The Canadian Navy boarded a cargo ship off the BC coastline carrying 490 refugees on Thursday. The people on the ship had left Sri Lanka in April and have been turned away from two other countries, now asked Canada for Asylum.

Europe announced what they plan on doing in space for the next 15-ish years.

They (Biomedical Engineers) have invented a tiny suction cup for picking up individual cells.

The American FAA (Federal Aviation Administration)'s computer systems are still vulnerable to cyber attack after a few fixes, along with many other government systems. Discovered about a year ago some of the vulnerabilities have not yet been fixed.

Computer Scientists in South Carolina discovered that you can trigger tire pressure warnings in cars that have tire pressure sensors remotely -- while driving next to the target vehicle, and in one system they were able to remotely deflate the tires.

Canadian researchers created a microchip "embedded with brain cells" allowing bilateral communication between brain and computer. Connecting your brain directly to your computer will make surfing the web faster, but their focus at the moment is curing Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Epilepsy.

Sources:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk
http://news.sciencemag.org
http://www.thestar.com/
http://www.physorg.com
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap
http://www.informationweek.com
http://www.ctv.ca

Moscow is too smoggy

There's a lot of extra water in Pakistan, so far the water has destroyed about 650,000 homes, 1.5 million acres of farm land, and killed 10,000 cows.

A landslide (lots of mud) in China has killed over 100 people, destroyed even more homes, and now over 2000 people are missing.

Rwanda is holding their 2nd presidential election since the Genocide in 1994 that killed half a million people. After some fatal and nearly fatal attacks on opposition politicians and a journalist, people are concerned about the potential for instability and corruption during the election process.

Columbian and Venezuelan leaders are set to talk about accusations that Venezuela is aiding Columbian rebels.

Former Cuban comandante Fidel Castro gave a brief speech to the National Assembly the other day warning the world about the dangers of nuclear war. The speech concluded a month long re-emergence into the public eye after retiring a few years ago. He's also been to dolphin shows and discussed communism with youngsters.

Central Europe is dealing with floods that have killed at least 14 people and displaced thousands from their homes

More than 50 people were killed and over 100 wounded in bombings and explosions over the weekend in Iraq.

Sources:

It hides itself on usb sticks inserted into infected systems, the simple act of viewing files on an infected usb stick infects your computer. It's also been discovered that it can infect your computer from website favicons in web browsers, email, office documents, cds, via webdav, ftp, etc.. So anywhere on a Windows system where you see any kind of shortcut icon, the act of viewing that icon will infect your computer - assuming the shortcut is malicious. The bug is in the heart of Windows; the function where Windows parses a shortcut icon to display it to you, will instead install the worm if parsing a malicious icon.

The worm once installed contacts home(the hackers) and can be used by the hackers to run any code on your computer they want. They can steal your passwords and see everything you type or is displayed on the screen, they can transmit files, they can erase your whole system or crash your drive. anything. They have total control of the system.

It's already been found infecting Siemens industrial systems and it could easily target core network infrastructure like your ISPs. There are reports that 9000+ newly infected systems are being discovered every day and that the number is skyrocketing. It is currently undetectable by anti-virus software. The exploit has been demonstrated and published for over a week now, so aside from Stuxnet there could be tens of thousands of other related worms and viruses taking advantage of the same security hole.

Microsoft is unlikely to fix this until the second Tuesday of August, and it's very unlikely they'll fix it in unsupported versions of Windows like 2000 or NT - which constitute millions of computers especially in the corporate world where proprietary information leaks can seriously affect the stock market and national defence. For regular users it means identity theft, system crashes, all your computer activity being monitored and broadcast, your email or Facebook account being used to send the virus to your friends, family, and colleagues, and more.

Microsoft has released a dirty patch to deactivate the vulnerable part of Windows until there's an actual fix, but it's believed not to be effective at preventing the spread of the worm, AND because the vulnerability exists in such an integral part of Windows it seriously affects your ability to use Windows. To paraphrase Steve Gibson, Windows uses shortcuts as the "glue" to link things together in the OS, even within some dialogues and other places you don't realize, so running the supposedly ineffective Microsoft patch leaves you looking at a lot of white squares and unable to perform certain tasks.

Microsoft Security Advisory:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/2286198.mspx

Symantec's Breakdown:
http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/w32stuxnet-network-operations

Security Now(The first 30 minutes is about Stuxnet):
http://twit.tv/sn258

Two and a half years after Kosovo officially declared independence from Serbia, a U.N. court decided it was legal. At the time of writing 69 countries have recognized Kosovo as an independent state making it the kinkiest declaration of independence to date.

Tony Blair (retired Prime Minister of the United Kingdom) urged a Lebanese flotilla to use established channels for delivering aid to Gaza, instead of attempting to run through a blockade for no reason. Barak Obama and the Israeli Navy also thought it was a good idea they use established routes and not engage the Navy. The flotilla organizers are still scheduled to make the attempt on Friday or Saturday.

Hugo Chávez (President of Venezuela) cut ties with Columbia and warned them not to incite conflict. To further pacify Columbia Hugo claimed that they fabricated evidence of Columbian rebel camps inside Venezuela - including images, video, maps, and eye witnesses. As though this didn't concern the involved parties enough Hugo then hinted that the Columbian president - in an effort not to leave office, is attempting to provoke a war with the "false" evidence. He also claimed that the entire thing is being orchestrated by the United States to justify and invasion of Venezuela.

North Korea threatens to use nukes in response to joint U.S. - South Korean naval exercises in the region. Hillary Clinton told North Korea to grow up and regime change.

Still under U.N. sanctions for it's alleged nuclear program, Iran has moved its target date for manned space flight to 2019. In February they launched a rocket into space loaded with a rat, turtle, and some worms. They insist their space program is not related to any nuclear activity.

sources:
http://www.nytimes.com
http://www1.voanews.com
http://www.jpost.com/
http://www.bloomberg.com
http://www.bbc.co.uk

Apparently it just extends a deal they already had where they handed over the source code for XP, 2000, and Server 2000. Anyone in the security community knows that Windows is rife with bugs and flaws that cause huge security risks. Things like keyloggers, viruses, and other malware are routinely downloaded without the user knowing, and often without them even doing anything due to these bugs and Microsoft's blasé approach to patching them. Often waiting years to patch a known vulnerability that's actively being exploited in the wild.

While Windows 7 is far more secure in general terms than previous versions, it - like most software - still suffers from new vulnerabilities being discovered and in the tens of millions of lines of code that's not unreasonable. Exploits are bound to be found and most vendors patch them as soon as possible after discovery.

What is completely unreasonable is to consider such publicly viewable, proprietarily authored code at all secure. Microsoft is known for creating highly exploitable products, and now also for not protecting their source code at all. The Russian Secret Service is only one of a large enough list of governments and agencies that have the source code.

Why did Microsoft do it? To increase sales of Windows and Office products. Why do the government agencies want it? Because sending spies to another country is dangerous, public, and bad for PR. It's also impractical when you can just spy on other governments and millions of citizens anywhere around the world who use Windows and Office products.

If you use Windows and connect it to the internet, you're asking to be spied on and monitored regardless of the anti-malware software you run because the underlying OS is completely insecure. You should have an encrypted thumb drive with some flavour of Linux which you boot up to do your banking, emailing, or anything else important. Or just don't use Windows at all.

RangeError: Error #2006: The supplied index is out of bounds.
	at flash.display::DisplayObjectContainer/addChildAt()
	at mx.core::Container/addChildAt()
	at mx.effects::EffectManager$/removedEffectHandler()
	at Function/http://adobe.com/AS3/2006/builtin::apply()
	at mx.core::UIComponent/callLaterDispatcher2()
	at mx.core::UIComponent/callLaterDispatcher()

It threw me for a minute because I hadn't made any changes to effects since I last tested the application and I couldn't see any connection between the code I had just written and any effects in the app. But after hunting around I found the culprit. There's a set of components in a Canvas that gets removed when moving to the parent state. What I had done was separate those components into two Canvases(Canvi?). For whatever crazy reason the new second Canvas can't have a RemoveEffect. The code works fine if just the first Canvas has it, but if both or just the second Canvas has it then it throws that error.

side note: the reason it took me a while to find the source of the error was because I copy/pasted the canvas declaration only changing the id, and I forgot that there was a removedEffect associated with it.

But wait there's more. The reason I split the components into two distinct Canvases was so I could position one below and the other on top of a third major component in z-space. The solution was to add the first Canvas as a "firstChild" and the second Canvas as a "lastChild". That it seems was the problem. In mxml when changing states you apparently can't add a firstChild before adding a lastChild. so I copy and pasted the first Canvas below the second one, so that all the lastChild additions occurred before all the firstChild additions and voila, presto, it works.

The reason is that when you move from a state back to its parent state it follows the order in which you add components in the state declaration to remove them. If the first component you add is added as a firstChild then that get's removed first changing the indexes and number of children of the parent container. I guess the underlying state changing function already calculated what the lastChild index was, so when trying to remove a Child with the pre-calculated index of lastChild it triggered an index out of bounds error.

In Illustrator CS5 they've updated the way registration points work. Flex 3(halo) skins require that the registration points be in the top left of the symbol. Illustrator CS5 defaults to a center registration point, so when you open your CS4 Illustrator skin file in CS5, it updates the registration point mechanism and defaults all your registration points to the center. Don't hulk-smash your computer just yet.

Another key difference with CS5 is while you get finer registration point control, it takes more work to move the registration point after the symbol is created. Say you've opened your CS4 created Flex 3 skin in CS5 and your registration points have been centered. There are a bunch of ways to edit the symbol. You could double click on the the symbol instance, or the symbol in the symbol pane, or click Edit Symbol at the top. Once editing the symbol, you'd need to drag your symbol around - make sure you get all the layers - positioning it rather than the registration point and don't forget to move the 9-slice guides. This process get's messy fast, it's time consuming, and it'll be hard to get the registration point and guides exactly where you want/need them. It's aggravating that there isn't a faster way to do it, and that in converting the file to work with CS5 it doesn't keep the registration point locations. So if you know a better faster way let me know. Until then here's the fastest way I've found to move all your registration points back to the top left.

1. First Save as your skin file, you can use the same filename but will get a dialog to save it as a CS5 compatible file
2. Click on the symbol instance, ie: the Up skin for a button, make sure you've got it selected on the artboard
3. Click on the Symbol Options button in the Symbol pane
4. Copy the name to the clipboard (ctrl/option + c)
5. Click Cancel
6. Click the Break Link button in the Symbol pane
7. Make sure the correct symbol is still selected in the Symbol pane, the selection may have jumped to the top left symbol in the list
8. Click on the Delete Symbol button in the Symbol pane
9. Delete the symbol, if it tells you there are other instances then take special care and double check that the correct symbol is selected; due to the nature of a flex 3 skin there should only be one instance of each symbol. It's not impossible to have multiple instances, but you would know if you created them.
10. Click on the New Symbol button in the Symbol pane
11. Paste the name you have in the clipboard (ctrl/option + v)
12. Select the top left corner for the registration point
13. Tick the box for Enable Guides for 9-Slice Scaling
14. Click Ok, and repeat for every other symbol
15. Now you can save, backup with DropBox, export as a Flex 3 skin, and finally it's time...
16. Hulk-SMASH!!! SMASH! this really should have been automated in the import mechanism.. right?

click image to zoom

Help get the word out to the millions of people who don't know about Facebook's gross misconduct
on Twitter using hashtag #BoycottFacebook
on Digg http://digg.com/d31QbvX
on Facebook using this short link http://bit.ly/bsmODu

One of the more horrifying of activities Facebook has begun engaging in recently is spying on everyone across the internet. If you're reading this you've likely seen the hundreds of bloggers, news outlets, consumer watchdog groups, or just talked to a techie in your family or social circle who's outraged - especially recently - at Facebook. If not here's a brief and simple overview that barely skims the surface of why Facebook is evil and why you should boycott the site: 15 Good Reasons to Ditch Facebook: For Dummies.

The problem we're facing here is that any site can connect to Facebook by embedding a small chunk of code on their site. The code can and does access your private data on Facebook, but it also let's Facebook see what you're doing on the random 3rd party site. No warnings, approvals, or notifications necessary; and regardless of what you set your privacy policies to. There are lots of reasons why a site might do this, and lots of reasons why they may not be upfront about doing this. Plenty of people have complained over the last few days of random sites they visit adding apps to their Facebook profile, and posting on their wall without consent and with total disregard for their privacy settings. Every day tons of new sites and desktop applications add this functionality tracking and making public more and more of your activity on the internet without your consent or knowledge.

Everyone's being watched. If you're a member of Facebook then they know who you are based on your Facebook activity and profile information. If you put fake information on Facebook, Facebook will easily figure out who you are when you visit your real bank, your real account at some other social network, or whatever sites decide to add this malicious Facebook code in the future. And if you don't have a Facebook account at all then they're still tracking you by ip address, which they can easily associate with your accounts on other 3rd party sites.

There's no telling how far Facebook will exploit this as more and more sites add it, but Facebook's Founder as publicly declared a war on privacy several times now, and claimed to be changing social norms. He believes he can tell us how much of our lives he can own, invade, and monitor; and that he doesn't have to tell us what or who he shares that information with. Nor does he believe your consent holds any value.

It's not just that your activity is being monitored, it's that it's being monitored by Facebook - a malicious evil company which cons ignorant people into handing over their very identity permanently with no way out.

How-To boycott Facebook:

note: These instructions are 100% reversible, but before you begin you should delete everything off your Facebook account, change any relationship descriptions to nonsense. Fill your account with dummy information or info about why you're boycotting Facebook. Message all your Facebook "friends" asking them to untag you from any pictures they have up, and then log out for the last time.

It's very simple if you connect to the internet through a router. I'll attempt to give as much detail as possible, if you get stuck or don't use a router feel free to comment and ask for help.

1. Open your Browser(Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or Internet Explorer)
2. Go to the following website http://192.168.0.1, if that doesn't work try http://192.168.1.1
3. You should now be looking at the login page for your router(The thing in between your computer and modem).
4. Type in the administrative username and password - the default username is usually admin, and the default password is usually left blank.
5. If that doesn't work you'll need to find the user manual or use Google to search for the make and model of your router to find the default username and password.
6. Once you're logged into your router look through the menus for an area called website filter or website block list or something to that effect. On my router it's located in Advanced -> Website Filter
7. Add the following entry: facebook.com
8. That's it. Make sure you save your settings, and once saved try going to Facebook.com in a new tab or window.

You should notice that Facebook will never load. Your browser will just keep waiting for a response from Facebook until it times out, but your router won't send or receive anything from Facebook anymore. It's like if you tried to call Facebook on the phone but the operator has been told never to connect a call between you and Facebook.

If you go to Digg.com you'll notice that while the site loads all the content you'd expect, it never finishes loading. This is because it's trying to connect to Facebook without your permission. You can try clicking the blue "Login with Facebook" button at the top, and you'll notice a small login window pops up with a bunch of other things spinning indefinitely. These are all occasions when Digg.com would normally be exchanging information with and loading Facebook.com - effectively letting Facebook recognize you and snoop on your Digg activity, and letting Digg access all your private information on Facebook.

Congratulations, you've safely and effectively boycotted Facebook. You can be comfortable in knowledge that no device that connects to the internet through your router will be able to reach Facebook, and Facebook will not be able to reach you.

Now that you're free help spread the word using the links at the top of this post.

The backlash against Facebook's rampant abuse of privacy is gaining ground. 15 consumer watchdog groups have filed complaints with the American FTC over their more recent abuses.

Lebanon holding up peace talks with Israel by stating that they won't tell Hezbollah(a militia turned political entity) to disarm until the country has decided on a defence strategy to integrate Hezbollah's weapons into the regular army.

Pakistan tests a couple of nuclear bombs saying they want recognition from the world for being a legitimate nuclear power.

Lithuanian court this week banned the gay pride parade in the name of Jesus. The ruling was later overturned by an appeals court in the name of justice and freedom.

The Pope fired a leading German bishop for allegedly physically and sexually abusing children, and financially misconducting.

In Afghanistan the now unanimously unwelcome violent extremist group, the Taliban, is upset that the Afghan president is visiting Washington. The group has announced that they will be launching a fresh violent campaign starting on Monday, planning to "Lay siege to the cities".

Protestors in Thailand becoming violent; using drive-by shootings, grenades, in an effort to encourage peace in the country and to keep busy while a rough peace draft is being written up. The draft is due by the 15th.

Researchers at the University of Toronto have found a way to better predict how genes will behave in different types of human tissue. The same gene does different things in different places in the body. This discovery decodes those different things for any given gene.

Scientists have created a material that mimics the physical properties of muscle tissue. No one's sure what to do with it yet.

Nokia (The world's biggest mobile phone company) is suing Apple, saying the iPhone infringes on 5 of Nokia's patents. It's not the first time. Apple is counter suing saying Nokia infringes on their patents.

A few days ago Greek protestors were upset with the government and economy, so they set fire to a bank killing 3 people.

Editorial Section:

Perhaps the most important news of the day, this dog smiled so much she almost fell over.

Supreme court of Canada says journalists shouldn't be able to fully protect anonymous sources. Saying it's not in the constitution.

The United Kingdom (ie: England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern ireland) had a general election. It resulted in a minority government. Now they're fiff-faffing.

iPad available in Canada starting May 28. During Google's IO event May 19-20 Adobe will demonstrate a Google phone running Flash 10.1 and Adobe AIR. This will spur the completion of the bevy of competing tablets and mobile devices. Notion Ink's Adam tablet, and Hp's speculated WebOS tablet will be fierce competitors. Notion Ink plans to start shipping by the end of July.

They dug up some neanderthal bones from 30,000 - 40,000 years ago, and sequenced their DNA. It was difficult. They're saying based on similarities between their DNA and ours'(humans) there was a lot of interspecies fucking going on. Which technically means neanderthals and humans were not separate species - if they were able to produce offspring together.

Beyond Petroleum(BP) - the petroleum company - lowered a heavy metal box over their pressurized leaking oil hole in the Gulf of Mexico today. They hope it will work to stop the torrential leakage and not destroy the entire eastern coastline of North America. They're saying that if they knew oil - the thing gasoline and propane comes from - could catch on fire, they would have had a backup plan to prevent such a catastrophic disaster.

Germany decided to help the Greeks with their economy melt down with 110 billion euros. Other larger members of the European Union(EU) have helped, and other Countries are thinking about it too.

The United States and United Nations trying to coax peace in the Middle East asked Israel - the only known country there to have them - to disarm and disable some of their nuclear weapons. Israel doesn't want to do that until there's peace in the area.

One of the volcanoes in Iceland responsible for the huge ash cloud over Europe emitted more ash yesterday.

6 days ago Maoists in Nepal went on strike because they're unhappy with the government, this made everyone else angry so thousands of protesters gathered to demand an end to the strike and compromise between the Maoists and the government. After the protesters became violent, the government injured some people firing bullets in the air and tear gas at the crowd.

Political parties in Burma are having differences and splitting up. This is all much more difficult under their strict election laws. Some say participating in the election at all is undemocratic in the military run country.

Turkey may revise their constitution from being secular to Islamic based. The bill to do so has been approved but may still be blocked before coming into affect.

Microsoft's security patches secretly attempt to fix more than they tell people, which can cause problems and complete system failures.

Google Goggles - an app that let's you photograph something with your phone and find out more about that thing - has added translation. So aside from taking a picture of the Eiffel Tower and getting Wikipedia or whatever, you can photograph a chalk menu outside a bistro in Milan and have it translated into the language of your choice.

There's a new update for Google's web browser Chrome which makes it the fastest browser for looking at web sites. It's half a second faster than the latest Firefox, four hundreds of a second faster than the latest Opera and Safari. Internet Explorer is still painfully slow, so much that it's not even benchmarked anymore.

The first non-latin domain names are live now. You can now register website names using Arabic, Japanese, and other non-latin characters.

Yahoo tries ad campaign to compete with Google as a search/home page, speculatively wastes $85 million proving how incompetent they are.