An anonymous reader writes "In a blog post, Comcast's Jason Livingood has announced that Comcast has signed all of its (5000+) domains in addition to having all of its customers using DNSSEC-validating resolvers. He adds, 'Now that nearly 20 million households in the U.S. are able to use DNSSEC, we feel it is an important time to urge major domain owners, especially commerce and banking-related sites, to begin signing their domain names.'"
Harperdog writes "The Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock from 6 minutes to midnight to 5 minutes to midnight. The Board deliberated on the decision and came to the conclusion based on a variety of events: failure on climate policy, Fukushima, nuclear proliferation, etc. This article is a good explanation of the policy decision. Lawrence Krauss said, 'As we see it, the major challenge at the heart of humanity's survival in the 21st century is how to meet energy needs for economic growth in developing and industrial countries without further damaging the climate, exposing people to loss of health and community, and without risking further spread of nuclear weapons, and in fact setting the stage for global reductions.'"
sfcrazy writes with news that developers for the Tizen project, an open source mobile OS based on MeeGo (itself a child of Moblin and Maemo), have posted a preview of their source code and SDK. They warn, "Please keep in mind that this is a very early preview and is not yet designed for use to create production applications. Further enhancements and improvements to Tizen and its development environment will continue as we work towards a formal release over the coming months." The source code is available here.
sciencehabit sends this excerpt from ScienceNOW: "Researchers in California have produced a cheap plastic capable of removing large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air. Down the road, the new material could enable the development of large-scale batteries and even form the basis of 'artificial trees' that lower atmospheric concentrations of CO2 in an effort to stave off catastrophic climate change."
snydeq writes "Two years later, Oracle's stewardship of Java continues to raise user and vendor ire, this time due to modularization, licensing, and security concerns. 'Plans for version 8 of Java Platform Standard Edition, which is due next year, call for inclusion of Project Jigsaw to add modular capabilities to Java. But some organizations are concerned with how Oracle's plans might conflict with the OSGi module system already geared to Java. In the licensing arena, Canonical, the maker of Ubuntu Linux, says Oracle is no longer letting Linux distributors redistribute Oracle's own commercial Java, causing difficulties for the company. Meanwhile, security vendor F-Secure views Java as security hindrance.'"
An anonymous reader writes "Two U.S. congressmen have accused Facebook of evading questions about whether it tracks users in order to deliver targeted ads. Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, and Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, said the social networking giant failed to adequately answer questions raised by a patent application that suggests Facebook could be tracking users on other websites. The duo previously asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate accusations that Facebook tracks its users even after they log out of the social network, an issue the company says it has since fixed."
RobinEggs writes "After long speculation and a few affirmative hints, Blizzard has confirmed that Diablo 3 will have a console version. Responding to a fan who asked him to 'confirm or deny' a console version of D3, Blizzard community manager Bashiok said, 'Yup. Josh Mosqueira is lead designer for the Diablo console project.' Here's hoping Blizzard remains one of the few companies to fully develop both the console and PC version of their titles, rather than simply porting the Xbox version to PC. I think we've all had enough of bizarre scrolling, menus that can't be used with a mouse, and 'Controls' menus that don't even bother replacing the 360 controller image with an actual keyboard layout."
First time accepted submitter xwwt writes "G-Form has a nice video of an iPad launched into the stratosphere via weather balloon and protected using its new protective gear 'Extreme Edge' to see how well the gear worked in the iPad free fall to Earth. The gear is being introduced at this year's CES where our own timothy will be attending and reviewing new products. The cool part of this whole video is really that the iPad survives the free fall from space, remaining fully functional."
Shipud writes "Insulin resistance is the harbinger of metabolic syndrome. Insulin resistance is when the body cannot use insulin effectively. As a result, blood sugar and fat levels rise. Therein lies the path to morbid obesity, diabetes, stroke, and heart problems. A group of Brazilian researchers have taken a strain of mice normally known to be immune to insulin resistance, and made them insulin resistant (pre-diabetic) by changing their gut bacteria. They then gave the mice antibiotics, and by changing their gut bacteria again, reversed the process, curing them of the disease. Their research shows just how influential the bacteria living in our gut can be on our health."
Nemesisghost writes "Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California), a major opponent of the Stop Online Piracy Act has announced he plans to call a hearing where Tech industry representatives will get to speak out about how legislation like SOPA will negatively affect the internet. From the article 'Representative Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) has called a hearing that will bring more voices from the technology industry to Washington, D.C. to discuss how legislation such as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) would affect the Internet. On Jan. 18, industry representatives that include Brad Burnham from Union Square Ventures; Lanham Napier, the CEO of Rackspace Hosting; and Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit.com, will testify before Congress.'"
theodp writes "The USPTO appears to have lowered the bar on obviousness, awarding a patent to IBM Tuesday for its System for Portion of a Day Out of Office Notification. 'Out of office features in existing applications such as Lotus Notes, IBM Workplace, and Microsoft Outlook all implement a way to take a number of days off from one day to many days,' acknowledges purported patent reformer Big Blue. 'Yet, none of these applications contain the feature of letting a person take a half-day or in more general terms, x days and x hours off.' Eureka! And yes, the invention is every bit as obvious as you can imagine."
LinuxScribe writes "Oracle has announced a new Big Data Appliance, which will feature Cloudera's Hadoop, shiny hardware, and a price tag that could be more affordable than commodity servers. But Oracle's new Cloudera partner should heed the lessons of Red Hat and what it means to partner with Oracle."
parallel_prankster writes "A recent Congressional Research Service report, titled U.S. Unmanned Aerial Systems, looks at the more-prominent role being played by drones. In 2005, drones made up just 5 percent of the military's aircraft. Today one in three American military aircraft is a drone. The upsides of drones are that they are cheaper and safer — the military spent 92% of the aircraft procurement money on manned aircraft. The downside — they're bandwidth hogs: a single Global Hawk drone requires 500 megabytes per second worth of bandwidth, the report finds, which is 500 percent of the total bandwidth of the entire U.S. military used during the 1991 Gulf War."
An anonymous reader writes "The Toronto Review of Books claims that the majority of digital books are awful because major publishers are handing over the design work to programmers, not artists and editors. This results in the 'typographical horrors' typical of so many eBooks, and hundreds of 'lackluster' iPad adaptations. 'Programmers are suddenly being given free reign to design books,' the article laments. 'Most publishers don't care about the iPad or eBooks very much... which may be an aesthetic rejection based on the publisher's historical reverence for the printed page.' Don't we deserve better eBooks?"
"Lost" music gets found all the time: Bands keep demos locked up in storage, original pressings are stumbled upon during spring cleaning at a recording studio. Here are five key pieces of "lost" music recovered last year.
Your next data storage device could be a fish. As revealed by a paper in the academic journal , researchers from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany recently used salmon DNA to build a write-once-read-many (WORM) data storage device. Data is written to the device with a laser and read electronically, and you can enjoy the thought that your data's sitting on a piece of sushi.
Adobe has released a free public beta preview of its coming Lightroom 4 image editor. On the surface Lightroom 4 may not look all that different from its predecessor, but behind the scenes Adobe has managed to pack in plenty of improvements aimed at serious photographers.
On Tuesday, Comcast, the nation?s largest cable system, introduced its version of the tablet-as-TV service. With Comcast?s AnyPlay, you can use your iPad to watch live and on-demand programming anywhere in your home.
Astronomers have captured an image of a black hole firing off two enormous "bullets" of ionized gas at nearly a quarter the speed of light. The cosmic explosion produces as much energy in an hour as the sun emits in five years.
It's eventually coming to many devices, but for now Verizon and Samsung have an exclusive window on the tablet newspaper.
Forget mouse clicking, finger swiping, or even using your voice to control a digital display. Tobii's eye-tracking technology, demoed as a prototype at CES, will let you control a laptop or monitor using only the movements of your eyes.
You can't hide from statistical analysis -- especially when that analysis shows changes in your weight, body mass index, and body fat percentages over time. The new Aria Wi-Fi scale picks up where Fitbit's pocket activity tracker leaves off by providing you with detailed reports of your most personal body measurements.
Balls are typically governed by the immutable laws of motion. However, Colorado-based Orbotix has taken that maxim and turned it on its head, outfitting a mini plastic ball with enough accelerometer-based power that a turn and dip of your smartphone will send it zooming around the floor.
With most of the country experiencing hard times for the last few years, many young adults, and young journalists in particular, are feeling uncertain about their future. Heading out on the road can be a way to take back control of one?s destiny and grow as a person and hone one's storytelling chops.
"We have no comment on this individual's claims," George Little, the Pentagon's chief spokesman, says. "But tell him the Secretary would like his lightsaber back."
Tipping the scales at two quadrillion times the mass of the sun, the El Gordo galaxy cluster is the largest, hottest, and most energetic cluster ever seen.
Our brains are tuned to find faces so well, in fact, that we sometimes see them in a jumble of rocks, a bilious cloud of volcanic ash or craters on Moon. The brain always knows a real face from a fake, however, and a new brain scan study reveals why.But another amazing thing about our brain is that we're never actually fooled into thinking it's a real person looking back at us. We might do a second take, but most normal brains can tell the difference between a man and the Moon.
Make sure you don't start the new year off with an unwanted bang. Be proactive about monitoring your drink for date rape drugs with these DIY prevention and detection techniques.
Beginning Wednesday, Jan. 12 ? midnight UTC, to be exact ? the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) starts accepting applications for new, bespoke top level domains (TLDs). As part of the rollout ICANN president Rod Beckstrom spoke to Wired.
John Taylor claimed the Guinness-certified fastest guitarist title after blazing through "The Flight of the Bumblebee" at 600 beats per minute.
The 45 rpm record makes its bow, and a coming legion of rock 'n' roll fans can hit their knees and give thanks.
The Army spent 20 years trying to strap 'wearable computers' onto its body armor to link soldiers together while they went on dismounted patrols. The end result: junking the heavy communications gear in favor of a system based around a smartphone. But now the Air Force, bizarrely, wants to pick up where the Army unsuccessfully left off.
There's something about old photographs. The perfect amount of faded light, outdated coloring, and nostalgia seems to make them more beautiful with age.Perhaps that's why this collection of images from NASA's Gemini Program is so stunning.
Microsoft's final keynote at CES failed to impress...
Google's daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.
The South Korean company is wading deep into the smart TV pool with sets that can recognize your face, your voice and your gestures.
Nokia declared all-out war on the mobile industry on Monday, publicly unveiling its flagship U.S. device at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Barnes & Noble is selling its Nook e-readers at deep discounts to new customers willing to bundle their purchase with a one-year digital subscription to , after the cost of the subscription, that discount amounts to giving away the bookseller's much-lauded E Ink Simple Touch reader away for free.
You knew it was coming. A huge wave of new smartphones, crushing last year's measly models with their impressive display, processor and camera specs.
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California), a major opponent of the Stop Online Piracy Act, announced Monday he is bringing in the techies to hold a public hearing highlighting the online security implications of a proposed bill that would force changes to internet infrastructure to fight online copyright infringement.
More than 20 years ago, Fox brought animated TV back to prime time and into world-historical greatness when it took a chance on a squiggly-drawn, irreverant short from The Tracey Ullman Show called "The Simpsons." Now, Fox is betting that the next might be found and fostered in YouTube-style short clips on the web.