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Submission + - Anonymous calls for day to defend free speech (alternet.org)

Submitted by jbell730
jbell730 writes: Anonymous has called for a day to protest in defense of free speech. The day named was Saturday, January 15. In a video posted to their AnonOps blog, they sought to rally others who supported their actions against corporations that censored or attempted to block actions of WikiLeaks. The video also called for people to "Stand up and fight. Every city, everywhere."
Science

Submission + - Extinct Mammoth: Coming to a Zoo Near You (telegraph.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Techmeology
Techmeology writes: Professor Akira Iritani of Kyoto University plans to use recent developments in cloning technology to give life to the currently extinct woolly mammoth. Although earlier efforts in the 1990s were unsuccessful due to damage caused by extreme cold, Professor Iritani believes he can use a technique pioneered by Dr Wakayama (who successfully cloned a frozen mouse) to overcome this obstacle. This technique will enable Professor Iritani to identify viable cell nuclei, and transfer them to egg cells of an African elephant which will carry the mammoth for a 600 day pregnancy.
Games

Submission + - The most disappointing sequels of 2010 (techspotlight.net)

Submitted by hbogard
hbogard writes: The videogame industry loves sequels, even moreso than Hollywood loves remakes or Bollywood loves dance numbers (well, almost; for the latter). Every publisher who ends up with a hit IP on their hands are always eager to have a sequel out the door as soon as possible to suck out an extra $60 or so from the established fanbase. But hey, gamers love them too! There’s a reason people kept sucking up to the roster-update-sequels of all the Madden games in the mid-2000s (saying that makes me feel old now). But pushing out sequels of franchises out the door doesn’t always bode well; because when a franchise becomes a hit, it builds up expectations and sometimes those expectations exceed the capabilities of the people who build the games.
United States

Patriot Act Up For Renewal, Nobody Notices 463

Posted by Soulskill from the wonder-how-long-we'll-put-up-with-it dept.
Ponca City, We Love You writes "When the Patriot Act was first signed in 2001, it was billed as a temporary measure required because of the extreme circumstances created by the terrorist threat. The fear from its opponents was that executive power, once given, is seldom relinquished. Now the Examiner reports that on January 5th, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) introduced a bill to add yet another year to the soon-to-be-expiring Patriot Act, extending it until February, 2012, with passage likely to happen after little debate or contention. If passed, this would be the second time the Obama administration has punted on campaign promises to roll back excessive surveillance measures allowed under the act. Last year's extension passed under the heading of the Medicare Physician Payment Reform Act. 'Given the very limited number of days Congress has in session before the current deadline, and the fact that the bill's Republican sponsor is only seeking another year, I think it's safe to read this as signaling an agreement across the aisle to put the issue off yet again,' writes Julian Sanchez."
Science

34,000-Year-Old Organisms Found Buried Alive 150

Posted by Soulskill from the ceti-alpha-five-not-involved dept.
cold fjord writes "A scientist has made a weird and wonderful find. 'It's a tale that has all the trappings of a cult 1960s sci-fi movie: Scientists bring back ancient salt crystals, dug up from deep below Death Valley for climate research. The sparkling crystals are carefully packed away until, years later, a young, unknown researcher takes a second look at the 34,000-year-old crystals and discovers, trapped inside, something strange. Something... alive.' The Geological Society of America's current issue of GSA Today has the academic paper."
NASA

Low Quality Alloy Cause of Shuttle Main Tank Issue 118

Posted by Soulskill from the heisenberg-compensators-were-acting-up dept.
BJ_Covert_Action writes "NASA engineers have finally discovered the root cause of the cracks that have been found on space shuttle Discovery's main external tank. The main tank, one of the 'Super Lightweight Tank' models developed by Lockheed-Martin, employs an aluminum-lithium alloy developed by Lockheed-Martin specifically for this application. The new alloy is used in various structural stringers throughout the SLWT design. Unfortunately, the batch of this alloy used in the tank that is currently mated with the Discovery shuttle appears to be of low quality. The alloy used in the stringers has a 'mottled' appearance, compared to the nominal appearance typically used in the main tank stringers (see picture in article). This appearance is indicative of a fracture threshold that is significantly lower than typical. NASA has determined, through testing, that this low grade alloy has only 65% of the fracture strength of the nominal alloy typically used. NASA engineers have devised a potential fix to the problem that they are currently testing to ensure the repair will cause no unintended consequences. NASA plans to have the Discovery shuttle ready to launch again by February 24th, 2011."
Earth

NASA Says 2010 Tied For Warmest Year On Record 554

Posted by timothy from the try-the-sunscreen-it's-delicious dept.
An anonymous reader writes "It may not seem like it, but 2010 has tied 2005 as the warmest year since people have been keeping records, according to data from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. The two years differed by less than 0.018 degrees Fahrenheit. That difference is so small that it puts them in a statistical tie. In the new analysis, the next warmest years are 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2007, which are statistically tied for third warmest year. The GISS records begin in 1880." Adds jamie: "This was the 34th consecutive year with global temperatures above the 20th century average — 0.62 +/- 0.07 C above, to be precise. It was the wettest year on record too, according to the Global Historical Climatology Network."
Security

Amazon EC2 Enables Cheap Brute-Force Attacks 212

Posted by timothy from the this-gun-for-hire dept.
snydeq writes "German white-hat hacker Thomas Roth claims he can crack WPA-PSK-protected networks in six minutes using Amazon EC2 compute power — an attack that would cost him $1.68. The key? Amazon's new cluster GPU instances. 'GPUs are (depending on the algorithm and the implementation) some hundred times faster compared to standard quad-core CPUs when it comes to brute forcing SHA-1 and MD,' Roth explained. GPU-assisted servers were previously available only in supercomputers and not to the public at large, according to Roth; that's changed with EC2. Among the questions Roth's research raises is, what role should Amazon and other public-cloud service providers play in preventing customers from using their services to commit crimes?"
Firefox

Mozilla To Release Firefox 4 Next Month 266

Posted by CmdrTaco from the battle-still-waging dept.
Neil writes "Damon Sicore, Senior Director of Platform Engineering at Mozilla, has announced that the company is almost ready to ship Firefox 4. On its mailing list, Mozilla has revealed it has around 160 hard blockers to fix, before proceeding to Release Candidate stage. Both the RC and the final version would arrive in February, according to Sicore. Mozilla was originally planning on having Firefox 4 out by the end of last year, but it had to delay the release till 2011. Last month, Firefox 4 Beta 8 was released for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux 32-bit/64-bit, with support for 57 languages. Mozilla's roadmap says it still wants to release a Beta 9, a Beta 10, and at least one Release Candidate build before the final version."
Image

Florida Man Sues WikiLeaks For Scaring Him Screenshot-sm 340

Posted by samzenpus from the don't-watch-the-news dept.
Stoobalou writes "WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been accused of 'treason' by a Florida man seeking damages for distress caused by the site's revelations about the US government. From the article: 'David Pitchford, a Florida trailer park resident, names Assange and WikiLeaks as defendants in a personal injury suit filed with the Florida Southern District Court in Miami. In the complaint filed on 6th January, Pitchford alleges that Assange's negligence has caused "hypertension," "depression" and "living in fear of being stricken by another heart attack and/or stroke" as a result of living "in fear of being on the brink of another nuclear [sic] WAR."' Just for good measure, it also alleges that Assange and WikiLeaks are guilty of 'terorism [sic], espionage and treason.'"
Moon

Playmate Photo From Apollo 12 Up For Auction 211

Posted by CmdrTaco from the here-comes-the-hatemail dept.
Kilrah_il writes "When the Apollo 12 crew left Earth for a trip to the Moon, they did not know that the ground crew hid a surprise in one of the command module lockers: a calendar photo of Playboy Playmate DeDe Lind. Now this card is offered for auction, after being kept in the personal collection of command module pilot Richard Gordon, who added the following memo: 'This is to certify that the accompanying 4.5" x 6.25" cue card did, indeed, accompany me on my trip to the moon in the Command Module Yankee Clipper aboard the historic Apollo 12 lunar landing mission. This cue card, which flew with me to the moon, has been in my sole possession and part of my personal space collection since my return from the moon in 1969 aboard America's second lunar landing mission, and it remains one of the all-time greatest Apollo era astronaut "Gotcha's!"' For those interested, the minimum bid is $1000." Warning, contains pixelated nudity.
The Internet

How Do You Visualize 100 GB of Google Text Data? 117

Posted by CmdrTaco from the do-you-see-what-i-see dept.
An anonymous reader writes "There is an amazing series of charts that visualizes trigrams and bigrams, portions of sentences that have been extracted from Google's web data set. The graphs highlight word associations and the frequency with which we use them on web pages. Chris Harrison from Carnegie Mellon University found, for example, that the word 'he' is often tied to 'argues,' while 'she' is found often with 'loves.' There are also word-relation charts that highlight words used in combination with their opposites, such as good and bad, peace and war, and PC and Mac." There are a lot of these things, and they're really interesting to browse through.
Censorship

ISPs Warn Europe — Website Blocks Don't Work 210

Posted by CmdrTaco from the where-have-we-heard-that-before dept.
Mark.JUK writes "The European Internet Services Providers Association has today warned the European Union that plans aimed at tackling online child sexual abuse content, which propose to force ISPs into adopting mandatory website blocking (censorship) technology, will not work because such methods are easy to circumvent; an ISP might cover your eyes but anybody can still take the blindfold off. Instead the EuroISPA has called for members of Parliament to consider permanently removing Internet-based child sexual abuse content at source, although this also runs into problems when the servers are based outside of your jurisdiction."
Google

Google Goggles Solves Sudoku 206

Posted by CmdrTaco from the better-it-than-me dept.
mikejuk writes "Ever been frustrated when you can't solve a Sudoku? Well, now there's an app for that. It is just one more capability in the latest version of Google Goggles. All you have to do is point your phone's camera at a Sudoku puzzle, take a snapshot, and pattern recognition and a bit of game logic sorts out the answer. Have you ever had the feeling that AI is getting to be just a little too commonplace?"
Science

Hubble Confirms Nature of Mysterious Green Blob 140

Posted by CmdrTaco from the send-in-kilowog dept.
An anonymous reader writes "In 2007, Dutch secondary school biology teacher Hanny van Arkel spotted something mysterious in the night sky. Combing through Galaxy Zoo, an online database set up to enlist the public's help in classifying galaxies, she came across a glowing green smudge of light approximately 650 million light-years away. The object, which became known as Hanny's Voorwerp (Dutch for 'object'), is one of the most mysterious in the universe. Now, detailed Hubble Space Telescope images and new x-ray observations presented here today at the 217th meeting of the American Astronomical Society may finally confirm what it is."

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