Judge Deals Blow to NSA Phone Spying

WASHINGTON—A federal judge on Monday ruled against the National Security Agency's collection of phone records, saying the program "almost certainly does violate" the Constitution.

However, the ruling will have little immediate effect and faces a lengthy future of court proceedings.

WSJ

The Black Budget

Covert action. Surveillance. Counterintelligence. The U.S. “black budget” spans over a dozen agencies that make up the National Intelligence Program.

The Washington Post

What We Need to Know About PRISM

A lot remains uncertain about the number of users affected by the NSA PRISM surveillance program that is taking place, the extent to which companies are involved, and how the NSA handles this sensitive data. Does the NSA regularly collect and examine a huge swath of the cloud communications of American and foreign Internet users? Does the agency present evidence and seek careful judicial review to obtain limited amounts of user data related to individual investigations? Or is the answer somewhere in the middle, with queries being constructed such that algorithms scan most or all of the accounts, identifying a smaller set of "interesting" accounts whose contents are sent to the NSA?

EFF

Amazon Secretly Removes "1984" From the Kindle

Thousands of people last week discovered that Amazon had quietly removed electronic copies of George Orwell's 1984 from their Kindle e-book readers. In the process, Amazon revealed how easy censorship will be in the Kindle age.
In this case, the mass e-book removals were motivated by copyright . A company called MobileReference, who did not own the copyrights to the books 1984 and Animal Farm, uploaded both books to the Kindle store and started selling them. When the rights owner heard about this, they contacted Amazon and asked that the e-books be removed. And Amazon decided to erase them not just from the store, but from all the Kindles where they'd been downloaded. Amazon operators used the Kindle wireless network, called WhisperNet, to quietly delete the books from people's devices and refund them the money they'd paid.

i09

My Life is My Own

Japan quake shortened length of days on Earth: NASA

The massive earthquake that struck Japan last Friday was so powerful that it accelerated the Earth's rotation speed, shortening the length of the day by 1.8 microseconds, a new analysis by NASA has claimed.

According to scientists at the US space agency, the 8.9-magnitude quake shifted the way the Earth's mass is distributed, which made the planet spin a little faster, cutting the 24-hour day by an estimated 1.8 microseconds. That is less than two millionths of one second.

The initial data suggested that the quake moved Japan's main island about eight feet and shifted the Earth's figure axis, around which the Earth's mass is balanced, by about 17 centimetres, said Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Earlier, scientists have estimated that the quake has shortened the day by 1.6 microseconds.

IndianExpress.com

Extra, Extra: Major Tom to bore you with personal insights!

I have decided in foolish earnestness to try and post my own column of the modern malaise every other week or so, entitled "Ground Control with Major Tom". I will be posting personal articles based on transience and so forth. I have done this every now and again, but I would like to give it a more formalized process, hence the name. I will list it as a label for easy use. Look for one such post today.

That is all,



The author.

Transience

• Main Entry: ¹tran·sient
• Pronunciation: \-sh(ē-)ənt, -zē-ənt, -sē-; -zhənt, -jənt\
• Etymology: Latin transeunt-, transiens, present participle of transire to cross, pass by, from trans- + ire to go — more at issue
• Date: 1599

1 a : passing especially quickly into and out of existence : transitory <transient beauty> b : passing through or by a place with only a brief stay or sojourn <transient visitors>
2 : affecting something or producing results beyond itself

Modular Men

Dear faithful legion of 'The Modern Malaise':

My brother Melvillian and I have been co piloting this blog together since it's inception from our wild rants on humanity, technology, the past, the present, and the future. Melvillian has lately bowed out of The Modular Man for reasons that may stagger our audience: he was blogged out. He is a very busy man, what with blogs, radio shows, school, family, the summer of George, ect. I am sure this is not the last we will see of him, and he will be WATCHING from afar.

Last night, he did a radio show dedicated to this corner of the globe, and it was excellent.
So then, I tip my hat to my brother as I begin the journey of posting all things modular by myself. Please feel free to contact me with anything that raises the hackles on your sensitive necks, and bear with any lack of postings for some days, as well as a lack of imagination in others.

Alright then, to it!

We here at the Modular Man are not Misoneists

misoneism: a hatred, fear, or intolerance of innovation or change

Pronunciation:\ˌmi-sə-ˈnē-ˌi-zəm\

Function: noun

Etymology: Italian misoneismo, from Greek misein + neos new + Italian -ismo -ism — more at new

Date: 1886

Announcement

More at The Melvillain Blog