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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 18 declined, 6 accepted (24 total, 25.00% accepted)

Censorship

Submission + - Fair use in scientific blogging?

Submitted by
GrumpySimon
GrumpySimon writes: "Recently, a well-read science blog, Retrospectacle posted an article on a scientific paper. This blog post reproduced a chart and a table from the original article and everything was fully attributed. When the publishers, the mega-science publishing house Wiley found out, they subsequently threatened legal action unless the chart and table were removed. Understandably, this whole mess has stirred up quite a storm of protest, with many people seeing this as falling under fair use, and calling for a boycott of Wiley & Wiley's journals."
Privacy

Submission + - Subliminal messages might actually work

Submitted by
GrumpySimon
GrumpySimon writes: "New research has proven that subliminal messages may actually work. In a paper titled Attentional Load Modulates Responses of Human Primary Visual Cortex to Invisible Stimuli , Bahrani et al demonstrate that even though stimuli may not be available to consciousness, they are processed by the visual cortex. Whilst I'm sure that marketing agencies all over the world are rubbing their hands in glee at this news, the authors report that there's no evidence that this can make people buy things against their will, so with any luck the use of this in advertising will remain an urban legend."
Security

Submission + - Wordpress 2.1.1 release compromised by cracker

Submitted by
GrumpySimon
GrumpySimon writes: "The recent 2.1.1 release of the popular blog software Wordpress was compromised by a cracker who made it easier for to execute code remotely. This is interesting because the official release was quietly and subtly compromised, and has been in the wild for a few days now. There's no word on if any affected sites have been compromised, but anyone running Wordpress is urged to upgrade to 2.1.2 immediately, and admins can check their logs for access to "theme.php" or "feed.php", and query strings with "ix=" or "iz=" in them."
The Media

Submission + - Wikipedia blocks Qatar

Submitted by
GrumpySimon
GrumpySimon writes: "Wikipedia has blocked the entire country of Qatar from editing pages. Whilst the ban is due to spam-abuse coming from the IP address in question, the fact that this belongs to the country's sole high-speed internet provider has the unintended consequence of stopping Qatarese from editing the wiki. The ban has raised concerns about impartiality — the majority of Al Jazeera journalists operate out of Qatar, for example. This raises a number of issues about internet connectivity in small countries — what other internet bottlenecks like this exist?"

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