Some random items of interest:
- The Supreme Court. The Supreme Court today overturned a century-old restriction on corporations using their money to sway federal elections and ruled that companies have a free-speech right to spend as much as they wish to persuade voters to elect or defeat candidates for Congress and the White House. Wow. The speed at which the US is hollowing out is rather breathtaking. The document. Analysis of this disaster.
- Pirate Bay's VPN (virtual private network) is now public. Its new €5/month IPRedator service is an encrypted VPN that you can use to hide your traffic (whatever it may contain) from prying eyes. The servers are maintained and provided by Pirate Bay affiliates... Here's where to sign up.
- PopSci. HERF cannon for stopping cars at 200m. Demo. Pistol size in five years. Nailing down a safe, efficient, low cost, and tested DIY design and a decentralized manufacturing network would be a very lucrative global business.
- UK Conservatives call for a resilient nation as a means of national defense (see document). If anyone finds anything interesting in it, plz let me know.
- Icognito. Early operating system for end to end encryption through the TOR network. Haven't verified its value yet.
- Roland Dobbins (Arbor Networks) presentation on BotNets and computer security threats (PDF). Pretty nice.
- NPR. Unplanned resilience in Haiti. Mr. STANTON: Haiti is one of the relatively few places in the world where you really can't rely on power at all, commercial power at all. So in every location we have a fuel tank. KASTE: Those fuel tanks power generators, which means many of the cell towers are up and running right now, even as the city's electricity grid remains a shambles.
- Kabul. The Taliban attempt a low level "urban takedown" ala Mumbai.
- The Taliban has finally created a simple rule set (69 points) for managing the territories they control to reduce resistance and speed growth. Simple rule sets like this are very effective at displacing the government, particularly in a poor country where the citizens pay out $2.5 billion in bribes a year.