India has come up with the world’s cheapest “laptop,” a touch-screen computing device that costs $35.
India’s Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal this week unveiled the low-cost computing device that is designed for students, saying his department had started talks with global manufacturers to start mass production.
“We have reached a (developmental) stage that today, the motherboard, its chip, the processing, connectivity, all of them cumulatively cost around $35, including memory, display, everything,” he told a news conference.
He said the touchscreen gadget was packed with Internet browsers, PDF reader and video conferencing facilities but its hardware was created with sufficient flexibility to incorporate new components according to user requirement.
Sibal said the Linux based computing device was expected to be introduced to higher education institutions from 2011 but the aim was to drop the price further to $20 and ultimately to $10.
The device was developed by research teams at India’s premier technological institutes, the Indian Institute of Technology and the Indian Institute of Science.
India spends about three percent of its annual budget on school education and has improved its literacy rates to over 64 percent of its 1.2 billion population but studies have shown many students can barely read or write and most state-run schools have inadequate facilities.
The U.S. armed services are issuing internal messages to all personnel barring them from visiting the WikiLeaks website, which recently posted 77,000 classified diplomatic and military messages on the long war in Afghanistan.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman confirmed Thursday for The Washington Times that all four services “have put out such messages” after The Times had obtained copies of Navy and Marine Corps messages banning troops from accessing WikiLeaks.
Mr. Whitman later told The Times that the Army and Air Force had not yet issued such statements.
The orders seem to be the most far-reaching effort by the Pentagon in its ongoing effort to stop the release of classified information. The military is telling the troops they cannot even view what is publicly available, even though the WikiLeaks documents are on hundreds of websites.
In addition, the Pentagon is demanding that WikiLeaks return the classified documents it posted on the Internet, as the whistleblower website apparently is preparing another huge document dump.
A July 29 message from the National Security Litigation Division of the Navy’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps tells all sailors that:
“[Department of the Navy] personnel should not access the WikiLeaks website to view or download the publicized classified information. Doing so would introduce potentially classified information on unclassified networks.”
“There has been rumor that the information is no longer classified since it resides in the public domain. This is NOT true,” said the internal message, a copy of which was obtained by The Times. …
WikiLeaks fired back at the Pentagon’s request for Afghanistan war documents with a series of tweets responding to “obnoxious” Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell.
Morrell at Thursday’s briefing said “the only acceptable course” is for WikiLeaks to turn some 15,000 documents still being reviewed by the website back to the U.S. government and delete all the files from its website pertaining to the original nearly 92,000 documents posted July 25.
“If doing the right thing is not good enough for them,” the Pentagon spokesman said, alternatives will be explored “to make them do the right thing.”
A Turkish immigrant claims New Zealand police cannot tell the difference between fighting and dancing after he was reportedly charged with assault while celebrating with his wife.
A judge has now told the police to go away and study a cultural Turkish video showing the kolbasti dance before deciding whether to proceed with the case.
Kebab shop owner Allaetin Can was arrested after a passerby reported he was hitting, kicking and strangling his wife outside their shop in the North Island town of Hawera, the Taranaki Daily News said.
But when he appeared in court, Mr Can argued he and his wife Elmas were merely performing the traditional Turkish dance kolbasti which, loosely translated, means “caught red-handed by the police” and involves energetic movements.
Mr Can said he and his wife and two teenage children danced out of their kebab shop into a car park after a particularly profitable lunch shift.
“We’re always dancing. I’m happy to dance with my wife and my family. What’s wrong with that?” he was quoted in the report as saying.
“People here understand fighting, not dancing. It’s our culture.”
The judge gave police two weeks to study a DVD of the kolbasti and if they accepted the Cans were involved in an innocent dance, then the charge would be withdrawn.
Powerful drug cartels are increasingly using gruesome videos of executions and interrogations to intimidate their rivals, police and an already terrified public in Mexico’s vicious drug war.
The drug gangs, battling for control of lucrative smuggling routes into the United States, have long attached handwritten notes to victims they dump in public as a way to scare rival gangs and pesky state officials.
But they are now airing more and more of their dirty work and threats on blogs or Web sites like YouTube, and bullying Mexican media into putting their gory tapes on television for wider play.
The aggressive media strategy raises new questions about whether President Felipe Calderon’s war on drugs is making any headway in weakening the gangs and in reining in a drug trade worth up to $40 billion a year in Mexico alone.
About 28,000 people have been killed since Calderon took office in late 2006 and sent thousands of federal police and troops to crack down on the drug cartels.
While the gangs began using the bloody videos to send a message to police and rivals several years ago, they have become more common in recent months as turf wars escalate across the country, experts and police say.
The format of the tapes is often the same: captives, many bloodied from beatings, are tied up, blindfolded and posed in front of a draped sheet in an anonymous setting.
Surrounded by heavily armed captors in ski-masks and guided by questioning from an off-camera voice, the captives are forced to confess allegiances to cartels or corrupt officials. Many are then murdered on-camera.
The most explicit videos, when detected, are usually removed by major web sites like YouTube but stay posted on “narco-blogs” run by anonymous administrators.
In one video, a man with a black eye is tethered to a chair in his underwear and appears to be strangled to death with a tourniquet by his captors. There is a “Z” scrawled across his chest, for Zetas, a spinoff of the Gulf Cartel.
In another video, a man is slowly beheaded with a knife. …
A new study has revealed that the inside of the Moon isn’t as watery as previously reported.
For decades, astronomers had thought the Moon is bone dry inside and out. However, recent moon-impact missions found water ice on the lunar surface, and reanalysis of rocks brought back by Apollo astronauts found evidence for significant amounts of water inside the Moon in the form of hydroxyl (-OH), a hydrogen compound formed by the breakdown of water (H2O).
In a new study of Apollo moon rocks, geochemist Zachary Sharp of the University of New Mexico and colleagues measured the moon rocks” chlorine isotopes, or different forms of the chlorine atom.
Chlorine is strongly attracted to hydrogen. As magma cools and solidifies, hydrogen and chlorine present in the molten rock tend to bond to form hydrogen chloride gas.
On Earth, volcanic magma contains more hydrogen than chlorine, so most of the chlorine bonds with hydrogen. Due to the nature of the bond, the ratio of chlorine isotopes left behind in the cooling rock is about the same as the ratio that gets released as gas.
“We analyzed the Moon, and we found that the chlorine isotope values vary by 25 times more than the Earth’s,” National Geographic News quoted Sharp as saying.
The best way to explain this result is that the rocks, formed as the Moon cooled 4.5 billion years ago, are low in hydrogen.
Instead of becoming mostly hydrogen chloride gas, the chlorine in lunar magma was free to bond with other elements and form salts such as iron chloride and zinc chloride, leading to a wider range of chlorine isotopes in the rock.
And if moon rocks lack hydrogen, they must lack water, the study concluded.
The findings have been published online by the journal Science.
… here are the details on the Electrolux Bio Robot Refrigerator, a concept that has been making quite a splash in the blogosphere! In lay terms, the fridge is a concept where the Bio Robot cools biopolymer gel through luminescence. A non-sticky gel surrounds the food item when shoved into the biopolymer gel, creating separate pods. The design features no doors or drawers, and the food items are individually cooled at their optimal temperature thanks to the robot. And since it can take any orientation (hung vertically, horizontally, and even on the ceiling), and can be modified in size, you can fit it in any apartment.
A Seattle parking enforcement officer ticketed a man Tuesday who authorities say was likely dead hours before the ticket was issued.
About 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, the parking enforcement officer marked the man’s car in a 2-hour parking zone. The woman returned a few minutes after noon and found the car hadn’t moved.
“The PEO rapped on the window twice in an attempt to wake the man,” police spokeswoman Renee Witt said in a statement. “When she was unsuccessful she concluded that the individual was simply a sound sleeper. The PEO left the ticket on the windshield and continued her patrol.”
She later learned he was dead.
About 40 minutes after the man was fined $42 for parking too long in the 2-hour spot, his girlfriend found the car with a GPS device.
Medics were dispatched at 12:47 p.m., but the man was unconscious and unresponsive when they arrived, Fire Department spokeswoman Dana Vander Houwen said.
The driver was Derek Michael Eldridge, 36, according to the King County Medical Examiner’s Office. The office is waiting for tests before releasing his cause and manner of death, though police say there was no sign of homicidal violence. Eldridge’s exact time of death was not released Wednesday.
Parking enforcement officers have radios and a reasonable expectation to call for help in an emergency.
But police Sgt. Sean Whitcomb said it’s not uncommon for parking enforcement officers to find people asleep in their cars. The woman, a 29-year parking enforcement veteran, did nothing wrong in the circumstances, he said. …
The yellow American-style school bus has been fitted with a jet engine from a Phantom fighter plane, allowing it to reach up to 367mph.
Paul Stender and his team from Indy Boys Inc, based in Indianapolis, USA adapted the bus which uses a full tank of 150 gallons of fuel in just one quarter-mile run.
Mr Stender’s creation, which he has dubbed ‘The School Time Jet-Powered School Bus’, also fires out 80 foot flames from the back creating massive clouds of smoke.
Mr Stender, 43, said: “I built the bus for two reasons. The first is to entertain people because, come on, it’s a jet bus.
“The second, is to keep kids off drugs. Jets are hot, drugs are not.
“The entire vehicle was custom built by myself. There’s no way the original bus could have withstood the speeds that I take it to.
“We do a lot of displays at schools and we are trying to show them there’s more to life than sitting in front of computers.
Mr Stender, whose mechanical skills are entirely self taught, said he has a passion for making things go fast.
He said: “I bought it just as an old school bus, but I have to say only about five percent are original parts.
“Actually a lot of it is hand-crafted and the types of metals used would be more at home on an aircraft.
“There’s still some bus left on it, a little bit on the front. And of course the door handle and the door are all original.
We were assured that the machines don’t even have the ability to record images, but they do. And they did. A privacy group, EPIC, obtained 100 of more than 35,000 “whole body” images recently. So far, the only images recorded are supposedly from one Florida courthouse, and no under aged persons were recorded. Yeah, right. How long before anyone can download airport scanner porn?
In an open government lawsuit against the United States Marshals Service, EPIC has obtained more than one hundred images of undressed individuals entering federal courthouses. The images, which are routinely captured by the federal agency, prove that body scanning devices store and record images of individuals stripped naked. The 100 images are a small sample of more than 35,000 at issue in the EPIC lawsuit. EPIC has pursued a but the DHS refuses to release the images it has obtained. EPIC has also filed suit to stop the deployment of the machines in US airports. For more information, see EPIC Body Scanners and EPIC – EPIC v. DOJ (Marshall Service FOIA). – epic.org
… the U.S. Marshals Service just admitted that it had saved “approximately 35,314 images” from a single Orlando, Florida courthouse, according to CNN. Whoops! This follows the TSA’s original claim that the body scanners could not store or transmit images, but the follow-up from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) revealed that images can be stored when the machines are running in “test mode.” And now EPIC has just filed a lawsuit asking for an immediate injunction to halt the TSA body-scanning program. This comes only two weeks after Janet Napolitano announced that the millimeter-wave systems would be coming to nearly every major U.S. airport. – switched
The TSA, it seems, requires all airport body scanners to be able to store images and transmit them – strange for a device that is supposed to do neither for “testing, training, and evaluation purposes.” Don’t worry, though. The TSA says these capabilities aren’t “normally activated when the devices are installed at airports,” reports CNET. Translation: “Trust us. We could do something bad … but we won’t.” So, next time you fly and fear that images of your privates may end up being stored somewhere, consider sticking some “Flying Pasties” to your unmentionables. – gadling
…A mere month after London Heathrow introduced full body scanners, the first harassment case is already being investigated by the authorities. When 29 year old Jo Margetson accidentally walked through the scanner, an airport security guard thought it would be hilarious to mention how he “loved those gigantic tits”. This was of course the situation everyone feared – I’m just surprised it took this long to happen. The security guard has been issued a warning for sexual harassment, which will no doubt be the first of many to be issued to people that have access to the scanner images. Miss Margetson is furious about the incident – ‘I can’t bear to think about the body scanner thing,’ she said. ‘I’m totally traumatised by it.”. She spoke to the police after the incident, and they in turn reported the case to BAA, the airport operator. – gadling
Claims on behalf of authorities that naked body scanner images are immediately destroyed after passengers pass through new x-ray backscatter devices have been proven fraudulent after it was revealed that naked images of Indian film star Shahrukh Khan were printed out and circulated by airport staff at Heathrow in London. “You walk into the machine and everything – the whole outline of your body – comes out,” he said. “I was a little scared. Something happens [inside the scans], and I came out. Then I saw these girls – they had these printouts. I looked at them. I thought they were some forms you had to fill. I said ‘give them to me’ – and you could see everything inside. So I autographed them for them,” stated Khan. The story was carried by Yahoo News under the headline “Shah Rukh signs off sexy body-scan printouts at Heathrow”… UK Transport Secretary Lord Adonis said last week that the images produced by the scanners were deleted “immediately” and airport staff carrying out the procedure are fully trained and supervised. “It is very important to stress that the images which are captured by body scanners are immediately deleted after the passenger has gone through the body scanner,” Adonis told the London Evening Standard. Adonis was forced to address privacy concerns following reports that the images produced by the scanners broke child pornography laws in the UK. When the scanners were first introduced, it was also speculated that images of famous people would be ripe for abuse as the pictures produced by the devices make genitals “eerily visible” according to journalists who have investigated trials of the technology. For the last few years, federal agencies have defended body scanning by insisting that all images will be discarded as soon as they’re viewed. The Transportation Security Administration claimed last summer, for instance, that “scanned images cannot be stored or recorded.“ – infowars
Now it turns out that some police agencies are storing the controversial images after all. The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.
This follows an earlier disclosure (PDF) by the TSA that it requires all airport body scanners it purchases to be able to store and transmit images for “testing, training, and evaluation purposes.” The agency says, however, that those capabilities are not normally activated when the devices are installed at airports.
Body scanners penetrate clothing to provide a highly detailed image so accurate that critics have likened it to a virtual strip search. Technologies vary, with millimeter wave systems capturing fuzzier images, and backscatter X-ray machines able to show precise anatomical detail. The U.S. government likes the idea because body scanners can detect concealed weapons better than traditional magnetometers.
This privacy debate, which has been simmering since the days of the Bush administration, came to a boil two weeks ago when Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that scanners would soon appear at virtually every major airport. The updated list includes airports in New York City, Dallas, Washington, Miami, San Francisco, Seattle, and Philadelphia. – cnet
It’s official: a full-body security scanner can theoretically store your blurry nude picture. After a Freedom of Information Act request from the advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center, the U.S. Marshals Service released 100 of 35,314 stored images taken by a scanner at an Orlando, Florida, courthouse. Though airport security scanners use similar radio wave technology to get a hazy peek under your clothes, whether these scanners can store your image still seems unclear.Publications such as CNET question if these images mean a change in federal officials’ statement that the scanners cannot store images:
For the last few years, federal agencies have defended body scanning by insisting that all images will be discarded as soon as they’re viewed. The Transportation Security Administration claimed last summer, for instance, that “scanned images cannot be stored or recorded.” [CNET]
The Transportation Security Administration responds on their blog that they stick by that original statement. Though the recently released images prove that the Marshal Service stores scanned images, the Marshal Service is not the TSA. The first falls under the Department of Justice, the second under the Department of Homeland Security.
As we’ve stated from the beginning, TSA has not, will not and the machines cannot store images of passengers at airports. The equipment sent by the manufacturer to airports cannot store, transmit or print images and operators at airports do not have the capability to activate any such function. [TSA]
Part of the reason for the now viral story is that the scanner images appearance comes just after a late-July announcement that the TSA will deploy additional “advanced imagining technology” at 28 airports.
The revelation comes at a tense time. Two weeks ago, when Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said such scanners would appear in every major airport, privacy advocates such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington D.C. filed a lawsuit to stop the device rollout. [MSNBC.com]
The scanners employ a millimeter wave radiometer which uses radio frequency waves to image visitors. In a letter published on the Electronic Privacy Information Center site, the acting administrator of the TSA responds to the chairman of Homeland Security: it seems that though the machines at airports are manufactured with the capability to store images, but that capability is used in “testing mode” only–and not at airports. The letter also says that security officers cannot put the machines into this storage mode.
Still, the Center filed a lawsuit last month to suspend the deployment of body scanners at US airports, saying that the scanning program violates the Privacy Act, Administrative Procedure Act, Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and the Fourth Amendment.
The TSA is looking to modify the machines further to protect passengers’ privacy, for example by replacing the somewhat realistic nude image with a “paper-doll-like figure,” The Boston Globereports, but the Center isn’t satisfied.
This will not solve the privacy issues, said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, because the images of travelers’ naked bodies are still being captured by the machine. “We think the privacy safeguards are mostly fiction,’’ said Rotenberg, adding that a congressional investigation is underway to review the scanners. [Boston Globe]
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India has come up with the world’s cheapest “laptop,” a touch-screen computing device that costs $35.
The U.S. armed services are issuing internal messages to all personnel barring them from visiting the WikiLeaks website, which recently posted 77,000 classified diplomatic and military messages on the long war in Afghanistan.
Powerful drug cartels are increasingly using gruesome videos of executions and interrogations to intimidate their rivals, police and an already terrified public in Mexico’s vicious drug war.
Six private security guards have been beheaded during a bank robbery in a usually safe part of northern Afghanistan, police said.
Adonis was forced to address privacy concerns following reports that the images produced by the 
Now it turns out that some police agencies are storing the controversial images after all. The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.
