I believe there is a good case to be made that having lots of cameras in the hands of citizens makes us more, rather than less, safe. Here's how bad it has gotten: Not long ago, an Amtrak representative did an interview with local TV station Fox 5 in Washington, D.C.'s Union Station to explain that you don't need a permit to take pictures there--only to be approached by a security guard who ordered them to stop filming without a permit.

Legally, it's pretty much always okay to take photos in a public place as long as you're not physically interfering with traffic or police operations. As Bert Krages, an attorney who specializes in photography-related legal problems and wrote Legal Handbook for Photographers, says, "The general rule is that if something is in a public place, you're entitled to photograph it." What's more, though national-security laws are often invoked when quashing photographers, Krages explains that "the Patriot Act does not restrict photography; neither does the Homeland Security Act." But this doesn't stop people from interfering with photographers, even in settings that don't seem much like national-security zones.

A freelance photographer who was taking pictures of a BP refinery in Texas was detained by a BP security official, local police and a man claiming to be with the Department of Homeland Security, according to nonprofit news org ProPublica. The photographer was working on a story about multiple large toxic releases at the BP refinery which happened just before the big Gulf oil blowout. From NBC News:

The photographer, Lance Rosenfield, said he was confronted by the officials shortly after arriving in Texas City, Texas, to work on a story that is part of an ongoing collaboration between PBS and ProPublica.

Rosenfield was released after officials looked through the pictures he had taken and took down his date of birth, Social Security number and other personal information, the photographer said. The information was turned over to the BP security guard who said this was standard procedure, ProPublica quoted Rosenfield as saying.

Rosenfield, a Texas-based freelance photographer, said he was followed by a BP employee after taking a picture on a public road near the refinery, and then cornered by two police cars at a gas station. The officials told Rosenfield they had the right to look at the pictures taken near the refinery and if he did not comply he would be "taken in," the photographer said according to ProPublica. Photographer detained by police, BP employee near refinery (NBC Field Notes)

Image: The BP refinery in Texas City, one of the largest in the country, is nearly two square miles. (Lance Rosenfield)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Military's new "Cyber Command" logo contains a hidden code. Noah Shachtman at Wired News says, "Help us crack it!"

Related reading today: Bruce Schneier says "The Threat of Cyberwar Has Been Grossly Exaggerated."

Everyone knows the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything is “42″, but for the first time we can reveal the question. It is this: how many command-line tricks must a man memorise? You see, graphical user interfaces are all well and good, but when you want to get real work done it’s time to switch to the terminal.

And so, we squeezed our brain cells, dug through dusty piles of old issues of Linux Format, and sat reflecting quietly over many a pint of ale, all with the goal of bringing you this: 42 awesome new command line tricks we think you ought to commit to memory. We’ve tried to include a few that are easier for our, er, less-experienced readers to enjoy, but we think even the most hardened Linux veteran will learn something new over the next 12,000 words.

• Link (via Hacker News)

Intel was the only game in town for about a year, but fortunately for us consumers, the competition finally caught up. The new Indilinx controller models, such as this Crucial 128 GB SSD, are just as fast as the X25-M. And, best of all, they’re cheaper, while also offering a not-insubstantial bump to 128 GB of storage!

I picked this model up for $325 plus tax and shipping. And, frankly, I was blown away by the performance difference compared to the 300 GB Velociraptor I had in my system before. That drive is not exactly chopped liver; it’s incredibly fast by magnetic platter drive standards. But it’s beyond slow next to the latest SSDs.

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When I first thought of this post, I more or less knew what programs I wanted to list here. The common theme that brought these together was that they were all really cool Windows “enhancements”: i.e. apps that tweak or change the way we work with files, folders, applications, or the system environment itself (or, apps that brings functionality to the Windows environment that could or should have been a built-in option in Windows ).

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Manual Hard Drive Destroyer

Government specifications require that in an emergency situation a hard drive needs to be destroyed so that a person or persons can not spin the drive. This must be done quickly and reliably. The MHDD meets this requirement. It takes less than 15 seconds to destroy each hard drive. All one needs to do is to insert the proper drive height adaptor (if applicable) into the slot and crank the handle 8 rotations. The internal workings of the unit press down on the drive, bending it approximately 90 degrees. The MHDD then pushes the destroyed hard drive out for easy disposal.

• Link (via UNEASYsilence)

This is an experiment, where I count one byte up – from 00000000 to 11111111. Decimal spoken, this is from 0 to 255. I have assigned a sound to each bit and when it switches from 0 to 1, the sound is played.

• Link (via MAKE: Blog)

FLAG, a fiber-optic cable now being built from England to Japan, is a skinny little cuss (about an inch in diameter), but it is 28,000 kilometers long, which is long even compared to really big things like the planet Earth. When it is finished in September 1997, it arguably will be the longest engineering project in history. Writing about it necessitates a lot of banging around through meatspace. Over the course of two months, photographer Alex Tehrani and I hit six countries and four continents trying to get a grip on this longest, fastest, mother of all wires. I took a GPS receiver with me so that I could have at least a general idea of where the hell we were. It gave me the above reading in front of a Chinese temple around the corner from the Shangri-La Hotel in Penang, Malaysia, which was only one of 100 peculiar spots around the globe where I suddenly pulled up short and asked myself, “What the hell am I doing here?”

• Link to printable version (via mental_floss)
• Regular version

We look at some useful keyboard shortcuts and commands that will help you personalize the MS-DOS Command Prompt Window without using the mouse.

You will also learn about hotkeys for executing DOS commands more quickly. The keyboard shortcuts are known to work in Windows Vista and XP command prompt.

• Link (via Lifehacker)
• More function key shortcuts

In 1991, Singh went to MIT to study artificial intelligence with his idol and soon attracted notice for his passion and mental stamina. Word was that he had read every single one of the dauntingly complex books on the shelves in Minsky’s office. A casual conversation with the smiling young researcher in the hallway or at a favorite restaurant like Kebab-N-Kurry could turn into an intense hour-long debate. As one fellow student put it, Singh had a way of “taking your idea and showing you what it looks like from about 50 miles up.”

The field of AI research that Singh was joining had a history of bipolar behavior, swinging from wild overoptimism to despair. When 2001 came out in the late ’60s, many believed that a thinking machine like HAL would exist well before the end of the 20th century, and researchers were flush with government grants. Within a few years, it had become apparent that these predictions were absurdly unrealistic, and the funding soon dried up.

• Link (via Slashdot)

In addition, I have noticed that when performing complex tasks such as viewing large images, or updating large spreadsheets, instead of the whole operating system locking down for several seconds, it now just locks down the application I am working on, allowing me to <gasp> Alt-Tab to another application and work on that. I am thrilled that Microsoft decided to add preemptive multitasking to their operating system, and for this reason alone I would strongly urge you to upgrade to XP.

• Link (via Slashdot)

Magic-1 is a completely homebuilt minicomputer. It doesn’t use an off-the-shelf microprocessor, but instead has a custom CPU made out of 74 Series TTL chips. Altogether there are more than 200 chips in Magic-1 connected together with thousands of individually wrapped wires. And, it works. Not only the hardware, but a full software stack. There’s a ANSI C cross-compiler for Magic-1 (retargeted LCC), a fully multi-user, multi-tasking port of the Minix 2 operating system. a TCP/IP stack and hundreds of programs.

• Link (via Slashdot)
• Article at LinuxDevices.com.

Related:

• Viktor’s Amazing 4-bit Processor
• Programmable Z80 Microcomputer

Published in 1954, Fitts’s Law is an effective method of modeling the relationship of a very specific, yet common situation in interface design. That situation involves a human-powered appendage at rest (whether it’s physical like your finger or virtual like a mouse cursor) and a target area that’s located somewhere else.

• Link (via UNEASYsilence)

By now you’ve probably seen a lot of the brouhaha over a bug in the newest version of Excel, 2007. Basically, multiplying 77.1*850, which should give you 65,535, was actually displaying 100,000.

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An operating system needs to reside in a home. That is a partition to me. I used 2×300Gb Pata disk and 2×200 Sata Disk to set up 152 partitions. I always put one operating system in one partition. As an extended partition of each hard disk has no storage of its own, one data-only partition is needed for my personal data, another data-only partition to house the common boot loader and one Swap partition is needed for all the Linux I ended up losing 7 partitions leaving 145 partitions to house the 145 operating systems.

• Link (via Lifehacker)

The multi-platform password cracker Ophcrack is incredibly fast. How fast? It can crack the password “Fgpyyih804423″ in 160 seconds. Most people would consider that password fairly secure. The Microsoft password strength checker rates it “strong”. The Geekwisdom password strength meter rates it “mediocre”.

Why is Ophcrack so fast? Because it uses Rainbow Tables. No, not the kind of rainbows I have as my desktop background.

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The obvious explanation is that some download sites give an award to every piece of software submitted to them. In return they hope that the author will display the award with a link back to them. The back link then potentially increases traffic to their site directly (through clicks on the award link) and indirectly (through improved page rank from the incoming links). The author gets some awards to impress their potential clients and the download site gets additional traffic.

• Link (via Slashdot)