The FBI, acting on a warrant, seized an internet scam ring's servers—and, apparently, those of everyone else in the datacenter rack. Among the victims of Operation Go Go Gadget Cybercrime Investigation was Instapaper, Marco Arment's splendid and widely-used web bookmarking system.

Due to the police culture in the United States, especially at the federal level, I don't expect to ever get an explanation for this, have the server or its data returned, or be reimbursed for the damage they have illegally caused. I'm really not sure what to do about this. I'm speaking to my lawyer about it shortly, but as far as I know, there's nothing I can reasonably do without spending more money, time, and stress than I can afford on a path that would likely lead nowhere productive.

The FBI stole an Instapaper server in an unrelated raid [Instapaper] Update: The server's back online, Arment reports.

LulzSec announced Thursday evening the publication at Pirate Bay of a trove of leaked material from Arizona law enforcement agencies. Arizona's Department of Public Safety confirmed shortly thereafter that it was hacked. In the press release included with the dump, a LulzSec affiliate outlines a more activist agenda than is usually associated with the group.

We are releasing hundreds of private intelligence bulletins, training manuals, personal email correspondence, names, phone numbers, addresses and passwords belonging to Arizona law enforcement. We are targeting AZDPS specifically because we are against SB1070 and the racial profiling anti-immigrant police state that is Arizona. The documents classified as "law enforcement sensitive", "not for public distribution", and "for official use only" are primarily related to border patrol and counter-terrorism operations and describe the use of informants to infiltrate various gangs, cartels, motorcycle clubs, Nazi groups, and protest movements. Every week we plan on releasing more classified documents and embarassing personal details of military and law enforcement in an effort not just to reveal their racist and corrupt nature but to purposefully sabotage their efforts to terrorize communities fighting an unjust "war on drugs". Hackers of the world are uniting and taking direct action against our common oppressors - the government, corporations, police, and militaries of the world. See you again real soon! ;D

With more than 700 bulletins, email archives, images and other files, the 440MB package will keep readers busy for days. A few excerpts from the most obviously newsworthy documents follow.

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(Photo: a delicious plate of noodles in Toronto by John Elmslie, contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool.)

A court in Taiwan this week ruled against a female food-blogger who said a local restaurant's beef noodles "were too salty," and that she'd seen cockroaches scurrying around in the restaurant. She gets 30 days in detention, two years of probation, and must pay 200,000 Taiwanese dollars (about $7K US dollars) in compensation to the restaurant. The court didn't argue she was lying about the bugs, but ruled that "Ms. Liu should not have criticized all the restaurant's food as too salty because she only had one dish on her single visit."

From the Taipei Times:

After visiting a Taichung beef noodle restaurant in July 2008, where she had dried noodles and side dishes, Liu wrote that the restaurant served food that was too salty, the place was unsanitary because there were cockroaches and that the owner was a "bully" because he let customers park their cars haphazardly, leading to traffic jams.

The restaurant owner, who sounds like a total dick (I can say this because I'm not in Taiwan!), said "he hoped the case would teach her a lesson."

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The Agile Bits blog discusses good methods for choosing a human-memorable "master password" that is used to lock up a file of non-memorable, strong passwords:

Avoid secrets or things that are personally meaningful
The more personally meaningful something is to you the fewer alternatives there are. There are more things that don't have personal meaning to you than do.

In particular avoid personal secrets. Twice in my life when I've been asked to find weak passwords where I worked, I had the embarrassing task of telling my friends and colleagues to change passwords that also revealed their secret crushes. Also there may be a time when you actually do need to reveal your master password to a loved one. When I spot passwords like IloveUVicky along with the owner's email address among 26000 email addresses and password exposed from a pornography site, I certainly hope that this won't cause too much trouble for the owner.

Toward Better Master Passwords (via JWZ)

(Image: Change your password or the dog gets it, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from dnisbet's photostream)

A reader writes: "Fifty-four venture capitalists from forty firms sent a letter to one hundred Senators and a number of Congressman expressing concern about S. 968, the PROTECT IP Act ('PIPA'), which would allow rights-holders to require third-parties to block access to and take away revenues sources for online services, with limited oversight and due process. The signatories to this letter work for firms that manage over $13B. We are early investors in services like Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, Skype, Groupon, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Foursquare, and a host of other important web services. The services they have backed now reach over a billion users."

The PROTECT IP Act Will Slow Start-up Innovation

"Byliner.com wants to be the Pandora of narrative nonfiction."

Here's something that really is killing kids: A new strain of scarlet fever that's about twice as resistant to antibiotics as previous antibiotic-resistant strains. This is heart-wrenching. My thoughts are with the families in Hong Kong suffering through this outbreak.

Pervious concrete is, basically, just concrete that allows water to flow through it. This has some benefits and detriments for urban environments, as explained on NPR's Science Friday. Frankly, though, it's kind of pleasant to just sit back and watch this patch of pervious concrete absorb 1500 gallons in five minutes.

Richard Dawkins contributed a guest post to Boing Boing over the weekend, sparked by a piece in the Guardian about Mara Hvistendahl's book, Unnatural Selection. "I am responding to allegations made by Richard Dawkins that my book is critical of science," Hvistendahl writes in a response post on her blog. "It is not."

One woman documented her meals for a year and turned them into a series of data visualizations. What did I learn? Well, for one thing, how important it is to gather and group data into logical and easily comparable categories. For another, this woman ate more french fries than fruit. (Via Liz Landau)

Last week, I told you about a new, peer-reviewed study detailing more than 700 cases of traumatic brain injury in the comic Asterix. Yesterday, I went on New Hampshire Public Radio's Word of Mouth to talk about WHY that study was done. That's the question everybody had about this research. And it's a reasonable question. After all, what good is it to anyone to know how comic book characters get injured?

The answer is surprising. On several levels. For one thing, lead author Marcel Kamp told me that Traumatic brain injuries in illustrated literature: Experience from a series of over 700 head injuries in the Asterix comic books is the first peer-reviewed paper he's ever published that didn't need any revisions. The reviewers were very supportive, right from the beginning.

The other big surprise: This is really a culture shock thing. Turns out, what the general public sees as frivolous "dumb science" makes a lot more sense if you know how this paper fits into the cultural norms of medical research. I explain this in my Word of Mouth interview, but I will spoil you on one little tidbit. Before you complain about the waste of public funds, you really should know that no public funds were spent on this paper. As Kamp told me, "the analysis" was done on weekends and holidays, using the researchers own collections of comic books.

Image: goldenslumbus, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from terrapin_flyer's photostream

AP: "Belarus is undergoing a severe economic crisis, and longtime President Alexander Lukashenko has overseen a sweeping crackdown on opposition and government critics. Authorities routinely block opposition websites using web-filters similar to those used in China. Pro-democracy activists such as those protesting Wednesday routinely use Facebook, Twitter and other social networking websites to support one another and their cause." But one activist says he was arrested this week and only released after he agreed to give the KGB his social media account passwords.

Highway contractors kindly deployed this electronic road sign last night in northern Kentucky. Unfortunately, the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet thought it to be a practical joke. They'll learn soon enough once drivers start disappearing. "Interstate 71/75 sign warns of zombies" (Cincinnati.com, thanks Charles Pescovitz!)

Xeni brought this to my attention yesterday. Over at Scientific American, Michael Moyer takes a critical look at an Al Jazeera story about a recent study purporting to show that infant deaths on the American West Coast increased by 35% as a result of fallout from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant meltdown.

At first glance, the story looks credible. And scary. The information comes from a physician, Janette Sherman MD, and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano, who got their data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports—a newsletter that frequently helps public health officials spot trends in death and illness.

Look closer, though, and the credibility vanishes. For one thing, this isn't a formal scientific study and Sherman and Mangano didn't publish their findings in a peer-reviewed journal, or even on a science blog. Instead, all of this comes from an essay the two wrote for Counter Punch, a political newsletter. And when Sci Am's Moyer holds that essay up to the standards of scientific research, its scary conclusions fall apart.

Sherman and Mangano tally up all the deaths of babies under one year old in eight West Coast cities: Seattle; Portland, Ore.; Boise, Idaho; and the California cities of San Francisco, Sacramento, San Jose, Santa Cruz and Berkeley. They then compare the average number of deaths per week for the four weeks preceding the disaster with the 10 weeks following. The jump--from 9.25 to 12.5 deaths per week--is "statistically significant," the authors report.

Let's first consider the data that the authors left out of their analysis. It's hard to understand why the authors stopped at these eight cities. Why include Boise but not Tacoma? Or Spokane? Both have about the same size population as Boise, they're closer to Japan, and the CDC includes data from Tacoma and Spokane in the weekly reports.

More important, why did the authors choose to use only the four weeks preceding the Fukushima disaster? Here is where we begin to pick up a whiff of data fixing. ... While it certainly is true that there were fewer deaths in the four weeks leading up to Fukushima than there have been in the 10 weeks following, the entire year has seen no overall trend. When I plotted a best-fit line to the data, Excel calculated a very slight decrease in the infant mortality rate. Only by explicitly excluding data from January and February were Sherman and Mangano able to froth up their specious statistical scaremongering.

You can see that data all plotted out nicely by Moyer over at Sci Am. How did these numbers get so heinously distorted? It's hard to say. But there should be some important lessons here. In particular, this is a good reminder that human beings do not always behave the way some economists think we do. We're not totally rational creatures. And profit motive is not the only factor driving our choices.

When you think about what information be skeptical of, that decision can't begin and end with "corporate interests." Yes, those sources often give you bad information. But bad information comes from other places, too. The Fukushima accident was worse than TEPCO wanted people to believe when it first happened. Radiation isn't healthy for you, and there are people (plant workers, emergency crews, people who lived nearby) who will be dealing with the effects of Fukushima for years to come. But the fact that all of that is true does not mean that we should uncritically accept it when somebody says that radiation from Fukushima is killing babies in the United States. Just because the corporate interests are in the wrong doesn't mean that every claim against them is true.

Reality leaves us in a confusing place. As Slacktivist, one of my favorite bloggers, likes to say, "It's more complicated than that." With "it," in this case, meaning "everything." The best solution is to always ask questions, even when the people we're questioning look like the good guys.

Image: Baby toes, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 40765798@N00's photostream

Photographer and Boing Boing reader Tom Blackwell shot a wonderful series of images from a visit to an abandoned coal power plant in the UK: the Thorpe Marsh Power Station. He shared them with us in the BB Flickr pool, and explains about the image above:

I have only ever seen these from a great distance and was always aware of their vast magnitude, but the size becomes breathtakingly apparent when looking directly up at one.

During regular operation they are filled with an array of equipment to assist with the cooling of the moisture that they vent; but many of the towers at Thorpe Marsh have been gutted of their innards and allow superb views right up through the interior.

A few more below, with Tom's notes. Do have a look at the whole set in his Flickr stream.

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