Canadians not always good guys: Amnesty MontrealGazette

Canadians have long prided themselves on being the good guys when it comes to protecting human rights at home and abroad, but that’s no longer always the case, says Alex Neve, secretary general of Amnesty International Canada. “Canada has started to be a problem with regard to some human rights issues and has in fact started to get in the way of protection,” said Neve, citing as an example Canada’s “aggressive opposition” to the 2007 adoption of a United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Canada was one of only four countries to vote against the measure. Under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the Canadian government “set out to block and defeat” the declaration, says Neve. “Other countries can’t believe they saw that kind of behaviour from Canada and it has significantly set back and undermined our authority on the world stage.”

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Apple sued over ‘broken promises’ regarding 3G speeds Apple Insider

A new class-action lawsuit claims Apple knowingly profited from faulty iPhone 3Gs that couldn’t stay connected to the faster 3G network, costing buyers inferior service and missed opportunities to use an alternative provider.

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One-Click iPhone App Cracker Released to the Public TorrentFreak

Crackulous, the one-click cracking application for software purchased from Apple’s AppStore, was previously only available to a select few. Now anyone with an iPhone or iPod Touch can start cracking software purchased from Apple so that they can share them with their friends, since Crackulous has just gone public and set to be released as open source software so that many people can contribute to its development

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Top 50 dumb blonde quotes: Paris Hilton, Jessica Simpson Daily Telegraph

HERE are the top 50 dumb blonde jokes cracked by Hollywood’s hottest actors and socialites, complied by The Sun newspaper in London. 1) Paris Hilton talking to press about the US chain store: “Wal-Mart… do they like make walls there?”

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Bands and fans caught in Warner Music copyright crackdown on YouTube News AU

YOUTUBE users are outraged over a sudden copyright crackdown on the video-sharing website. Artists such as Death Cab For Cutie and Led Zeppelin have had their official videos removed from YouTube after negotiations between the Google-owned video website and the Warner Music Group broke down last month. Other fan-made videos have been muted or removed without notice – including cover songs. Covers covered up – The crackdown seems to be using an arbitrary song identification system to find Warner-owned songs, as some amateur covers have been removed while the originals remain online.

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Budget erases funding for key science agency Globe and Mail

For the first time in nine years, Genome Canada, a non-profit non-governmental funding organization, was not mentioned in the federal budget and saw its annual cash injection from Ottawa – $140-million last year – disappear. “We got nothing, nothing, and we don’t know why,” said a stunned Martin Godbout, Genome Canada president and CEO. “We’re devastated.” The news spread like a virus through the research community yesterday as the country’s top scientists wondered whether the oversight was a mistake. Genome Canada supports 33 major research projects in areas such as genomics, agriculture and cancer stem cells with operating grants of $10-million a year. The projects employ more than 2,000 people. By comparison, medical research grants from the federally funded Canadian Institutes of Health Research run in the $100,000-a-year range.

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Vole hired a mole-MS accuses mole of spying The Inquirer

MICROSOFT IS SUING a former employee after finding out that it didn’t do its homework properly when inviting the Ancora Technologies boss into the company. Microsoft claims that Miki Mullor applied for the job under false pretences, using his role in the company to gain access to information of a confidential nature. Mullor joined the company in November 2005, claiming that Ancora had gone out of business – yet Ancora was still very much alive, and Mullor was none other than chief executive. Still, he got the job and while at the company was in perfect position to download confidential documentation relating to the patent complaint Ancora filed in June last year against Dell, HP and Toshiba. The patent case states that the companies use of certain Microsoft technology violated an Ancora patent. [This case has now been resoved. Click here for details.]

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Local Police Want Right to Jam Wireless Signals Washington Post

As President Obama’s motorcade rolled down Pennsylvania Avenue on Inauguration Day, federal authorities deployed a closely held law enforcement tool: equipment that can jam cellphones and other wireless devices to foil remote-controlled bombs, sources said. It is an increasingly common technology, with federal agencies expanding its use as state and local agencies are pushing for permission to do the same. Police and others say it could stop terrorists from coordinating during an attack, prevent suspects from erasing evidence on wireless devices, simplify arrests and keep inmates from using contraband phones. Industry officials said that radio-jammers work in several ways: They can send a barrage of energy that drowns out signals across multiple bands or produce a surge of energy on a particular frequency. In other instances, the devices detect and disrupt a suspicious signal, a technique known as “scan and jam.”

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Extinct ibex is resurrected by cloning Telegraph

An extinct animal has been brought back to life for the first time after being cloned from frozen tissue. The Pyrenean ibex, a form of wild mountain goat, was officially declared extinct in 2000 when the last-known animal of its kind was found dead in northern Spain. Shortly before its death, scientists preserved skin samples of the goat, a subspecies of the Spanish ibex that live in mountain ranges across the country, in liquid nitrogen. Using DNA taken from these skin samples, the scientists were able to replace the genetic material in eggs from domestic goats, to clone a female Pyrenean ibex, or bucardo as they are known. It is the first time an extinct animal has been cloned. Sadly, the newborn ibex kid died shortly after birth due to physical defects in its lungs. Other cloned animals, including sheep, have been born with similar lung defects. But the breakthrough has raised hopes that it will be possible to save endangered and newly extinct species by resurrecting them from frozen tissue.

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Contractor indicted for logic bomb The Inquirer

A FORMER IT CONTRACT WORKER at the giant US mortgage bank known as Fannie Mae* was indicted last week for having planted – on the day he was fired last October – a logic bomb that would have trashed all 4,000 of its production servers tomorrow if it hadn’t been found.

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Tracking web chatter to uncover trends The Star

The world is talking, are you listening? That’s the question being asked by Nick Koudas and Nilesh Bansal, a University of Toronto computer science professor and his graduate student. They recently received a provincial loan of up to $500,000 to kick-start their social networking analysis company, Sysomos. The company mines information from social media sites like Twitter and Facebook and roughly 30 million blogs. It graphs the findings by time, sentiment and demographics to provide a full picture of the “buzz” around products, brands, public figures or issues.

February , 2009

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