Scientists plan to test whether sharks enjoy listening to Christmas pop songs, after US research showed fish could recognize melody. Chris Brown, senior marine biologist at the Loch Lomond aquarium, said seasonal music would be played through walkthrough underwater tunnels where they can be heard by dozens of nurse sharks, black-tip reef sharks, and ray species. Experts will then monitor the sharks' reactions to different songs. We'll play everything from Kim Wilde and Mel Smith's Rocking Around the Christmas Tree and Merry Christmas Everybody by Slade to Wham's Last Christmas. We may find they prefer something softer like White Christmas by Bing Crosby," Brown said. Thank you for answering this question science.

jonbryce writes "The Internet Watch Foundation, guardians of the Great Firewall of Britain, have stopped censoring Wikipedia for hosting what they considered to be a child porn image. They had previously threatened to block Amazon for hosting the same image." Here is the IWF's statement, which credits the Streisand Effect for opening their eyes: "...in light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability, the decision has been taken to remove this webpage from our list. Any further reported instances of this image which are hosted abroad, will not be added to the list. ... IWF's overriding objective is to minimize the availability of indecent images of children on the internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect."

Bootsy Collins writes "Last Wednesday, the Lori Drew 'cyberbullying' case ended in three misdemeanor convictions under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a 1986 US Federal law intended to address illegally accessing computer systems. The interpretation of the act by the Court to cover violations of website terms of service, a circumstance obviously not considered in the law's formulation and passage, may have profound effects on the intersection of the Internet and US law. Referring to an amicus curiae brief filed by online rights organizations and law professors, PJ at Groklaw breaks down the implications of the decision to support her assertion that 'unless this case is overturned, it is time to get off the Internet completely, because it will have become too risky to use a computer.'"

sumj sends in word out of a Taiwanese research institute of a folding display on a smartphone that allows its screen to double in size to 5 inches (slideshow here). It's a prototype at this point. Don't bother clicking for the article's second page — it's one sentence with an interstitial before.

Barence writes "The deplorable speed of British broadband connections has been revealed in the latest figures from the Office of National Statistics, which show that 42.3% of broadband connections are slower than 2Mb/sec. More worryingly, the ONS statistics are based on the connection's headline speed, not actual throughput, which means that many more British broadband connections are effectively below the 2Mb/sec barrier. Better still, a separate report issued yesterday by Ofcom revealed that the majority of broadband users had no idea about the speed of their connection anyway."

MacWorld is running a piece from MacJournals.com's for-pay publication detailing how the Safari browser's anti-phishing works. The article takes Apple to task for not thinking enough of its users to bother telling them when Safari sends data off to a third party on their behalf. For it seems that Safari uses the same Google-based anti-phishing technology that Firefox has incorporated since version 2.0, but, unlike Mozilla, tells its users nothing about it. "Even when phrased as friendly to Apple as we can manage, the fact remains that after installing Safari 3.2, your computer is by default downloading lots of information from Google and sending information related to sites you visit back to Google — without telling you, without Apple disclosing the methods, and without any privacy statement from Apple."

Erris writes "Opendotdotdot has good news about laws in the EU: 'EU culture ministers yesterday (20 November) rejected French proposals to curb online piracy through compulsory measures against free downloading ... [and instead pushed] for "a fair balance between the various fundamental rights" while fighting online piracy, first listing "the right to personal data protection," then "the freedom of information" and only lastly "the protection of intellectual property." [This] indicates that the culture ministers and their advisers are beginning to understand the dynamics of the Net, that throttling its use through crude instruments like the "three strikes and you're out" is exactly the wrong thing to do.'"

Roland Piquepaille writes "In recent months, the concept of 'cloud computing' was all the buzz. European researchers think about another name, the World Wide Grid, which could run on top of the Internet. In an article to appear soon, ICT Results will report about the g-Eclipse project. As the scientists said, 'the g-Eclipse project aims to build an integrated workbench framework to access the power of existing Grid infrastructures. The framework will be built on top of the reliable eco-system of the Eclipse community to enable a sustainable development.' The project started in July 2006 and was successfully completed in June 2008 for a total cost of €2.5 million, including a EU contribution of €1.96 million."

svnt writes "Janella Spears wiped out her husband's retirement account, remortgaged their paid-for house, and took out a lien against the family car in an attempt to cash in on the deal. A undercover officer involved with the investigation called it the worst example of the scam he's ever seen. Thoughtfully, Spears has gone public with her story as a warning to others not to fall victim."

ESCquire writes "Apparently, the Washington Post Blog 'Security Fix' managed to shut down McColo, a US-based hosting provider facilitating more than 75 percent of global spam. " Now how long before the void is filled by another ISP?

Wolfger writes "Continuing the recent (useful) stupid theme: I've recently become a BlackBerry user, and I'm in love with the obvious(?) tricks, such as installing MidpSSH to access my home box remotely. But I'd like to know what more experienced Crackberry addicts can share."

SpuriousLogic sends in a sad note from the BBC: "NASA says its Phoenix lander on the surface of Mars has gone silent and is almost certainly dead. Engineers have not heard from the craft since Sunday 2 November when it made a brief communication with Earth. Phoenix, which landed on the planet's northern plains in May, had been struggling in the increasing cold and dark of an advancing winter. The US space agency says it will continue to try to contact the craft but does not expect to hear from it."

Khemisty writes "Back in grade school you were probably taught the importance of warm-up exercises, and it's likely you've continued with pretty much the same routine ever since. Science, however, has moved on. Researchers now believe that some of the more entrenched elements of many athletes' warm-up regimens are not only a waste of time but are actually bad for you. The old presumption that holding a stretch for 20 to 30 seconds — known as static stretching — primes muscles for a workout is dead wrong. It actually weakens them. In a recent study conducted at the University of Nevada, athletes generated less force from their leg muscles after static stretching than they did after not stretching at all. Other studies have found that this stretching decreases muscle strength by as much as 30 percent. Also, stretching one leg's muscles can reduce strength in the other leg as well, probably because the central nervous system rebels against the movements."

Peter (Professor) Fo writes "I've recently had two CD-Rs reported to me as faulty which are just 3 years old. This is worrying — I suspect the failure rate for this batch could be 10%. When researching CD longevity there is old and unreliable information; pious 'how to cosset your discs so they last 100 years' blurb; and endless discussions of what sort of dye to use, don't use cheap media, burn slower (or don't), but not much by way of hard facts besides there's a lot of data loss going on. Does anyone know of a generic utility (win or *nix would suit me) that can map sector readability/error rates of CDs? I'd like to measure decay over time in my environment with my media and my other variables; and I expect others would too."

narramissic writes "Researchers Erik Tews and Martin Beck 'have just opened the box on a whole new hacker playground, says Dragos Ruiu, organizer of the PacSec conference. At the conference, Tews will show how he was able to partially crack WPA encryption in order to read data being sent from a router to a laptop. To do this, Tews and Beck found a way to break the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) key, used by WPA, in a relatively short amount of time: 12 to 15 minutes. They have not, however, managed to crack the encryption keys used to secure data that goes from the PC to the router in this particular attack. 'Its just the starting point,' said Ruiu."