An Israeli single mother who became famous for her protest march to Jerusalem after her monthly government income supplement was cut in half has gone from simpatico to suspicion after she decided to pose in the nude for an Israeli adult Website. Viki Knafo's decision provoked mixed reaction in the Israeli press which had followed her sympathetically when she marched from her home town Mitzpeh to Jersusalem, gathering supporters who helped her set up a tent city near the Knesset. "We cannot understand it, none of us," said Ilana Azulay, a woman from Arad who marched behind Knafo with her disabled son, to an Israeli newspaper. "If you're poor or hungry, you can clean houses, sweep streets, but not this." However, the Center for Jewish Pluralism's Rabbi Gilad Kariv told the paper something different. "I don't justify or understand her," the rabbi said. "[But] perhaps we, the social organizations, abandoned her too soon."
The New Hampshire Association of American Mothers and the Burbridge Foundation are looking forward to at least one day of anti-porn exchanges, planning a daylong anti-porn seminar September 24 in Manchester. Aiming to examine and discuss porn on and offline, the conference hopes to give attendees “positive, constructive tools to combat this destructive epidemic. Pornography has a severe, negative impact on the family, and is a major force in crimes against women, spouses, and children.” Those expected to attend the conference include Morality in Media president Robert Peters, Jack Samad of the National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families, retired FBI special agent Roger Young, and Dennis R. Shaw of I-Safe America.
There are some legacies not worth keeping – like old computer systems you can’t dump because they can’t be easily transferred. Well, that is what Transitive Corp. says its new QuickTransit program is for: letting software applications gathered for one processor and operating system run on another of each with no source code or binary changes. What they say they do differently with QuickTransit is doing the move with “slight impact on computational performance, no impact on graphic and interactive performance, and preserve[ing] all an original application’s functionality.” Typically, according to Transitive chief Bob Wiederhold, emulators translate one instruction at a time and do no optimzation. “What we do,” he said, “is take blocks of instructions, convert it into an intermediate representation and then we do all kinds of very complex optimizations across large blocks of code.” And if Transitive gets the 80 percent of higher performance level they claim they can get, according to Insight 64 principle analyst Nathan Brookwood, it would “allow customers who have software written for one machine to move to different systems and still use their existing software…. That hasn't been something that people could do in the history of the computer industry.”
Something a lot of people would like to do is keep other people from peer-to-peer file swapping and viruses and worms, and that is what IM Detector Pro purports to do. The freeware, released by IMLogic September 15, will let companies detect and block unmanaged instant messaging, P2P, and Internet telephony traffic. "IM Detector Pro enables organizations of all sizes to secure their networks from the inherent risks of unmanaged IM and P2P usage while determining the best approach to managing and leveraging IM for their business," said IMlogic CEO Francis deSouza. "We're offering IM Detector Pro for free because we believe organizations will want to immediately protect themselves from security threats and legal risks while implementing best practices and policies for leveraging IM to enhance real-time communications."
Something a lot of people might not care to acknowledge is that hacking sometimes pays – especially if you happen to be a hacker on the government payroll. Take Jason Larsen: he’s what’s called a white-hat hacker, testing security at chemical plants and similar facilities. Technically, he’s with the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory. His real boss: the U.S. Department of Energy. And that’s not the limit to Washington’s hacker corps. The Cyber Corps is a scholarship program training computer security specialists to protect the government information technology infrastructure, a program launched after a round of hack attacks on federal Websites moved then-president Bill Clinton to call for a government counterattack on cyberterrorism. Under this program, degree candidates in computer science get a two-year ride on the government’s dime at one of a handful of universities, and all they have to do is give Uncle Sam two years’ service. “It's the challenge,” said Larsen, who claims to have learned to hack when he was thirteen years old, back when he said hacking was a “cool thing” to do. “It's you finding the flaws. It's you against the defenders. It comes from a deep-seeded need to find out how things work.”
This isn’t the only place the government or its supplements are paying to play in cyberspace. Chat room spying is another. The U.S. National Science Foundation has ponied up at least $175,000 in a grant program to “develop new techniques for information gathering, analysis and modeling of chatroom communications.” This includes investigators capturing the structure of chat communications, then studying to develop multi-dimensional “singular value decomposition approach[es] for component analysis of chatroom communication data.” The ultimate aim, according to the grant award: a fully-automated surveillance system to find “hidden groups” in chat rooms – like terrorist groups. Recent reporting has suggested strongly that al-Qaeda, for one, has used cyberspace liberally to keep communications flowing and even to make attack plans.
