NASA - The Frontier Is Everywhere

Your BlackBerry or Your Wife

When you're out to dinner, does your BlackBerry occupy a seat at the table? Does your spouse ever check email before saying "good morning" to the kids? Does your son sleep with his laptop?

It may be time for a technology cleanse.

Like an extreme diet that cuts out all processed foods for a short period of time with the promise of lasting good health, a technology cleanse means you unplug for a short time with longer-term benefits for your relationships.

But be warned: As with any other diet, it isn't easy.

The Wall Street Journal

The Shallows

Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle, and that, says author Nicholas Carr, is what you're doing every time you use the Internet.

Carr is the author of the Atlantic article Is Google Making Us Stupid? which he has expanded into a book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

Carr believes that the Internet is a medium based on interruption — and it's changing the way people read and process information. We've come to associate the acquisition of wisdom with deep reading and solitary concentration, and he says there's not much of that to be found online.

NPR

Tweeting in court: why reporters must be given guidelines

The decision by a district judge to allow tweeting from the court in the Julian Assange extradition hearing raises interesting legal questions.

First, has the district judge, Howard Riddle, set a precedent which other courts will follow? Not exactly: it is a magistrates court, lowest in the pecking order of courts, so decisions do not bind other courts. However, his decision may be persuasive of other courts, especially other magistrates. The sky did not fall in as a result of yesterday's tweeting, so why not allow it again? For the decision to gain wider acceptance we really need a crown court judge or high court judge to follow suit.

guardian.co.uk

Assange's 'poison pill' file impossible to stop, expert says

The Poison Pill. The Doomsday Files. Or simply, The Insurance.

Whatever you call the file Julian Assange has threatened to release if he's imprisoned or dies or WikiLeaks is destroyed, it's impossible to stop.

"It's all tech talk to say, 'I have in my hand a button and if I press it or I order my friends to press it, it will go off,'" said Hemu Nigam, who has worked in computer security for more than two decades, in the government and private sector.

"Julian is saying, 'I've calibrated this so that no matter how many ways you try, you're never going to be able to deactivate it,'" Nigam said. "He's sending a call to action to hackers to try it. To the government, he's also saying, 'Try me.'"

CNN

For the first time a commercial spacecraft was launched into orbit and returned safely to Earth.
The launch, a test of a commercially developed spacecraft designed to take cargo and eventually astronauts to the International Space Station, was successful from beginning to end on Wednesday.

The flight was the first demonstration flight in a program by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to use private companies to ferry cargo and supplies to the space station.

“It reinforces what the president laid out and what Congress endorsed as the future of space transportation,” said Lori Garver, NASA’s deputy administrator. “This does indeed validate the path we are on.”

Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, launched its Falcon 9 rocket, carrying a Dragon capsule, at 10:43 a.m. Eastern time from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The rocket appeared to operate flawlessly as it headed skyward.

Nine minutes later, the Dragon capsule reached orbit. It circled the Earth twice at an altitude of 186 miles before re-entering the atmosphere. Slowed by three parachutes, it softly splashed in the Pacific Ocean about 500 miles west of northern Mexico. Ms. Garver said she had been told it landed within a mile of the recovery ship.

The entire flight lasted less than three and a half hours.

A second demonstration flight, going close to the space station but not docking, is scheduled for next spring. A third and final demonstration flight under SpaceX’s $278 million development contract would dock at the station.

With the success of the first flight, SpaceX is likely to pursue its desire to combine the second and third demonstration flights. With the completion of the demonstrations, SpaceX would then begin delivering cargo under a separate contract, worth $1.6 billion.

New York Times

4chan rushes to WikiLeaks' defense, forces Swiss banking site offline

The forces of Anonymous have taken aim at several companies who are refusing to do business with WikiLeaks. 4chan's hordes have launched distributed denial-of-service attacks against PayPal, Swiss bank PostFinance, and other sites that have hindered the whistleblowing site's operations.

A self-styled spokesman for the group calling himself "Coldblood" has said that any website that's "bowing down to government pressure" is a target. PayPal ceased processing donations to the site, and PostFinance froze WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's account. The attacks are being performed under the Operation: Payback banner; Operation: Payback is the name the group is using in its long-running attacks on the RIAA, MPAA, and other organizations involved with anti-piracy lawsuits.

The initial attacks against PayPal were substantially ineffective; the PayPal blog was taken offline, but the main PayPal site wasn't harmed. The attacks against PostFinance, however, have resulted in the bank's website being unavailable for more than 16 hours. It remains unavailable at the time of writing. The latest target is the site of the Swedish prosecutors in Assange's sexual misconduct trial. This too appears to be offline. Twitter has also been named as a future attack target, due to its censorship of the #wikileaks hashtag.

ars technica

Are Aliens Among Us? Sort of, NASA Says

Alien life has been among us all along, according to new biological findings announced by NASA Thursday.

Research conducted by biochemist Dr. Felisa Wolfe-Simon from the U.S. Geological Survey has turned the quest for alien life on its ear, suggesting that phosphorous -- which is found in every living thing -- is not necessarily the only sign of life. Wolfe-Simon will explain the findings at a hotly anticipated NASA press conference today at 2 p.m.

After a two-year study at California's Mono Lake, near Yosemite National Park, Wolfe-Simon found that a bug will grow in the presence of the toxic chemical arsenic when only slight traces of phosphorous are present. It's a radical finding, says molecular biologist Steven Benner, who is part of NASA's "Team Titan" and an expert on astrobiology -- forcing the space agency to redefine the quest for other life in the universe.

Fox News

Amazon cuts off WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks no longer has a home at Amazon.

The controversial site, which has roused the ire of the U.S. government for leaking classified information, is no longer being hosted by Amazon's Web servers as of yesterday.

WikiLeaks had been tapping into Amazon's EC2, or Elastic Cloud Computing service--including earlier this week. WikiLeaks said yesterday it's now being hosted by servers in Europe, according to Reuters.


cnet

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