U.S. Kindle Users Can Now Borrow E-Books from Local Libraries
September 22nd, 2011DISCLOSURE: Cryptogon is an Amazon affiliate.
This whole Kindle thing moved so fast that I didn’t really have a chance to form my nonspecific sense of doom about it into much besides, Amazon is Tracking the Most-Highlighted Kindle Passages.
And now, people will be signing into their Amazon accounts to borrow ebooks from public libraries.
So it goes…
Via: Amazon (Link does not contain my affiliate code):
You can check out a Kindle book from your local library and read it on any generation Kindle device or free Kindle reading app.
When you borrow a Kindle public library book, you’ll have access to all the unique features of Kindle books, including real page numbers and Whispersync technology that synchronizes your notes, highlights, and last page read. After a public library book expires, if you check it out again or choose to purchase it from the Kindle store, all of your annotations and bookmarks will be preserved.
Kindle books are available at more than 11,000 libraries in the U.S.
How It Works
You can borrow Kindle books from your local library’s website and, with the click of a button, have them delivered to your Kindle device or free reading app.
* Visit the website of a U.S. library that offers digital services from OverDrive.
* Check out a Kindle book (using a valid library card).
* Click on “Get for Kindle” and then sign in to your Amazon.com account to have the book delivered to your Kindle device or reading app.
Note: Public library books can be sent wirelessly to Kindle devices via an active Wi-Fi connection or transferred via USB.
Video Games Intruding on Reality: ‘Game Transfer Phenomena’ [???]
September 22nd, 2011
Wow, if there was one for the top of your Not The Onion stack, this is it.
Via: New Zealand Herald / AP:
Some video-game players are so immersed in their virtual environment that when they stop playing, they transfer their experiences into the real world. A study found evidence of game transfer phenomena, which result in gamers doing things in the real world as if they were still playing.
The most extreme examples included reaching for a search button when looking for someone in a crowd and seeing energy boxes appear above people’s heads.
Half of the gamers questioned said they often look to use something from a video game to resolve a real-life issue.
In some cases these thoughts were accompanied by reflexes such as reaching to click a button on the controller even when it is not in their hands.
One interviewee reported seeing a menu of topics that were available for him to think about, while another created a list of possible responses in their head after being insult-ed.
—
Also: Game Firms Set Sights on Female Market
Via: New Zealand Herald / AP:
Like many young Japanese women, Takako Suzuki says the first thing she does most days is think about her next boyfriend. Her choices: a cute millionaire, a butler or a samurai.
Whether playing the role of a teenager who fantasises about her five rich housemates or flirting with a civil war warrior, Suzuki says she can’t get enough of “otome” Japanese romance games geared towards women.
Suzuki, who says she once played 10 different titles concurrently, buys credit from Gree to pamper her avatar with virtual clothes or shoes and buy tickets for additional game chapters.
“When I wake up in the morning, I play these games for a while before I really get up,” said Suzuki, 28, an office worker. “I need to play otome games because I’m so stressed out by my nagging boss at work.”
Next Generation Hardware Specification Could Prevent Computers from Booting Linux
September 21st, 2011Update: Microsoft Responds
Via: Microsoft:
Who is in control?
At the end of the day, the customer is in control of their PC. Microsoft’s philosophy is to provide customers with the best experience first, and allow them to make decisions themselves. We work with our OEM ecosystem to provide customers with this flexibility. The security that UEFI has to offer with secure boot means that most customers will have their systems protected against boot loader attacks. For the enthusiast who wants to run older operating systems, the option is there to allow you to make that decision.
—
Jailbreaking for commodity PCs?
Via: Network World:
Windows 8 PCs will boot super fast in part because of the next-generation booting specification known as Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). The latest UEFI, released April 8, includes a secure boot protocol which will be required for Windows 8 clients. Secure UEFI is intended to thwart rootkit infections by requiring keys before allowing executables or drivers to be loaded onto the device. Problem is, such keys can also be used to keep the PC’s owner from wiping out the current OS and installing another option such as Linux, says Matthew Garrett, a mobile Linux developer at Red Hat, in a blog post.
‘If a vendor key is installed on a machine, the only way to get code signed with that key is to get the vendor to perform the signing. A machine may have several keys installed, but if you are unable to get any of them to sign your binary then it won’t be installable. … Microsoft requires that machines conforming to the Windows 8 logo program and running a client version of Windows 8 ship with secure boot enabled.’
Lloyd’s of London Pulls Euro Bank Deposits
September 21st, 2011Hmm. What did they do with the money?
Via: Bloomberg:
Lloyd’s of London, concerned European governments may be unable to support lenders in a worsening debt crisis, has pulled deposits in some peripheral economies as the European Central Bank provided dollars to one euro-area institution.
“There are a lot of banks who, because of the uncertainty around Europe, the market has stopped using to place deposits with,” Luke Savage, finance director of the world’s oldest insurance market, said today in a phone interview. “If you’re worried the government itself might be at risk, then you’re certainly worried the banks could be taken down with them.”
European banks and their regulators are trying to reassure investors and customers that lenders have enough capital to withstand a default by Greece and slowing economic growth caused by governments’ austerity measures. Siemens AG (SIE), European’s biggest engineering company, withdrew short-term deposits from Societe Generale SA, France’s second-largest bank, in July, a person with knowledge of the matter said yesterday.
Lloyd’s, which holds about a third of its 2.5 billion pounds ($3.9 billion) of central assets in cash, has stopped depositing money with some banks in Europe’s peripheral economies, Savage said, declining to name the countries or institutions.
BofA, Wells Fargo Downgraded by Moody’s
September 21st, 2011Via: Bloomberg:
Bank of America Corp. (BAC) and Wells Fargo & Co. had their long-term credit ratings downgraded by Moody’s Investors Service, citing a decreasing probability that the U.S. would support the lenders in an emergency. Citigroup Inc.’s short-term rating also was cut.
The government is “more likely now than during the financial crisis to allow a large bank to fail should it become financially troubled, as the risks of contagion become less acute,” Moody’s wrote in statements today on Bank of America and Wells Fargo. While Citigroup may lose backing as well, its stand-alone credit has shown improvement, Moody’s said, confirming the bank’s long-term rating.
U.S. financial companies may lose their too-big-to-fail status as regulators create a system for dismantling large firms that get into financial trouble. Lawmakers have vowed to prevent a repeat of taxpayer-funded bailouts after 2008’s credit crisis.
Germany: ‘Forest Boy’
September 21st, 2011Update: Identified
Via: MSNBC:
Police in Berlin said on Friday they had identified the mysterious “Forest Boy” who turned up in the German capital nine months ago claiming to have lived in woods for several years.
Investigators said a woman in The Netherlands contacted Dutch police, saying she recognized the young man as her 20-year old step-son who had gone missing in September. A report in Die Welt [link in German] identified the “boy” as Robin, from the Dutch municipality of Hengelo.
The woman said she saw a picture that had been issued to the international press on Wednesday by German authorities seeking clues on the mystery man’s identity.
“We are 100 percent certain that he is this 20-year-old boy, because his step-mother positively identified him,” a police spokeswoman told Die Welt.
The boy, who called himself Ray, told authorities he had been living in woods until the death of his father. He said his father told him he was born June 20, 1994 — which would have made him 17 — but claimed not to know his last name or where he was from.
“It turns out that the young man presented a Pinocchio story,” Berlin police spokesman Michael Maass told NBC News.
“We now know that the young man turned 20 in April and was reported missing in the Netherlands by his family last September,” he said.
—End Update—
Via: Sydney Morning Herald:
Psychologists and linguistic experts drafted to help crack the bizarre case of Germany’s ‘forest boy’ as it emerges authorities first turned him away.
All that was certain about the teenage boy who walked into Berlin City Hall was that he spoke perfect English.
‘‘I’m all alone in the world, I don’t know who I am. Please help me,’’ he told the security guards.
He went on to claim that he had been living rough with his father in a German forest for five years, that his father had recently died and that he had walked to Berlin in the hope of finding shelter.
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Two weeks on and German police are still baffled as to the true identity of the boy, who is now being cared for by social services.
Police told The Telegraph they had consulted several psychologists and linguistic experts but were no closer to establishing his nationality. Interpol is also on the case. They are pinning their hopes on the discovery of his father’s body, which the boy said he had buried in the forest and could provide important fingerprint clues.
“We have tried psychologists – as a means of getting more information from him – but without success,” confirmed Klaus Shubert, a Berlin police spokesman.
“We just don’t know if he’s British or from elsewhere,” said Mr Schubert. “He speaks English but it seems his accent is hard to pin down.”
SSL Broken
September 21st, 2011SSL… that’s ok for buying a book online, but no tinfoiler in his right mind would bet his life on SSL.
Turns out, the part about it being ok for buying a book online was too optimistic. Haha.
Via: Register:
Researchers have discovered a serious weakness in virtually all websites protected by the secure sockets layer protocol that allows attackers to silently decrypt data that’s passing between a webserver and an end-user browser.
The vulnerability resides in versions 1.0 and earlier of TLS, or transport layer security, the successor to the secure sockets layer technology that serves as the internet’s foundation of trust. Although versions 1.1 and 1.2 of TLS aren’t susceptible, they remain almost entirely unsupported in browsers and websites alike, making encrypted transactions on PayPal, GMail, and just about every other website vulnerable to eavesdropping by hackers who are able to control the connection between the end user and the website he’s visiting.
At the Ekoparty security conference in Buenos Aires later this week, researchers Thai Duong and Juliano Rizzo plan to demonstrate proof-of-concept code called BEAST, which is short for Browser Exploit Against SSL/TLS. The stealthy piece of JavaScript works with a network sniffer to decrypt encrypted cookies a targeted website uses to grant access to restricted user accounts. The exploit works even against sites that use HSTS, or HTTP Strict Transport Security, which prevents certain pages from loading unless they’re protected by SSL.
The demo will decrypt an authentication cookie used to access a PayPal account, Duong said.
Nanoparticles Cause Brain Injury in Fish
September 21st, 2011Via: Science Daily:
Scientists at the University of Plymouth have shown, for the first time in an animal, that nanoparticles have a detrimental effect on the brain and other parts of the central nervous system.
They subjected rainbow trout to titanium oxide nanoparticles which are widely used as a whitening agent in many products including paints, some personal care products, and with applications being considered for the food industry. They found that the particles caused vacuoles (holes) to form in parts of the brain and for nerve cells in the brain to die. Although some effects of nanoparticles have been shown previously in cell cultures and other in vitro systems this is the first time it has been confirmed in a live vertebrate.
The results will be presented at the “6th International meeting on the Environmental Effects on Nanoparticles and Nanomaterials” (21st — 23rd September) at the Royal Society in London.
U.S. Assembling Drone Bases in Africa, Arabian Peninsula
September 21st, 2011Via: Washington Post:
The Obama administration is assembling a constellation of secret drone bases for counterterrorism operations in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula as part of a newly aggressive campaign to attack al-Qaeda affiliates in Somalia and Yemen, U.S. officials said.
One of the installations is being established in Ethiopia, a U.S. ally in the fight against al-Shabab, the Somali militant group that controls much of that country. Another base is in the Seychelles, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, where a small fleet of “hunter-killer” drones resumed operations this month after an experimental mission demonstrated that the unmanned aircraft could effectively patrol Somalia from there.
The U.S. military also has flown drones over Somalia and Yemen from bases in Djibouti, a tiny African nation at the junction of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. In addition, the CIA is building a secret airstrip in the Arabian Peninsula so it can deploy armed drones over Yemen.
The rapid expansion of the undeclared drone wars is a reflection of the growing alarm with which U.S. officials view the activities of al-Qaeda affiliates in Yemen and Somalia, even as al-Qaeda’s core leadership in Pakistan has been weakened by U.S. counterterrorism operations.
The U.S. government is known to have used drones to carry out lethal attacks in at least six countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. The negotiations that preceded the establishment of the base in the Republic of Seychelles illustrate the efforts the United States is making to broaden the range of its drone weapons.
Related: A Future for Drones: Automated Killing
Rumsfeld Stripped of Immunity in Case Involving Torture of U.S. Citizens
September 21st, 2011Via: USC – Neon Tommy:
Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was stripped of immunity in a case involving the torture of two United States citizens.
Two FBI informants, Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel, were detained and tortured by United States military personnel in Iraq in 2006. They filed suit against Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for violations of their constitutional rights. The Judicial View states:
“Plaintiffs seek damages from Secretary Rumsfeld and others for their roles in creating and carrying out policies that caused plaintiffs’ alleged torture. Plaintiffs also bring a claim against the United States under the Administrative Procedure Act to recover personal property that was seized when they were detained.”
Rumsfeld and the United States government moved to dismiss the charges, and were denied. The plaintiffs relayed “in sufficient detail facts supporting Secretary Rumsfeld’s personal responsibility for the alleged torture.”


