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Space

Submission + - Secret American Spy-plane Snooping on Chinese Spac (fellowgeek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: China has decided that they want to own space. That’s okay! It’s been a while since we’ve had a good ol’ fashioned space race. Apparently, though, China’s space ambitions are bothering the US military. That top secret X-37B space plane whose mission was described as being to "demonstrate a reliable, reusable, unmanned space test platform for the United States Air Force?" It’s on almost the exact same orbit as China’s current spacelab and future space station Tiangong-1.
Google

Submission + - NOAA Can Now Use Gmail from Eric Schmidt's Yacht

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Explaining the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) move of 25K employees to Google Apps (under an $11.5 million, 3-year contract), Google noted that 'Google Apps allows NOAA's scientists and staff to get their email and other information wherever their work may take them.' Which, presumably, could include Google Chairman Eric Schmidt's always-Internet-ready Lone Ranger, a $48 million yacht that was retrofitted into a research vessel for the Schmidt Ocean Institute (SOI), which SOI Research Fellow and NOAA Project Lead Peter Etnoyer notes has a 'unique public/private partnership' with NOAA (a long-term MOA between SOI and NOAA was developed in 2010). Or perhaps judging a $1.4 million prize contest for Schmidt's wife Wendy. Or working on other NOAA-Google R&D partnership ocean-science projects. BTW, while Google announced that the 'NOAA [is] the largest federal agency to complete the switch to cloud-based email and collaboration tools,' Computerworld reports that 'the agency is also giving its users the flexibility to use a variety of email clients, as well as the option of continuing to use Microsoft Office.'
Facebook

Submission + - FTC To Probe Over Facebook Timeline Privacy Issues

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is unhappy with the way Facebook launched its new Timeline profile. Last month, the privacy organization complained Facebook went too far because it started rolling out the redesign without asking users first. EPIC then followed up with a four-page letter (PDF) to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asking it to investigate the new feature to insure that it meets with the terms of a November 2011 FTC-Facebook settlement. Facebook denies these claims, saying that the Timeline launch has nothing to do with its users' privacy.
Blackberry

Submission + - Leaked Memo Says Apple Provides Backdoor to Govern 2

Submitted by Voline
Voline writes: In a tweet early this morning, cybersecurity researcher Christopher Soghoian pointed to an internal memo of India's Military Intelligence that has been liberated by hackers and posted on the Net. The memo suggests that, "in exchange for the Indian market presence" mobile device manufacturers, including RIM, Nokia, and Apple (collectively defined in the document as "RINOA") have agreed to provide backdoor access on their devices.

The Indian government then "utilized backdoors provided by RINOA" to intercept internal emails of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a US government body with a mandate to monitor, investigate and report to Congress on "the national security implications of the bilateral trade and economic relationship" between the US and China. Manan Kakkar, an Indian blogger for ZDNet, has also picked up the story and writes that it may be the fruits of an earlier hack of Symantec.

If Apple is providing governments with a backdoor to iOS, can we assume that they have also done so with Mac OS X?
User Journal

Journal Journal: Ron Paul in West Virginia Caucuses 7

Journal by roman_mir

Iowa caucuses are coming up in a few days, everybody is looking at that, I think Ron Paul has more chances than anybody else there, however few people are thinking beyond Iowa, but there is an interesting case of West Virginia now, where only Romney and Paul are registered for Republican primaries.

Submission + - Paul Christoforo tries to extort money from Avenge (escapistmagazine.com)

Submitted by yuldude
yuldude writes: Well, after pissing off one of penny-arcades.com founder by disrespecting a customer.

Paul, who still has access to Avenger Controller's GoDaddy account,has parked the domain.

Then, went on tweeting things such as:
"if they fuck with me, I got all these websites all over me. Whatever I tell them to write, they write"

According to the new PR, Moises Chiullan, at Avenger, Paul is asking for money in exchange for the GoDaddy account access.
His demands include a contract written on his terms and substantial compensation, both immediate and for as long as the company continues to exist.
The Military

Submission + - What War in the Hormuz Strait Would Look Like

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The high stakes standoff between Iran and the US over the Strait of Hormuz, the passageway for one-fifth of the world's oil, escalated this week as Iran's navy claimed to have recorded video of a US aircraft carrier entering the Port of Oman and the deputy chief of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Hossein Salami rejected US claims that it could prevent Iran from closing the strait. To drive the point home, Iran has started a 10-day naval exercise in the Persian Gulf to show off how it could use small speedboats and a barrage of missiles to combat America's naval armada while in a report for the Naval War College, US Navy Commander Daniel Dolan wrote that Iran has acquired “thousands of sea mines, wake homing torpedoes, hundreds of advanced cruise missiles (PDF) and possibly more than one thousand small Fast Attack Craft and Fast Inshore Attack Craft. The heart of the Iran's arsenal is its 200 small potential-suicide boats — fiberglass motorboats with a heavy machine gun, a multiple rocket-launcher, or a mine — and may also carry heavy explosives, rigged to ram and blow a hole in the hull of a larger ship. These boats will likely employ a strategy of “swarming”—coming out of nowhere to ambush merchant convoys and American warships in narrow shipping lanes. But the US Navy is not defenseless against kamikaze warfare. The US has put more machine guns and 25-millimeter gyro-stabilized guns on the decks of warships, modified the 5-inch gun to make it more capable of dealing with high-speed boats, and improved the sensor suit of the Aegis computer-integrated combat system aboard destroyers and cruisers. “We have been preparing for it for a number of years with changes in training and equipment,” says Vice Admiral (ret.) Kevin Cosgriff, former commander of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command."
Android

Submission + - A look at the average Android user [infographic] (bgr.com)

Submitted by zacharye
zacharye writes: Bluestacks, the team behind the Android app player for Windows, has released the company’s first “Mr.Android” study. Ever wonder what the average Android user may look like? Pretty normal, apparently. Using data collected from Nielsen Media Research along with a survey of Bluestacks’s 145,000 Facebook fans, the company created a composite of what the average Android user looks like and even what kind of clothes typical Android users might wear...
Television

Submission + - US Bans Loud Commercials (activepolitic.com)

Submitted by bs0d3
bs0d3 writes: On Tuesday, the FCC passed the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act, or CALM. It's a law that states all commercials must run at the same volume as network newscasts. The same applies to network promos. The responsibility falls on cable providers like Comcast or charter. The law will not take effect until next year which leaves it plenty of time to be challenged in court by cable providers or advertisers.
Science

Submission + - Hairy men catch more bedbugs (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by cyachallenge
cyachallenge writes: When it creeps into your bed at night and crawls across your skin, the bedbug has to navigate a forest of body hair before plunging its proboscis into your flesh for a meal. One wrong step, and it could get smushed. Tickled by the question of how people detect such microscopic pests, researchers recruited 19 volunteers with various amounts of body hair and shaved one of each of their arms. They then asked the subjects to look away while they dropped bedbugs onto their arms. The volunteers hit a button as soon as they felt something crawling on them. Participants, especially men, with more hair follicles per square inch and whose body hairs were longer, tended to be several seconds quicker than less hirsute individuals to notice the bugs on their unshaven arms, the researchers report online today in Biology Letters. And everyone took a long time to notice the bedbugs on the shaved arm. That might explain why humans still have hair on their bodies, the researchers conclude, since we no longer need it for keeping warm.
Science

Submission + - high speed camera, trillion FPS (mit.edu)

Submitted by ManicMechanic
ManicMechanic writes: A team at MIT has developed a camera that lets them see light move (as in individual photons) in slow motion. (Insert deregatory Michael Bay ref here)

Submission + - Tor Operations Security (cryptome.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: What began as a simple reply to a Tor user on the subject of downloading PDF files through Tor, turned into a wealth of information on Tor OPSEC, or Tor Operations Security.

Submission + - Amazing Trans-Atlantic Amateur Balloon Flight In P (aprs.fi)

Submitted by
cjsnell
cjsnell writes: "An amateur high altitude balloon was launched in San Jose, CA on Sunday by some ham radio enthusiasts. Their balloon achieved a rare "float": instead of bursting, it maintained an altitude of ~105Kft and headed east over the continental US. Amazingly, it crossed over Atlantic City, NJ at 2200 local time. The amateur ballooning community was going nuts because this may have been the first-ever transcontinental amateur balloon flight. The balloon continued out over the ocean until it disappeared ~500 miles off Nantucket. ...and then suddenly, at 1100 MST this morning, radio repeaters in the Azores islands off of Africa started hearing the balloon! Incredibly, it was still aloft and trucking towards Europe/Africa at ~150mph! If it makes it, this will be a new record for the first-ever transatlantic amateur flight. What's more amazing is that teams from engineering schools have been launching balloons from the east coast for years, trying to achieve an Atlantic transit. Out of nowhere, two guys who clean swimming pools for a living launch a balloon from Northern California and break every major record in amateur ballooning in a day. They launched three other balloons on Sunday, one of which set a new altitude record of 136,000 ft. Unbelievable.

Track it: http://aprs.fi/?call=K6RPT-11"
NASA

Submission + - NASA Developing Comet Harpoon for Sample Return (scienceblog.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: NASA appears t have decided that the best way to grab a sample of a rotating comet that is racing through the inner solar system at up to 150,000 miles per hour while spewing chunks of ice, rock and dust may be to avoid the risky business of landing on it. Instead, researchers want to send a spacecraft to rendezvous with a comet, then fire a harpoon to rapidly acquire samples from specific locations with surgical precision while hovering above the target.

Submission + - 25% of males in tribe were attacked by giant snake (mongabay.com)

Submitted by rhettb
rhettb writes: After spending decades living among the Agta Negritos people in the Philippines, anthropologist Thomas Headland has found that the hunter gatherer tribes were quite commonly attacked by reticulated pythons (Python reticulatus). Headland found 26 percent of Agta Negritos men had been attacked by a reticulated python in the past, most bearing the scars to prove it. Women were attacked much less frequently, but since men spent their time hunting in the forest they were more likely to run into a python, an encounter that could prove deadly for either party.

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