Read WSJ.com for free

There are rumors since a while now about The Wall Street Journal becoming available for free.
It recently took a step in that direction, making articles free to read for users of Digg.com
I wrote a small proxy that allows me to navigate the WSJ site, and read all of the articles :

http://wsj.free.fr/
(you can also replace http://online.wsj.com/ by http://wsj.free.fr/ in the URL of any article, and you’ll be able to read it)

Update : You can now subscribe to RSS feeds that will automatically use the proxy (full list here).

(PS: I wrote this script for my personal use, and post it here just to make it easier for Digg members to read the WSJ…)

Natural Language Artificial Intelligence

the demo is pretty impressive…

more info…

China and cyber-war

In the last few months, there have reportedly been many cyber-attacks by China, in the US, UK, Germany and France.

See this article… 

Mise à jour : Article sur Zone-H 

Update : Jonathan Evans, Director-General of MI5 (UK’s secret service), has sent a letter to 300 chief executives and security chiefs in banks and accounting and legal firms telling them that they are under attack from “Chinese state organisations”. Rolls-Royce and Royal Dutch Shell are reported to have fallen victim to Chinese espionage attacks.

French provider lets everyone create their own live TV channel

The number two french ISP, Free, launched a new service today which showcases the new revolution currently occurring online : after blogs and podcasting, here is personal TV…

The service lets you broadcast directly on the TV screens of its million+ users, either on-demand or live, publicly or privately to group of friends/family. Everything is done with a remote control by plugging your camera directly onto the set-top-box.

There also exists online services that let you broadcast live, with different levels of complexity and functionality :
Gaspanik (french), Mogulus (pro), Ustream (simple), Kyte (mobile), BlogTV, Stickam, operator11, Veodia, etc…

Robots

Voici deux vidéos à voir, ça fait réflechir :
Here are two interesting videos :
Video 1  — Video 2

Homeland Security radio-tags foreign visitors

Starting this week, three US border crossings will begin to tag visitors to America with wireless RFID-cards, which contain visitors’ personally identifying information and can be read from 12 yards away. The only exempted visitors are Canadians who are not on a US business visa or engaged to an American. If this program is “successful” (who the fuck knows what constitutes a “success” here — maybe Homeland Security has a divinating machine that can tell it whether fewer terrorists have entered the country this quarter than last?) this program will go live at every border crossing, in addition to the current practice of fingerprinting and photographing visitors.

They’ll have to carry the wireless devices as a way for border guards to access the electronic information stored inside a document about the size of a large index card.

Visitors to the U.S. will get the card the first time they cross the border and will be required the carry the document on subsequent crossings to and from the States.

Border guards will be able to access the information electronically from 12 metres away to enable those carrying the devices to be processed more quickly.

via Boing Boing

U.K. man arrested, fined for using open WiFi signal

Looks like Florida isn’t the only place where you can get arrested for “borrowing” bandwidth as it floats past you. Word is that U.K. police recently arrested a man for using an open WiFi signal. According to reports, Gregory Straszkiewicz, 24, was found guilty of “dishonestly obtaining an electronic communications service” and “possessing equipment for fraudulent use of a communications service” after he was found logging on with a laptop outside an apartment building. Straszkiewicz was fined £500 ($872) and given a year’s probation; he also had his laptop confiscated. We’re not experts on U.K. law, and the details of this case are pretty sketchy, but it still seems to us that just standing around and accessing the internet via an open network doesn’t exactly constitute “fraudulent use” of anything.

More info… - Source : En gadget