Iran Cuts off Access to YouTube

The article that I chose to elaborate upon this week is titled “Iran Cuts off Access to YouTube Website.” The article goes on to explain how and why Iran has blocked access to TouTube.com. It is said that when users attempted to call up the video- sharing site on Tuesday, they were met with the message, “On the basis of the Islamic Republic of Iran Laws, access to this website is not authorized.” It was speculated that the site had been blocked for approximately 5 days. Supposedly the Shiite cleric-run government regularly blocks opposition Web Sites including blogs, and unauthorized messages.
It was said that there were videos from the Mujahedeen Khalq and other Iranian opposition groups have been posted on the site. The site also was housing pop music videos from Iran, which are frowned upon by the religious leadership. It was said by reporters in the Country, “censorship is now the rule rather than the exception”. They stated that the government is trying to create a digital border to stop culture and news from coming to Iran.
Iran is simply out of control in my opinion. Even the thought of this country, or any country for that matter, censoring websites that simply show videos is insane. After living in a country where freedom of speech is not only allowed, its encouraged, seeing something like this seems so foreign and makes little sense. But then again, Iran is a lot different then the United States. In my opinion, I don’t think Iran should even have the Internet. They don’t deserve it if they don’t like youTube.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0612060120dec06,1,3957375.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed

Hackers

Hackers attacked the computer network at the Naval War College in Newport, taking down the school's network for more than two weeks, including some e-mail services and the college's Web site. The Navy Cyber Defense Operations Command in Norfolk, Virginia, detected the intrusion around November 16 and took the system offline, spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Doug Gabos said. He said the unclassified network was used by students. A spokesmen wouldn't give an estimate on when the school's network would be back online. The Naval War College bills itself as the Navy's leading center of strategic thought and national security policy. Investigators were trying to determine the extent of the intrusion, Gabos said. They planned to upgrade firewalls and make other unspecified improvements. School spokeswoman Karen Sellers said e-mail worked on campus, but people could not send or receive messages from off-campus.

Myspace traffic redirects to flash

There is a new program you can download plus some extra hard working and some coding and you will be able to take the basic crappy myspace layout and send people that try to go to your myspace site to a different flash site of your own. First you need to download the Ming package with is an advanced library for generating Macromedia flash files.

after this is done you can go ahead and right the code in that will initially do the redirecting

"apt-get install libming-util

Now, in your favorite text editor, create a file with the following text:

getURL("http://www.example.com");

Substitute the URL for the site you want to redirect to in place of ‘www.example.com' above. Save this file as redirect.as. Now run the command:

makeswf redirect.as

This will produce a file called out.swf. Upload this file to a webserver where you can now fetch it from an external page.

The final step is to include the new flash file in your MySpace page. Include the following code somewhere on your MySpace page:

src="http://www.example.com/path/to/out.swf" quality=high
pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="200" height="200">
"

what this does is send em t a site you would prefer them to go to
I think this will totally change the myspace world. Now people will no longer have to suffer through tons of crappy layouts and junk when they can now go to a well done flash website.Through this I think myspace will also get more popularity cause people will sign up now just to get those to redirect tons of traffic to there better sites. This will also boost the popularity of flash just because people that may have been using HTML will switch to flash to be able to pull the higher amounts of traffic

To Preload or Not to Preload thats a good question

Written by Mike Truese.
Creative Director, Within Reach Concepts
http://www.flashmagazine.com/543.htm

This article discusses the importance of preloaders and the diferent methods available for creating one. The article says that one of the biggest criticisms of a flash based site is how long some of them take to load, but it also says it doesnt have to be this way it is quite easy to produce faster seeming site with a preloader. Writer Mike Truese explains that he likes to be involved in a process from stat to finish making sure that everything goes well.

While this article was not super informatitve i thought it was a good article to read because it showed readers that there are many different ways to use a preloader, it doesn't have to be just a little bar that moves across a screen. Most of us imagine a preloader as some type of graphic that represents a sites progress in loading but as this article explains it can also tell a story such as tell about the company while the site is loading or something like that. I never really thought about it that way and if i pulled one thing from this article i would have to say that it is that.

Universal says "Screw you Apple, I'm going home!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Okay, they didn't quite say it like that but they are concerned with the abilities of iTunes users to burn their movies up to 5 times and put it on up to 5 machines. They feel that it is way too much freedom and borders on piracy. They say that Apple should look at movies, TV shows and music as seperate entities.
I would have to agree to some extent, that is exept for the fact that if someone really digs a movie anymore, they aren't going to put it on their computer they will buy the DVD's for the now almost standard extra content. I think it seperates the shit movies that people will only want to see once and maybe show a friend and keep the worth while movies payed.
I love seeing big companies( music studios, movie studios) get screwed by the firm hand of justice. I like knowing that studios could be trembling in there smelly white suites about having to actually coming up with a good idea for there next film or else the movie will be raped from the start and word will get out out that their 2 hour crap fest.
In the end I don't care. I just like sleeping at night. And I sleep better knowing rich people have problems too.

study cellphone

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2006/12/study_cellphone.html



Using a mobile phone is not linked to an increased risk of brain cancer, researchers have said. The largest study of its kind found no association between mobile use and the most common type of brain tumours. But the research, published in the British Medical Journal, warned that mobile phones had only been in widespread use for about 10 years. Therefore the long-term effects are still unknown.
The latest study involved 966 people with glioma - the most common type of brain cancer - and 1,716 healthy volunteers who acted as a comparison. The two groups were interviewed about their use of mobile phones in the past. The researchers, from the Universities of Leeds, Nottingham and Manchester and the Institute of Cancer Research in London, found that those who regularly used mobile phones were not at a greater risk of developing glioma.
The researchers did find a significant increased risk between the side of the head where people said they held the phone and where their tumour occurred. However they believed those with cancer were making their own link between phone use and their tumour, making them exaggerate the number of calls on the affected side.
Professor Anthony Swerdlow, head of epidemiology at the Institute of Cancer, said the short time mobiles had been used made it impossible to predict long-term effects. It might take 30 years or more to show up any link.Although mobile phones have been available in the UK since 1985, they did not become widely used until the late 1990s.
More than 40 million people in the UK are thought to use mobile phones, including many children. Last year Sir William Stewart, chairman of the Health Protection Agency, called on parents to ban children under eight from using mobile phones.
Scientists believe youngsters are at greatest risk from the potentially damaging health effects of mobile phone emissions. A team from the National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB), which advises the Government, said it was important to take a "precautionary approach" to using m

GM likely to launch new plug-in hybrid

Original Article


General Motors Corp. will likely unveil a prototype plug-in hybrid at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit in January. Plug-in hybrids are gas-electric vehicles that can recharge their batteries with an extension cord and a normal wall outlet. Unlike a traditional hybrid, a plug-in hybrid will run 90% of the time on batteries or until they are too low to move the vehicle. Then the gasoline or diesel engine would power the vehicle the remainder of the duration.

With the introduction of a plug-in hybrid with a battery range of 100-120 miles, a driver could cut down other their fuel costs by a large percent. For those who need more then the battery range, the vehicle could travel the rest of the way under the power of it's smaller internal combustion engine.

The cost of operating an electric vehicle would be like paying 60 cents a gallon for gas. I for one would welcome this much smaller price for my daily driving.

SONY DEBUTS DOWNLOAD-TO-OWN GAME SERVICE

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2068538,00.asp

On Tuesday, following Microsoft, Sony launched a download-to-own gaming service for PSP handheld consoles which will feature the games, Cool Boarders, Crash Bandicoot, Hot Shots Golf2, Syphon Filter, and Tekken 2. Additional titles will be available later this month.

However, PSP owners have to try this new feature in a more "round-a-bout" way. In order to download these games, they need to be PS3 owners as well, for they have to download the them from the PlayStation Store through PS3 and then transfer the games to the PSP console.

This is nice if you own both the PSP and PS3, but what if you only have the handheld console, and don't have the money to buy a PS3, let alone even want one? Some are just satisfied with the older PlayStation version and don't want to upgrade, so shouldn't this feature be available for all versions, including the handheld? What's the point of being able to download games for that version when many people won't be able to access them, especially with all of the mixed feelings about the recently released PS3. I just think this is one more way of trying to market the PS3 and getting more consumers to buy it and boost it's ratings since it released with a rocky start. But what do I know? I don't own any PlayStations.

Cell phones don't raise cancer risk

It has been a long time belief that using your cellular phone would cause cancer. Well, just like the myth about your cellphone causing the filling station to blow up while you are pumping gas, this silly myth has been debunked. And they used the entire population of Denmark to do it.
Researchers collected data on 420,095 Danish cell phone users. Some of those users were tracked since they started using cell phones in 1982… two decades worth of data. Data collection ended in 2002 and the results are in…
"We were not able to identify any increased risks of any cancers that could be related to the use of the cellular phones," John Boice, a cancer epidemiologist at Vanderbilt University who worked on the research.
Out of the over 400,000 people tracked, only 14,249 were cancer patients. That number is much lower than what one could expect for that number under normal circumstances.
The popular idea is that cell phones emit some sort of radiation that causes the cancer. According to Dr. Boice, the radiation attributed to cellular phones cannot damage a person’s DNA or cell structure… “there's no biological mechanism that would suggest that even this type of exposure could cause cancer or DNA damage," Boice said.
So the long and short of it is that cell phones simply don’t cause cancer.
Boice did point out that there is a great danger with the use of cell phones. "There is, in fact, a hazard from the use of a cellular phone that we have to all be concerned about," added Boice, but it is not cancer-related.”
The great threat that we need to worry about is not cancer. According to Dr. Boice that danger is, " using a phone when we're driving an automobile".
That my friends is a completely different story.

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