Agency will be free to continue tapping it.

Leading House Democrats introduced the so-called RESTORE Act (.pdf) Tuesday that allows the nation's spies to maintain permanent eavesdropping stations inside United States switching centers. Telecom and internet experts interviewed by Wired News say the bill will give the NSA legal access to a torrent of foreign phone calls and internet traffic that travels through American soil on its way someplace else.

But contrary to recent assertions by Bush administration officials, the proportion of international traffic entering the United States is dropping, not increasing, experts say.

International phone and internet traffic flows through the United States largely because of pricing models established more than 100 years ago in the International Telecommunication Union to handle international phone calls. Under those ITU tariffs, smaller and developing countries charge higher fees to accept calls than the U.S.-based carriers do, which can make it cheaper to route phone calls through the United States than directly to a neighboring country.

"Carriers shop around for the best price for termination," says Stephan Beckert, the research director at Telegeography, a communications-traffic research firm.

The United States, where the internet was invented, was also home to the first internet backbone. Combine that architectural advantage with the pricing disparity inherited from the phone networks, and the United States quickly became the center of cyberspace as the internet gained international penetration in the 1990s.

In those early days, internet traffic from one Asian country often bounced through the first West Coast internet-exchange point, the San Jose-based MAE West, says Bill Woodcock, the research director for Packet Clearing House, which helps create packet-exchange points around the world.

While nobody outside the intelligence community knows the exact volume of international telephone and internet traffic that crosses U.S. borders, experts agree that it bounces off a handful of key telephone switches and perhaps a dozen IXPs in coastal cities near undersea fiber-optic cable landings, particularly Miami, Los Angeles, New York and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Miami sees most of the internet traffic between South America and the rest of the world, including traffic passing from one South American country to another, says Bill Manning, the managing partner of ep.net. "Basically they backhaul to the United States, do the switch and haul it back down since (it's) cheaper than crossing their international borders."

And some internet traffic traveling from Asia to Europe still crosses the entire breadth of the United States, entering in Los Angeles and exiting in New York, says Woodcock.

For the rest of this article click here.

NVDL: Big Brother is watching...