Category Archives: News

Current affairs

Are you sure you want to take a laptop to the USA ? (Updated)

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From the Washington Post:

Federal agents may take a traveler’s laptop or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed. Also, officials may share copies of the laptop’s contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption, or other reasons, according to the policies, dated July 16 and issued by two DHS agencies, US Customs and Border Protection and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The full policy is available and it says that they have to destroy the information retained unless there is “probable cause“, except..

Copies may be retained by an assisting Federal agency or entity only if and to the extent that it has the independent legal authority to do so – for example, when the information is of national security or intelligence value.

So if you’re working for a company that competes with a US one you should probably be careful..

(Via)

Update: Steve Bellovin points out that this applies when you leave America, too..

Firefox to have Vorbis and Theora codecs built in

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This is pretty damn cool:

It was announced at the Firefix Plus summit today that Firefox will include native Theora and Vorbis support for the HTML 5 media elements. So

So in other words it will have built in support for the free audio and video codecs out of the box!

(Via)

KDE 4.1 released

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So yesterday the release version of KDE 4.1 came out and I’m up and running with it. Very nice!

My KDE 4.1 desktop with the \"Cover Switch\" alt-tab window selector

It’s also fixed at least two of the problems I had with the release candidate, listed below, which is nice!

  • Konqueror locks up when you’re using Request Tracker (RT) and try and either reply or comment on a ticket, which isn’t particularly helpful.
  • For some reason I don’t seem to be able to drag and drop a lock/logout widget onto the panel, presumably because it’s already full of windows and systray icons.

It is eminently possible that the second problem was just me dragging it to the wrong place though.. 🙂

CSIRO & BOM report – “Drought: Exceptional Circumstances” (not)

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For those looking for the joint assessment by the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO that’s all over the news at the moment, you can find it on the MAFF website. There is also a web page listed for the data and analysis in the report, but it’s not working yet (I guess they forgot the webmaster doesn’t work on weekends).

It’s about 35 pages long and is fairly technical, but not overly daunting. The content, however, is pretty scary. For us in Victoria is it predicting:

  • by 2010-2040, exceptionally hot years are likely to affect about 75% of the region, and occur every 1.3 years on average;
  • by 2010-2040, exceptionally low rainfall years are likely to affect about 10% of the region and occur about once every 12 years on average;
  • by 2030, exceptionally low soil moisture years are likely to affect about 11% of the region and occur about once every 9 years on average.

Historically it says that Victoria and Tasmania are down 109 mm in rainfall since 1950 and average temperature is up by almost 0.8C over the same 50 year timescale.

The most worrying thing is that these predictions are based on a lower level of CO2e emissions than we are currently tracking towards.

Observations since 1990 show that we are tracking the highest IPCC emission scenario, called A1F1, but climate simulations have not been performed using the A1FI scenario. Most climate research institutes around the world did simulations using the mid-range emission scenarios, called A1B and A2. Hence, in this report, projections for the next 20 to 30 years are based on simulations using mid-range emission scenarios.

So if we carry on how we’re doing now, then the reality could be much worse..

Melbourne’s Water (or lack of it)

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From todays Weekly Water Update:

Storages are now 29.6% full (524,546 million litres) compared with 31.5% (558,019 million litres) for the same period last year. This is the first time in 2008 that storages have dipped below 2007 levels and coincides with a one-in-30 year storm in late June 2007, when reservoirs saw some of their largest one-day gains on record.

So we’re now the bottom line on their graph..

How Not to Handle Sensitive Documents (Updated)

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According to the the UK Government’s Cabinet Office:

Top secret – The compromise of this information or material would be likely: to threaten directly the internal stability of the UK or friendly countries; to lead directly to widespread loss of life; to cause exceptionally grave damage to the effectiveness or security of UK or allied forces or to the continuing effectiveness of extremely valuable security or intelligence operations; to cause exceptionally grave damage to relations with friendly Governments; to cause severe long-term damage to the UK economy.

So it’s not very clever to have one of your employees leave such a document on a train..

Our correspondent said that across several departments in Whitehall on Wednesday evening there is said to be “horror” that top-secret documents could have been so casually mislaid.

I’ll say! Apparently the culprit has been suspended from his job.

Update: It happened again, though this time it’s not as clear what the actual classification was.

Large Earthquake in Japan (Mag 6.8) (updated)

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The USGS is reporting a mag 6.8 quake on the Japanese island of Honshu:

80 km (50 miles) SW of Morioka, Honshu, Japan
85 km (50 miles) SSE of Akita, Honshu, Japan
100 km (60 miles) NNW of Sendai, Honshu, Japan
390 km (240 miles) N of TOKYO, Japan

Update: The BBC says the current death toll is 4, and the USGS has downgraded the magnitude to 6.8 from 6.9.

Update 2: Death toll is now 9, and the news services persist in reporting it as a magnitude 7.2 quake even though the USGS page still shows it as 6.8.