SkeptOlympics writes “A new chapter in the ongoing controversy surrounding China’s women’s gymnastics team opened today, as search engine hacker stryde.hax found surviving copies of official registration documents issued by China’s General Administration of Sport of China. The incriminating documents, expunged by censors from the official site and from Google’s document cache, still appear in the document translation cache of Chinese search giant Baidu, here and here, showing the age of one of China’s gold medal winning gymnasts to be 14 instead of 16, the minimum age for competition presented on her government issued passport. Now that official government documentation is available, how long will the IOC be able to keep a lid on this scandal?” I imagine the answer is “Forever”.

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Something you would have thought would only be part of action movies may be a reality soon in the UK. The government has plans to create a massive database that will store all phone calls, emails, and internet logs of all UK citizens. The information can be stored for as long as 2 years.

The database will take time to create, but there are trials and tests set in place with pre-determined people.

This is a feasible solution to solving criminal cases, and lowering crime rates, however, many will see it as a very large invasion of privacy.

UK Home Office minister, Lord West, noted:
“It is a cross-government program, led by the Home Office, to ensure that our capability to lawfully intercept and exploit data when fighting crime and terrorism is not lost.”

I would like to hear you opinions, Neowin. In an act to ensure safety, is this action taking it too far?

View: TechRadar

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whisper_jeff writes “Due to some potential copyright issues, The Watchmen might be delayed, or worse. It seems that Fox claims it still owns copyrights which would prevent Warner Bros from releasing the movie. US District Court Judge Gary Feess decided that Fox had enough of a case that he’s willing to hear things out. The geek in me hopes that it will be resolved quickly and the movie will hit theaters on time.”

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Davide Marney passes along an AP story about the thousands of voting machines gathering dust in warehouses across the country after states such as California, Ohio, and Florida have banned their use. Many of these machines cost $3.5K to $5K each. Local election boards are struggling to find ways to recover any of the cost of the machines, or even to recycle them. The picture in Ohio is the most confusing, as multiple court cases limit the state’s options and result in a situation in which the discredited machines will nevertheless be used in the presidential election coming up in November. The state’s new (Democratic) attorney general has just issued a rule banning the practice of election workers taking the machines home with them the night before elections.

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FireStormZ writes “Magpies can recognize themselves in a mirror, confounding the notion that self-awareness is the exclusive preserve of humans and a few higher mammals. It had been thought only four species of apes, bottlenose dolphins, and Asian elephants shared the human ability to recognize their own bodies in a mirror. But German scientists reported on Tuesday that magpies, a species with a brain structure very different from mammals, could also identify themselves. It had been thought that the neocortex brain area found in mammals was crucial to self-recognition. Yet birds, which last shared a common ancestor with mammals 300 million years ago, don’t have a neocortex, suggesting that higher cognitive skills can develop in other ways.”

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Anti-Globalism recommends a posting up at O’Reilly’s ONLamp on reasons that some companies are turning away from Perl. “[In one company] [m]anagement have started to refer to Perl-based systems as ‘legacy’ and to generally disparage it. This attitude has seeped through to non-technical business users who have started to worry if developers mention a system that is written in Perl. Business users, of course, don’t want nasty old, broken Perl code. They want the shiny new technologies. I don’t deny at all that this company (like many others) has a large amount of badly written and hard-to-maintain Perl code. But I maintain that this isn’t directly due to the code being written in Perl. Its because the Perl code has developed piecemeal over the last ten or so years in an environment where there was no design authority.. Many of these systems date back to this company’s first steps onto the Internet and were made by separate departments who had no interaction with each other. Its not really a surprise that the systems don’t interact well and a lot of the code is hard to maintain.”

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Microsoft said on Monday in the US that the server version of Windows 7 would not be a major release and will bear the name Windows Server 2008 R2. In the past, Microsoft has used R2 monikers to signify a product with a few new features, as opposed to major changes to a product. Microsoft declined to discuss what will be in Windows Server 2008 R2, but a spokesman confirmed that it is the server version of Windows 7. The release was due sometime in 2010, Microsoft said.

The server move calls into question just how different Windows 7 is going to be from Windows Vista on the desktop side. Steven Sinofsky, the head of development for the desktop version of Windows, has said that Windows 7 on the PC side would not make major changes to things like the kernel and driver model, but has maintained that it would be a major release of Windows.

Microsoft has said that the desktop version of Windows 7 would include a new multitouch interface, but has not talked about other features. The software maker confirmed its naming plans, following a report by ZDNet.com blogger Mary Jo Foley. Initially Foley reported that Microsoft was skipping its minor R2 release and moving straight to its next major release. However, Microsoft clarified that it indeed saw Windows 7 on the server side as a minor release.

View: Full Article @ ZDNet Australia

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One of the most interesting feature that didn’t quite make it into the final release of Firefox 3 is “Private Browsing”, a.k.a. porn mode. The only other browser with this feature built-in today is Safari (another reason to try it in case you haven’t), however, Microsoft may also be building a similar feature into Internet Explorer 8 if two trademark filings are any indications.

Although “private browsing” can be easily associated with viewing particular genres of media content, the Mozilla foundation argues “while viewing pornography may be a popular use case due to the nature of content on the Web, assuming that this is the only reason that users need private browsing trivializes the overall feature. For instance, users may wish to begin a private browsing session to research a medical condition, or plan a surprise vacation or birthday party for a loved one.”

If indeed Microsoft is rolling out such a feature in Internet Explorer 8, I can imagine it becoming very popular with surprise birthday planners across the world. Oh those birthday people are in for a treat.

View: Article @ istartedsomething.com

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Microsoft will begin alpha testing the next version of Office in November or December, according to a blog posting by a Microsoft employee that was later pulled from the Web. According to the blog posting, by Hayley Rixon, who works on the Microsoft business intelligence team, Microsoft is calling for people to be part of a technology adoption program (TAP) that will give them an early opportunity to test the monitoring and analytics components of Office PerformancePoint Server.

The TAP for this product will be a part of the TAP for Office 14, the alpha test of which will begin in the “November/December timeframe this year,” according to the blog posting. Office PerformancePoint Server is business performance analysis software that will be a part of the Office 14 release. While the blog posting was live on Microsoft's Technet site on Monday afternoon Eastern time, by afternoon on the West coast the Web site was no longer working. The post also no longer appears on Rixon's blog.

Microsoft could not be reached for comment Tuesday about the site no longer being active. However, on Monday through its public relations firm Microsoft said that while the Office team is working on the next version, “it is too early to discuss specific features, capabilities or timing” for the product. The deadline for submissions to be a part of the Office PerformancePoint Server TAP is Aug. 28, according to the post.

View: Full Article @ InfoWorld

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coondoggie writes “In the ongoing battle to let us eat dinner in peace without being interrupted by amazingly annoying telemarketer blather, and in this case the even more infuriating recorded telemarketing drivel, the Federal Trade Commission today basically outlawed recorded telemarketing calls. Specifically, the FTC changed its venerable Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR) to prohibit, as of Sept. 2009, telemarketing calls that deliver prerecorded messages, unless a consumer has agreed to accept such calls from a given caller/seller. Between now and 2009, telemarketers must provide an obvious, easy and quick way for consumers to opt-out of any call, the FTC said. Such an opt-out mechanism needs to be in place by December 1, 2008.”

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