China Paper Bites on Onion Gag

Beijings most popular newspaper has unwittingly republished a bogus story about U.S. Congress threats to skip town for Memphis or Charlotte unless Washington builds them a new Capitol building with a retractable dome. The source? Americas celebrated spoof tabloid, the Onion. The Beijing Evening News, which claims a circulation of 1.25 million, translated portions of the Onions tall tale word-for-word in the international news page of its June 3 edition.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,53048,00.html

Canada, Mexico Discuss Problem Neighbour

The challenge of having the United States as a neighbour was one of the topics discussed Tuesday during a meeting with Mexican President Vicente Fox, International Trade Minister Pierre Pettigrew said Tuesday.Mr. Pettigrew, heading a trade mission to Mexico, told a news conference that he and Fox talked about how Canada and Mexico have to cope with issues that arise from "sharing a continent with the U.S."
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/RTGAMArticleHTMLTemplate/C/20020604/wpett0406?hub=homeBN&tf=tgam%2Frealtime%2Ffullstory.html&cf=tgam/realtime/config-neutral&vg=BigAdVariableGenerator&slug=wpett0406&date=20020604&archive=RTGAM&a

Dead Mans Switch

Whatever gets your attention. Anyway, there was a thread last week about what would happen if one of us were to shuffle off to that Great Motherboard in the Sky. Software which would act as a proverbial "Dead Mans Switch" came up, which is basically a system that, if not reset by a given time, will automatically carry out a series of tasks, such as posting messages to websites like Ars, sending e-mails to loved ones (or hated ones), and encrypting or destroying sensitive files (*cough* pr0n *cough*). Interest was expressed for the creation of such software, and well, here it is. The software is designed to run without installation. Just stick it in a convenient directory, and it will create all the necessary registry entries the first time it is run. Any additional files that it creates will be in the same directory, and will have the extensions .dwp and .dem, for easy portability.
http://daisyman.arsware.org/dms/

Dead Men Tell No Passwords

The man in charge of archiving and maintaining electronic copies of Norways most important historical documents is dead and so is access to those archives. So the director of the Norwegian cultural center is pleading for hackers to help him crack the centers password-protected database. The problem started when the technician responsible for the archives at Norways National Center of Language and Culture never divulged the password before he died a few years ago. Since then, employees at the center have been unable to access some of the password-protected archives that contain data on a collection of thousands of documents and books. A national database that allowed researchers access to those documents is also partly inaccessible.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,52997,00.html

Number Of Computations Done Since The Universe Began

A physicist has worked out how many calculations have happened since the Big Bang. We are all living inside a gigantic computer. No, not The Matrix: the Universe. Seth Lloyd, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, has estimated how much information the Universe can contain, and how many calculations it has performed since the Big Bang. Lloyd views every process, every change that takes place in the Universe, as a kind of computation. One way of looking at the exercise is to imagine setting up a simulation of the Universe, particle for particle, on a hypothetical super-duper computer.To simulate the Universe in every detail since time began, the computer would have to have 10^90 bits - binary digits, or devices capable of storing a 1 or a 0 - and it would have to perform 10^120 manipulations of those bits. Unfortunately there are probably only around 10^80 elementary particles in the Universe.
http://www.nature.com/nsu/020527/020527-16.html

Some Thoughts On The Idea Of Hacker Culture.

The main principle at work here is the so-called "Hackers Ethic". And its practice is the usual, daily activity of hackers. To put it very simply, without going deeper into its precise content, the hacker ethic runs strikingly parallel to the formula "lart pour lart (art for arts sake). What matters here, is the realisation that, unlike activists, hackers are focused on the pursuit of knowledge and the exercise of curiosity for its own sake. Therefore, the obligations that derive from the hacker ethic are perceived by genuine hackers as sovereign and not instrumental, and always prevail above other aims or interests, whatever these may be - and if there are any at all. This consequently makes the hackers movement to be wary of any particular blueprint of society, however alternative, and even adverse to embrace particular antagonism (some hackers, and not minor ones, are for instance loath to demonise the Microsoft Corporation). Hence the spread of political and philosophical opinions harboured by individual hackers, without any loss of their feeling of identity and belonging to the mouvance at large or even their particular group, is truly astonishing, and very unlikely to obtain within any other new social movement. In fact, the militant defense of individual liberties and a penchant for rather unequalitarian economic convictions one encounters in tandem among a good many hackers has provided for bafflement among networked political (i.e. left-leaning) activists coming to be better acquainted with their natural allies. Yet it is neither fortuitous nor aberrant that the Californian transmutation of libertarianism enjoys such widespread support among hackers.
http://cryptome.org/hacker-idea.htm

The Unfolding Universe

An hour-long documentary to be shown on The Discovery Channel (9 p.m. EDT) -- tells the story of a spinning disc of a hundred-billion suns orbiting a globe of stars and stellar remnants with a gigantic black hole in the center. Seen from above, the Milky Way is an unremarkable spiral galaxy dotting intergalactic space. And yet, for all its blandness, its story is both familiar to scientists and emblematic of the universe as a whole. "Its a good way to get a snapshot in the course of an hour of the breadth of cosmic history," said Tom Lucas, director of the program.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,52891,00.html