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Funny....

This is the story of a woman who sent the scammers $400K: She wiped out her husband's retirement account, mortgaged the house and took a lien out on the family car. Both were already paid for. For more than two years, Spears sent tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Everyone she knew, including law enforcement officials, her family and...

In this story about luggage stealing at Los Angeles International Airport, we find this interesting paragraph: They both say there are organized rings of thieves, who identify valuables in your checked luggage by looking at the TSA x-ray screens, then communicate with baggage handlers by text or cell phone, telling them exactly what to look for. Someone should investigate the...

This looks like it was a very interesting conference. And here's a random paper on the subject....

Twitter was a vital source of information in Mumbai: News on the Bombay attacks is breaking fast on Twitter with hundreds of people using the site to update others with first-hand accounts of the carnage. The website has a stream of comments on the attacks which is being updated by the second, often by eye-witnesses and people in the city....

I'm still reading about the Mumbai terrorist attacks, and I expect it'll be a long time before we get a lot of the details. What we know is horrific, and my sympathy goes out to the survivors of the dead (and the injured, who often seem to get ignored as people focus on death tolls). Without discounting the awfulness of...

I thought that large squid were too chewy and not very tasty, but this person cooked a 30-pound Humboldt squid....

Seems not to be a joke....

Fascinating photo and explanation....

Another unsubstantiated terrorist plot: An internal memo obtained by The Associated Press says the FBI has received a "plausible but unsubstantiated" report that al-Qaida terrorists in late September may have discussed attacking the subway system. [...] The internal bulletin says al-Qaida terrorists "in late September may have discussed targeting transit systems in and around New York City. These discussions reportedly...

Colleges aren't assigning enough homework these days. In seriousness, it's hard to prevent ballot stuffing in online polls....

This quote impresses me: Gov. Janet Napolitano, D-Ariz., is smashing the idea of a border wall, stating it would be too expensive, take too long to construct, and be ineffective once completed. "You show me a 50-foot wall and I'll show you a 51-foot ladder at the border. That's the way the border works," Napolitano told the Associated Press. Instead...

Interesting: Triggerfish, also known as cell-site simulators or digital analyzers, are nothing new: the technology was used in the 1990s to hunt down renowned hacker Kevin Mitnick. By posing as a cell tower, triggerfish trick nearby cell phones into transmitting their serial numbers, phone numbers, and other data to law enforcement. Most previous descriptions of the technology, however, suggested that...

In 1937, Ronald Coase answered one of the most perplexing questions in economics: if markets are so great, why do organizations exist? Why don't people just buy and sell their own services in a market instead? Coase, who won the 1991 Nobel Prize in Economics, answered the question by noting a market's transaction costs: buyers and sellers need to find...

When he becomes president, Barack Obama will have to give up his BlackBerry. Aides are concerned that his unofficial conversations would become part of the presidential record, subject to subpoena and eventually made public as part of the country's historical record. This reality of the information age might be particularly stark for the president, but it's no less true for...

This is a big deal. British National Party (BNP, a far-right nationalist party) membership and contacts list. 12,801 individuals are represented. Contains contact details and notes on selected party members and (possibly) other individuals. The list has been independently verified by Wikileaks staff as predominantly containing current or ex-BNP members, however other individuals who have donated to the BNP or...

At the Smithsonian: At the centerof the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History's gleaming new Sant Ocean Hall lies a preserved giant female squid -- the arresting, spineless star among the vibrant exhibition's animal specimens. Tentacles menacingly outstretched and seemingly frozen in time, the 24-foot squid embodies humans' fascination with the briny deep. But this squid also symbolizes something...

Nice: You might think that a Lego safe would be easy to open. Maybe just remove a few bricks and you're in. But that's not the case with this thing, the cutting edge of Lego safe technology. The safe weighs 14 pounds and has a motion detecting alarm so it can't be moved without creating a huge ruckus....

A discussion of the security trade-off: Child-safety activists charge that some of the age-verification firms want to help Internet companies tailor ads for children. They say these firms are substituting one exaggerated threat -- the menace of online sex predators -- with a far more pervasive danger from online marketers like junk food and toy companies that will rush to...

They're not even close to perfect: Since 9/11, more than three dozen federal air marshals have been charged with crimes, and hundreds more have been accused of misconduct, an investigation by ProPublica, a non-profit journalism organization, has found. Cases range from drunken driving and domestic violence to aiding a human-trafficking ring and trying to smuggle explosives from Afghanistan. The meta-problem...