Science & TechnologyS


Radar

Tunisia plants country-wide keystroke logger on Facebook

Dan Goodin
The Register
Tue, 25 Jan 2011 04:13 UTC
Gmail and Yahoo! too

Malicious code injected into Tunisian versions of Facebook, Gmail, and Yahoo! stole login credentials of users critical of the North African nation's authoritarian government, according to security experts and news reports.

The rogue JavaScript, which was individually customized to steal passwords for each site, worked when users tried to login without availing themselves of the secure sockets layer protection designed to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. It was found injected into Tunisian versions of Facebook, Gmail, and Yahoo! in late December, around the same time that protestors began demanding the ouster of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the president who ruled the country from 1987 until his ouster 10 days ago.
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Magnify

Apple hires a military grade security chief

David Neal
The Inquirer
Mon, 24 Jan 2011 04:12 UTC
THE NOTORIOUSLY SECRETIVE antenna testing outfit and fruit themed device manufacturer Apple has hired the sort of security chief who might appeal to military dictators in third world countries.

In fact the US military is just where the cappuccino firm found its new security chief. David Rice recently skippered a desk in the US Navy and can also count the US National Security Agency and the US Cyber Consequences Unit amongst his references.
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Light Sabers

Egyptian government websites down after hacker threat


Monstersandcritics
Wed, 26 Jan 2011 04:10 UTC
Cairo - A collective of anonymous hackers, who in the past have allied themselves with WikiLeaks and disrupted major websites, vowed Wednesday to attack Egyptian government websites if access to certain social networking websites remains restricted.
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Binoculars

Even DHS Is Freaked Out by Spy Drones Over America

Spencer Ackerman
The Wired
Wed, 26 Jan 2011 04:07 UTC
spydrone
© The Wired
Police departments around the country are warming up to unmanned spy planes. But don't expect the Department of Homeland Security to catch drone fever anytime soon. It's too controversial for an agency already getting hammered for naked scanners and junk-touching.

Sure, DHS flies some Predators along the Mexican border. But a broader deployment, above the majority of American skies, to stop terror attacks? Not likely.
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Network

Internet disruptions hit Egypt

Elinor Mills
CNET
Thu, 27 Jan 2011 03:56 UTC
egyptnet
© (Credit: http://twitter.com/#!/bencnn)CNN Cairo Correspondent Ben Wedeman reports of the outage first-hand on Twitter.

Amid a third day of anti-government protests, Internet outages and disruptions occurred today in Egypt.

Facebook and Twitter confirmed the disruptions for their sites.

"We are aware of reports of disruption to service and have seen a drop in traffic from Egypt this morning," a Facebook spokesman said in a statement. "You may want to visit Herdict.org, a project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University that offers insight into what users around the world are experiencing in terms of web accessibility."

According to Herdict.org, there were 459 inaccessible sites in Egypt and 621 accessible sites.

Twitter's Global PR account reported on the site that: "Egypt continues to block Twitter & has greatly diminished traffic. However, some users are using apps/proxies to successfully tweet."
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Pharoah

Great Pyramid has two secret chambers: French architect


PhysOrg
Thu, 27 Jan 2011 00:00 UTC
Image
© Agence France-PresseCheops Pyramid aka The Great Pyramid, Giza Plateau, Egypt.
A French architect campaigning for a new exploration of the 4,500-year-old Great Pyramid of Giza said on Thursday that the edifice may contain two chambers housing funereal furniture.

Jean-Pierre Houdin -- who was rebuffed three years ago by Egypt in his appeal for a probe into how the Pyramid was built -- said 3-D simulation and data from a US egyptologist, Bob Brier, pointed to two secret chambers in the heart of the structure.

The rooms would have housed furniture for use in the afterlife by the pharaoh Khufu, also known as Cheops in Greek, he told a press conference.

"I am convinced there are antechambers in this pyramid. What I want is to find them," he said.

In March 2007, Houdin advanced the theory that the Great Pyramid had been built inside-out using an internal spiral ramp, as opposed to an external ramp as had long been suggested.

Comment: What a load of nonsense. This architect guy sounds like he fell out of the stupid tree and hit every branch on the way down. The pyramid never was a burial chamber.

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Hourglass

Ancient Body Clock Discovered That Helps Keep All Living Things on Time


Science Daily
Thu, 27 Jan 2011 11:27 UTC
Image
© iStockphoto/Sergey PanteleevImage of blood cells. The mechanism that controls the internal 24-hour clock of all forms of life from human cells to algae has been identified.
The mechanism that controls the internal 24-hour clock of all forms of life from human cells to algae has been identified by scientists.

Not only does the research provide important insight into health-related problems linked to individuals with disrupted clocks -- such as pilots and shift workers -- it also indicates that the 24-hour circadian clock found in human cells is the same as that found in algae and dates back millions of years to early life on Earth.

Two new studies in the journal Nature from the Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh give insight into the circadian clock which controls patterns of daily and seasonal activity, from sleep cycles to butterfly migrations to flower opening.

One study, from the University of Cambridge's Institute of Metabolic Science, has for the first time identified 24-hour rhythms in red blood cells. This is significant because circadian rhythms have always been assumed to be linked to DNA and gene activity, but -- unlike most of the other cells in the body -- red blood cells do not have DNA.
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Info

Orangutan DNA Offers a Strange Genetic Mystery

Alasdair Wilkins
Nature
Wed, 26 Jan 2011 17:01 UTC
Orangutan
© Ysangkok/Wikipedia"Orangutan image taken by Tom Low at Camp Leakey, Tanjung Puting, Kalimantan, Indonesia (2003)."

Orangutans, the most distant of our great ape relatives, changed less in 15 million years than our species has in 200,000. And yet orangutans also have tremendous genetic diversity, an apparent contradiction that has created a strange evolutionary riddle.

The family Hominidae, commonly known as the Great Apes, has four main members: humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. Humans and chimpanzees are the most closely related species, and then both are more related to gorillas than orangutans, who are all alone on their corner of the family tree. Orangutans are now the latest members of the great ape family to have their genomes sequenced, and they've revealed some surprising details about our evolutionary story.

The most shocking has to be that the orangutan genome hasn't changed in 15 million years. To put that in some perspective, our species didn't even really exist until 200,000 years ago, and even the Homo genus doesn't stretch much further back than 2.4 million years. Chimpanzees don't become distinct from our evolutionary ancestors until about six million years ago, and gorillas don't emerge until about 7 million years ago. Orangutans are, by the standards of the rest of their family, an incredibly ancient species.
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Eye 1

Facebook to Let Advertisers Republish User Posts

Barbara Ortutay
The Associated Press
Wed, 26 Jan 2011 03:02 UTC
facebook privacy
© unknown
Facebook to let advertisers republish users' check-ins as 'sponsored stories'

Facebook users who check in to a store or click the "like" button for a brand may soon find those actions retransmitted on their friends' pages as a "Sponsored Story" paid for by advertisers.

Currently there is no way for users to decline this feature.

Facebook says this lets advertisers promote word-of-mouth recommendations that people already made on the site. They play up things people do on the site that might get lost in the mass of links, photos, status updates and other content users share on the world's largest social network.

The new, promoted posts would keep the same privacy setting that the original posting had. So if you limit your check-ins to a specific group of friends, only these same friends would see the "Sponsored Story" version later.

The promoted content will appear on the right side of users' home pages, not in their main news feed. That's where regular ads, friend requests and other content are located.
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Info

Royal Society Meets to Weigh Up The Shrinking Kilogram

Alok Jha
The Guardian
Mon, 24 Jan 2011 15:56 UTC
Prototype Kilogram
© AFP/Getty The ‘international prototype’ kilogram, above, has lost about 50 micrograms since it was cast in 1879 – about the weight of a grain of sand.

For more than a century, all measurements of weight have been defined in relation to a lump of metal sitting in Paris. The "international prototype" kilogram has been at the heart of trade and scientific experiment since 1889, but now experts want to get rid of it.

Today, scientists will meet at the Royal Society in London to discuss how to bring the kilogram into the 21st century, by defining this basic unit of measurement in terms of the fundamental constants of nature, rather than a physical object.

"The kilogram is still defined as the mass of a piece of platinum which, when I was director of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, I had in a safe in my lab," said Terry Quinn, an organiser of today's meeting. "It's a cylinder of platinum-iridium about 39mm high, 39mm in diameter, cast by Johnson Matthey in Hatton Garden in 1879, delivered to the International Committee on Weights and Measures in Sevres shortly afterwards, polished and adjusted to be made equal in mass to the mass of the old French kilogram of the archives which dates from the time of the French Revolution. Then, in 1889, it was adopted by the first general conference for weights and measures as the international prototype of the kilogram."Many of the other units of scientific measurement rely on the standard definition of the kilogram. A newton of force, for example, is the amount required to accelerate one kilogram at one metre per second squared. The unit of pressure, the pascal, is defined as one newton per unit metre squared.
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