no.good.at.coding writes "Google has launched a Windows-only, in-browser (you need to install a client first, though) 3D avatar world — Lively — that you can embed in websites and use to interact with other people. It's not as expansive as Second Life yet, but expect things to get better."

mister_woods writes "It's not just governments that lose private data. Germany's Chaos Computer Club (CCC) reports that market research firm TNS Infratest/Emnid has lost 41,000 private data records of their survey participants. By simply changing the customer ID number in the browser's address bar access could be gained to comprehensive survey results, including names, addresses, dates of birth, email addresses, phone numbers and much more sensitive data. A CCC spokesman described this as 'unprofessional, grossly negligent and above all deeply worrying' and sees this loss as a vindication for its calls for strict regulations for public and private sector data collectors."

Roland Piquepaille writes "UK researchers have developed a prototype of a future giant rubber tube which could catch energy from sea waves. The device, dubbed Anaconda, uses 'long sea waves to excite bulge waves which travel along the wall of a submersed rubber tube. These are then converted into flows of water passing through a turbine to generate electricity.' So far, the experiments have been done with tubes with diameters of 0.25 and 0.5 meters. But if the experiments are successful, future full-scale Anaconda devices would be 200 meters long and 7 meters in diameter, and deployed in water depths of between 40 and 100 meters. An Anaconda would deliver an output power of 1MW (enough to power 2,000 houses). These devices would be deployed in groups of 20 or even more providing cheap electricity without harming our environment."

destinyland writes "A year ago, Aaron Stanton harangued Google over his new project, a web site analyzing patterns in books to generate infallible recommendations. In March he finally finished a prototype which he showed to Google, Yahoo, and Amazon, and he's just announced that he's finally received a big contract which 'gives us a great deal of potential data to work with.' The 25-year-old's original prototype examined over 200 books, plotting 729,000 data points across 30,293 scenes — but its universe of analyzed novels is about to become much, much bigger."

Bandman writes "My business just purchased a couple dozen blades, and with our existing servers, this brings us to around 60 machines. We're geographically dispersed, and most of the users who need to connect to servers are not technical (if that matters). We used to use theme-based naming schemes, but we've been migrating to a more utilitarian system. I think it's clearer and more concise, but I've had some feedback from users who didn't find it understandable. What do you use for your internal DNS schemes? How big is your network, and what do you recommend for future expansion? Does it matter to your users at all?"

An anonymous reader writes "A site called LegalTorrents has just launched that hosts trackers and seeds for digital media licensed under the Creative Commons license. ('We distribute content with the full permission of the rights holders and use the peer-2-peer file-sharing technology called Bittorrent.') The site even provides a way to donate money to artists you like. (LegalTorrents takes 15% off the top unless you are a member, which costs $50 one-time during the beta period.)" It's always good to see "legitimate" content distributed in ways that make it hard to demonize the distribution system itself — something Lawrence Lessig in particular has been doing for years, and his book "Free Culture" is one of the audiobooks available through LegalTorrents. Note that LegalTorrents has been around for a while now, rather than "just launched," but the current beta period won't last forever.

Joe Riedel writes "The alpha version of Tread 3.0, a Quake series map editor, has been released (including source code). Independent game developers and hobbyists who are looking for an editing tool may also want to check it out since it should provide a good starting point for their own tools (and it's free). This latest incarnation of the editor is unrelated source-wise from its predecessors; it is based on an in-house tool I developed a few years ago."

CWmike writes "Google has released for free one of its internal tools used for testing the security of Web-based applications. Ratproxy, released under an Apache 2.0 software license, looks for a variety of coding problems in Web applications. A 2006 survey by the Web Application Security Consortium found that 85.57 percent of 31,373 sites were vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks, 26.38 percent were vulnerable to SQL injection and 15.70 percent had other faults that could lead to data loss."

An anonymous reader writes "In a recent interview on Comic Book Resources about his new continuation of the Marvel comic-book series 'Invincible Iron Man,' Matt Faction provides information about the the new series (debut will be May 7). The villain is Ezekiel Stane, son of Obadiah Stane (the villain of the new Iron Man movie opening on May 2). Whereas Obadiah was a ruthless billionaire who fought as the Iron Monger, Zeke 'rejects the strategies of his father as being the crude tactics of Attila the Hun.' Instead, he will be 'a post-national business man and kind of an open source ideological terrorist.' As the author puts it, 'Windows wants to be on every computer desktop in the world, but Linux and Stane want to destroy the desktop.' The concept has gone over well on the CBR forums."

reverseengineer writes "Eminent physicist John Archibald Wheeler has died from pneumonia at the age of 96. The coiner of the terms 'black hole' and 'wormhole,' Wheeler popularized the study of general relativity, and advised a distinguished list of graduate students including Kip Thorne and Richard Feynman. Other work included a collaboration with Niels Bohr to develop the 'liquid drop' model of nuclear fission. Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said of Dr. Wheeler, 'For me, he was the last Titan, the only physics superhero still standing.'"

I Buy These From eBay points out a Washington Post story about how stolen military equipment has ended up on eBay and Craigslist. Undercover investigators reported being able to purchase defense-related items with "no questions asked." Let's hope the sellers don't get their hands on any retired rebellious robots. From the Post: "Among the items purchased include two components from F-14 fighter jets, bought from separate buyers on eBay. The warplanes, now retired by the military, could easily be purchased and transferred to the Iranian military, which is seeking its components, the report said. Investigators couldn't determine where the sellers had obtained the F-14 parts. They also purchased from a Craigslist seller a used Nuclear Biological Chemical protective suit, other protective accessories as well as an unused chemical-biological canister, which contained the mask filter used to guard against warfare agents. The property was likely stolen from the Defense Department, the report said."

Ant writes in to note a study indicating that, because of air pollution, the smell of flowers is not wafting as far as it once did. Pollutants from power plants and automobiles destroy flowers' aromas, the study suggests: "The scent molecules produced by flowers in a less polluted environment, such as in the 1800s, could travel for roughly 1,000 to 1,200 meters; but in today's polluted environment downwind of major cities, they may travel only 200 to 300 meters." The finding could help explain why some pollinators, particularly bees, are declining in certain parts of the world.

Crymson4 writes "We discussed the shutdown of the Demonoid torrent tracker last fall. For those who don't already know, Demonoid is back up. Looks like they found a new host for the Web site and the tracker is functioning properly as well. For those with old accounts, all the old data has been saved. It's almost as if they never left."

QuantumG writes "In a recent article on The Space Review, Greg Zsidisin reveals that Barack Obama plans to delay Project Constellation for at least five years, using the redirected funds to nationalize early-education for children under five years old to prepare them for the rigors of kindergarten and beyond, if he is elected president. It is feared that if this happens the Vision for Space Exploration will flounder and that may be the end of human spaceflight altogether."