One of my bots just received the following message from Google, verified in Google Webmaster Tools:
Notice of removal from Google Search April 3, 2015
Hello,
Due to a request under data protection law in Europe, we are no longer able to show one or more pages from your site in our search results in response to some search queries for names or other personal identifiers. Only results on European versions of Google are affected. No action is required from you.
These pages have not been blocked entirely from our search results, and will continue to appear for queries other …
When manufacturers of ATMs started using Windows to run them, you just knew that no good would come of it.
Eastern European banks discovered this the hard way when the security companies Sophos and SpiderLabs discovered strains of malware tailored for automated teller machines that record the second data track of banking cards inserted into the reader slot along with the PIN entered by the machine's user. That's really all you need to make a copy of the card and loot the account. As if that's not enough, the malware also makes it possible for anyone carrying a specially encoded …
For unknown reasons, someone in northern Europe is leaving odd gifts for people all over the place - carved stone heads with rhymes taped to them. Each head (face, really) is carved into a large rock, about one foot in height, and from looking at the pictures of the faces they've been finding, they're very well done. Not exactly life-like, mind you (a little stylized), but each is unique and recognizable. So far 13 of them have been left on the doorsteps of random people, and each has been at least 100 miles from the others.
Remember those bulletproof windbreakers from Snow Crash? They looked good, they wore well, and they could stop a 9mm round?
I don't know if you'd call this a windbreaker or not, but it's close enough for government work. This jacket weighs only 3kg (about 6.6 pounds) and can stop up to a 7.62mm round from a Tokarev military rifle. On top of that, they say it's also proof against impact trauma, cutting and stabbing, and even hypodermic needles.
Grassroots lobbying groups and a relatively small number of politicians have been pushing the US government for more environmentally friendly measures to be put in place, particularly in the field of automotive travel. Vehicles in the US just aren't all that efficient, energy-wise, and on top of that, the most popular vehicles are SUVs and consumer Humvees that can be measured in dinosaurs per mile, and not miles per gallon. The hell of it is, there are much more efficient vehicles in use in Europe that get between 40 and 80 miles per gallon of fuel (averaged between city and …
