A beer company in Italy has created a heat-activated coaster-sized sticker that fits in urinals for men. If they pass more than a pint’s worth of liquid the sticker reveals a message that says they should call a cab.
…after 25 seconds of pee – a length of time at the urinal that would only occur if the person relieving themself had drunk more than one pint of beer (the Italian drink-drive limit).
I am sure bars also like it because it reduces the cost of cleaning the men’s toilets.
Maybe they have a different reason than what I explored at length in the case of America’s ban on Vegemite. It reads very similar to me at first glance:
It is unclear exactly why the Danish authorities have launched a crackdown on foods with too many vitamins.
But Marmite now joins the ranks of Australian alternative Vegemite, Horlicks, Ovaltine and Farley’s Rusks – all products the Danes have an apparent aversion to.
The anger expressed from the British seems to head towards the whole continent.
The ban highlights the absurdity of the EU which states that it is a legal product, but which has no authority over nation states about what can and cannot be sold.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say a Marmite ban highlights the absurdity of the EU.
It appears to be a situation where a state reserves the right to regulate a subset of the total legal products available to them. This is like if Kansas banned beer even though the US federal rules said beer is legal.
It highlights peculiar food and health standards in Denmark but does not appear to tarnish the relationship between Denmark and the EU.
At least you can still go to England and buy it…for now.
Jose Nazario provides an excellent summary on the Arbor blog of a bot that spreads via USB and instant messenger. He starts with a note on anti-Sino bias often found in American security analysis.
Lest you think all of the DDoS bots we focus on come only from China, we found one that appears to be from the US.
It appears to be from the US, but it still has links to the countries where it is easier to evade law enforcement.
His servers that he has used go back to “Net-0x2a: Zharkov Mukola Mukolayovuch†in the Ukraine, and also “PIRADIUS†in Malaysia. This is someone familiar with underground hosting, it seems.
It sounds much less American now. Don’t let it slip away Jose.
Inspection of the bots we captured show a handful of user-agents (my favorite is the Cyberdog one!) and HTTP headers that appear distinctive, enabling us to detect its traffic selectively. The author appears to have imported Slowloris’ attack method without any modification.
We have also been sinkholing this botnet. Inspection shows hundreds of bots checking in from around the world, with most in the US.
Aha! I can’t overstate the importance of including the lineage in an attack analysis. But even more to the point, Cyberdog is an obviously American reference. I remember in the late 90s when Steve Jobs said he put a “bullet through the head” of Cyberdog.
And now Cyberdog is back, as a zombie! I bet Steve didn’t see that coming.
But seriously, a Chinese user-agent is unlikely to be Cyberdog. It might be ç‹—å± or maybe called Sundog, if Chinese, but I doubt Cyberdog.
Even more seriously, the speculation about nationality just forces me to wonder if the common definition of a nation is being pushed too far to fit these scenarios.
It’s relevant to law enforcement and financial take-down operations but, when it comes to explaining where a bot is “from”, are we at risk of shoving a square peg into a round hole?
Maybe I’m getting stuck on this idea of nationality linked to a product because it brings to mind how some say Budweiser is from America, instead of the Czech Republic. I mean Cheddar cheese has to be from Cheddar, England, right?
Reuters says a federal agriculture agency is funding surveillance of school lunches
Using a $2 million grant from the Department of Agriculture, the schools in San Antonio are installing sophisticated cameras in the cafeteria line and trash area that read food bar codes embedded in the food trays.
Kids are going to become so used to surveillance and monitoring as an every-day fact that they are going to be far better equipped than previous generations to avoid it or game it. It’s like they are being trained to break common security controls at an early age.
“We’re going to snap a picture of the food tray at the cashier and we will know what has been served,” said Dr. Roberto Trevino of the San Antonio-based Social and Health Research Center, which is implementing the pilot program at five schools with high rates of childhood obesity and children living in poverty.
“When the child goes back to the disposal window, we’re going to measure the leftover.”
I hope I am not the first person to point this out but kids swap food at the table, and kids cheat. What they take from the line and what they throw away does not necessarily reflect what they actually eat.
It seems that a test of their body would be a more common sense approach. In the old days we used to joke about toilets that could print out a receipt with your health information when you finished. What happened? Where did our future go?
A camera that watches lunch trays? I have a feeling this system has more to do with regulating the kitchen, the register and the garbage collection than the health of the kids. After all, the monitors are focused on what’s served, what’s purchased and what’s thrown away.
Echon on Wednesday showed reporters a printout of the reading from one student’s tray at W.W. White Elementary School. It listed the size of the serving, and its calorie, fiber, sugar, and protein count.
He said the program can break down the data into total monounsaturated fatty acids, soluble dietary fiber, and more than 100 other specific measures.
Brilliant. That should make lunch-room trading and haggling far more interesting. Kids now can say “I’ll trade you an empty carton that will show 5g soluble dietary fiber at the garbage sensor for that bag of red corn syrup twists”.
Here’s my idea for how to do this and retain some futurist flair — give students a mouse for a computer when they take a test that also assesses their health and nutritional intake. When their hand touches the mouse it first authenticates them and then reads their data. Tiny pin-prick of blood like those new diabetic tests, etc. show that we already have the technology. Just need to put it together.
Privacy is a problem, but for the sake of argument let’s say the data can be made private enough to meet HIPAA/HITECH. Even better would be, instead of a mouse, for kids to order lunch from a touch-screen register. They first authenticate with their full hand and their body outline (via camera). Then it reads their health data. Then it records what they order. They can swap food later but the health data will be matched to their biometric.