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Launch of Japan Moon Probe Postponed (George Antunes) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2007 04:25:54 -0400 From: Greg Williams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [Medianews] NASA Fears Dust Storm Could Doom Mars Rovers To: medianews@twiar.org Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed NASA Fears Dust Storm Could Doom Mars Rovers By Dave Mosher Staff Writer posted: 20 July 2007 12:14 pm ET http://www.space.com/news/070720_rover_dust.html Updated 2:05 p.m. ET. A raging dust storm on Mars has cut power to NASA's twin rovers to dangerously low levels, threatening an end to the mission. The rovers were slated to operate for only 3 months but have been on Mars more than 3 years, so mission officials have had ample time to ponder their eventual silencing. The storm presents perhaps the rover team's biggest challenge, NASA said in a statement today. Scientists said the storm, which has been brewing for nearly a month, is blocking around 85 to 90 percent of all sunlight to the surface. The rovers, Opportunity and Spirit, rely on sunlight to charge their solar panels, and one or both rovers could be damaged permanently or even disabled by the limited solar power, officials said. SPACE.com reported the storm's fresh severity earlier today. The forecast Scientists fear the storms might continue for several days or weeks. If the sunlight is further slashed for an extended period, the rovers will not be able to generate enough power to keep warm and operate at all, even in a near-dormant state, the statement said. The rovers use electric heaters to keep vital core electronics from becoming too cold. "We're rooting for our rovers to survive these storms, but they were never designed for conditions this intense," said Alan Stern, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Steve Squyres of Cornell University, who is the lead scientist of the Mars Exploration Rover Project, said the direct sunlight to the rovers is at an all-time low. "To give you a sense of the 'thickness' of the dust, the brightness of the sun as viewed from the surface is now down to less than 1 percent of what it would be with a perfectly transparent atmosphere," Squyres said. "Of course, Mars never has a perfectly transparent atmosphere, but the sun is still very faint." The rovers' scientific operations were stopped Wednesday. "This is, I think, one of the most significant challenges we've faced over this entire mission," Squyres told SPACE.com today. "The nature of the risk is well understood, but the magnitude of the risk is not. We simply don't know what's going to happen next." Martian weather is unpredictable, in part because there are few monitoring instruments and no formal weather forecasting agency as on Earth. "Whatever we do, though, the problem is not going to get much better rapidly," Squyres said. "I think that we have a good chance. If Mars really wants to kill these vehicles it can, but we have a lot of things working in our favor." The cold facts If the rovers expend too much energy, they may be unable to warm their electronics and prevent circuit-snapping temperatures. Before the dust storms began blocking sunlight last month, Opportunity's solar panels had been producing about 700 watt hours of electricity per day, enough to light a 100-watt bulb for seven hours. When dust reduced the panels' daily output to less than 400 watt hours, the rover team suspended driving and most observations, including use of the robotic arm, cameras and other site-inspection instruments. On Tuesday, July 17, the output from Opportunity's solar panels dropped to 148 watt hours, the lowest point for either rover. On Wednesday, the output dropped even lower, to 128 watt hours. Mark Lemmon, a planetary scientist at Texas A&M University and member of the rover team, said Opportunity is consuming 130 watt hours per martian day in its "sleep mode." If the negative balance continues without a break, Lemmon explained, the rover may malfunction in a matter of weeks. "Even with a 10-20 watt hour gap, we'd have a healthy rover for over a week," Lemmon said in a telephone interview. "We've never been in situation where we've been in any imminent danger of a battery depleting, but it's possible." NASA engineers are working to protect the rovers, especially Opportunity, which is experiencing the brunt of the dust storm. The rovers are showing robust survival characteristics. Spirit, in a location where the storm is currently less severe, has been instructed to conserve battery power by limiting its activities. "We are taking more aggressive action with both rovers than we needed before," said John Callas, project manager for the twin rovers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Hanging on By Opportunity's 1,236th Martian day, which ended Tuesday, driving and all science observations had already been suspended. The rover still used more energy than its solar panels could generate on that day, drawing down its battery. "The only thing left to cut were some of the communication sessions," Callas said. To minimize further the amount of energy Opportunity is using, mission controllers sent commands on Wednesday, July 18, instructing the rover to refrain from communicating with Earth on Thursday and Friday. This is the first time either of the rovers has been told to skip communications for a day or more in order to conserve energy. Since the onset of the storms, engineers have said a similar storm could be weathered by NASA's next Mars mission, a robotic lander. Human missions to Mars, a plan for the distant future, would be challenged greatly by storms like this, officials say. Even if either of the rovers do malfunction, Lemmon explained all would not be lost. "This is a really good scientific opportunity to understand how dust storms on Mars work, how they dissipate and how the dust moves around inside them," he said. "I think we'll be able to use the information we're getting now to look ahead to future mission to Mars." -- Greg Williams K4HSM [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.twiar.org http://www.etskywarn.net ------------------------------ Message: 2 Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2007 16:43:30 -0500 From: George Antunes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [Medianews] Charting the $480 billion US spectrum giveaway To: medianews@twiar.org Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; format=flowed Charting the $480 billion US spectrum giveaway By Nate Anderson Ars Technica July 19, 2007 - 01:36PM CT http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070719-charting-the-480-billion-us-spectrum-giveaway.html Critics of US spectrum policy will have plenty of ammunition for their howitzers after reading the new working paper (PDF) from J.H. Snider of the New America Foundation. Snider heads up the Wireless Future Program at New America, and his paper offers an inside look at the sometimes-dirty world of spectrum lobbying, which Snider characterizes as responsible for a $480 billion giveaway from the public treasury. The giveaway in question comes after Congress passed legislation in 1993 requiring the FCC to hold auctions for future spectrum licenses, a move that was itself prompted by a massive giveaway of prime spectrum in the late 1980s. Using the high end of his estimate (which ranges from $140 to $480 billion), Snider observes that the giveaway in question amounted to "more than 90 percent of the value of spectrum usage rights [the government] has assigned from 1993 through the present." The giveaway that Snider's talking about isn't a massive grant of free spectrum to corporate interests; instead, it's something much more subtle and far more difficult for the public to understand. To understand why Snider considers this a "giveaway," let's first look at the difference between the amount of money the government has actually received for licenses since 1993 and the amount of money that such licenses are worth. The FCC has taken in no more than $40 billion from auction licenses in the last 15 years, but Snider digs into SEC filings from the companies that own such licenses. These companies are required to estimate the value of these assets each year; in 2006, the major television and radio broadcasters, along with the major local phone companies, estimated that the value of their spectrum was $177 billion for the licenses in question (and this may be low, given Snider's own calculations). Where did the $140 billion difference come from? Snider argues that it did not come from the "changing conditions of supply and demand." Instead, it tended to come from the ways that licenses were modified after they were issued, almost always in favor of the license owner. This is where spectrum lobbyists enter the picture. They generally follow a four-step program to secure lucrative rights to spectrum: 1) create a problem, 2) outline a solution complete with a "public interest" promise, 3) secure a license and increased negotiating power against the government, and 4) exploit that enhanced power to renegotiate the terms of the license. The "public interest" pitches are predictable, usually involving variations on the terms "public safety," "free TV," "universal broadband," "educational programming," etc. Snider doesn't say it, but this sounds a bit like the current pitch for reduced-price 700MHz spectrum by Frontline Wireless, which is itself backed by a former FCC Commissioner and wants to help serve "public safety." Once a company has a license in hand, it's difficult for the federal government to get it back and easier for the company to convince the FCC to broaden the initial terms of the license without requiring any more money. Snider outlines a whole host of strategies that lobbyists use?the spilled milk strategy, the technobabble strategy, the go-slow strategy, the Louisiana Purchase strategy?and this part of the report actually makes the most interesting reading (it also contains the best titles). Even if the giveaway numbers are less than Snider's lowest estimate, he points out that they would still be huge. "If Representative Jefferson can be indicted for accepting bribes of less than $1 million," he writes, "and an average citizen can be thrown in jail for attempting to walk out of a government building with a decrepit chair worth five dollars, then surely a giveaway of public assets of at least $10 billion deserves careful public scrutiny to ensure that the conditions that cause it do not persist." There are a host of things that can be done to clean up the situation. New rules to track changes to spectrum rights can help, as can rules that would limit the revolving door between the FCC and industry. Such reforms "will be very difficult and require leadership at the highest levels," Snider says, and he ends the report by calling for leaders "with the vision and courage to make it happen." Any takers up in Washington? ------------------------ Those who are interested can download the 52 page report as a pdf file The Art of Spectrum Lobbying America's $480 Billion Spectrum Giveaway, How it Happened, and How to Prevent it from Recurring By J.H. Snider, New America Foundation http://www.newamerica.net/files/WorkingPaper19_SpectrumGiveaway_Snider.pdf ================================ George Antunes, Political Science Dept University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204 Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927 antunes at uh dot edu ------------------------------ Message: 3 Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2007 18:00:41 -0500 From: George Antunes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [Medianews] What if Murdoch Doesn't Get Dow Jones? To: medianews@twiar.org Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; format=flowed What if Murdoch Doesn't Get Dow Jones? Associated Press Saturday July 21, 12:48 AM EDT http://finance.myway.com/jsp/nw/nwdt_rt_top.jsp?news_id=ap-d8qgp14g0& NEW YORK (AP) ? Just a few weeks ago, it seemed inevitable to many on Wall Street and in the media industry that Rupert Murdoch would prevail in his campaign to add Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal, to the media empire he has spent a lifetime building. But with the sudden departure of a director in protest of the deal with News Corp. and more signs of dissent in the family that controls Dow Jones, that outcome seems less assured now as the monthslong process comes to a head. The endgame for Dow Jones begins on Monday, when the controlling shareholders of the company, the Bancroft family, will receive a briefing on the outline of a $5 billion deal that Dow Jones' board signed off on Tuesday evening. They are expected to decide the fate of the company within a few days after that. Predicting which way the Bancrofts will lean has become increasingly difficult ? so much so that Murdoch himself told The Associated Press last week at a media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho that the Bancrofts "keep changing their minds." The family has been concerned about accounts of corporate interference at other Murdoch-owned newspapers, and demanded assurances that the newsroom of the Journal, which has been under the family's control since 1902, would be free of corporate meddling. Murdoch says those concerns are unfounded. Anti-Murdoch sentiment among Bancroft family members is sure to be fanned by the abrupt departure late Thursday of Dieter von Holtzbrinck as a director of Dow Jones. In a tersely worded resignation letter, von Holtzbrinck, whose family controls a prominent publishing company in Germany, including the leading business daily there, said that while Murdoch's offer is "very generous in financial terms," von Holtzbrinck is "very worried" that Dow Jones' journalism will suffer under Murdoch. Even though Dow Jones' board signed off on Murdoch's proposal without von Holtzbrinck ? he was reported to have abstained from the vote ? there are other signs of trouble for Murdoch's bid. At that same board meeting Tuesday night, Leslie Hill, a director who is also a Bancroft family member, also reportedly abstained, and fellow director and relative Christopher Bancroft left the meeting early. All of which raises the question of what would happen if the deal falls apart. The Bancrofts could either kill the deal themselves by promising to vote against it or show such tepid support that News Corp. could walk away rather than risk a nasty shareholder fight later. The first consequence of a failed deal would surely be a sharp decline in the shares of Dow Jones, most likely to around the mid-$30s level they had been trading at prior to Murdoch's $60-per-share offer becoming public in early May. Investors are increasingly accounting for the risk of the deal failing, sending Dow Jones shares steadily below Murdoch's offering price since late June. After cresting at $61.76 on June 5, Dow Jones shares have fallen more than 10 percent, losing 40 cents to $55 Friday amid a broader downturn in the market. A collapse in Dow Jones' stock in turn would leave a lot of shareholders unhappy, which could lead to the possibility of shareholder lawsuits. However, given that investors already knew full well that the company has controlling shareholders, it's not clear that there's much they can do to legally challenge a decision not to sell the company. "I'm sure the board is following their fiduciary duty by considering the offer," said Espen Eckbo, professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. "But ultimately when you have a controlling shareholder, they will decide yes or no." The Bancrofts own 25 percent of the company but control 64 percent of the shareholder vote through supervoting shares. "You cannot by law take away the control of votes," said Eckbo, who is also the founding director of the Center for Corporate Governance at the Tuck school. "They own the votes ... and that's something you need to know when you buy the shares." A union representing Journal reporters and some Bancroft family members have sought to drum up alternatives to Murdoch's offer, but so far none have yet to gain serious traction. In late June Pearson PLC abandoned exploratory talks to combine its Financial Times newspaper with Dow Jones and General Electric Co.'s CNBC. Internet entrepreneur Brad Greenspan also met with Dow Jones negotiators along with California supermarket mogul Ron Burkle, but the board wound up endorsing Murdoch's plan. Late Friday, Greenspan put out a press release detailing a proposal that would involve, in part, lending Bancroft family members up to $600 million to buy out members who wanted to sell out. Dow Jones had no comment, and a Bancroft family spokesman declined comment. Without Murdoch's considerable financial resources and global reach, Dow Jones would have to go it alone as it tries to stem the deep losses of print advertising confronted by newspaper publishers everywhere while simultaneously trying to build up its electronic businesses such as WSJ.com, MarketWatch.com and its Factiva online news database. Dow Jones Newswires also faces a threat by the combination of two major competitors in real-time financial news, Thomson Corp. and Reuters Group PLC. Initial word about that deal leaked out just days after the Bancrofts initially rebuffed Murdoch in early May. Murdoch has promised to invest in the Journal's operations, particularly its online and overseas brands as well as its Washington coverage, with the goal of building an even bigger brand for the company and also going up against The New York Times for national readers at home as well as overseas business readers of the Financial Times, owned by Pearson PLC of the United Kingdom. Like other newspapers, Dow Jones is trying to move beyond the printed page and bring its brand name to other media such as TV, online video and other forms of Web-based news. Part of Murdoch's plan for Dow Jones involves tapping its resources to help build a business-themed cable news channel to compete with General Electric Co.'s highly profitable CNBC. Murdoch has already proved his mettle in going up against established media players, creating the Fox News Channel which eventually surpassed CNN, owned by Time Warner Inc., in the general news category. But by announcing last week a firm start date for the Fox Business Network on Oct. 15, News Corp. is indicating that it is moving ahead with its own plans ? with or without Dow Jones. ================================ George Antunes, Political Science Dept University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204 Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927 antunes at uh dot edu ------------------------------ Message: 4 Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2007 18:13:10 -0500 From: George Antunes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [Medianews] Card Sharks to Battle Computer at Poker To: medianews@twiar.org Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Card Sharks to Battle Computer at Poker Jul 21, 2007 12:22 PM (ET) By MATT CRENSON Associated Press http://apnews.myway.com//article/20070721/D8QH36C00.html NEW YORK (AP) - Poker champion Phil Laak has a good chance of winning when he sits down this week to play 2,000 hands of Texas Hold'em - against a computer. It may be the last chance he gets. Computers have gotten a lot better at poker in recent years; they're good enough now to challenge top professionals like Laak, who won the World Poker Tour invitational in 2004. But it's only a matter of time before the machines take a commanding lead in the war for poker supremacy. Just as they already have in backgammon, checkers and chess, computers are expected to surpass even the best human poker players within a decade. They can already beat virtually any amateur player. "This match is extremely important, because it's the first time there's going to be a man-machine event where there's going to be a scientific component," said University of Alberta computing science professor Jonathan Schaeffer. The Canadian university's games research group is considered the best of its kind in the world. After defeating an Alberta-designed program several years ago, Laak was so impressed that he estimated his edge at a mere 5 percent. He figures he would have lost if the researchers hadn't let him examine the programming code and practice against the machine ahead of time. "This robot is going to do just fine," Laak predicted. The Alberta researchers have endowed the $50,000 contest with an ingenious design, making this the first man-machine contest to eliminate the luck of the draw as much as possible. Laak will play with a partner, fellow pro Ali Eslami. The two will be in separate rooms, and their games will be mirror images of one another, with Eslami getting the cards that the computer received in its hands against Laak, and vice versa. That way, a lousy hand for one human player will result in a correspondingly strong hand for his partner in the other room. At the end of the tournament the chips of both humans will be added together and compared to the computer's. The two-day contest, beginning Monday, takes place not at a casino, but at the annual conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in Vancouver, British Columbia. Researchers in the field have taken an increasing interest in poker over the past few years because one of the biggest problems they face is how to deal with uncertainty and incomplete information. "You don't have perfect information about what state the game is in, and particularly what cards your opponent has in his hand," said Dana S. Nau, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland in College Park. "That means when an opponent does something, you can't be sure why." As a result, it is much harder for computer programmers to teach computers to play poker than other games. In chess, checkers and backgammon, every contest starts the same way, then evolves through an enormous, but finite, number of possible states according to a consistent set of rules. With enough computing power, a computer could simply build a tree with a branch representing every possible future move in the game, then choose the one that leads most directly to victory. That's essentially the strategy IBM's Deep Blue computer used to defeat chess champion Gary Kasparov in their famous 1997 match. No computer can calculate every single possible move in a chess game, but today's best chess programs can see an astounding 18 moves ahead. Yet poker involves not just myriad possibilities but uncertainty, both about what cards the opponent is holding and more importantly, how he is going to play them. "It's mandatory for you to understand how the other guy approaches the game. This is critical information in poker, and it's not true of any of these other games that we've studied in academia," said Darse Billings, a recent Alberta Ph.D. who has worked on the robot for 15 years - except for a three-year break to play poker professionally. The game-tree approach doesn't work in poker because in many situations there is no one best move. There isn't even a best strategy. A top-notch player adapts his play over time, exploiting his opponent's behavior. He bluffs against the timid and proceeds cautiously when players who only raise on the strongest hands are betting the limit. He learns how to vary his own strategy so others can't take advantage of him. That kind of insight is very hard to program into a computer. You can't just give the machine some rules to follow, because any reasonably competent human player will quickly intuit what the computer is going to do in various situations. "What makes poker interesting is that there is not a magic recipe," Schaeffer said. In fact, the simplest poker-playing programs fail because they are just a recipe, a set of rules telling the computer what to do based on the strength of its hand. A savvy opponent can soon gauge what cards the computer is holding based on how aggressively it is betting. That's how Laak was able to defeat a program called Poker Probot in a contest two years ago in Las Vegas. As the match progressed Laak correctly intuited that the computer was playing a consistently aggressive game, and capitalized on that observation by adapting his own play. Programmers can eliminate some of that weakness with game theory, a branch of mathematics pioneered by John von Neumann, who also helped develop the hydrogen bomb. In 1950 mathematician John Nash, whose life inspired the movie "A Brilliant Mind," showed that in certain games there is a set of strategies such that every player's return is maximized and no player would benefit from switching to a different strategy. In the simple game "Rock, Paper, Scissors," for example, the best strategy is to randomly select each of the options an equal proportion of the time. If any player diverted from that strategy by following a pattern or favoring one option over, the others would soon notice and adapt their own play to take advantage of it. Texas Hold 'em is a little more complicated than "Rock, Paper, Scissors," but Nash's math still applies. With game theory, computers know to vary their play so an opponent has a hard time figuring out whether they are bluffing or employing some other strategy. But game theory has inherent limits. In Nash equilibrium terms, success doesn't mean winning - it means not losing. "You basically compute a formula that can at least break even in the long run, no matter what your opponent does," Billings said. That's about where the best poker programs are today. Though the best game theory-based programs can usually hold their own against world-class human poker players, they aren't good enough to win big consistently. Squeezing that extra bit of performance out of a computer requires combining the sheer mathematical power of game theory with the ability to observe an opponent's play and adapt to it. Many legendary poker players do that by being experts of human nature. They quickly learn the tics, gestures and other "tells" that reveal exactly what another player is up to. A computer can't detect those, but it can keep track of how an opponent plays the game. It can observe how often an opponent tries to bluff with a weak hand, and how often she folds. Then the computer can take that information and incorporate it into the calculations that guide its own game. "The notion of forming some sort of model of what another player is like ... is a really important problem," Nau said. Computer scientists are only just beginning to incorporate that ability into their programs; days before their contest with Laak and Eslami, the University of Alberta researchers are still trying to tweak their program's adaptive elements. Billings will say only this about what the humans have in store: "They will be guaranteed to be seeing a lot of different styles." Even so, Laak and Eslami are top-notch players with a deep understanding of poker's mathematical fundamentals. They should be able to keep up with the computer - this time. ================================ George Antunes, Political Science Dept University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204 Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927 antunes at uh dot edu ------------------------------ Message: 5 Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2007 18:43:39 -0500 From: George Antunes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [Medianews] Microchip Implants Raise Privacy Concern To: medianews@twiar.org Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Microchip Implants Raise Privacy Concern Jul 21, 2007 12:19 PM (ET) By TODD LEWAN Associated Press http://apnews.myway.com//article/20070721/D8QH34P80.html CityWatcher.com, a provider of surveillance equipment, attracted little notice itself - until a year ago, when two of its employees had glass-encapsulated microchips with miniature antennas embedded in their forearms. The "chipping" of two workers with RFIDs - radio frequency identification tags as long as two grains of rice, as thick as a toothpick - was merely a way of restricting access to vaults that held sensitive data and images for police departments, a layer of security beyond key cards and clearance codes, the company said. "To protect high-end secure data, you use more sophisticated techniques," Sean Darks, chief executive of the Cincinnati-based company, said. He compared chip implants to retina scans or fingerprinting. "There's a reader outside the door; you walk up to the reader, put your arm under it, and it opens the door." Innocuous? Maybe. But the news that Americans had, for the first time, been injected with electronic identifiers to perform their jobs fired up a debate over the proliferation of ever-more-precise tracking technologies and their ability to erode privacy in the digital age. To some, the microchip was a wondrous invention - a high-tech helper that could increase security at nuclear plants and military bases, help authorities identify wandering Alzheimer's patients, allow consumers to buy their groceries, literally, with the wave of a chipped hand. To others, the notion of tagging people was Orwellian, a departure from centuries of history and tradition in which people had the right to go and do as they pleased, without being tracked, unless they were harming someone else. Chipping, these critics said, might start with Alzheimer's patients or Army Rangers, but would eventually be suggested for convicts, then parolees, then sex offenders, then illegal aliens - until one day, a majority of Americans, falling into one category or another, would find themselves electronically tagged. The concept of making all things traceable isn't alien to Americans. Thirty years ago, the first electronic tags were fixed to the ears of cattle, to permit ranchers to track a herd's reproductive and eating habits. In the 1990s, millions of chips were implanted in livestock, fish, dogs, cats, even racehorses. Microchips are now fixed to car windshields as toll-paying devices, on "contactless" payment cards (Chase's "Blink," or MasterCard's "PayPass"). They're embedded in Michelin tires, library books, passports, work uniforms, luggage, and, unbeknownst to many consumers, on a host of individual items, from Hewlett Packard printers to Sanyo TVs, at Wal-Mart and Best Buy. But CityWatcher.com employees weren't appliances or pets: They were people made scannable. "It was scary that a government contractor that specialized in putting surveillance cameras on city streets was the first to incorporate this technology in the workplace," says Liz McIntyre, co-author of "Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID." Darks, the CityWatcher.com executive, dismissed his critics, noting that he and his employees had volunteered to be chip-injected. Any suggestion that a sinister, Big-Brother-like campaign was afoot, he said, was hogwash. "You would think that we were going around putting chips in people by force," he told a reporter, "and that's not the case at all." Yet, within days of the company's announcement, civil libertarians and Christian conservatives joined to excoriate the microchip's implantation in people. RFID, they warned, would soon enable the government to "frisk" citizens electronically - an invisible, undetectable search performed by readers posted at "hotspots" along roadsides and in pedestrian areas. It might even be used to squeal on employees while they worked; time spent at the water cooler, in the bathroom, in a designated smoking area could one day be broadcast, recorded and compiled in off-limits, company databases. "Ultimately," says Katherine Albrecht, a privacy advocate who specializes in consumer education and RFID technology, "the fear is that the government or your employer might someday say, 'Take a chip or starve.'" Some Christian critics saw the implants as the fulfillment of a biblical prophecy that describes an age of evil in which humans are forced to take the "Mark of the Beast" on their bodies, to buy or sell anything. Gary Wohlscheid, president of These Last Days Ministries, a Roman Catholic group in Lowell, Mich., put together a Web site that linked the implantable microchips to the apocalyptic prophecy in the book of Revelation. "The Bible tells us that God's wrath will come to those who take the Mark of the Beast," he says. Those who refuse to accept the Satanic chip "will be saved," Wohlscheid offers in a comforting tone. --- In post-9/11 America, electronic surveillance comes in myriad forms: in a gas station's video camera; in a cell phone tucked inside a teen's back pocket; in a radio tag attached to a supermarket shopping cart; in a Porsche automobile equipped with a LoJack anti-theft device. "We're really on the verge of creating a surveillance society in America, where every movement, every action - some would even claim, our very thoughts - will be tracked, monitored, recorded and correlated," says Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Program at the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, D.C. RFID, in Steinhardt's opinion, "could play a pivotal role in creating that surveillance society." In design, the tag is simple: A medical-grade glass capsule holds a silicon computer chip, a copper antenna and a "capacitor" that transmits data stored on the chip when prompted by an electromagnetic reader. Implantations are quick, relatively simple procedures. After a local anesthetic is administered, a large-gauge hypodermic needle injects the chip under the skin on the back of the arm, midway between the elbow and the shoulder. "It feels just like getting a vaccine - a bit of pressure, no specific pain," says John Halamka, an emergency physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He got chipped two years ago, "so that if I was ever in an accident, and arrived unconscious or incoherent at an emergency ward, doctors could identify me and access my medical history quickly." (A chipped person's medical profile can be continuously updated, since the information is stored on a database accessed via the Internet.) Halamka thinks of his microchip as another technology with practical value, like his BlackBerry. But it's also clear, he says, that there are consequences to having an implanted identifier. "My friends have commented to me that I'm 'marked' for life, that I've lost my anonymity. And to be honest, I think they're right." Indeed, as microchip proponents and detractors readily agree, Americans' mistrust of microchips and technologies like RFID runs deep. Many wonder: Do the current chips have global positioning transceivers that would allow the government to pinpoint a person's exact location, 24-7? (No; the technology doesn't yet exist.) But could a tech-savvy stalker rig scanners to video cameras and film somebody each time they entered or left the house? (Quite easily, though not cheaply. Currently, readers cost $300 and up.) How about thieves? Could they make their own readers, aim them at unsuspecting individuals, and surreptitiously pluck people's IDs out of their arms? (Yes. There's even a name for it - "spoofing.") What's the average lifespan of a microchip? (About 10-15 years.) What if you get tired of it before then - can it be easily, painlessly removed? (Short answer: No.) Presently, Steinhardt and other privacy advocates view the tagging of identity documents - passports, drivers licenses and the like - as a more pressing threat to Americans' privacy than the chipping of people. Equipping hospitals, doctors' offices, police stations and government agencies with readers will be costly, training staff will take time, and, he says, "people are going to be too squeamish about having an RFID chip inserted into their arms, or wherever." But that wasn't the case in March 2004, when the Baja Beach Club in Barcelona, Spain - a nightclub catering to the body-aware, under-25 crowd - began holding "Implant Nights." In a white lab coat, with hypodermic in latex-gloved hand, a company chipper wandered through the throng of the clubbers and clubbettes, anesthetizing the arms of consenting party goers, then injecting them with microchips. The payoff? Injectees would thereafter be able to breeze past bouncers and entrance lines, magically open doors to VIP lounges, and pay for drinks without cash or credit cards. The ID number on the VIP chip was linked to the user's financial accounts and stored in the club's computers. After being chipped himself, club owner Conrad K. Chase declared that chip implants were hardly a big deal to his patrons, since "almost everybody has piercings, tattoos or silicone." VIP chipping soon spread to the Baja Beach Club in Rotterdam, Holland, the Bar Soba in Edinburgh, Scotland, and the Amika nightclub in Miami Beach, Fla. That same year, Mexico's attorney general, Rafael Macedo, made an announcement that thrilled chip proponents and chilled privacy advocates: He and 18 members of his staff had been microchipped as a way to limit access to a sensitive records room, whose door unlocked when a "portal reader" scanned the chips. But did this make Mexican security airtight? Hardly, says Jonathan Westhues, an independent security researcher in Cambridge, Mass. He concocted an "emulator," a hand-held device that cloned the implantable microchip electronically. With a team of computer-security experts, he demonstrated - on television - how easy it was to snag data off a chip. Explains Adam Stubblefield, a Johns Hopkins researcher who joined the team: "You pass within a foot of a chipped person, copy the chip's code, then with a push of the button, replay the same ID number to any reader. You essentially assume the person's identity." The company that makes implantable microchips for humans, VeriChip Corp. (CHIP), of Delray Beach, Fla., concedes the point - even as it markets its radio tag and its portal scanner as imperatives for high-security buildings, such as nuclear power plants. "To grab information from radio frequency products with a scanning device is not hard to do," Scott Silverman, the company's chief executive, says. However, "the chip itself only contains a unique, 16-digit identification number. The relevant information is stored on a database." Even so, he insists, it's harder to clone a VeriChip than it would be to steal someone's key card and use it to enter secure areas. VeriChip Corp., whose parent company has been selling radio tags for animals for more than a decade, has sold 7,000 microchips worldwide, of which about 2,000 have been implanted in humans. More than one-tenth of those have been in the U.S., generating "nominal revenues," the company acknowledged in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing in February. Although in five years VeriChip Corp. has yet to turn a profit, it has been investing heavily - up to $2 million a quarter - to create new markets. The company's present push: tagging of "high-risk" patients - diabetics and people with heart conditions or Alzheimer's disease. In an emergency, hospital staff could wave a reader over a patient's arm, get an ID number, and then, via the Internet, enter a company database and pull up the person's identity and medical history. To doctors, a "starter kit" - complete with 10 hypodermic syringes, 10 VeriChips and a reader - costs $1,400. To patients, a microchip implant means a $200, out-of-pocket expense to their physician. Presently, chip implants aren't covered by insurance companies, Medicare or Medicaid. For almost two years, the company has been offering hospitals free scanners, but acceptance has been limited. According to the company's most recent SEC quarterly filing, 515 hospitals have pledged to take part in the VeriMed network, yet only 100 have actually been equipped and trained to use the system. Some wonder why they should abandon noninvasive tags such as MedicAlert, a low-tech bracelet that warns paramedics if patients have serious allergies or a chronic medical condition. "Having these things under your skin instead of in your back pocket - it's just not clear to me why it's worth the inconvenience," says Westhues. Silverman responds that an implanted chip is "guaranteed to be with you. It's not a medical arm bracelet that you can take off if you don't like the way it looks..." In fact, microchips can be removed from the body - but it's not like removing a splinter. The capsules can migrate around the body or bury themselves deep in the arm. When that happens, a sensor X-ray and monitors are needed to locate the chip, and a plastic surgeon must cut away scar tissue that forms around the chip. The relative permanence is a big reason why Marc Rotenberg, of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, is suspicious about the motives of the company, which charges an annual fee to keep clients' records. The company charges $20 a year for customers to keep a "one-pager" on its database - a record of blood type, allergies, medications, driver's license data and living-will directives. For $80 a year, it will keep an individual's full medical history. --- In recent times, there have been rumors on Wall Street, and elsewhere, of the potential uses for RFID in humans: the chipping of U.S. soldiers, of inmates, or of migrant workers, to name a few. To date, none of this has happened. But a large-scale chipping plan that was proposed illustrates the stakes, pro and con. In mid-May, a protest outside the Alzheimer's Community Care Center in West Palm Beach, Fla., drew attention to a two-year study in which 200 Alzheimer's patients, along with their caregivers, were to receive chip implants. Parents, children and elderly people decried the plan, with signs and placards. "Chipping People Is Wrong" and "People Are Not Pets," the signs read. And: "Stop VeriChip." Ironically, the media attention sent VeriChip's stock soaring 27 percent in one day. "VeriChip offers technology that is absolutely bursting with potential," wrote blogger Gary E. Sattler, of the AOL site Bloggingstocks, even as he recognized privacy concerns. Albrecht, the RFID critic who organized the demonstration, raises similar concerns on her AntiChips.com Web site. "Is it appropriate to use the most vulnerable members of society for invasive medical research? Should the company be allowed to implant microchips into people whose mental impairments mean they cannot give fully informed consent?" Mary Barnes, the care center's chief executive, counters that both the patients and their legal guardians must consent to the implants before receiving them. And the chips, she says, could be invaluable in identifying lost patients - for instance, if a hurricane strikes Florida. That, of course, assumes that the Internet would be accessible in a killer storm. VeriChip Corp. acknowledged in an SEC filing that its "database may not function properly" in such circumstances. As the polemic heats up, legislators are increasingly being drawn into the fray. Two states, Wisconsin and North Dakota, recently passed laws prohibiting the forced implantation of microchips in humans. Others - Ohio, Oklahoma, Colorado and Florida - are studying similar legislation. In May, Oklahoma legislators were debating a bill that would have authorized microchip implants in people imprisoned for violent crimes. Many felt it would be a good way to monitor felons once released from prison. But other lawmakers raised concerns. Rep. John Wright worried, "Apparently, we're going to permanently put the mark on these people." Rep. Ed Cannaday found the forced microchipping of inmates "invasive ... We are going down that slippery slope." In the end, lawmakers sent the bill back to committee for more work. ================================ George Antunes, Political Science Dept University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204 Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927 antunes at uh dot edu ------------------------------ Message: 6 Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2007 18:59:39 -0500 From: George Antunes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [Medianews] IPhone Didn't Cause Duke Power Outages To: medianews@twiar.org Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Duke: IPhone Didn't Cause Power Outages Associated Press Jul 20, 2007 8:34 PM (ET) http://apnews.myway.com//article/20070721/D8QGL9QO0.html RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - A problem with Duke University's wireless network caused outages at the school, officials said Friday, exonerating the initial suspect, Apple Inc.'s new iPhone. "A particular set of conditions made the Duke wireless network experience some minor and temporary disruptions in service," Duke spokeswoman Tracy Futhey said in a written statement posted on the university's Web site. "Those conditions involve our deployment of a very large Cisco-based wireless network that supports multiple network protocols." San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco Inc. said it worked with Duke and Apple this week to identify the network issue that was causing the problem. Elizabeth McNichols, a Cisco spokeswoman, declined to be more specific, and officials at Duke did not immediately return a message seeking additional comment. "Cisco has provided a fix that has been applied to Duke's network and the problem has not occurred since," the company said in a written statement. The school's Wi-Fi wireless network had jammed nine times for spans of about 10 minutes, and a review of network traffic led Duke's technology team to iPhone users. Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple released the iPhone, its first cell phone, at the end of June. The phones retail for $499 to $599 and combine cell phone capability with a media player and Wi-Fi access. --- On the Net: Apple Inc.: http://www.apple.com/ Duke University: http://www.duke.edu/ Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) (CSCO): http://www.cisco.com ================================ George Antunes, Political Science Dept University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204 Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927 antunes at uh dot edu ------------------------------ Message: 7 Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2007 19:01:10 -0500 From: George Antunes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [Medianews] Launch of Japan Moon Probe Postponed To: medianews@twiar.org Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Launch of Japan Moon Probe Postponed Associated Press Jul 21, 2007 1:17 AM (ET) http://apnews.myway.com//article/20070721/D8QGPEBO0.html TOKYO (AP) - Japan's space agency said the mid-August launch of its lunar orbiter will be postponed due to a technical glitch, delivering another setback to the much-delayed probe. The Selenological and Engineering Explorer - or SELENE - probe was to have been launched aboard one of the space program's mainstay H-2A rockets on August 17, JAXA, as the agency is called, said in a statement issued Friday. However, during an inspection it was discovered that some components were improperly installed on the two smaller satellites that accompany the main orbiter, JAXA said. The components will be replaced and a new launch date announced once it has been determined, it said. The $264 million SELENE is already four years behind schedule. Japan launched a moon probe in 1990, but that was a flyby mission, unlike SELENE, which is intended to orbit the moon. It canceled another moon shot, LUNAR-A, that was to have been launched in 2004 but had been repeatedly postponed due to mechanical and fiscal problems. JAXA says the SELENE project is the largest lunar mission since the U.S. Apollo program. It involves placing the main satellite in orbit at an altitude of about 60 miles and deploying the two smaller satellites in polar orbits. Researchers will use data gathered by the probes to study the moon's origin and evolution. The main orbiter will remain in position for about a year. ================================ George Antunes, Political Science Dept University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204 Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927 antunes at uh dot edu ------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Medianews mailing list Medianews@twiar.org http://twiar.org/mailman/listinfo/medianews_twiar.org End of Medianews Digest, Vol 331, Issue 1 *****************************************