too_old_to_be_irate writes to tell us about a site that word got out on before they were ready. Wikileaks aims to be an anonymous and uncensorable repository of leaked documents, posted for commentary by interested parties. It's expected to go live in a month or two. From the site: "Wikileaks is developing an uncensorable version of Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. Our primary interests are oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the west who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their own governments and corporations. We aim for maximum political impact; this means our interface is identical to Wikipedia and usable by non-technical people. We have received over 1.1 million documents so far from dissident communities and anonymous sources."

SwashbucklingCowboy writes "Infoworld has an article up about a survey by the Software & Information Industry Association claiming that offshoring doesn't cost American jobs. The article quotes the executive director of the SIIA as saying, '[Offshoring] was used almost entirely as a form of expansion, not as a replacement.' Well, if a job is created elsewhere that could have been created in the US, isn't that a job lost?"

Game Politics is carrying the news that the state of Massachusetts is asking Jack Thompson for help in drafting a piece of videogaming related legislation. The bill aims to block minors from purchasing games which fall under one of these categories: "Depicts violence in a manner patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community, so as to appeal predominantly to the morbid interest in violence of minors. Is patently contrary to prevailing standards of adults in the county where the offense was committed as to suitable material for such minors. Lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value for minors." The bill has strong backing in the state, from mayors all the way up to state senators.

tundra_man writes "CBC has an article about RFID type devices in Canadian coins found on US Contractors. From the article: 'Canadian coins containing tiny transmitters have mysteriously turned up in the pockets of at least three American contractors who visited Canada, says a branch of the U.S. Department of Defense.' The report did not indicate what kinds of coins were involved."

The increasingly excellent games coverage from MTV continues, with Stephen Totilo's conversation with an Iraqi gamer (Flash site, video in upper left-hand corner). Wisam, the 23 year old gamer Totilo speaks with, shares a few stories with the reporter about his life in Iraq. He gained some notoriety on the web after sitting for an interview with the 'Alive in Baghdad' blog, but at the moment he's only interested in games and having something to do. A recent graduate of his city's English department, current circumstances in the city makes it hard for him to find meaningful work. From the article: "The American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime changed Wisam's taste in games. He and his gamer friends used to enjoy first-person shooters like Medal of Honor and Call of Duty. Then a real war started around him. 'We hate the attacking, the gunfire in games,' Wisam said. 'We started to hate it.' In fact, there's only one game with guns he can still tolerate. 'Grand Theft Auto is the exception. Because Grand Theft Auto is like us.'"

eldavojohn writes "The contract between ICANN & ICM Registry has just been revised for procedures on using the .XXX TLD. ICM is saying that the domain should be readily available for registration as early as this summer. This means that parents will most likely have an easier time protecting their children from these sites and these sites will be more tightly regulated and easier to scrutinize by authorities. ICM also mentioned the collaboration with International Foundation for Online Responsibility."

anaesthetica writes "The Quaero project, a French initiative to build a European rival to Google, has lost the backing of the German government. The search engine was announced in 2005 by Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder, but the German government under Merkel has decided that Quaero isn't worth the $1.3-2.6 billion commitment that development would require. Germany will instead focus on a smaller search engine project called Theseus. From the article: 'According to one French participant, organizers disagreed over the fundamental design of Quaero, with French participants favoring a sophisticated search engine that could sift audio, video and other multimedia data, while German participants favored a next- generation text-based search engine.'"

Ramakrishnan writes "The Wall Street Journal is carrying a report on immigrant innovators and entrepreneurs. According to the piece, nearly a quarter of all California startups which went into business between 1995 and 2005 had an immigrant as a founding member. These businesses, together, employ almost half a million workers and generated about $50 billion in sales in the year 2005. The study seems quite topical, given recent discussions in the U.S. capital. From the article: 'Supporters of an immigration bill are likely to use the study to argue the importance of foreign-born workers to the U.S. economy. An immigration bill passed by the last Congress and heavily lobbied by business groups would have greatly increased the number of green cards available to skilled workers. Business has long argued that the U.S. schools aren't turning out enough scientists, mathematicians and engineers, and that the economy will lose its competitive edge without more skilled foreign workers.'"

elearning 2.0 writes "It looks like the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) has died a slow death. DOPA was proposed during the height of last year's moral panic around the issue of child safety and sites like MySpace. The legislation would have banned the use of commercial social networking websites in US schools and libraries which receive federal IT funding — therefore undermining much of the pioneering work being done by educators in the e-learning 2.0 space."

Erik Moeller writes "According to a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, oil company ExxonMobil 'has funneled nearly $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of 43 advocacy organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science.' The report compares the tactics employed by the oil giant to those used by the tobacco industry in previous decades, and identifies key individuals who have worked on both campaigns. Would a 'global warming controversy' exist without the millions of dollars spent by fossil fuel companies to discredit scientific conclusions?"

mattnyc99 writes "Popular Mechanics has an in-depth report on North Korea's biological and chemical weapons stock, which has been developed in secret and has gone largely unnoticed amidst the country's nuke threat. From the article: 'North Korea's Chemical and Bioweapons (CBW) program appears to be modeled on that of the former Soviet Union, which covertly constructed a massive biological weapons infrastructure within the shell of a civilian research organization called Biopreparat. Inside Biopreparat, the Soviets developed deadly agents that included weaponized forms of anthrax and pneumonic plague. Intelligence reports from the United States and South Korea list anthrax, smallpox, pneumonic plague, cholera and botulism toxins as leading components of North Korea's bioweapons projects.' "

don_combatant writes to note that President Bush claimed new powers to search US mail without a warrant. He made this claim in a "signing statement" at the time he signed a postal overhaul bill into law on December 20. The signing statement directly contradicts part of the bill he signed, which explicitly reinforces protections of first-class mail from searches without a court's approval. According to the article, "A top Senate Intelligence Committee aide promised a review of Bush's move."

Alchemist253 writes "Advocates of open government have another reason to celebrate New Year 2007: at midnight hundreds of millions of U.S. government documents that were classified more than 25 years ago got automatically declassified. Various agencies have applied for exemptions for specific documents, but nonetheless there should be a release of a number of interesting papers." From the article: "'It is going to take a generation for scholars to go through the material declassified under this process,' said Steven Aftergood, who runs a project on government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists."

An anonymous reader writes "The Council of the EU has a streaming service so that we can watch its meetings — but the service can only be accessed by Mac or MS Windows users. This is because they employ WMV format for the videos. In the FAQ they express a really strange opinion about this: 'The live streaming media service of the Council of the European Union can be viewed on Microsoft Windows and Macintosh platforms. We cannot support Linux in a legal way. So the answer is: No support for Linux.' An online petition has been set up to create pressure to convince the EU council to change its service to one that is platform independent."

MrMetlHed writes "A judge ruled Friday that congressional aspirant Christine Jennings has no right to examine the source code that runs the electronic voting machines at the center of a disputed Southwest Florida congressional race. From the article: 'The ruling Friday from Judge Gary prevents for now the Jennings camp from being able to use the programming code to try to show voting machines used in Sarasota County malfunctioned. Jennings claims that an unusually large number of undervotes (ballots that didn't show a vote) recorded in the race implies the machines lost the votes.'"

Degrees writes "The Washington Post is reporting that the Justice Department is building a massive database, known as 'OneDOJ'. The system allows state and local police officers around the country to search millions of case files from the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and other federal law enforcement agencies. The system already holds approximately 1 million case records and is projected to triple in size over the next three years. The files include investigative reports, criminal-history information, details of offenses, and the names, addresses and other information of criminal suspects or targets. From the article: 'Civil-liberties and privacy advocates say the scale and contents of such a database raise immediate privacy and civil rights concerns, in part because tens of thousands of local police officers could gain access to personal details about people who have not been arrested or charged with crimes. The little-noticed program has been coming together over the past year and a half. It already is in use in pilot projects with local police in Seattle, San Diego and a handful of other areas, officials said.'"

mozzwald writes "This New Year's Eve, at midnight on the dot, hundreds of millions of pages of U.S. government secrets will be revealed. Or at least they'll no longer be official secrets — it may actually take months or more for the National Archives and Records Administration to make those pages available for public consumption."

Rancid Altoid was one of a large number of readers to tell us that "Former U.S. President Gerald Ford, who was swept into office after the Watergate scandal and later pardoned Richard Nixon, died at age 93, his widow said on Tuesday."

bigmammoth writes "C-SPAN's bid to "liberate" the House and Senate floor footage has re-emerged and been shot down. In an aim to build support a recent New York Times editorial called for reality TV for congress. But what is missing from this editorial is the issue of privatization and the subsequent restriction of meaningful access to these media assets. Currently the U.S. government produces this floor footage and it is public domain. This enables projects such as metavid to publicly archive these media assets in high-quality Ogg Theora using all open source software, guaranteeing freely reusable access to both the archive and all the media assets. In contrast C-SPAN's view-only online offerings disappear into their pay for access archive after two weeks and are then subject to many restrictions." (Continues)

News.com is reporting the somewhat unsurprising news that a government program we were assured was 'perfectly safe', has actually been proven to be a privacy nightmare. The 'Secure Flight' program matched air traveler information with commercial databases in the interests of national security. The charter for the program specifically forbade the TSA from accessing this information; the organization got their hands on it anyway. The Department of Homeland Security has released a report, detailing these findings and analyzing the situation. The News.com piece makes it clear the report was released on Friday in an attempt to obscure it from public notice; it was only linked to from a DHS subsite, and has not shown up on the DHS or TSA main pages. From the article: "The report from the Homeland Security privacy office takes pains to say that the privacy compromises over Secure Flight were 'not intentional,' and includes a list of seven recommendations to avoid similar mishaps in the future. Those include explaining to the public exactly what's going on and creating a 'data flow map' to ensure information is handled in compliance with the 1974 Privacy Act. This isn't the first report to take issue with Secure Flight. Last year, auditors at the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that the program violated the Privacy Act."