Atlantis back on track

NASA has nearly completed repairs to the space shuttle Atlantis' tank, which took a battering in a hailstorm earlier this year. Space Program managers are so pleased with the progress that they have decided to roll the shuttle back out in preparation for its eventual launch. All being well, the craft will start its journey at 4am, local time.

When Bruce Schneier recently argued that security shouldn't be a standalone industry, he was partly speaking from his own experience. Last autumn, his own firm, Counterpane, was acquired by BT, as part of a plan to offer managed security services to its corporate customers. In a move that echoes that deal, Verizon has announced the purchase of Cybertrust, which offers similar managed security services to business. For telcos like BT and Verizon, selling security services allows them to stave off becoming a much-feared dumb pipe. On the other hand, this strategy presents an opportunity for companies that are willing to be that dumb pipe and let clients do what they want at a cut rate. And seeing as how Verizon is the company that claims it has a First Amendment right to hand over private data to the government, you have to wonder how crazy companies will be to buy security services from it.

Looking for yet another reason to hold off buying Vista? Read on

Seven weeks ago, when we first reported Vista was causing many machines to stall indefinitely while deleting, copying and moving files, we were sure the problem was caused by a bug that would be fixed relatively quickly. After all, Vista is Microsoft's flagship product. It's also an operating system. And everyone knows deleting, copying and moving files are among the most basic tasks any operating system can set out to do.

Blog: Scientists have discovered that light therapy might help people whose insomnia is caused by having an internal body clock that is longer or shorter than normal/

We all know that the RIAA likes to think its strategy of suing its best customers is about "educating" people, but you would think that by now the press would know better than to simply reprint RIAA propaganda. Unfortunately, that's not the case. The latest AP article (that's getting picked up in a variety of places) about the threat letters to college students basically reprints a lot of RIAA propaganda as fact, misstates what the letters are actually about and doesn't bother to get a quote from anyone who questions the RIAA's legal standing or business rationale for these letters. Instead, it's a scare story that the RIAA will use to show universities that their students better pay up. The article is full of stories about students who can barely afford to pay, but who feel compelled to pay the RIAA $3,000 without ever getting a chance to defend themselves. The article never once notes that the students often have pretty strong legal defenses, and Universities have no requirement to pass on the threats until an actual lawsuit is filed. Meanwhile, it falsely states that the lawsuit threats are for "downloading" when they're actually for sharing or uploading. You would think that, with the RIAA having so many cases shot down these days, while various universities are fighting back against the bogus RIAA threats, that an AP reporter would at least mention some of these issues, rather than accepting the RIAA spin as fact.

Blog: Yahoo's got two new green services to help people figure out what they can do to have less impact on the environment. The winning city even gets their own hybrid taxi cabs.