Nemesisghost wrote to us with a story about attempts to reform the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Under the act, messages left on a server are considered abandoned after six months and are trivially subpoenaed by law enforcement. A group of ISPs is lobbying to extend the protections afforded to locally stored messages to messages stored on third party servers, but the Obama administration is urging Congress not to reform the law.

angry tapir writes "Visa has announced it is planning a new service that will let US customers send money directly to one another, presenting new competition to PayPal. Visa already lets people send money to Visa accounts in many other countries, but this will be the first time it will offer the service in the US."

An anonymous reader writes "Apple's iPad competitors are still spec-obsessed, and Apple's next-gen iPad coupled with the same price point is forcing Samsung to rethink its tablet strategy and pricing methodology altogether. The South Korean Yonhap News Agency relays a quote from Lee Don-joo, executive VP of Samsung's mobile division, about Samsung's upcoming Galaxy Tab 10.1 compared to the new iPad. 'We will have to improve the parts that are inadequate,' Don-joo said. 'Apple made it very thin.' Features aside, Samsung also finds itself in a bind price-wise. The upcoming Galaxy Tab model, complete with a 10.1-inch screen and Android 3.0, was initially going to be priced higher than the current 7-inch Galaxy Tab. Apple's iPad 2, however, is forcing Samsung to 'think that over.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Using Facebook can increase your self-esteem, according to a new study from Cornell University researchers, published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. Researchers Amy Gonzales and Jeffrey Hancock conducted the experiment with three groups of 21 students each in the university's Social Media Lab. The first one was the control group, which sat in front of blank computer screens for three minutes. The second group of individuals had mirrors propped up against their computer monitors and spent their three minutes looking at their own reflections. The third group was allowed to surf their own Facebook profiles and its associated tabs for the allotted time. At the end, all three groups were given a self-esteem questionnaire."

garymortimer writes "Sentient, an Australian company that makes drone software, has given UAVs the ability to search for small, high visibility objects such as life jackets. From the article: 'Kestrel Maritime is a software solution that processes electro-optical (EO) and infrared (IR) full motion video (FMV) from manned and unmanned vehicles (UAVs). The Life Jacket Detection enhances Kestrel Maritime EO capability to automatically detect small, high visibility objects whilst searching wide maritime areas.'"

c0lo writes with news that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is lamenting the difficulty in executing wiretaps because of "web-based e-mail, social-networking and peer-to-peer services." "President Barack Obama's administration is debating ways to deal with Web-based services not covered by traditional wiretap laws, including incentives for companies to build in surveillance capabilities, said Valerie Caproni, general counsel at the FBI. Many Internet services are not covered by the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which requires traditional telecom carriers to allow law enforcement agencies real-time access to communications after a court has issued a wiretap order, she told members of a subcommittee of the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. But Caproni told lawmakers she was not asking for expanded CALEA powers. And she stopped short of calling for rules requiring Web-based communication providers to build in so-called back doors allowing law enforcement access to their software, although she said she's optimistic the US government can find incentives for companies to 'have intercept solutions engineered into their systems.'"

RedEaredSlider writes "The largest solar flare in several years has disrupted some communications, though it was not in the right position to create auroral displays visible from lower latitudes. The flare, which erupted on Feb. 15, sent what is called a coronal mass ejection, or CME, towards the Earth. A CME is billions of tons of charged particles, mostly protons." Most of the reported disruptions were in China, says the article.

An anonymous reader writes "Many Libyan Internet activists have declared their support for the pro-democracy movements and revolutions in the Middle East. After seeing the power of the people succeed in Tunisia and Egypt, they created groups on Facebook to call for political and economic reforms in Libya. Libya's dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, has responded by warning against the use of Facebook."

ralphart writes with this excerpt from the Dallas Morning News: "As a result of an ongoing tax dispute with Texas, Amazon.com has decided to take its ball and go home. The online retailer said Thursday that it would shutter its Irving distribution facility April 12 and cancel plans to hire as many as 1,000 additional workers rather than pay Texas what the state says is owed in uncollected sales tax. Texas wants $269 million from Seattle-based Amazon in past-due sales tax. It sent the bill to the company last October." We've discussed the online retailer's tax battles with other states in the past.

schliz writes "Harvard University researchers have assembled nanowires into tiny 'logic tiles' that can perform adder, subtractor, multiplexer, demultiplexer and clocked D-latch functions. While the 960-square-micrometre chips are not currently as dense as 32nm CMOS technology, the researchers say future versions could be up to 100 times more efficient than current electronics, and could yield low-power, application-specific 'nanocontrollers' for use in tiny embedded systems and biomedical devices."

Gunkerty Jeb writes "The days of wondering whether those drunken sex party photos are indeed the Olsen Twins, or if they are just the Mary-Kate and Ashley's faces photo-shopped on the bodies of Lindsay Lohan and Amy Winehouse are OVER! A group of academic researchers at the University of Cambridge has developed a new technique for making JPEG images copy-evident, so that users can tell whether an image has been recompressed and copied."

An anonymous reader writes "The recent stellar explosion known as 'supernova 2011b' is gradually fading after outshining its host galaxy for over a month. The explosion first flared up in early January, and peaked at magnitude 12.9, putting it within the reach of many amateur telescopes. The host galaxy, NGC 2655, lies 64 million light years away, meaning that the star exploded while the dinosaurs still roamed the planet. My own sketches are available at gkastro.tk/."

angry tapir writes "Dell has released two servers for the US market that have been customized to run Ubuntu-based cloud services. The company has outfitted its PowerEdge C2100 and C6100 servers with Canonical's Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), an implementation of the Eucalyptus private cloud software that runs on the Ubuntu Server Edition operating system."