Blue Marble 2012 – Arctic View
NASA – Fifteen orbits of the recently launched Suomi NPP satellite provided the VIIRS instrument enough time (and longitude) to gather the pixels for this synthesized view of Earth showing the Arctic, Europe, and Asia.
Suomi NPP orbits the Earth about 14 times each day and observes nearly the entire surface. The NPP satellite continues key data records that are critical for climate change science. Image Credit: NASA/GSFC
Posted in Nature, Science, SPACE WATCH
By Harold Feld – A recently released ITU document summarizing various proposals to modify the existing ITU regulations (“ITRs”) confirms what folks have been saying and leaking for some time now. The Russian Federation, various Arab states, and others have submitted proposals that would expressly ratify the right of member states to disrupt communication in the name of national security, and to limit the ability of parties to route around censorship or communicate anonymously by providing members states the authority to determine routing paths and to prevent “misuse and misappropriation of numbering resources.” (See, for example, proposed MOD 30 & 31A – but there are numerous other proposals that could achieve the same end).
Current international law does not explicitly recognize the same right of governments to disrupt Internet-based services as it recognizes in basic telephony. To the contrary, the trend in International law in the last few years has been to view widespread disruption of Internet networks as a means of suppressing speech as a violation of international human rights.
Adoption of any of the pro-censorship provisions at the WCIT does not automatically lead to Internet censorship everywhere. But it would represent the first material setback to the growing international consensus that disrupting networks and otherwise exerting control over Internet traffic flows for censorship purposes violates fundamental human rights. more> http://tinyurl.com/82hfbru
By Joshua Keating – Mitt Romney told reporters today (June 19, 2012) that Sen. Marco Rubio is being “thoroughly vetted” by his campaign as a possible Vice Presidential nominee.
Himself the son of Cuban immigrants, Rubio has promoted a GOP alternative to the DREAM act, which would allow undocumented immigrants who graduated from high school and have no criminal record to obtain a nonimmigrant visa, allowing them to obtain a driver’s license or continue to study in the country. Unlike DREAM it would provide no pathway to citizenship. The proposal is actually similar in practice to the policy change announced by the White House this week, and Rubio’s office is currently reevaluating their proposal. more> http://tinyurl.com/864cxrl
Posted in Business, Economy, Leadership
Tagged DREAM Act, Government, Leadership, Marco Rubio, Mitt Romney, United States, Vice President of the United States, White House
By Ann R. Thryft – On the heels of Plastic Logic‘s announcement of a flexible color display for e-readers (which we covered last week), Corning has released Willow Glass, a display material that is 100 microns thin and flexible enough to be rolled.
Willow Glass is said to be the first display material that can be adapted to high-volume, low-cost, continuous roll-to-roll manufacturing processes. These processes, similar to the methods used for printing newspapers, involve temperatures of up to 500 degrees Centigrade, which the polymer films used in plastic display technology can’t tolerate. more> http://tinyurl.com/cp269cc
By Andy Greenberg – Starting around five years ago, Google switched from merely mapping out the Web to acting as its roving police force, scanning pages and labeling troublemaker sites as it crawled them. Now it wants to take credit for cleaning up some of the Web’s worst neighborhoods.
To celebrate the fifth anniversary of its Safe Browsing security initiative Tuesday, Google released a new collection of data that shows some of the numbers that have resulted from that project’s continual scouring of the Web for phishing sites, websites built to harbor malware and perform drive-by downloads on users’ machines, and innocent sites hijacked by cybercriminals to serve the same nasty purposes: It now spots around 9,500 new malicious sites around the Web every day. more> http://tinyurl.com/ccqjhl3
Posted in Net
Tagged Cybersecurity, Drive-by download, Google, Internet, Malware, Phishing, Safe Browsing, World Wide Web
