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Photo of secret U.S. Navy technology hits Internet

A photograph of a sensitive piece of Navy technology — the propeller of a ballistic-missile submarine — now appears on the Internet, thanks to commercial efforts to photograph and map all corners of the Earth by aircraft and satellite.

And it appears there by accident.

Dan Twohig works as a deck officer on the ferry that runs between Seattle and Bremerton, Wash. He was thinking of moving to be closer to his job, so he began scanning the real estate on the Bremerton side of Puget Sound using the Microsoft mapping tool called Virtual Earth. He saw the ballistic submarine in dry dock and its exposed propeller.

“My initial reaction was ‘oops.’ Then I looked around awhile and looked at other things. If you look at the White House, it’s all blurred out. They protect that, but don’t protect what else is out there,” he said.

Twohig posted a link to the photo on his Web site; Navy Times is not publishing the name of the site. “My intention of bringing the prop photos to the attention of my readers was in no way malicious,” he said, adding that he wanted to highlight that the image exists for “the average Joe to find if he is looking for it.”

The Navy goes to great lengths to conceal the design of its submarine propellers, but the aerial photo now on the Internet clearly shows the blades.

While he confirmed that the photo does show an Ohio-class hull, Lt. Cmdr. Chris Loundermon, submarine force public affairs officer, said it’s unclear what submarine is pictured.

“Yes, that is an Ohio-class submarine, either an SSBN or SSGN, in dry dock in the Pacific Northwest at the intermediate maintenance facility on the Naval Submarine Base Kitsap-Bangor,” he said.

Though the photograph appears on a Microsoft site, photo credit is given to Pictometry International Corporation, which specializes in such aerial photography. Several messages left for a company spokesman were not returned.

Pictometry’s motto is, “See anywhere, measure anything, plan everything,” according to its Web site.

The submarine maintenance facility is photographed in good detail from several angles. A further search through Virtual Earth shows a ballistic submarine in an East Coast shipyard with its missile tubes open.

Microsoft provided a statement attributed to Justin Osmer, a senior product manager at LiveSearch, through public relations firm Waggener-Edstrom.

“Our mapping products fully comply with U.S. laws governing the acquisition and publishing of aerial imagery,” according to the statement. “The clarity of the images is impressive, but beyond a certain zoom level, the images become ‘pixilated’ and blur. In addition, some Virtual Earth imagery can only be viewed from certain distances.

“Additionally, there are other instances where images have been intentionally blurred for security purposes. We review requests to do so on a case-by-case basis. In addition, we do not provide real-time data or live satellite images. All the imagery has been collected at a fixed point in time over a period of the last few years.”

A request to interview a Microsoft official about the program was not granted.

Naval Sea Systems Command did not respond to a request for information about government rules on overflights of naval shipyards and facilities by Friday afternoon.

Nathan Hughes is a military analyst at Stratfor, a global intelligence company. He A military analysts for a global intelligence company says it was a major mistake at the facility for that propeller to be exposed at all.

“It’s very sensitive naval technology,” said Nathan Hughes, an analyst at Stratfor. You always hide that from above.”

He says that such equipment has been concealed for decades since the Cold War and the first spy satellites.

“The SSBN, especially, with it’s acoustic signature, they try to be as quiet as possible. That [propeller] is national secret. This is something that should not be seen from space or an airplane or any other way.”

Today such imagery, like recent pictures of a new Chinese ballistic missile submarine, appear with greater frequency on the globally accessible Internet.

“This is just the world we live in these days,” he says.

TorrentSpy blocks searches from US visitors

Starting today, TorrentSpy blocks all searches from US visitors and redirects them to a privacy statement. TorrentSpy is caught up in a lawsuit in which the MPAA demands that TorrentSpy hands over all user info stored in “random access memory” (RAM).

This service denial seems to be a preventative measure to protect their users, when US users try to search on TorrentSpy they now get this message:

Sorry, but because you are located in the USA you cannot use the search features of the Torrentspy.com website.Torrentspy’s decision to stop accepting US visitors was NOT compelled by any Court but rather an uncertain legal climate in the US regarding user privacy and an apparent tension between US and European Union privacy laws.

At this point it is still unclear whether the search redirect will be temporary or permanent, TorrentSpy owner Justin was not available to comment at this point. Over 15% of TorrentSpy’s visitors are US residents, shutting them down for good will be a disaster for the site.

TorrentSpy currently does not log any user data, but if the court decides that they have to hand over all information stored in RAM, this would be a huge blow to Internet privacy. The MPAA reasons that all IPs, downloaded .torrent files, dates and other user info are temporarily stored in RAM for a few milliseconds and demands that TorrentSpy logs this info and hands it over to the MPAA. Basically they are demanding that TorrentSpy should keep server logs (pdf link).

TorrentSpy lawyer Ira Rothken is determined to fight this but said in a statement about the case: “The odds favor the copyright owners, copyright law in this country is Draconian and dramatically skewed on the owner’s side”.

Everything TorrentSpy does also applies to other search engines according to the TorrentSpy defense. Last year, when the case started, Rothken said “It [TorrentSpy] cannot be held ‘tertiary’ liable for visitors’ conduct that occurs away from its web search engine”. TorrentSpy claims it did nothing illegal and suggested the MPAA should sue Google.

Study: Students more wary of Wikipedia, online resources than thought

A new study conducted at a California liberal arts college found that students don’t look first at Wikipedia when given a research assignment. They don’t even go to Google or Yahoo. Instead, most students look at their course readings, talk to professors, and use their library’s web site and databases. Hurrah for US research skills? Not exactly.

The study appears in the current issue of First Monday, a peer-reviewed online-only journal dealing with digital culture. Researchers at St. Mary’s, a small liberal arts college in California, took a look at what students did when confronted with a new research assignment from a professor. The findings aren’t especially surprising: the first thing students did was to get confused and procrastinate. Once they finally settled down to work, though, the surprises began.

Some professors have lamented the fact that too many students dive right into Wikipedia or fire up general search engines when searching for scholarly information. The St. Mary’s study found, though, that 40 percent of students surveyed first went to their course materials for background information and citations.

Next up was the library web site, where 23 percent of students went first. Search engines were the first destination for 13 percent of students, and 12 percent went to the professor. Only 3 percent tried Wikipedia. Students were also (thankfully) aware that blogs weren’t scholarly sources, and all of them noted that they would not include blog data in a research paper.

Those findings would be more heartening if they were representative of all college students; sadly, that’s not the case. The study included only upper-division students, which excludes half of the US collegiate population. It took place at a small liberal arts school with an annual tuition of $30,000 a year (not including room and board). And it relied on the survey data of 178 students (survey data can lend itself to the underreporting of “undesirable” behaviors) rather than on observation. As such, we wonder how the data would look were the scope considerably expanded.

Perhaps the survey wasn’t representative of all students, but it was interesting in that it covered a fairly privileged subset of students—and even these students admitted to being routinely confused about doing research, procrastinating until the last possible moment, and finding the research process “barely a tolerable task.” The study found that even these upper-level students were “confused by what college-level research entails.”

Concerns about students running to the web to take shortcuts on their research may be overblown, but it is clear that students need better instruction and tools to guide their research. In light of this, it’s surprising how many students aren’t turning to online resources, even if these resources may be flawed.

Microsoft revises anti-Linux campaign

Microsoft Corp. has replaced its controversial anti-Linux “Get the Facts” Web site with a kinder, gentler site explaining how its Windows Server operating system compares to open-source Linux as well as other competitive OSes.

The new WindowsServer/Compare Web site provides information about how Windows Server stacks up in total cost of ownership, reliability, security, manageability and interoperability with Linux, Unix and IBM Corp.’s mainframe architecture.

Microsoft has posted customer information, feedback from industry experts, white papers and resources about the capabilities of Windows Server on the site. It also offers information for developers building applications on Windows Server.

Microsoft said the new site is an evolution of its Get the Facts campaign, launched in mid-2003 and seen by many as a direct slam against Linux and open source.

The campaign compared Windows Server favorably against Linux and other technologies in terms of some of the same factors handled on the Compare site. Get the Facts was panned by Linux proponents. Their ire in part may have been due to the outspoken swagger of then Microsoft rising star Martin Taylor who led the campaign. After 13 years at Microsoft, Taylor abruptly left the company in June 2006 and no explanation was given for his departure.

Since Taylor’s departure, Microsoft has appeared on one hand to be more friendly toward Linux and open source while on the other continuing to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about those technologies, according to the open-source camp. Linux proponents gained fuel for their side when Microsoft executives earlier this year made bold claims that Linux and other open-source software violate more than 230 of Microsoft’s patents.

At the same time, Microsoft has put former IBM Linux executive Bill Hilf front and center stage as its open-source advocate. The vendor also recently launched a new open-source Web page that explains how the company views its relationship with the open-source community.