An article on the Guardian website asks whether collecting too much information on innocent people makes it harder to catch the guilty.

At a certain point, data gathered to predict the weather overwhelms your capacity to add it to your

calculations efficiently, resulting in ever-longer runtimes that give less accurate predictions. It’s better to crunch the data needed to calculate tomorrow’s weather in 10 minutes (and refine your guess twice an hour) than to shovel so much data into the hopper that you don’t get tomorrow’s forecast until next week.

The sweet spot lies somewhere between gathering too much information and gathering too little – and the secret to hitting that spot is intelligent, discriminating data-acquisition.

Take London: cover every square inch of the city with CCTVs and you’ll get so much information that you’ll never make any sense of it. Scotland Yard says that CCTVs help solve fewer than 3% of all crimes, while a study in San Francisco found that at best, criminals simply move out of camera range, while at worst they assume no one is watching.

Similarly, if you take fingerprints from every person who applies for a visa – or worse still, from every person in Britain who has to carry one of the proposed new biometric cards – you will fill the databases with chaff that slows down searches, generates endless false matches, and threatens everyone in the database with the worst kind of identity theft.

Look, I’m against this over-surveillance of the government as much as the next guy, but I don’t think Cory Doctrow’s argument is very good. To me, most of the talking points revolve around two key points:

1. All the extraneous information makes it harder and slower to process in order to uncover the desired results.
2. Becoming overwhelmed with information leads to more false accusations or findings.

Point 1 can be countered with the old adage “throw more hardware at it!” This is a solvable problem assuming there is room in the surveillance budget for technical equipment in the backend.

Point 2 is also a technical problem. Falsehoods can be reduced by properly structuring your search queries or parse routines. While not a trivial problem, time can be spent to improve the efficiency of this process – given great speed and storage of course.

The concern here is that both of these points accentuate the point that existing surveillance is not “good enough”, therefore it should be junked. That’s fine to have that argument, but what then if those issues are addressed? Is it suddenly justifiable? I suspect many would still have issues.

The federal government is secretly negotiating an agreement to revamp international copyright laws which could make the information on Canadian iPods, laptop computers or other personal

electronic devices illegal and greatly increase the difficulty of traveling with such devices.

The deal could also impose strict regulations on Internet service providers, forcing those companies to hand over customer information without a court order.

Called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the new plan would see Canada join other countries, including the United States and members of the European Union, to form an international coalition against copyright infringement.

I don’t see how this will get very far. The Canadian economy is very much dependent on traffic flowing more or less smoothly across the border. Even that is ignoring the most immediate reaction, by what mechanism will copyright gestapo determine which material is illegal. As it is, all of my music is stored in digital form on my laptop and iPod. Should I be expected to carry receipts or other forms to verify my music was legally obtained? Maybe I should just care my CDs around. More so, it is often trumpeted how Canadians pay a levy on blank media that entitles them to make digital copies of music. Where does that fit in here?

I guess you should be leaving the iPod at home – travel with the Walkman, it’s hip and retro you know?

As Al Gore continues his onslaught against global warning and the go green initiative makes waves in corporations throughout the western world, courier company DHL has different aspirations. With a virtual slap to Gore, they chose to support an artist with a clever viral marketting campaign. The artist crafted a self-designed briefcase device with a GPS unit onboard and delivered it to DHL will very specific instructions. After the giant game of connect the dots that spanned 6 continents and 62 countries, the GPS device was delivered to Stockholm.

The result of the plotted GPS coordinates? The biggest drawing in the world, thanks to DHL and GPS!

Unfortunately, there is very little information that officially verifies this crazy stunt. However, some of the artists documents do look very convincing in their own right. So the next time your DHL delivery is running behind schedule, it might be because the pilot is too busy doing dipsy-doodles across the Atlantic Ocean with a briefcase filled with active electronics around the world – complete with red capped toggle switch straight out of a James Bond movie. On second thought, maybe this is a hoax.

Update 5/28/08 – Turns out, it was faked. The artist has updated his webpage saying “this is fictional work. DHL did not transport the GPS at any time.” Enjoy your 5 minutes in the sun Erik Nordenenkar.

A damper may be placed over the engineering and scientific possibilities of carbon nanotubes should a study out of the UK garner a lot of attention. Mice injected with specific lengths of the tiny fibers were found to cause asbestos-like symptoms in their lungs – a finding that will surely get the Lab Mice Union up in arms. The long, straight shape of the nanotubes causes problems in the linings of the lung: inflammation, scarring, and cancer in the long term. No need to panic just yet, as is often the case when the “C word” is mentioned – further studies have yet to be completed that would provide conclusive linking of cancer to nanotube inhaling.

They are already known to be incorporated into products such as tennis rackets, bicycle handlebars and baseball bats, where they are used because of their strength and light weight.

Other undocumented products may also make use of them, the researchers said, but companies did not have a duty to report their use.

“As a society, we cannot afford not to exploit this incredible material but neither can we afford to get it wrong – as we did with asbestos,” said Dr Andrew Maynard the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC, US.

Smith will demonstrate how network-enabled systems firmware is susceptible to a remote PDOS attack — which he calls “phlashing” — this week at the EUSecWest security conference in London. He’ll also unveil a fuzzing tool he developed that can be used to launch such an attack as well as to detect PDOS vulnerabilities in firmware systems.

His so-called PhlashDance tool fuzzes binaries in firmware and the firmware’s update application protocol to cause a PDOS, and it detects PDOS weaknesses across multiple embedded systems.

Phlashing? PhlashDance demo? Did we have to go completely looney with the naming? “Damn, sir, we’ve been phlashdanced!” Take that to management when determining next fiscal’s security budget. When the commonplace term “bricking” is rather appropriate, they choose to go another direction.

“We’ve been hit with a brick-and-run!”

Houston, we have a problem! Millions of swarming “crazy raspberry ants” – named after exterminator Tom Raspberry – are causing quick a ruckus in Houston, Texas. After arriving via a cargo ship in 2002, these exotic ants have invaded homes and offices, where they are unexplainably attracted to electronics. Worse, they’re resistant to over-the-counter ant killers and each colony has multiple queens; they’re damn near impossible to slay.

They have ruined pumps at sewage pumping stations, fouled computers and at least one homeowner’s gas meter, and caused fire alarms to malfunction. They have been spotted at NASA’s Johnson Space Center and close to Hobby Airport, though they haven’t caused any major problems there yet.

Exterminators say calls from frustrated homeowners and businesses are increasing because the ants — which are starting to emerge by the billions with the onset of the warm, humid season — appear to be resistant to over-the-counter ant killers.

“The population built up so high that typical ant controls simply did no good,” said Jason Meyers, an A&M doctoral student who is writing his dissertation on the one-eighth-inch-long ant.

It’s not enough just to kill the queen. Experts say each colony has multiple queens that have to be taken out.

How about a roach hotel-like device out of all our eWaste? Creepy stuff guys.

Not wanting to miss out on Hollywood’s current craze of 1980s entertainment nostalgia the US Air Force aims for a WarGames-esque suite of hacker tools. Such tools would allow “access to” and ” full control” of all computers. If that isn’t fantastic enough, the now zombie’d computer will continue to broadcast future information back to US Air Force HQ.

On Monday, the Air Force Research Laboratory introduced a two-year, $11 million effort to put together hardware and software tools for “Dominant Cyber Offensive Engagement.”  “Of interest are any and all techniques to enable user and/or root level access,” a request for proposals notes, “to both fixed (PC) or mobile computing platforms… any and all operating systems, patch levels, applications and hardware.” This isn’t just some computer science study, mind you; “research efforts under this program are expected to result in complete functional capabilities.”

Unlike an Air Force colonel’s proposal, to knock down enemy websites with military botnets, the Research Lab is encouraging a sneaky, “low and slow” approach. The preferred attack consists of lying quiet, and then “stealthily exfiltrat[ing] information” from adversaries’ networks.

But, in the end, the Air Force wants to see all kinds of “techniques and technologies” to “Deceive, Deny, Disrupt, Degrade, [or] Destroy” hostile systems.  And “in addition to these main concepts,” the Research Lab would like to see studies into “Proactive Botnet Defense Technology Development,” the “reinvent[ion of] the network protocol stack” and new antennas, based on carbon nanotubes.

But isn’t this the NSA’s job? Actually, this sounds a lot like Skynet – the computer-based military defense system in the Terminator movies. California, let it be said, I blame you and your beloved governator.

Before mobile carriers made a mint in ringtones they were nickel and dimeing us with SMS texting charges. Without too much effort, overage charges from SMS could double or triple your entire bill. Sending even a megabyte of SMS data would result in almost $1000 in usage fees. This is the mobile phone rip off that few talk about, but scientest Dr Nigel Bannister hopes to change all that by working out the cost of obtaining a megabyte of data from Hubble – and comparing that with the cost of sending a text.

He worked out the cost of obtaining a megabyte of data from Hubble – and compared that with the 5p cost of sending a text.

He said: “The bottom line is texting is at least 4 times more expensive than transmitting data from Hubble, and is likely to be substantially more than that.

“The maximum size for a text message is 160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is 5p. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that’s 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 5p each, that’s £374.49 per MB – or about 4.4 times more expensive than the ‘most pessimistic’ estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs.”

Dr Bannister said it had been difficult to work out exactly how much Hubble data transmission costs. So he contacted NASA who gave him a firm figure of £8.85 per megabyte (MB) for the transmission of data from HST to the Earth.

The irony of all this? SMS costs the mobile carrier practically nothing! Quite regularly, your phone transmits a 256 byte message to the receiving tower, which transmits a corresponding response. This is how your cell phone connects to the network and determines if you are able to receive calls or not. In actuality, this communication results in 186 bytes of wasted space (out of the 256) – bandwidth that is wasted that could hold other types of data – like SMS! In fact, SMS does ride in this carrier byte packet. Another reason to despise your mobile carrier.

In example of throwing your weight around for good, Microsoft security strategist Katie Moussouris further announced that such a proposal is making its way through the International Organization for Standardization. If passed, it would protect ethical hackers who responsibly disclose holes in other companies’ websites. Well played Microsoft!

The philosophy here is if someone is being nice enough to point out your fly is down, they’re really doing you a favor and you should thank them rather than calling the cops and saying you’re a pervert.

A new Microsoft? What’s next, Vista refund coupons?