Basically the article talks about how in the US the government is subsidising the opposite of what we should be eating. Counter intuitive? Yes.

Healthy food should cost less than un-healthy food.

The chart was put together by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, but its figures still, alas, look quite relevant. Thanks to lobbying, Congress chooses to subsidize foods that we’re supposed to eat less of.

Head over to the full article to read more.
Link

I read this just before watching the documentary called “Food inc” I highly recommend watching this to anyway who wants to know more about what goes into your food.

They made this great image of basically who is suing who in the Mobile technology world.

At first glance, it looks as if we’re in the middle of a patent lawsuit Super Bowl party. Nearly every large mobile phone player — with the exception of Microsoft, Palm and, so far, Google — has recently been involved in some sort of patent litigation regarding mobile technologies.

Read more at they NYT Bits blog (Source)

They seem to be moving in the same direction as the old Communist Soviet Union was in terms of tracking their civilians activities in order to suppress civil disobedience and forward their power over the people.

The Obama administration has argued that warrantless tracking is permitted because Americans enjoy no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in their–or at least their cell phones’–whereabouts. U.S. Department of Justice lawyers say that “a customer’s Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to the government its own records” that show where a mobile device placed and received calls.

“You don’t know how much you miss something until it is gone.”

This is a critical question for privacy in the 21st century,” says Kevin Bankston, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who will be arguing on Friday. “If the courts do side with the government, that means that everywhere we go, in the real world and online, will be an open book to the government unprotected by the Fourth Amendment.

Obtaining location details is now “commonplace,” says Al Gidari, a partner in the Seattle offices of Perkins Coie who represents wireless carriers. “It’s in every pen register order these days.”

Source

Personally I am surprised that the US Government and Phone service companies keep pushing for more and more tracking and spying on their own people without much if any backlash from the populous. It really is becoming similar to a police state, all they need now are security cameras, curfews and police checkpoints everywhere and they are set.

The EFF tried to uncover the scale of AT&T, Verizon and Sprints lobbying expenditures which are in the interest of destroying privacy, the companies tried to hide behind a legal wall.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has been seeking records detailing the telecoms’ campaign for retroactive legal immunity under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Telecom immunity was enacted as part of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.

This decision is the latest setback for the government in its long-running attempt to delay disclosure of the documents EFF seeks. So far, EFF has obtained thousands of pages of records through this litigation.

“AT&T, Verizon and Sprint expended millions of dollars to lobby the government and get an unconstitutional grant of retroactive immunity for their illegal spying on American citizens,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl. “The public deserves to know how our rights were sold out by and for telecom lobbyists.”

Source

Big industries are running America, spending billions of dollars lobbying the government to pass laws in their interest. The middle and lower class people in America don’t have access to the large reserves of cash that these large companies have, and in my opinion Civil liberties are taking a back door to the wants of big industries like the Entertainment industry, Phone service industry and many others. They are fighting on an unfair field, one side has billions to spend while the other can only at most rally together a small protest.

It seems that Capitalism always ends up in the classic “Aristocrats vs. The Working Class” situation, the Aristocrats winning in the end because of the power they wield. Its written in history, and it will repeat itself, look at Europe, Great Britain was run by Aristocrats for ages and still is. They end up making the laws and exploiting the working class who don’t have the money or power to do anything about it. Anyone who has read up on this knows about the situation where the Aristocrats held almost all the land and taxed the working class people heavily in Britain to the point where they raked in huge sums of money and kept the working class from gaining any monetary power.

Medical College of Georgia researchers are seeking to refine cancer treatment with an anti-inflammatory plant derivative long used in Chinese medicine.

Celastrol, derived from trees and shrubs called celastracaea, has been used for centuries in China to treat symptoms such as fever, chills, joint pain and inflammation. The MCG researchers think it may also play a role in cancer treatment by inactivating a protein required for cancer growth.

That protein, P23, is one of many proteins helping the heat shock protein 90. Scientists are just beginning to realize the potential of controlling inflammation-related diseases, including cancer, by inhibiting HSP90.

Source

This is great news, I also read somewhere else that they treated a dog with a tumour the size of a pop can using the same medicine mentioned above, the dog made a healthy recovery afterwards and suffered no side effects.

The first 5,000 names have been printed on a four-foot tall “tablet” and shipped to Cupertino. Defective by Design will send a new tablet for every 5,000 signatures.

BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA — Thursday, February 4, 2010 — The Free Software Foundation’s (FSF) Defective by Design campaign against Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) delivered its “iPad is iBad for Freedom” petition to Apple CEO Steve Jobs today, demanding that he drop DRM on all Apple devices.

The petition is still accepting signatures, but the first 5,000 names have been printed on a four-foot tall “tablet” and shipped to Cupertino. Defective by Design will send a new tablet for every 5,000 signatures, so supporters can still add their voices at http://defectivebydesign.org/ipad.

This is an inventive way of getting the word out against DRM and the numerous legal barriers that come with most DRM technologies.

One example would be that when the Apple itunes store launched all the music was DRM encumbered, meaning you could only play the music on devices that could decode the AAC protected format. Defective by Design sent a petition to the founder of Apple and the DRM was (mostly) stripped off the itunes store. Hopefully this will happen again, with the iPad.

According to the defective by design campaign website the DRM is more than just preventing music from being pirated.

DRM will give Apple and their corporate partners the power to disable features, block competing products (especially free software) censor news, and even delete books, videos, or news stories from users’ computers without notice– using the device’s “always on” network connection.

This past year, we have seen how human rights and democracy protestors can have the technology they use turned against them. By making a computer where every application is under total, centralized control, Apple is endangering freedom to increase profits.

Apple can say they will not abuse this power, but their record of App Store rejections and removals gives us no reason to trust them. The iPad’s unprecedented use of DRM to control all capabilities of a general purpose computer is a dangerous step backward for computing and for media distribution. We demand that Apple remove all DRM from its devices.

Apple has taken it a step further according to defective by design, by literally acting like a dictator, censoring people on the internet who dare talk about connecting non Apple software to Apple products.

Apple abused the DMCA (legislation which makes it illegal for you to assert your basic rights by breaking DRM) to keep people from even discussing how to make other software players work with the iPhone. Apple tried to use the DMCA to force Bluwiki, a host of public wikis, to take down a public discussion of how to make other music player applications compatible with the iPod and iPhone. But iTunes compatibility isn’t illegal under the DMCA, let alone merely hosting a site that discusses it. It took seven months (during which the page was effectively censored) and the threat of an EFF lawsuit to make Apple back down. Apple feels so entitled to the lock-in that DRM provides that they try to stretch DRM legislation to cover cases where it doesn’t apply.

Sources:
www.defectivebydesign.org
www.eff.org

Simon Glik, a lawyer, was walking down Tremont Street in Boston when he saw three police officers struggling to extract a plastic bag from a teenager’s mouth. Thinking their force seemed excessive for a drug arrest, Glik pulled out his cellphone and began recording.

Within minutes, Glik said, he was in handcuffs.

The charge? Illegal electronic surveillance.

If you want to read more of the article head over to www.boston.com

Recently he published an essay on the whole Chinese hacking thing.
Here is a link to his essay I HIGHLY suggest you read it, its informative to say the least.
Link

Under a requirement taking effect soon, every computer sold in China will have to contain the Green Dam Youth Escort software package. Ostensibly a pornography filter, it is government spyware that will watch every citizen on the Internet.

Green Dam has many uses. It can police a list of forbidden Web sites. It can monitor a user’s reading habits. It can even enlist the computer in some massive botnet attack, as part of a hypothetical future cyberwar.

This is in my opinion a big factor in why the movie industry is seemingly pushing 3D as the next great technology, I always wondered what they would do to get people to upgrade from their HD TVs, well it looks like 3D TVs are “it”.

Eric Schmidt said the following in an interview with CNBC.

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.

What he said is essentially what every police state and totalitarian regime has said concerning privacy. Its shocking that he, being the CEO of Google has such a basic understanding of privacy. Privacy is fundamentally important to being a free individual.

The hypocrisy in all this is that according to the EFF “Schmidt blacklisted CNET reporters from Google after the tech news company published an article with information about his salary, neighborhood, hobbies, and political donations — all obtained from Google searches.”

If you lose privacy, you lose your individuality because instead of being unique individuals with private lives you become a data farm. Its not about your privacy as one person but the combined privacy of everyone, its what makes us unique. If you could have access to all my data ever, big deal, you wouldn’t get much out of it… But if you have access to all my data and everyone elses combined, you now have allot of power to do evil, such things like insider trading would be a good example. If a company like Google could search all your emails and everyone elses then they could literally have an inside view at the stock market, when to buy or sell based on insider emails.

Privacy is a big deal, its important and if we lose privacy on the internet then we give up our individual identities.

Here is a link to the CNBC interview: CNBC Link
If you want to read more, PCWord did a great job covering it. PCWord Link
The EFF also did a good job covering it. EFF Link

Here is a quote from the cnet article.

Twitter.com was down Thursday evening, and it appears that the microblogging site may have been hacked or the victim of a DNS hijacking.

The site, which was inaccessible for about an hour starting around 10 p.m. PST, was defaced with the following image before it was taken offline:

Source: Link

It looks as though they wanted to get their misinformed message out. They defaced the website by replacing it with propaganda written in very poor English and all capital letters with an image of a flag in the background… I suggest next time they hack such a well trafficked American site that they use proper English and not type in all caps to get their point across. Then again twitter users aren’t big on punctuation or spelling either.

This raises an important issue about how we are still in the early days of the web, and websites aren’t really that secure at all. Should it not be the website owners responsibility to keep their website clean of malware or hackers? Most hackers are amateurs like the ones that hacked Twitter, and if someone actually was good at hacking im sure even the top web sites would be in trouble. Most websites these days are a hastley compiled absolute mess of code, written without even the slightest knowledge of security.