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I thought it looked like they were using an iPhone.
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I forgot to mention this last week, but! I made some middle-size banners (200x40) for if people want to link to Flaky Pastry (I know you dooo!). There were already banners, just not that particular size. Now there are! All those are the bottom of my Links page.
Travelocity: In a campaign of Non Sequitirs, Senator McCain has tonight reached a new high, in low. First announcing in Denver today that Senator Obama has failed the so-called Commander- in- Chief test... Then on television...endorsing Obama's plan for bringing U-S forces home from Iraq. Our fifth story on the Countdown: Senator McCain now saying a 16-month withdrawal "timetable based on conditions on the ground" is "a pretty good timetable."...(read more)
John McCain's 'Obama Love' fund-raising video was a hit on the web this week, so it's a surprise to find that it's been zapped from the campaign's YouTube channel.
According to Unruly Media's viral video tracking service, the McCain campaign's 'Obama Love' video was the hottest presidential candidate viral video on the web this week.
Nevertheless, the video has been removed from YouTube. The fund-raising videos also appear to have also been removed from the campaign's web site.
Unruly Media reports that the video has been viewed almost 260,000 times since its release Tuesday.
It's not clear why the video was deleted, but there's a good chance that the campaign's use of Frankie Valli's hit tune Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You had something to do with it. Licensing such hits is expensive, and the tune is frequently used in television commercials.
There were two versions of the video, and both appear to have been taken down. Viewers voting for their preferences for the two videos generally preferred the one accompanied by the Valli tune.
The McCain campaign did not return a call or an e-mail for an explanation.
If the video were taken down due to a copyright violation, it wouldn't be the first time that the campaign has run into a wall with its online fund-raising mash-ups.
In October, Fox News went after McCain for using a clip from a debate appearance on its network in a web ad called "Tied Up."
The ad used a clip of McCain criticizing Hillary Clinton for an earmark.
Fox's lawyers argued at the time that the clip's use didn't constitute fair-use because the campaign was using it to raise money -- therefore it was a commercial use of the footage.
See Also:
Jeremiah Mondello was a damn good software salesman. While he was still in college, he started a backyard eBay business that earned him some $300,000 in three years, mostly shipping Intuit's Quicken financial software at the rock-bottom price of about $30 a pop.
His secret? He pirated the software, burned it onto counterfeit discs and laundered his profits through a series of PayPal accounts established under stolen identities. This week a federal judge sentenced the 23-year-old to four years in prison for identity theft, copyright violation and mail fraud, in a prosecution hailed by the Justice Department as a warning shot to software counterfeiters.
"It's the scariest thing I've ever imagined," Mondello said. "I never dreamed this would happen in my wildest dreams. I never wanted any of this. It was a huge mistake."
In an exclusive interview with Wired.com, Mondello described how he stumbled into the counterfeit software business, and the fear gripping him as he awaits his upcoming prison stint; free on bail for the moment, he has to report to jail within 60 days.
Mondello's conviction, the 29th involving online auctioning and commercial distribution of counterfeit software, comes as Congress considers strengthening enforcement of copyrights and trademarks -- legislation that would set up an FBI anti-piracy unit and create an executive-level copyright czar reporting directly to the president. The Software Information and Industry Association and other groups say U.S. companies lose billions in revenue from piracy.
Mondello started small. In 2005, while a college student, it occurred to him he could make a quick buck by copying the SonicMY DVD Deluxe software that came with his new computer, then selling the original. Then he noticed his Epson photo printer had the ability to print on discs at a near professional quality, so he took the logical next step and began making counterfeit versions of DVD Deluxe and other programs, and offering them on eBay.
"I just sold a few to pay for gas and lunch. I was on financial aid. I didn't want to take out any more student loans," he said. "That was the starting motivation. Later, I guess I kind of decided I thought it would be a good idea to save some money and start my own business and do some travel."
Like any smart businessman, he poured some of his profits back into the enterprise, investing in some acrylic spray from the local hardware store and a few more Epson printers. "This spray-on you get from the hardware store, it gives it a nice seal," he said. "It looks professional. I thought that was kind of interesting."
Mondello chose to counterfeit products like Intuit's because they were often marketed without retail packaging.
He said he "started experimenting out in the back shed. I tried to see what I could produce for a better product. I sold a few more. Then I was like 'Well, I'm selling this under my name under my eBay account with my PayPal account with my return address.' I thought this was a pretty bad idea."
Mondello decided to conceal his identity, but needed real PayPal accounts to receive payment for the thousands of discs he was selling, which were eventually produced on two Bravo Premier Pro copiers. PayPal, though, required a link to a real bank account, and for obvious reasons he didn't want to use his own. That's where the hacking entered.
He began delivering a Trojan horse program to bank-account holders over instant messenger. The Trojan monitored the key strokes of his victims, allowing him to acquire their online banking passwords. He wielded the stolen passwords to get the victims' bank account numbers, and then to verify the microdeposits that PayPal sends as a bulwark against exactly this kind of fraud.
He withdrew his piracy profits from cash machines using PayPal debit cards. But he insists that he never stole a penny from the bank accounts he hacked. "Absolutely not. I would never do that and take that money. I never did anything I felt was wrong. And that's the truth," he said in the telephone interview from Eugene, Oregon, where he was a University of Oregon student.
Mondello, who comes from a broken home (.pdf), said he learned his craft on internet forums or websites. "It was all discovered online," he said. "I was self-taught."
He knew the scheme would eventually come to a halt, but he didn't expect to be arrested. "What I thought: I would probably one day get an e-mail from somebody asking for me to stop. That e-mail never came," he said.
Instead, last Halloween, federal agents showed up to his apartment in Eugene. "I opened the door. I immediately felt they had the wrong house," he said. "''What is this?' I thought. I was not expecting that. They started to read me the warrants. It kind of dawned on me that they had the right house."
He doesn't recall whether they were armed. Nevertheless, he spilled his guts. "I gave them (.pdf) all they wanted," he said.
For all he precautions he took to conceal his own identity, he kept records of every transaction on his laptop. He watched as the U.S. Customs agents carted the computer out the door.
"I had all the records on my computer that they took. It never ever occurred to me that anybody would ever come in my home like that," he said. "I never password-protected the computer. I never encrypted anything."
He pleaded guilty in May, and returned about $160,000 in cash. Matthew Friedrich, acting assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's Criminal Division, said the case "proves that law enforcement can identify and prosecute offenders who attempt such schemes."
Mondello's lawyer, Jay Frank, said in a court filing that the hacker has "has learned a great deal in the last year or so."
"He feels tremendous remorse for what he's done," Frank wrote. "In addition, he is extremely fearful of prison, and seems ... to be more openly fearful, and more openly preoccupied with what his circumstances will be when he's in prison, than virtually any other client [I have] represented in this court since 1985."
See Also:
- Ameritrade Hack Settlement: $2 Per Victim, $1.8 Million for Lawyers
- San Francisco Held Cyber-Hostage? Disgruntled Techies Have Wreaked ...
- San Francisco Admin Charged With Hijacking City's Network
- Prosecutor: Admin Rigged City Network for 'Failure'
- ICANN and IANA Sites Hacked, Redirected
- Republicans Search For Dollars Online
- New York Hack Hacked
Image via snowfreak91287.
News item both for gloating, and gratuitous excuse to show you the hot photo above. NYT — Math Scores Show No Gap for Girls, Study Finds, snip:
Three years after the president of Harvard, Lawrence H. Summers, got into trouble for questioning women’s “intrinsic aptitude” for science and engineering — and 16 years after the talking Barbie doll proclaimed that “math class is tough” — a study paid for by the National Science Foundation has found that girls perform as well as boys on standardized math tests.
Although boys in high school performed better than girls in math 20 years ago, the researchers found, that is no longer the case. The reason, they said, is simple: Girls used to take fewer advanced math courses than boys, but now they are taking just as many.
“Now that enrollment in advanced math courses is equalized, we don’t see gender differences in test performance,” said Marcia C. Linn of the University of California, Berkeley, a co-author of the study. “But people are surprised by these findings, which suggests to me that the stereotypes are still there.”
The findings, reported in the July 25 issue of Science magazine, are based on math scores from seven million students in 10 states, tested in accordance with the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
The researchers looked at the average of the test scores of all students, the performance of the most gifted children and the ability to solve complex math problems. They found, in every category, that girls did as well as boys. (To their dismay, the researchers found that the tests in the 10 states did not include a single question requiring complex problem-solving, forcing them to use a national assessment test for that portion of their research.)
Janet Hyde, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who led the study, said the persistent stereotypes about girls and math had taken a toll.
“The stereotype that boys do better at math is still held widely by teachers and parents,” Dr. Hyde said. “And teachers and parents guide girls, giving them advice about what courses to take, what careers to pursue. I still hear anecdotes about guidance counselors steering girls away from engineering, telling them they won’t be able to do the math.” (…read more.)
Also — I shall now plug the psychosexual reassurances of metric. “Apart from the actual benefits of metric, 10 centimeter stilettos and a 30 centimeter penis sounds a lot more interesting than 4 inch stilettos and a 12 inch penis.”
I know I'd want to punch me in the face.
And yet she's still there, loving me, supporting me. It feels like a complete blessing, like great wings attached to my back. I know I'm a shallow twit now, the sort of obsessed artist who I normally mock, and I suspect that I'll be doing this for some time afterwards. My writing's suddenly become a lot harder, and a lot more psychodramatical.
She's still there.
I don't know why she's there, but I love her for that.
How does one make sense of this? The simple answer may get me ejected from the guild of political commentators, who have a lot of space to fill between now and November – but I report it nonetheless. It is that these early head-to-head polls and the vast enterprise of political analysis, nit-picking and minute speculation they support, are, to a first order of approximation, worthless. In short, you resolve the paradox by ignoring them.
Note that if you do, science is on your side. Alan Abramowitz, a politics scholar at Emory University, has shown that summer head-to-head polls convey almost no information about the forthcoming election. (Subsequent head-to-head polls are not much better.) Instead, he has a simple “electoral barometer” that weighs together the approval rating of the incumbent president, the economy’s economic growth rate and whether the president’s party has controlled the White House for two terms (the “time for a change” factor). This laughably simple metric has correctly forecast the winner of the popular vote in 14 out of 15 postwar presidential elections.
The only exception is 1968, when the barometer (calibrated to range between +100 and –100) gave Hubert Humphrey a wafer-thin advantage of +2; he lost, with a popular vote deficit of less than 1 percentage point. The barometer not only picks winners but pretty accurately points to winning margins, too. In 1980, Jimmy Carter had the biggest postwar negative reading (–66); Ronald Reagan beat him by nearly 10 percentage points.
President George W. Bush’s net approval rating (favourable minus unfavourable) is currently –40; the economy grew at a 1 per cent annual rate in the first quarter; and Republicans have had two terms in the White House. Plugging the numbers into Mr Abramowitz’s formula gives the Republican candidate a score of –60, about as bad as it gets: second only to Mr Carter’s in the annals of doomed postwar candidacies. The barometer says Mr Obama is going to waltz to victory.
Why has this barometer been so much more accurate than the wisdom of Gallup? That is hard to say – but as a factual matter, its superiority is indisputable. Even if you do not buy it, it ought to inform your reading of the polls. A wide winning margin, which is what the barometer predicts for Mr Obama, renders moot all the detailed electoral map analysis of swing states, solid states, toss-up states, states leaning one way or the other. All this wonderful stuff might matter if the margin in the national popular vote is thin. If it is wide, the toss-up states move together and that is that.
The unsettling thing about this way of predicting the outcome, of course, is that it does not matter whether the Democratic candidate is Mr Obama or Hillary Clinton – or Joe Biden or Dennis Kucinich, for that matter. The Republicans’ choice of Mr McCain was equally beside the point. On the merits, one candidate may be much better than another – a separate and endlessly interesting question. When it comes to predicting the result, the barometer says that as long as the incumbent is not running, it makes no difference...
Full article here
- Mood:
amused
In a year when the female vote is so important, it might have benefited John McCain if he'd built a little better of a relationship with them over the years. Hillary Clinton's withdrawal from the presidential race created a vacuum among women voters, a group that heavily favored Clinton's bid. While the vast majority of Clinton voters folded neatly in Barack Obama's camp, the adversarial relationship developed during the Democratic primary between the former First Lady and the Illinois Senator makes McCain a natural alternative. However, his history of insulting comments and inappropriate humor toward the demographic might make it difficult to capitalize at all on the scores of women voters marooned by Clinton's departure.
Former Rep. Pat Schroeder, a Colorado Democrat who became well-known and respected for her championing of women's rights during the 1970s and 80s, told the LA Times recently, "He has always had trouble dealing with women as equals." Based on the following collection of McCain incidents- from rape jokes to derogatory slurs- she just might be right.
Calling His Wife a C*nt - In his new book, The Real McCain, Cliff Schecter, a journalist and frequent contributor at the Huffington Post related perhaps the most disturbing of McCain's many well-publicized tirades. During his 1992 reelection bid, the Senator was joined on the campaign trail by his wife, Cindy, his aides, and three journalists who spoke to Schecter on condition of anonymity, but independently confirmed each other's accounts of the incident. Cindy McCain playfully ran her fingers through the Senator's hair and teased, "You're getting a little thin up there." McCain reddened and fired back, "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollup, you cunt." After he'd cooled down, McCain apologized, saying he'd had a long day.
Calling a Young Girl Ugly and Disparaging the Attorney General - In 1998, McCain was speaking before a GOP fundraiser in Washington, D.C. when he asked, "Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because Janet Reno is her father." The joke was ill-received on many levels- for its offense to the Attorney General, for its offense to the president and his wife. But most of all, for its attack on an eighteen year old girl.
Anyone who has a daughter can tell you that those middle teenage years can be tough. Girls at school can be vicious as it is. But when a national figure makes a predatory attack on a defenseless girl to further his own political causes, it's downright disgusting.
( Read more... )
At their joint press conference this evening in Paris that was broadcast throughout Europe, French President Sarkozy could barely contain his preference for Obama as the presumptive president of the United States. Addressing a huge contingent of French and American journalists at the Elysee Palace on a springlike evening in downtown Paris, Sakozy and Obama engaged in a veritable love fest from the moment they both strode to their respective podiums, manifesting an extraordinary confluence of friendship and mutual admiration that bodes well for Obama and the United States should he be elected president. It was so Gershwin-like. Obama even quipped that he was glad that French fries were back on the menu in the Congressional cafeteria.
rest
- Mood:
bored
Thank you, southern Illinois. Just another reason I hate you so very much.
I love peanut butter.
- Location:Home
- Mood:Totally grossed out
1) I don't fuck people who can't tell the difference between spam and a work-related sig appended to a list-relevant email.
2) I don't fuck people who can't tell the difference between Connecticut, Western MA, and Central MA.
3) I don't fuck people argue with the list mods that they don't understand the rules the mods wrote.
4) I don't live in Massachusetts.
5) I'm a guy.
This is a fantastic event to support Stray Rescue of St.Louis.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
7p-10p
5200 Delmar; 63108
314.367.4527
Over 30 professional artists will be donating a piece of art in honor of a dog rescued by Stray Rescue and many Stray Rescue dogs will make their own painting for the event as well. All artwork will be auctioned off at the end of the evening.
Loretta Swit, actress and animal activist, will be joining the event this year and donating some of her beautiful watercolor artwork.
http://www.strayrescue.org
http://www.stlglass.com
View Flyer Here:
http://www.strayrescue.org/download/Arf
- Mood:
cheerful
From our pals at MyConfinedSpace come some more great Cthulhu images:
This just in from the hard-working filmophiles at Cinema St. Louis and the St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase:
The staff and board of directors of Cinema St. Louis want to congratulate all of the participating filmmakers on their spectacular work this year. The following films have been invited to screen in the St. Louis International Film Festival in November [see list after the jump]:
Most collectors whose libraries we bought were dead years before libraries came to us, so the only way we could judge the level of eccentricity in the collectors was the books themselves, or from other evidence….Larry McMurtry Books: A Memoir
An Orientalist named Paul Linebarger, whose father, we were told, had been Sun Yat-sen's lawyer, had absolutely wonderful books, but he had other things too. He was an early expert at psychological warfare, which I believe he later taught. In one of his closets, for example, we found a huge pile of anticommunist comic books in Mongolian. Paul Linebarger also wrote science fiction, under the name Cordwainer Smith. And he had an interest in ladies' lingerie. One of the more unusual things we bought in his estate was a bra mannequin, complete with bra. Several drawers full of bras we let lie.
Douglas Jackson, the founder and director of the online payment service e-Gold and its parent company Gold & Silver Reserve, has ended a two-and-a-half-year battle with the Justice Department and pleaded guilty to charges pertaining to money laundering and operating an unlicensed money transmitting business. He faces up to 20 years in prison on the money-laundering charge and up to 5 years in prison on the licensing charge.
Jackson (at right) was indicted in April 2007, following a December 2005 Secret Service raid on his company's offices in Melbourne, Florida.
He and two other senior e-Gold directors, who also pleaded guilty to operating an unlicensed money transmitting business, have also agreed to introduce user restrictions on e-Gold and to revamp the system to make it easier to detect money-laundering activities, fixing some design flaws that Jackson acknowledges allowed criminals to use the system for illegal purposes. The company has currently suspended the opening of new accounts.
The move marks a turnaround for Jackson, who has long maintained his innocence in a fight that he estimates has cost him in the "seven figures." He told Threat Level in an e-mail that rather than drag out the case, he opted to resolve it in a manner that allowed e-Gold to move forward and shake off its reputation as being a haven for criminals.
"From our perspective, the possibility of resolving the legal case in a manner that allows for a path forward, that provides an explicit roadmap enabling e-Gold to emerge as a regulated financial institution in full compliance with US law is greatly preferred over continued conflict," he wrote. "We acknowledge that we made mistakes and fully accept responsibility for those mistakes. Our goal throughout these recent negotiations was to set the stage for e-Gold to get a second chance and to get it right this time, to emerge as an institution that can become an integral and vital part of the financial and commercial mainstream."
E-gold is a privately issued digital currency backed by real gold and silver stored in banks in Europe and Dubai. Jackson, a former oncology doctor, launched the digital cash service in 1996 with a partner. At its height, the service had about 1,000 new e-Gold accounts opening daily, and processed between 50,000 and 100,000 transactions a day. That changed in the years since the government's raid.
"All e-Gold in circulation remains 100 percent backed by physical gold," Jackson wrote. But "there has been a substantial decline in transaction volume over the past two years."
The government claimed that e-Gold facilitated child pornography and identity theft by allowing criminals to pay for illegal images and launder other funds gained through credit card fraud and other crimes. The government had initially accused Jackson and e-Gold of aiding terrorists, but dropped that claim.
Back in 2006, Jackson called the charges a farce and described all of the ways in which the company tracked criminal behavior in its system. He also discussed how the company repeatedly helped the U.S. Postal Service and other federal agencies track child pornographers and credit card thieves who sent money through the service and even established undercover accounts for law-enforcement agents to help them ensnare crooks. He had dismissed the idea that Gold & Silver was an unlicensed money-transmitting business at the time, since he said the company never accepted cash from customers, only wire transfers.
Jackson now says he has high hopes that the new e-Gold that emerges after they've implemented the required changes will attract new customers that previously stayed away because of the perception that e-Gold was favored by criminals.
"From its beginning in 1996, e-Gold has been regarded with skepticism and reflexive mistrust," he wrote Threat Level. "E-Gold as an explicitly regulated financial institution however is a whole new ball game. . . . Very importantly, the e-Gold that will emerge from this turbulence will be a community that does not tolerate criminal abuse and maintains highly effective defenses to detect and interdict such abuse."
Sentencing is set for November.
In addition to possible jail time, Jackson faces a possible fine of up to $500,000 for money laundering and $250,000 for operating an unlicensed business. Jackson told me last year, however, that a high-level U.S. attorney had told him privately, "We know you guys aren't bad guys, and the last thing we want is for anyone to go to jail. We don't want the company to fail we just want you to clean up your act."
See Also:
- E-Gold Founder Calls Indictment a Farce
- E-Gold Gets Tough on Crime
- I Was a Cybercrook for the FBI
- Confessions of a Cybermule
- Secret Service Operative Moonlights as Identity Thief
- Location:Chicago
- Mood:
Yummers
Amused