An anonymous reader writes "On December 23, Amazon advertised a 'buy one get one free' sale on DVD box-sets, but apparently did not test the promotion before going live. When anyone placed two box-sets in their cart, the website gave a double discount — so the 'grand total' shown (before order submission) was $0.00 or some very small amount. Despite terms stating that Amazon checks order prices before shipping, Amazon shipped a large number of these orders. Five days later (December 28), after orders had been received and presumably opened, Amazon emailed customers advising them to return the box-sets unopened or their credit cards would be charged an additional amount (more threads). Starting yesterday, Amazon has been (re)charging credit cards, often without authorization. On Amazon's side, they didn't advertise any double discount, and the free or nearly-free box-sets must have cost them a mint. But with Amazon continually giving unadvertised discounts that seem to be errors, is 'return the merchandise or be charged' the new way that price glitches will be handled?"

Bruce Schneier has a commentary in Wired titled An American Idol for Crypto Geeks on the US government's competition for a new cryptographic hash function to become the national standard, covered here recently. He talks about how much the competition, slated to wrap up by 2011, will advance the cryptographic state of the art. And how much fun he expects to have.

daria42 writes "Sun is leaning toward changing the license for Java and Solaris to the GNU GPL version 3. The article has some insightful comments from Sun boss Jonathan Schwartz. '"Will we GPL Solaris? We want to ensure we can interact with the GPL community and the Mozilla community and the BSD community," he says.'"

Overly Critical Guy writes "The former editor of New Scientist has written an article in the TimesOnline suggesting that cosmic rays may affect global climate. The author criticizes the UN's recent global warming report, noting several underreported trends it doesn't account for, such as increasing sea-ice in the Southern Ocean. He describes an experiment by Henrik Svensmark showing a relation between atmospheric cloudiness and atomic particles coming in from exploded stars. In the basement of the Danish National Space Center in 2005, Svensmark's team showed that electrons from cosmic rays caused cloud condensation. Svensmark's scenario apparently predicts several unexplained temperature trends from the warmer trend of the 20th century to the temporary drop in the 1970s, attributed to changes in the sun's magnetic field affecting the amount of cosmic rays entering the atmosphere."