mindpixel writes "I first mentioned Virtual Observatories in my July 2000 Slashdot interview. Now, nearly four years later, Spacetelescope.org is reporting a European team has used the Astrophysical Virtual Observatory (AVO) to find 30 supermassive black holes that had previously escaped detection behind masking dust clouds. The identification of this large population of long-sought 'hidden' black holes is the first scientific discovery to emerge from a Virtual Observatory. The result suggests that astronomers may have underestimated the number of powerful supermassive black holes by as much as a factor of five."

MadMirko writes "MacNN quotes an article from Money Magazine titled Why iPod can't save Apple, which says 'the buzz on the digital music player and "swank" storefronts are masking an ebbing bottom line, noting reduced CPU sales (resulting a shrinking marketshare), decreased profits (in part due to the lower-margin iPod and little-to-no profit at the iTunes Music Store), failure of the iPod to drive CPU sales, failure of the retail stores to increase marketshare, hidden retail store costs, no operational income, and little value in the stock.'"

Animalicious Cow writes "A shunt implanted in the skull of a patient with Alzheimer's could be the first treatment that actually fixes what's broken in the brain rather than simply masking symptoms of the debilitating disease."

bluethundr writes "Uhm... Is Star Trek just not considered geeky anymore? Must I turn in my Local Geek Union 508 membership Card? Holy freakin' crap! Did I miss a memo somewhere, or did I fail to notice a story on /. about the one and only CAPTAIN'S CHAIR from the freakin' ENTERPRISE (...no bloody A, B, C or D) being up for auction on eBay? To be had, no doubt for about the amount of a small-to-mid-sized suburban home in the NE USofA." bluethundr continues on his 12-step program below.

Anemophilous Coward writes "Tom's Hardware has a story detailing cDc's new anonymity app, just demonstrated Sunday. Peek-A-Booty is designed to let surfers access sites blocked by government restrictions, and is essentially, a distributed proxy network. It uses a peer-to-peer model, masking the identity of each node. This means the user can route around censorship that blocks citizens' access to specific IP addresses, because the censor doesn't know they're going there. There is also a website dedicated to the project."

The indefatigable Andrew Leonard writes: "Now Princeton researchers are getting in on the act. SDMI's watermarks do not seem to be made of very stern stuff. Janelle Brown has a story about a team led by Edward Felten that says it too has triumphed in the hack SDMI challenge." I think they could have made it simpler by having the watermark simply be Vincent Price's voice moaning over every track so "protected," or some juicy backwards masking, and been done with it. The Salon piece is loaded with the links you need;)

The fight to keep standards Open and Free is raging in the audio compression business. With mp3 tearing up bandwidth and the court system, Christopher Montgomery and the rest of the Ogg Vorbis team are working hard to ensure that the mp3 format has a Free alternative in their system, which seems to outperform mp3 everywhere it counts. I got the opportunity to pull Chris away from development just long enough to tell us exactly what's going on, and to answer some questions about the process and the product necessary to take on mp3.

John A. Turner writes "Haven't seen anything on /. about how much Linux-related stuff there was at Supercomputing '98 so thought I'd mention it. One of the best things was a panel discussion titled "Clusters, Extreme Linux, and NT". There's a nice summary of the Linux-related events at SC '98 at the Extreme Linux site " Note that reactions to Red Hat's support options announcements included One area in which Linux is far ahead of the pack is clustering . Has any participant written up a summary we could post? Update Rahul Dave has written a report for us.