The Wall Street Journal reports how your medical history can affect your insurability. Finding and correcting errors in your medical history can save you a bunch of money. (H/T to The Consumerist for the link) Tags: If You Only Knew

Bruce Schneier caught this story of an Austrailian kid who broke a $70 Million government supplied porn filter in under half an hour. The software was being given away free to schools, libraries and families. Schneier says it best:

Remember that the issue isn’t that one smart kid can circumvent the censorship software, it’s that one smart kid — maybe this one, maybe another one — can write a piece of shareware that allows everyone to circumvent the censorship software. It’s the same with DRM; technical measures just aren’t going to work.

Duh. Whoever sells DRM to big companies is a criminal. A very wealthy criminal.

I have always said that Google has the best search engine and I still believe that (for now). But when it comes to their other offerings, they've proven to be a bit dodgy. Now comes news from someone who's been paying attention that according to their terms of service, any content you produce with their Google Apps belongs to them! Write a love letter to your girl and find it on a greeting card later with no royalty fees or otherwise due to you. Tags: If You Only Knew

Microsoft is announcing new service packs for both operating systems soon, but urges people not to wait and to "upgrade" to Vista now. Yeah right. Unless Vista SP1 addresses the DRM and spyware issues, I will continue to avoid it and recommend that other people do the same. As for XP service pack 3, I'll be watching to see if they try to add some of the bad "features" of Vista or some other thing that makes XP less attractive. In other words, beware any attempts to break XP in order to force people forward. Tags: Windows

To compete with the current market leading in online digital music downloads (Apple), Walmart will be offering music for less money and with NO DRM. That means you can copy the song to any device you want, as many times as you want with no tricky, annoying software blocking you. Finally, someone gets it.

It turns out that Comcast thinks they have the right to control how someone uses the Internet. Bittorrents, often, but not always used to distribute copyrighted content is one of the types of filesharing that big nasty companies like the RIAA target. Whether in the spirit of cooperation with the RIAA or just to save a little money by preventing heavy Internet users from actually using the Internet, Comcast is throttling Bittorrent shares and actually blocking seeders (people who provide the content originally). If this disgusts you, now is a good time to become a supporter of net neutrality. Tags: If You Only Knew, Public Confidence

I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me, but it did. Smoking damages your genes and some of the damage is irreversible. The article doesn’t say, but I wonder if that means you can pass the defects on to your kids or if that kind of stuff gets filtered out. Someone with more biology experience than me can clear that up.

It’s well known that body language is very difficult to control and often gives away your true thoughts and feelings for those capable of looking for the signs. Now a German company is trying to make software that understands those slight signals in order to produce superior quality manipulative ads.

Here's something that will become a catalyst for a lot of bad things, a tiny generator that could be used to replace batteries in devices that are hard to reach. Why is this a problem? Think "hidden wireless camera". Think "active RFID tag that lasts forever". Oh man… Tags: RFID

The new Chinese law specifies the rules and regulations for reincarnation including the need to seek government permission. What sounds insane at first turns out to have a legitimate reason… if you’re a country like China.

But beyond the irony lies China’s true motive: to cut off the influence of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual and political leader, and to quell the region’s Buddhist religious establishment more than 50 years after China invaded the small Himalayan country. By barring any Buddhist monk living outside China from seeking reincarnation, the law effectively gives Chinese authorities the power to choose the next Dalai Lama, whose soul, by tradition, is reborn as a new human to continue the work of relieving suffering.