Archive for July 30th, 2008
The truth may be out there somewhere, but for Gary McKinnon, it will be in the US. As the British hacker who infiltrated multiple US government computers searching for proof that aliens exist, McKinnon has lost his appeal of extradition and will face trial in US courts.
Between 2001 and 2002, McKinnon used a simple brute-force Perl script over a 56Kbps modem that tested default passwords against various systems in the US Army, Navy, Air Force, NASA, the Pentagon, and even the Department of Defense. He was also charged with shutting down the entire US Army’s Military District of Washington network—more than 2,000 computers in all—for 24 hours.
The UK’s National Hi-Tech Crime Unit ultimately caught and arrested McKinnon under the Computer Misuse Act. The US asked for extradition, which, according to critics, would allow McKinnon to be used as an example and a deterrent to future hackers.
In 2006, the UK approved McKinnon’s extradition to the US, after which he announced plans to appeal the decision. According to Reuters, the hacker’s appeal made it to the House of Lords—Britain’s highest court—where it has just been denied.
McKinnon claims that he was only searching for proof that aliens exist, but he faces penalties of up to 70 years in prison and fines that could amount to $1.75 million. Paul McNulty, US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, dubbed McKinnon’s crime “the biggest military computer hack of all time,” which critics of his extradition are citing as a prime reason why he could receive a punishment disproportionate to his deeds.
Further muddying the question of exactly how much damage McKinnon did are his claims of finding evidence from other hackers who accessed the same computer systems he did, but successfully evaded detection. Based on previous sentences for similar crimes, critics say the potential for up to 70 years in prison and $1.75 million in fines are outlandish punishments and a breach of his human rights for the $700,000 in damages McKinnon is accused of causing.
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Israel’s beleaguered prime minister, Ehud Olmert, threw his country and the Middle East into political turmoil last night when he announced he was resigning after months of mounting pressure over corruption allegations.
Olmert said he would step down in September after his Kadima party has chosen a new leader. The main candidates are Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister, a pragmatic centrist, and Shaul Mofaz, transport minister but a hawk on national security issues, including Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the ongoing, though faltering, negotiations with the Palestinians.
Last night’s announcement came as a surprise but hardly a shock, given the accumulating weight of comment that he could not go on in the face of a slew of police and judicial inquiries.
“I will step aside properly in an honourable and responsible way, and afterwards I will prove my innocence,” Olmert told reporters from a podium outside his Jerusalem office. “I want to make it clear – I am proud to be a citizen of a country where the prime minister can be investigated like a regular citizen. It is the duty of the police to investigate, and the duty of the prosecution to instruct the police. The prime minister is not above the law.”
Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, deeply pessimistic about peace since talks were relaunched at Annapolis in the US last November, are likely to be indifferent to his departure, though Olmert forged personal ties with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president and Fatah leader. Riad Malki, the Palestinian foreign minister, said: “It’s true that Olmert was enthusiastic about the peace process, and he spoke about this process with great attention but this process has not achieved any progress or breakthrough.”
A spokesman for Abbas said last night that the Palestinian president considered Olmert’s decision an “internal Israeli matter”, adding: “The Palestinian Authority deals with the prime minister of Israel, regardless if he is Olmert or somebody else.”
Miley Cyrus tops the charts ‘Breakout’ debuts at #1, selling 371,000 copies
Posted on: July 30, 2008
The transition from “Hannah Montana” to Miley Cyrus at the top of the album sales chart has been completed.
Cyrus’ “Breakout” (Hollywood) not only debuted at No. 1, its first-week sales surpassed the tallies registered by the two “Hannah Montana” soundtracks, which also debuted at No. 1. The queen of tweens’ “Breakout” sold 371,000 copies in the week ended Sunday, according to Nielsen Soundscan data.
That first-week number bested the 326,000 of “Hannah Montana 2/Meet Miley Cyrus” last summer and the 261,000 for the first “Hannah Montana” in late 2006. The first one has sold 3.6 million copies; volume two has moved 3.1 million.
The “Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert” pic grossed $65 million during its theatrical release, which started in February.
At No. 2, Sugarland’s deluxe version of “Love on the Inside” (Mercury Nashville) sold 314,000 copies, registering the biggest sales week of the year for a country act. The duo’s 2006 release, “Enjoy the Ride,” peaked at No. 4 on sales of 211,000.
Release is a rare example of a deluxe edition preceding the release of a standard edition. Album with five fewer tracks went on sale Tuesday.
The “Mamma Mia!” soundtrack nearly doubled its sales for a second week in a row, moving 168,000 copies and staying put at No. 3.
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MOJAVE, Calif., July 28 — British entrepreneur and adventurer Richard Branson on Monday took the wraps off an aircraft that, for $200,000 a seat, may someday take tourists who can afford it on the first leg of regular, albeit very brief, commercial flights into space.
Amid extravagantly orchestrated publicity at a historic test airfield near Edwards Air Force Base, Branson unveiled the double-hulled “mother ship” built to carry a capsule filled with six wealthy tourists high into the stratosphere, from where the smaller ship would rocket into the blackness more than 60 miles above Earth.
The dual-fuselage, all-composite plane expands and refines the smaller version that famed aircraft designer Burt Rutan twice used four years ago to begin the journey of a piloted capsule to sub-orbital altitude, winning the X-Prize competition aimed at encouraging private spaceflight.
No one knows when Virgin Galactic will fly, but about 100 people have already paid full price for the trip, which comes to $50,000 per minute for the four minutes the travelers will spend in weightlessness. An additional 170 have put down deposits.
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BEIJING (Reuters) – Olympic host Beijing saw hazy pollution lift on Tuesday, but a damning Amnesty International report brought into sharp view tensions over China’s human rights policies ten days before the Games begin.
With the 2008 Olympic Games due to open in the shining Bird’s Nest Stadium on August 8, the human rights group on Tuesday gave a scathing assessment of China’s record, saying many of its citizens’ protections and freedoms have shrunk, not expanded, in the seven years since Beijing won the right to hold the Games.
China had not honoured vows to improve rights that officials made in lobbying for the Games, and was not living up to commitments as an Olympic host, Amnesty International stated in the report released in Hong Kong.
“There has been no progress towards fulfilling these promises, only continued deterioration,” it said in the report, titled “The Olympics countdown – broken promises”.
“The authorities have used the Olympic Games as pretext to continue, and in some respects, intensify existing policies and practices which have led to serious and widespread violations of human rights,” it said in the report released in Hong Kong.
Amnesty said Chinese authorities had targetted human rights defenders, journalists and lawyers to “silence dissent” ahead of the Games, jailing dissidents such as prominent AIDS activist Hu Jia and often intimidating their families.
A Chinese government spokesman dismissed the Amnesty report as a product of habitual bias that ignored big improvements.
“This is a statement that anyone who knows China cannot agree with,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s chief spokesman Liu Jianchao told a news conference in Beijing. “I hope Amnesty International can take off the coloured glasses it has been wearing for years and look at China fairly and objectively.” Continued…
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Three tech giants — Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Yahoo — said on Tuesday they are teaming up on a research project to help turn Web services into reliable, everyday utilities.
The companies are joining forces with academic researchers in Asia, Europe and the United States to create an experimental network that lets researchers test “cloud-computing” projects — Web-wide services that can reach billions of users at once.
Their goal is to promote open collaboration among industry, academic and government researchers by removing financial and logistical barriers to working on hugely computer-intensive, Internet-wide projects.
Founding members of the consortium said they aim to create a level playing field for individual researchers and organizations of all sizes to conduct research on software, network management and the hardware needed to deliver Web-wide services as billions of computer and phone users come online.
“No one institution or company is going to figure this out,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, the head of Yahoo Research who is also a consulting professor of computer science at nearby Stanford University.
Cloud computing has become the industry’s biggest buzzword. It is a catch-all term to describe how Internet-connected hardware and software once delivered as discreet products can be managed as Web-based, utility-like services.
“Potentially the entire planet will come to rely on this, like electricity,” Raghavan said, referring to the push to make everything from daily communications to shopping to entertainment into always-available, on-demand Web services.
“We are all trying to move from the horse driving the wagon to a million ants driving the wagon,” Raghavan said of the need to let computers manage millions of small jobs, adding that the available capacity on the Web would vary widely. “The challenge can be a billion ants one day and a million ants the next.” Continued…
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MENLO PARK, California (Reuters) – A start-up led by former star Google engineers on Sunday unveiled a new Web search service that aims to outdo the Internet search leader in size, but faces an uphill battle changing Web surfing habits.
Cuil Inc (pronounced “cool”) is offering a new search service at www.cuil.com that the company claims can index, faster and more cheaply, a far larger portion of the Web than Google, which boasts the largest online index.
The would-be Google rival says its service goes beyond prevailing search techniques that focus on Web links and audience traffic patterns and instead analyzes the context of each page and the concepts behind each user search request.
“Our significant breakthroughs in search technology have enabled us to index much more of the Internet, placing nearly the entire Web at the fingertips of every user,” Tom Costello, Cuil co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement.
Danny Sullivan, a Web search analyst and editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, said Cuil can try to exploit complaints consumers may have with Google — namely, that it tries to do too much, that its results favor already popular sites, and that it leans heavily on certain authoritative sites such as Wikipedia.
“The time may be right for a challenger,” Sullivan says, but adds quickly: “Competing with Google is still a very daunting task, as Microsoft will tell you.”
Microsoft Corp, the No. 3 U.S. player in Web search has been seeking in vain, so far, to join forces with No. 2 Yahoo Inc to battle Google.
Cuil was founded by a group of search pioneers, including Costello, who built a prototype of Web Fountain, IBM’s Web search analytics tool, and his wife, Anna Patterson, the architect of Google Inc’s massive TeraGoogle index of Web pages. Patterson also designed the search system for global corporate document storage company Recall, a unit of Australia’s Brambles Ltd Continued…
GENEVA (Reuters) – Global trade talks collapsed on Tuesday after a clash over agriculture between the United States and emerging powers, including China, India and Indonesia.
The breakdown came on the ninth day of marathon talks. The United States and India failed to find a compromise on measures intended to help poor countries protect their farmers against import surges, a diplomat said.
“We were so close to getting this done,” U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab told reporters at World Trade Organisation headquarters in Geneva. Global negotiators have worked on the Doha trade round for seven years.
“The U.S. remains committed to the Doha round. This is not a time to talk about a round collapsing,” said Schwab, who looked frustrated. “The U.S. commitments remain on the table, awaiting reciprocal responses.”
The collapse also prompted disappointment in other countries that had stood to gain from another round of trade opening.
“It’s really bad news. It’s sad to have lost so many years of work. For an emerging market, it is worrying to see a WTO that is not strong,” said Soraya Rosar, director of international negotiations with Brazil’s National Industry Confederation.
Failure to find agreement on the core agriculture and industrial goods chapters of the Doha trade round could delay any final accord on trade liberalisation for several more years.
Washington had opposed a push from India, China and Indonesia to secure measures to protect their farmers if faced with sudden surges of cheap farm
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CHINO HILLS, California (Reuters) – Living in the shadow of Los Angeles, retiree Doug Sparkes thought that Tuesday’s strong tremor had squarely hit the big city.
Little did he know his town of Chino Hills, where he and his wife live on a farm with horses and chickens, was the epicentre of the biggest earthquake to hit the Los Angeles area in nearly 15 years.
“The first thing we thought was that L.A. went down and we were on the other end of it,” Sparkes said as he shopped at a supermarket a few hours after the magnitude 5.4 quake. “It was a hard shake and it lasted about 30 seconds.”
The Sparkes had been through stronger Southern California temblors, the 1994 Northridge and the 1987 Whittier Narrows quakes.
“This felt double that,” said Debbie Sparkes. The centres of those quakes were much farther from Sparkes’ home, though.
Around 30 miles (48 km) east of Los Angeles and home to 80,000 people, Chino Hills is a pleasant suburb with new large homes built among the big rolling hills.
The town returned to normality just a few hours after the temblor and filled up with people shopping and eating out. Only the presence of police, emergency teams and reporters indicated something big had happened.
The Wal-Mart store where some bottles fell off the shelves was back open for business in a few hours, after inspectors made sure nothing would fall and hurt customers. Continued…
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