Link: Free Rootkit with Every New Intel Machine
In light of the recent book on BSD Rootkits by Joseph Kong, some of us have been paying closer attention to possible rootkits in the wild. This post on “The Cryptography Mailing List” highlights Intel Active Management 2.5, which essentially boils down to hardware rootkit functionality built right into the machine.
Link: Which ISPs Are Spying On You?
firesquirt sends us an article from Wired about a survey they conducted to determine major ISPs’ data retention and other privacy practices. Over a period of two months, four national ISPs would not give Wired the time of day; and another four answered some of their questions in a fashion not altogether reassuring.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Link: Everything I Know About Design I Learned from The Sopranos
Last night, after eight years, 86 episodes, and untold quantities of gobbagool, The Sopranos finished its run on HBO. And this is what we’ve learned, from a design point of view.
The University of Colorado at Boulder forbids concealed firearms on campus. CU Police Department Commander Brad Wiesley says switching that policy could decrease safety on campus.
“There’s no standard way to identify the good guys versus the bad guys in the middle of an active shooting situation. It tremendously complicates the response for officers responding,” said Wiesley.
On the mental health front, the National Alliance on Mental Health says there are alternatives to institutionalizing more people.
“The U.S. Surgeon General has reported that the likelihood of violence by people with mental illness is low … More often, people living with mental illness are the victims of violence,” states NAMI in a press release that went out after the Virginia Tech shootings.
 link
Link: Sheriff calls for guns on campus and mental health reform
Larimer (Colorado) County Sheriff Jim Alderden has an interesting take on guns on campus… In his county, CSU allows concealed weapons. In Boulder County, CU Boulder forbids them.
 Alderden was instrumental in passing Colorado’s CCW law, and apparently the shall-issue program was based on his practices in Larimer County.
Link: nimrangul’s “netjihad” for the Beastie
It seems that the BSD daemon image has been blatantly ripped off for years by a British sex-toy vending machine company. McKusick knows it, but can’t do anything about it, being a foreigner. Hmmm.
Link: VMware to include Unity feature to battle Parallels’ Coherence
VMware Fusion is offering Unity, a feature designed to run Windows apps transparently on the Mac desktop like Coherence in Parallels. It’s a tight race between the two.
Link: Riding an Ion Drive to the Asteroid Belt
Iron Condor writes “JPL is now close to embarking on another of its trademark, one-of-a-kind missions, this time to the heart of the asteroid belt: The Dawn mission is being prepared for launch this summer from Kennedy Space Center. Dawn will explore Ceres and Vesta, the two largest known asteroids in our solar system, which lie in the vast expanse between Mars and Jupiter. In the process, the mission will make history on several fronts. Besides being the first spacecraft to orbit a main-belt asteroid and the first to ever orbit two targets after leaving Earth, Dawn will be the first science mission powered by electric ion propulsion, the world’s most advanced and efficient space propulsion technology.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Link: Forgetting May be Part of the Remembering Process
CFTM writes “The New York Times is running an interesting article about how human memory works and the theorized adaptive nature of forgetfulness”. From the article, “Whether drawing a mental blank on a new A.T.M. password, a favorite recipe or an old boyfriend, people have ample opportunity every day to curse their own forgetfulness. But forgetting is also a blessing, and researchers reported on Sunday that the ability to block certain memories reduces the demands on the brain when it is trying to recall something important. The study, appearing in the journal Nature Neuroscience, is the first to record visual images of people’s brains as they suppress distracting memories. The more efficiently that study participants were tuning out irrelevant words during a word-memorization test, the sharper the drop in activity in areas of their brains involved in recollection. Accurate remembering became easier, in terms of the energy required.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Link: The 2012 Olympic Logo Ate My Hamster
Designers often bemoan the lack of coverage given to graphic design in mainstream media. Yet when design catches the attention of journalists and commentators it usually results in a vicious mugging rather than hearty praise.