German officials have scoffed at the idea of using full body scanners for airline security.

Germany will not participate in EU proposals for airports to use full-body scanner security checks, which have raised privacy issues, its interior ministry said Friday.

“I can tell you in all clarity that we will not take part in this nonsense,” a spokeswoman for the interior ministry told a regular news conference.

[…]

EU lawmakers criticized the scanners in a resolution on Thursday, saying they were equivalent to “a virtual strip search” and raised serious human rights concerns. The lawmakers called for a detailed study of the technology before it is used.

I recently ran into a young Australian woman at an airport who was having what she called “fun” with the strange searches and contraptions required of her in the US. “We don’t have any of this stuff at home” she said with wide-eyes and wonderment as though travel through TSA rules was like visiting the zoo.

Speaking of animals and airports, did you hear about the poodle that caused a serious security incident in Boston?

Airport spokesman Phil Orlandella says the poodle evaded airport personnel for more than 17 hours and delayed at least eight flights.

About 15 state police, firefighters, operations personnel and even electricians chased Choochy late into the night, delaying flights for up 30 minutes.

Quick, someone needs to develop a poodle scanning system for homeland security.

I did not make up the pun. Credit goes to Wired that tries to make a story out of the fact that communication technology can be used by militants:

Could Twitter become terrorists’ newest killer app? A draft Army intelligence report, making its way through spy circles, thinks the miniature messaging software could be used as an effective tool for coordinating militant attacks.

Effective? I am certain the report does not mention the availability and performance issues of Twitter. Real-time communication channels require resilience, which Twitter certainly does not have figured out.

Twitter is broken. People are updating and most of the updates are simply not coming through.

[…]

We’re all used to Twitter outages, but this is something different.

And why should they? What’s the economic incentive, the market if you will, for Twitter to provide a highly-available service? Don’t tell me, they just received funding by an obscure company in the Middle East…but seriously, any communication channel of any kind is going to be fair game for good and bad purposes. Given all the needs of an operation (e.g. mobility, confidentiality, availability) I would rank Twitter fairly low on the list of things to bother with. It has more theoretical relevance than actual.

The story from Reuters is on MSNBC:

A dog was hailed as a hero on Sunday after it risked its life to save a litter of newborn kittens from a house fire, rescuers said.

In a case which gives the lie to the saying about “fighting like cats and dogs,” the terrier cross named Leo had to be revived with oxygen and heart massage after his ordeal. Fire broke out overnight at the house in Australia’s southern city of Melbourne, where he was guarding the kittens.

Firefighters who revived Leo said he refused to leave the building and was found by them alongside the litter of kittens, despite thick smoke.

Good dog. Cats and dogs fighting? I thought it was a question of communication issues. A Tel Aviv University study reported in Science Daily explains how the two species can learn to get along:

In homes where cat/dog détente existed, Prof. Terkel observed a surprising behavior. “We found that cats and dogs are learning how to talk each other’s language. It was a surprise that cats can learn how to talk ‘Dog’ and vice versa.”

What’s especially interesting, Prof. Terkel remarks, is that both cats and dogs have appeared to evolve beyond their instincts. They can learn to read each other’s body signals, suggesting that the two species may have more in common than was previously suspected.

The study of course concludes that if there is hope for these animals, people also have a chance. Leo the dog managed to not only guard the kittens but more importantly he communicated risk (value, threat, vulnerability) to the fire fighters.