An Invention that Could Change the Internet

The biggest internet revolution for a generation will be unveiled this month with the launch of software that will understand questions and give specific, tailored answers in a way that the web has never managed before


The new system, Wolfram Alpha, showcased at Harvard University in the US last week, takes the first step towards what many consider to be the internet's Holy Grail – a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does. Although the system is still new, it has already produced massive interest and excitement among technology pundits and internet watchers. Computer experts believe the new search engine will be an evolutionary leap in the development of the internet. Nova Spivack, an internet and computer expert, said that Wolfram Alpha could prove just as important as Google. "It is really impressive and significant," he wrote. "In fact it may be as important for the web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose.

Tom Simpson, of the blog Convergenceofeverything.com, said: "What are the wider implications exactly? A new paradigm for using computers and the web? Probably. Emerging artificial intelligence and a step towards a self-organising internet? Possibly... I think this could be big."Wolfram Alpha will not only give a straight answer to questions such as "how high is Mount Everest?", but it will also produce a neat page of related information – all properly sourced – such as geographical location and nearby towns, and other mountains, complete with graphs and charts.

The real innovation, however, is in its ability to work things out "on the fly", according to its British inventor, Dr Stephen Wolfram. If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. Or ask what the weather was like in London on the day John F Kennedy was assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer. Ask it about D sharp major, it will play the scale. Type in "10 flips for four heads" and it will guess that you need to know the probability of coin-tossing. If you want to know when the next solar eclipse over Chicago is, or the exact current location of the International Space Station, it can work it out.

Dr Wolfram, an award-winning physicist who is based in America, added that the information is "curated", meaning it is assessed first by experts. This means that the weaknesses of sites such as Wikipedia, where doubts are cast on the information because anyone can contribute, are taken out. It is based on his best-selling Mathematica software, a standard tool for scientists, engineers and academics for crunching complex maths."I've wanted to make the knowledge we've accumulated in our civilisation computable," he said last week. "I was not sure it was possible. I'm a little surprised it worked out so well."

Dr Wolfram, 49, who was educated at Eton and had completed his PhD in particle physics by the time he was 20, added that the launch of Wolfram Alpha later this month would be just the beginning of the project."It will understand what you are talking about," he said. "We are just at the beginning. I think we've got a reasonable start on 90 per cent of the shelves in a typical reference library."

The engine, which will be free to use, works by drawing on the knowledge on the internet, as well as private databases. Dr Wolfram said he expected that about 1,000 people would be needed to keep its databases updated with the latest discoveries and information. He also added that he would not go down the road of storing information on ordinary people, although he was aware that others might use the technology to do so.

Wolfram Alpha has been designed with professionals and academics in mind, so its grasp of popular culture is, at the moment, comparatively poor. The term "50 Cent" caused "absolute horror" in tests, for example, because it confused a discussion on currency with the American rap artist. For this reason alone it is unlikely to provide an immediate threat to Google, which is working on a similar type of search engine, a version of which it launched last week."We have a certain amount of popular culture information," Dr Wolfram said. "In some senses popular culture information is much more shallowly computable, so we can find out who's related to who and how tall people are. I fully expect we will have lots of popular culture information. There are linguistic horrors because if you put in books and music a lot of the names clash with other concepts."

He added that to help with that Wolfram Alpha would be using Wikipedia's popularity index to decide what users were likely to be interested in. With Google now one of the world's top brands, worth $100bn, Wolfram Alpha has the potential to become one of the biggest names on the planet.Dr Wolfram, however, did not rule out working with Google in the future, as well as Wikipedia. "We're working to partner with all possible organisations that make sense," he said. "Search, narrative, news are complementary to what we have. Hopefully there will be some great synergies."

What the experts say

"For those of us tired of hundreds of pages of results that do not really have a lot to do with what we are trying to find out, Wolfram Alpha may be what we have been waiting for."

Michael W Jones, Tech.blorge.com

"If it is not gobbled up by one of the industry superpowers, his company may well grow to become one of them in a small number of years, with most of us setting our default browser to be Wolfram Alpha."

Doug Lenat, Semanticuniverse.com

"It's like plugging into an electric brain."

Matt Marshall, Venturebeat.com

"This is like a Holy Grail... the ability to look inside data sources that can't easily be crawled and provide answers from them."

Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of searchengineland.com

Police Stop and Searches Treble

The number of people who police in England and Wales stop and search under anti-terrorism laws has trebled in just a year, but only a handful result in arrests

Officers were last night accused of abusing their powers after it emerged just one per cent of around 124,000 "suspects" targeted in 2007/08 were arrested - and only a fraction of those were for terrorism related offences. Nearly 90 per cent of the searches were carried out in London by the Metropolitan Police, which saw a 266 per cent increase, with the aftermath of the attempted nightclub bombing in the Haymarket in the summer of 2007 blamed for the rise. The level of stop and searches for other suspected offences also increased to more than a million last year - the highest for a decade.

There was also a sharp rise in the number of times the public had to justify their activities to police in so-called "stop and account" incidents. Members of the public were stopped and questioned by officers more than 2.3 million times last year after a rise of 26 per cent. It is the equivalent of one in every 20 people being stopped, although that proportion plummets to one in ten for the black population. Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, said: "People will be highly suspicious about the scale of stop and search under terror laws. "This will only serve to reinforce the view that many anti-terror powers are being used for unrelated purposes."

Home Office figures showed a total of 124,687 people were stopped and search under anti-terror laws in 2007/8, up from 41,924 in 2006/7. But only 1,271 arrests - or one per cent - were made as a result and just 73 of those were for terror offences. Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said: "These statistics will only fuel the fear that anti-terror powers are being overused by the police and for reasons other than they were intended for. "When only one in nearly 2,000 stop and searches under the Terrorism Act results in an arrest for a terror offence, questions must be asked about how effectively these powers are being used. "There is a real risk that indiscriminate or excessive use of stop and search may alienate the communities we rely most on for intelligence, which is a far more crucial tool in the fight against terrorism". Most other police searches are carried out under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE), which were up nine per cent last year to 1,045,923, nearly half of which were for suspected drugs offences. It was the highest total since 1998/99 and the fourth year in a row that numbers have increased.

Met offices carried out almost 400,000 stop and searches - the equivalent of one in every 19 people in the capital. Using both terror and non-terror powers, 1,223,860 people and vehicles were stopped and searched by police in England and Wales last year, a 17 per cent increase. Black people remain proportionately the most likely to be stopped and increasingly so. Black "suspects" are now almost eight times more likely to be stopped and searched than a white person, up from a seven to one ratio the year before, according to separate figures from the Ministry of Justice. Asians are more than twice as likely to be stopped than whites. The MoJ figures also showed officers used powers to stop people and demand they account for themselves some 2.35 million times last year, separate figures revealed. That was up by a quarter on the previous year and is set to get even higher after the Home Office pledged to make it easier for officers by scrapping a form they must fill in every time they stop a member of the public. The figures on ethnicity showed black people were almost three and a half times more likely than white people to be stopped on the street and questioned by police.

Forces began to record statistics on the ethnicity members or of the public called to stop and account following recommendations made in the Macpherson report into the death of Stephen Lawrence. Corinna Ferguson, a lawyer for human rights group Liberty, said: "A threefold increase in anti-terror stop and search is the clearest signal that these powers are being misused. "Only six in 10,000 people stopped were arrested for terrorism, let alone charged or convicted. "And the disproportionate impact on ethnic minorities is even greater than in previous years."
Home Office minister Vernon Coaker said the rise in anti-terror stop and search last year was in part linked to the failed bombings in London's Haymarket. He said: "It is important that the police have the right powers available to keep our communities safe. "Stop and search is a power aimed at disrupting crime and responding to intelligence and levels of risk. "It is an important tool for the police - helping tackle knife crime and fight terrorism. "But we are clear that its use must be proportionate, which is why there is clear guidance about when and how these powers should be exercised and we are working with the police and community groups to ensure that the powers are implemented fairly. "Today's statistics show an increase in the use of terrorist-related stop and searches which reflects the police response to the terrorist threat during the 2007-2008 reporting period, most notably the events in Haymarket, London."

Incredible Ball Pen Art

These may look like photographs, but these amazing pictures are the creation of the Spanish artist Juan Francisco Casas, who creates his large artworks using just a blue ballpoint pen. He uses up to four 14p ballpoints on one picture, and his works are already a sell-out at exhibitions and gets up to £3,750 each. Formerly a traditional painter, Juan began the drawings three years ago based on photographs of nights out with his friends. His photo realistic ballpoint pen drawings are based on the incredible detail photos that he takes on his camera. We have seen many artists who can drawings of lifelike figures, but not with blue Bic pen!

Rapidshare Hands Over Uploader’s Details, House Raided (Dirty Fuckers)

In Germany, the file-hosting service Rapidshare has handed over the personal details of alleged copyright infringers to several major record labels. The information is used to pursue legal action against the Rapidshare users and at least one alleged uploader saw his house raided. Like many new releases, Metallica’s latest album “Death Magnetic” was uploaded to the popular file hosting service Rapidshare one day prior to its official release date last year. Since users don’t broadcast their IP-address or distribute files to the public directly though Rapidshare, it came as a surprise when the police raided the house of an uploader a few weeks ago.

At first it was unclear how the identity of the uploader was revealed, but today German news outlet Gulli said it had found out that this was likely to be accomplished by creative use of paragraph 101 of German copyright law. It turns out that several record labels are using this to take legal action against those who share music on Rapidshare. Previously the paragraph was only used by rights holders to get the personal details of those who share copyrighted works on file-sharing networks. It basically enables the copyright holders to get “permission” from a civil judge to ask ISPs to disclose the personal details of a user behind a certain IP. Now, however, this also seems to be the case for file-hosting services such as Rapidshare, which is based in Germany.

This of course opens up the possibility for rights holders to go after a wide range of file-hosting services and potentially even BitTorrent sites. Indeed, everyone who now uploads a torrent file to a site hosted in Germany is at risk of having his personal details revealed. Although it will be impossible to prove that the uploader actually seeded the file it might be seen as assisting in copyright infringement. Pretty much all torrent sites keep track of the IP-addresses of their (.torrent) uploaders, and if the rights holders can get the IP-address of people who upload to file-hosting services such as Rapidshare, they can easily extend this to BitTorrent sites hosted in Germany. A dream come true for copyright holders, but a nightmare for the privacy of Internet users

Closing In on the Next Earth

A group of astronomers today announced the discovery of the least massive planet yet detected outside of our solar system. It is lightweight enough--between two and three times the mass of Earth--to almost certainly be rocky like Earth rather than a huge ball of gas. Although the planet orbits too close to its star to be habitable, a new analysis of one of its neighbors suggests a world with deep oceans. All this raises the prospect of discovering an Earth-size planet orbiting at just the right distance from its star to give life a chance. "It's just a matter of time now," says exoplanet specialist Sara Seager of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

Planet hunters are an ambitious lot. They're after an Earth-sized, rocky planet orbiting at a comfortable, livable distance from its star. For ease of observation, the exoplanet should periodically pass between the star and astronomers on Earth. They've already bagged huge planets orbiting in a star's habitable zone--where any water would be liquid--and huge planets transiting in front of their stars. They've found small planets too: CoRoT-Exo-7b, whose discovery was announced in February, is twice the diameter of Earth but likely eight times its mass--and far from habitable.

What makes the new world so noteworthy is its small mass. At the Joint European and National Astronomy Meeting being held this week in Hatfield, U.K., a 13-member group led by planet hunter Michel Mayor of the Observatory of Geneva in Switzerland announced that Gliese 581 e, located only 20.5 light-years away in the constellation Libra, is so small that it isn't smothered with gas the way Jupiter or Neptune is.

The group found the new record holder, as most exoplanets have been found, by monitoring the spectral color of its star (Gliese 581) for years. Subtle periodic color shifts trace a star's wiggling induced by a planet's periodic gravitational tugging as it orbits. Three other planets are known to orbit this star, with Gliese 581 e innermost in a 3.15-day orbit. Being that close to even this low-mass, relatively cool star makes the new find too hot a rock to be habitable; any water would have boiled away eons ago.

But the group also announced a correction to their calculated orbit for Gliese 581 e's massive planetary neighbor, Gliese 581 d, bringing it in from an 83-day orbit to a 67-day orbit. That puts it in the habitable zone, where it would be warm enough for any water to be liquid but not so hot as to boil it away. Gliese 581 d "could even be covered by a large and deep ocean," team member Stephane Udry of the Observatory said in a statement. "It is the first serious 'water world' candidate."

More exciting finds should be on the way. In its manuscript submitted to Astronomy & Astrophysics, the group shows that its current instrumentation, a high-resolution spectrograph linked to the European Southern Observatory's 3.6-meter telescope at La Silla Paranal Observatory in Chile, could detect a planet twice the mass of Earth all the way out in the middle of the Gliese habitable zone. So, given time, says Seager, habitable Earths will turn up. With some luck, one will be aligned to pass in front of its star, letting astronomers decipher more about the next Earth from the starlight passing by

Pirate Bay Judge Biased, Retrial Demanded

Less than a week after the Pirate Bay copyright trial ended with a guilty verdict, lawyers for the defense are calling for a retrial. Swedish radio station Sveriges Radio P3 news program revealed that Judge Tomas Norström holds close ties to pro-copyright organizations and his ruling may be considered a substantial conflict of interest. If it can be proven that Norström has a legitimate bias against the Pirate Bay Four based on his affiliations, there is a possibility the original verdict could be thrown out. Sveriges Radio reported that Norström is a member of the following pro-copyright or copyright-relevant organizations that may have impacted his decision-making abilities at the trial:

• The Swedish Association of Copyright, a discussion forum. While such an affiliation may seem harmless, other members of the organization include Henrik Pontén, Monique Wadsted, and Peter Danowsky — three key representatives in the entertainment industry’s case against Pirate Bay.
  


• The Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property, an organization devoted to implementing stronger copyright laws. Norström sits on the board.
  


• .SE, The Internet Infrastructure Foundation, another harmless-sounding affiliation with another questionable allegiance: Monique Wadsted is also a member of this group that oversees the .se name domain and handles domain disputes.

Peter Althin, the lawyer who represents Pirate Bay spokesperson Peter Sunde, told The Local that in setting up this case, several lay judges were thrown out due to conflicts of interest. That Norström somehow sneaked past this deletion process raised suspicion and anger in the defense team. Norström claims that his decision was not colored by his associations. “My view has been that these activities do not constitute a conflict of interest,” he told Sveriges Radio. It’s evident that Judge Norström has strong ties to the pro-copyright lobby. I think he should have stepped down from the case in the beginning. That he didn’t shows a serious perversion of justice. Last Friday, Pirate Bay was sacked with a bill for 30 million Swedish kronor (US$3.6 million) and a one-year prison sentence for the Pirate Bay Four: Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström.

Robots are Narrowing the Gap with Humans

WASHINGTON — Robots are gaining on us humans. Thanks to exponential increases in computer power — which is roughly doubling every two years — robots are getting smarter, more capable, more like flesh-and-blood people.

Matching human skills and intelligence, however, is an enormously difficult — perhaps impossible — challenge.

Nevertheless, robots guided by their own computer "brains'' now can pick up and peel bananas, land jumbo jets, steer cars through city traffic, search human DNA for cancer genes, play soccer or the violin, find earthquake victims or explore craters on Mars. At a "Robobusiness" conference in Boston last week, companies demonstrated a robot firefighter, gardener, receptionist, tour guide and security guard.

You name it, a high-tech wizard somewhere is trying to make a robot do it. A Japanese housekeeping robot can move chairs, sweep the floor, load a tray of dirty dishes in a dishwasher and put dirty clothes in a washing machine.

Intel , the worldwide computer-chip maker, headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif. , has developed a self-controlled mobile robot called Herb, the Home Exploring Robotic Butler. Herb can recognize faces and carry out generalized commands such as "please clean this mess," according to Justin Rattner , Intel's chief technology officer.

In a talk last year titled "Crossing the Chasm Between Humans and Machines: the Next 40 Years,'' the widely respected Rattner lent some credibility to the often-ridiculed effort to make machines as smart as people. "The industry has taken much greater strides than anyone ever imagined 40 years ago," Rattner said. It's conceivable, he added, that "machines could even overtake humans in their ability to reason in the not-so-distant future.''

Programming a robot to perform household chores without breaking dishes or bumping into walls is hard enough, but creating a truly intelligent machine still remains far beyond human ability. Artificial intelligence researchers have struggled for half a century to imitate the staggering complexity of the brain, even in creatures as lowly as a cockroach or fruit fly. Although computers can process data at lightning speeds, the trillions of ever-changing connections between animal and human brain cells surpass the capacity of even the largest supercomputers

"One day we will create a human-level artificial intelligence,'' wrote Rodney Brooks , a robot designer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , in Cambridge, Mass. "But how and when we will get there — and what will happen after we do — are now the subjects of fierce debate.''

"We're in a slow retreat in the face of the steady advance of our mind's children,'' agreed Paul Saffo , a technology forecaster at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif. "Eventually, we're going to reach the point where everybody's going to say, 'Of course machines are smarter than we are.' ''. "The truly interesting question is what happens after if we have truly intelligent robots,'' Saffo said. "If we're very lucky, they'll treat us as pets. If not, they'll treat us as food.'' Some far-out futurists, such as Ray Kurzweil , an inventor and technology evangelist in Wellesley Hills , a Boston suburb, predict that robots will match human intelligence by 2029, only 20 years from now. Other experts think that Kurzweil is wildly over-optimistic.

According to Kurzweil, robots will prove their cleverness by passing the so-called "Turing test.'' In the test, devised by British computing pioneer Alan Turing in 1950, a human judge chats casually with a concealed human and a hidden machine. If the judge can't tell which responses come from the human and which from the machine, the machine is said to show human-level intelligence. "We can expect computers to pass the Turing test, indicating intelligence indistinguishable from that of biological humans, by the end of the 2020s,'' Kurzweil wrote in his 2005 book, "The Singularity Is Near.'' To Kurzweil, the "singularity'' is when a machine equals or exceeds human intelligence. It won't come in "one great leap,'' he said, "but lots of little steps to get us from here to there.'' Kurzweil has made a movie, also titled "The Singularity Is Near: A True Story About the Future,'' that's due in theaters this summer.

Intel's Rattner is more conservative. He said that it would take at least until 2050 to close the mental gap between people and machines. Others say that it will take centuries, if it ever happens. Some eminent thinkers, such as Steven Pinker , a Harvard cognitive scientist, Gordon Moore , a co-founder of Intel , and Mitch Kapor , a leading computer scientist in San Francisco , doubt that a robot can ever successfully impersonate a human being.

It's "extremely difficult even to imagine what it would mean for a computer to perform a successful impersonation,'' Kapor said. "While it is possible to imagine a machine obtaining a perfect score on the SAT or winning 'Jeopardy' — since these rely on retained facts and the ability to recall them — it seems far less possible that a machine can weave things together in new ways or . . . have true imagination in a way that matches everything people can do.''

Nevertheless, roboticists are working to make their mechanical creatures seem more human. The Japanese are particularly fascinated with "humanoid'' robots, with faces, movements and voices resembling their human masters. A fetching female robot model from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology lab in Tsukuba, Japan , sashays down a runway, turns and bows when "she'' meets a real girl.

"People become emotionally attached'' to robots, Saffo said. Two-thirds of the people who own Roombas, the humble floor-sweeping robots, give them names, he said. One-third take their Roombas on vacation.

At a technology conference last October in San Jose, Calif. , Cynthia Breazeal , an MIT robot developer, demonstrated her attempts to build robots that mimic human and social skills. She showed off "Leonardo,'' a rabbity creature that reacts appropriately when a person smiles or scowls. "Robot sidekicks are coming,'' Breazeal said. "We already can see the first distant cousins of R2D2," the sociable little robot in the "Star Wars" movies. Other MIT researchers have developed an autonomous wheelchair that understands and responds to commands to "go to my room'' or "take me to the cafeteria.''

So far, most robots are used primarily in factories, repeatedly performing single tasks. The Robotics Institute of America estimates that more than 186,000 industrial robots are being used in the United States , second only to Japan . It's estimated that more than a million robots are being used worldwide, with China and India rapidly expanding their investments in robotics.

Pirate Bay Case: Four Found Guilty

Four men behind a Swedish file-sharing Web site used by millions to exchange movies and music have been found guilty of collaborating to violate copyright law in a landmark court verdict in Stockholm.

The four defendants — Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi and Carl Lundstrom, three founders and one patron of The Pirate Bay — were sentenced to one year in jail and also ordered to pay 30 million kronor ($3.6 million) in damages to several major media companies including Warner Brothers, Columbia, Twentieth Century Fox, Sony BMG and EMI.

The Pirate Bay allows users to exchange files including movies, music, games and software, but does not host the files itself. It claims more than 3.5 million registered users.

The court case, which involved both a criminal case and a civil claim brought by the media companies, marks a key victory for anti-piracy campaigners, who had long targeted the Web site. Should the perpetrators of Internet piracy be punished? Have your say

The year-long prison terms are for violating Swedish law, while the damages are compensation to the media giants in the civil case — though the court ordered the men to pay just one-third of the 110 million kronor ($13 million) which the companies had asked for. Friday’s verdict did not include an order to shut down The Pirate Bay site.

Its owners have consistently shrugged off legal threats and police raids, posting letters from entertainment industry lawyers on their Web site with mocking responses. When Dreamworks studio demanded that the site act over file-sharing of Dreamworks’ movie “Shrek 2,” The Pirate Bay threatened to sue for harassment and lodge a formal complaint “for sending frivolous legal threats.”

“It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are … morons,” the response continued, suggesting that studio representatives perform a sexual act. The response closed with an obscenity. Site owners dismissed the effects of a police raid in 2006, saying the site had been down longer on other occasions due to illness or drunkenness than when “the U.S. and Swedish government forces the police to steal our servers … yawn.”

But Magnus Eriksson, who in 2003 co-founded the “loosely formed group of theorists, artists and programmers” that spawned The Pirate Bay, says there are serious issues at stake. He does not think copyrighted material should be free for everyone, “but that it already is.” “The control over what people communicate is lost and we have to adapt to this new state of things,” he said via e-mail. “To monitor all communications, fight all new digital technologies and spread a culture of fear in what should be a free and open communication network is not a desirable option.”

Entertainment companies claim The Pirate Bay has hurt their box office profits, part of an annual loss the Motion Picture Association of America claims to be about $6 billion a year worldwide. “Hollywood studios are businesses. They’re there to make money,” said association lawyer Thomas Dillon. “It costs $100 million to make a feature film, so of course they’re quite keen to get some back. So I don’t accept this argument that there’s some benefit to culture in allowing people to make copies of commercial films and getting them for free.”

Monique Wadsted, a Swedish lawyer for the MPAA, said The Pirate Bay was also harming individual artists. A victory for the entertainment companies “will, of course, be for all authors all around the world, some kind of redress… because what is going on now is actually a plundering of the author’s works,” she said via e-mail.

“If some authors find it good to market their products using file-sharing or whatever, they are free to do that,” she added. “But that is not what is happening at the moment. What’s happening at the moment is that authors’ and rights holders’ works are file-shared against their will and that is not acceptable.” She argued that The Pirate Bay “is specifically tailored for copyright infringement.”

The prosecution claims the site provides a search engine that helps people find and download copyrighted material including movies, music and games — in effect, enabling copyright theft. The site’s supporters say they’re doing nothing wrong under Swedish law because the site doesn’t actually put the copyrighted material on the Web site.

Internet piracy and illegal downloading from peer-to-peer systems are some of the biggest piracy problems in Europe, the MPAA argues. Internet piracy is growing at a faster rate in Europe than anywhere else in the world, the MPAA says, because of increased broadband use, weak laws, and lenient public perceptions.

Sweden’s official efforts to battle online piracy have been weak, the MPAA says. Eriksson, the co-founder of the group that led to The Pirate Bay, says the MPAA’s argument that file-sharing hurts movie studio revenues is “nonsense.” “Cinema is doing better than ever,” he said by e-mail. “They only claim this because they calculate losses by looking at the number of downloads and imagining that all of them would have been a purchase if they hadn’t been downloaded first.”

Eriksson said what was at stake in the Swedish courtroom was the future of the Internet itself. “The Internet revolution meant that we created a global network where any digital entity could connect and exchange information with any other,” he said. “Anti-piracy efforts must be seen in the light of a counter-revolution against this that goes all the way to the very infrastructure of the net.”

He suggested that even if The Pirate Bay is convicted of facilitating making works public through its indexing service, which he does not expect, Internet piracy will not stop. “The prosecution can’t understand that The Pirate Bay is just one stratification of a social and technological change that is decentralized,” he said. "Piracy does not have a head that you can cut off, and The Pirate Bay is just a technology allowing communication, a part of the Internet infrastructure.”

-CNN

Life As We Know It

The mystery of how our planet's atmosphere became rich in oxygen has finally been solved

It was one of the most important changes to have happened to the Earth's atmosphere and it was the reason why today we can breathe life-giving oxygen. And yet the Great Oxidation Event has remained a mystery – until now.

Without oxygen, life on Earth would not exist as we know it. It has provided the supercharged air that has fuelled an explosion in the diversity and size of all living organisms, from the smallest shrimp to the biggest dinosaur. About 21 per cent of air is oxygen, a vital ingredient for living organisms to carry out the most efficient method of converting food into energy using aerobic respiration. Yet an oxygen-rich atmosphere did not always exist, and the explanation for how it came about has eluded generations of scientists.

Now a team of researchers led by Kurt Konhauser of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, has come up with a convincing explanation for why oxygen suddenly began to accumulate in the early atmosphere of the Earth about 2.7 billion years ago, when life consisted of nothing more complex than single-cell microbes. The Great Oxidation Event happened, they believe, when one group of oxygen-destroying microbes began to die off, leaving another group of oxygen-producing microbes to gain the ascendancy. The trigger for this event was a fall in a trace metal called nickel, which led to the inexorable rise of oxygen – and life – on Earth.

The role of nickel in the story of atmospheric oxygen is new. If Professor Konhauser and his colleagues are right then it could explain not just the explosive evolution of life, but how the Earth itself was shaped, because it the erosive power of oxygen that was so crucial to the sculpturing of rocks, the formation of rivers and the carving out of the coastlines. "The Great Oxidation Event is what irreversibly changed surface environments on Earth and ultimately made advanced life possible. It was a major turning point in the evolution of life on our planet, and we are getting closer to understanding how it occurred," said Dominic Papineau of the Carnegie Institution in Washington.

Oxygen as a molecule is so reactive that it soon disappears unless it is being constantly produced. The concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere today is maintained by plants carrying out photosynthesis – the conversion of sunlight into chemical energy and oxygen. The first photosynthetic microbes, the "blue-green" algae or cyanobacteria, are thought to have evolved about 300 million years before the Great Oxidation Event 2.5 billion years ago. But the oxygen they produced was quickly destroyed by the methane gas produced by the far more numerous methanogenic bacteria, which could breathe without oxygen using the less efficient method of anaerobic respiration. These methanogenic bacteria, which still live in the waterlogged, oxygen-starved environment of swamps and wetlands, crucially need nickel to survive. Without a rich supply of nickel, the vital enzymes of these methane-producing microbes are fatally undermined.

The scientists found that by analysing a type of sedimentary rock known as banded-iron formations they could monitor levels of nickel in the oceans of the early Earth dating as far back as 3.8 billion years ago. They found there was a marked fall in nickel between 2.7 billion and 2.5 billion years ago – the same time as the Great Oxidation Event. "The timing fits very well. The drop in nickel could have set the stage for the Great Oxidation Event. And from what we know about living methogens, lower levels of nickel would have cut back methane production," Dr Papineau said. "The nickel connection was not something anyone had considered before. But our study indicates that it may have had a huge impact on the Earth's environment and on the history of life," he said.

Professor Konhauser said that the study, published in Nature, supports the idea that these methane-producing microbes prevented oxygen from accumulating in the early atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years. The scientists believe that nickel levels fell because the Earth's crust had cooled down during this period, which meant that there was less nickel being ejected from volcanic eruptions into the ocean. "We're certain from looking at the rocks in banded-iron formations that nickel dropped about 2.5 billion years ago to about half its previous value. The issue is how the methane-producing microbes responded to this decrease in nickel. We think they died off," Professor Konhauser said. Although the Great Oxidation Event did not lead to a sudden rise of oxygen to levels like those experienced today, it did cause a significant rise that has never been reversed.

Tougher Piracy Laws, Blacklists of Pirates

Six of the UK’s biggest net providers have agreed a plan with the music industry to tackle piracy online. The deal, negotiated by the government, will see hundreds of thousands of letters sent to net users suspected of illegally sharing music. Hard core file-sharers could see their broadband connections slowed, under measures proposed by the UK government. BT, Virgin, Orange, Tiscali, BSkyB and Carphone Warehouse have all signed up. Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the BPI, which represents the music industry, said: “All of the major ISPs in the UK now recognise they have a responsibility to deal with illegal file-sharers on their networks.” The plan commits the firms to working towards a “significant reduction” in the illegal sharing of music.

In addition to this chance, parents whose children download music and films illegally will be blacklisted and have their internet access curbed under government reforms to fight online piracy. Households that ignore warnings will be subjected to online surveillance and their internet speeds will be reduced, making it very difficult for them to download large files. The measures, the first of their kind in the world, will be announced today by Baroness Vadera, who brokered the deal between internet service providers and Ofcom, the telecoms body. About 6.5 million Britons are thought to have downloaded music illegally last year. It has been estimated that illegal downloads will cost the music industry alone £1 billion over the next five years.

Source: Times, BBC

Don't Photograph The Police!

LONDON - Tourists better think twice now before snapping pictures of the iconic British bobby. A new British anti-terrorism law went into effect Monday that could effectively bar photographers from taking pictures of police or military personnel — a move that prompted some 200 photographers to protest outside of Scotland Yard's headquarters.

Although the measure aims to prevent terrorists from taking reconnaissance shots, photographers say it could be misused at a whim to stop any pictures from being taken — especially images involving police abuse and demonstrations. "This law makes it much more difficult to photograph any kind of public demonstration or riot," said Marc Vallee, a protester and photographer. "The police are already suspicious of photographers and this just gives them more ammunition to stop us at our work".

Britain has come under fire in recent years for several measures that civil liberties groups say erode people's freedoms. In 2005, another law prohibited demonstrations around Parliament. The new act makes it a crime to "elicit, publish or communicate information" about British police or military personnel. Officials defend policyBritain's Home Office said in a statement that the law is designed to protect police officers on counterterrorism operations. In many cases, officers could allow photographers to keep taking pictures. In other cases, they could ask them to stop or threaten them with arrest.

It is legal to take photographs in any public space, but photographers complain they have been harassed by police while taking photographs near airports, government buildings or train tracks under the Terrorism Act 2000, which gives police the right to stop, search and question anyone taking photographs.

"We've seen more and more limits being placed in this country on photographers and this new legislation will make things even more difficult for them," said Padraig Reidy of Index on Censorship, a group that monitors civil liberties.
Freelance photographer Jess Hurd said she was stopped by police when photographing a December wedding of Irish Travelers. Part of the story was about how the Travelers — who often roam from site to site — face harassment from police.

"The police stopped me and ordered me to stop filming them, saying I could be carrying out hostile reconnaissance," Hurd said. "I had no idea what they were talking about until I realized we were vaguely in the vicinity of City Airport."
Photographers who refuse to stop taking pictures after a warning face arrest, up to 10 years in prison or unspecified fines.

British Police Allowed to Hack

The power of anti piracy organizations is constantly growing and latest news from Great Britain sounds somehow scary: The Home Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain routinely to hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant. The move, which follows a decision by the European Union’s council of ministers in Brussels, has angered civil liberties groups and opposition MPs. They described it as a sinister extension of the surveillance state which drives “a coach and horses” through privacy laws. The hacking is known as “remote searching”. It allows police or MI5 officers who may be hundreds of miles away to examine covertly the hard drive of someone’s PC at his home, office or hotel room. Material gathered in this way includes the content of all e-mails, web-browsing habits and instant messaging.

Under the Brussels edict, police across the EU have been given the green light to expand the implementation of a rarely used power involving warrantless intrusive surveillance of private property. The strategy will allow French, German and other EU forces to ask British officers to hack into someone’s UK computer and pass over any material gleaned. A remote search can be granted if a senior officer says he “believes” that it is “proportionate” and necessary to prevent or detect serious crime — defined as any offence attracting a jail sentence of more than three years. The authorities could break into a suspect’s home or office and insert a “key-logging” device into an individual’s computer. This would collect and, if necessary, transmit details of all the suspect’s keystrokes. The Home Office said it was working with other EU states to develop details of the proposals.

Source: The Times

The Mutant Pig With A Monkey Face

Shock and awe fill the newsroom from today’s WTF headline, hailing all the way from China. As opposed to the expected lab-bred superhuman clone army you may expect to hear about in a weird feature from China, the following picture is filling the minds of readers full of shock and awe. With no further ado, the mutant monkey faced pig…

Yes, that pig has a face with strikingly eerie resemblance to a primate. Wtf is going on here?

The pig is apparently owned by a man named Feng Changlin. After the pig was born in his village, he quickly told his neighbors that something weird was going on with his new piglet. It didn’t look quite right. Word quickly spread and like moths to fire, neighbors of course gathered around to see the spectacle and offered their sage, professional scientific insight, as neighbors tend to do.

In an interview with a Chinese paper, Feng claims that the pig looks really similar to a monkey, from lips, eyes, to nose to mouth. He went as far to say its rear legs are a bit longer than its forelegs, causing it to jump as opposed to walking.

Feng’s wife also added on that the piglet was born along with four others, all of which look normal. Their son keeps feeding the pig, as to see how it will grow up.

“Our son likes to play with it, and he stopped us from getting rid of it. He even feeds it milk.”

The ongoing question to this is definitely wtf?!, and it occurs on several levels.

Is it even possible for a pig to have monkey features? I would think the answer should be no, but according to the Daily Telegraph, human pig embryos have been given the go ahead by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. I have no idea what all that research entails, but the end result is genes of primates and pigs mixed together. With their more laxed ideas about genetic research, there is no telling what China is doing in its labs and has villagers assisting with in their daily lives.

A colleague also asked about the possibility of a monkey literally ‘porking’ a female pig, and giving rise to this abomination. All points considered, I suppose the physics and mechanics of a pig and monkey would allow them to do the dirty pazookie all night long. I don’t think there would be enough genetic similarity in each other’s reproductive needs to have fertilization take place. But you never know.

This pig could also represent a random mutation (see human face fish in image to right and video below) or maybe it’s just Chinese media pulling shenanigans on us.

What I do know is that the idea of a mutant monkey pig sounds cool on paper, but in appearance, it’s pretty messed up. Just think, as the field of controlled genetic manipulation advances, animal concoctions such as our mutant monkey pig face will become far more common .