Nine rare comets will be invading the inner solar system and you can watch them shoot through space live during a Slooh Space Camera collaboration show starting at 3 p.m. PDT/6 p.m. EDT.
No one reads Terms of Service agreements, they're long, convoluted and inscrutable. Most of us just click "Agree" and give it no further thought. But what are we giving up? That's what a new project, ToS;DR, wants to help us understand.
We?re reaching a tipping point where mobile access to the Internet is surpassing access from traditional wired workstations. With little infrastructure in place and all your data in the cloud, the integration of cloud and mobile becomes an extremely important one for decades to come.
The Occupy Wall Street movement kicked into high gear right as indie rocker Jason Collett began recording his upcoming record , so it only makes sense that the album would end up infused with that movement's politics and rallying cries.
Scrolls: cryptic, ancient documents, filled with lost languages or tales of bygone eras. Except when they're just straight-up art. Hadieh Shafie packs together hundreds of multicolored paper coils, each concealing a message in Farsi—first language to her, completely alien to most of her audience.
An interview with Marvel Comics' most famous creator Stan Lee, plus lots of opinions about Sony's showing at the European Gamescom conference, highlight this week's Game|Life podcast.
This week on the Gadget Lab show, Wired reviews editor Michael Calore and staff writer Nathan Olivarez-Giles take a look at the Galaxy Note 10.1.
Google says it didn?t pay bloggers to write about its Java dispute with Oracle.
The Gates Foundation wants to build a better toilet for the developing world, but good intentions and clever engineering aren't enough. Would-be designers of post-porcelain thrones don't just need to account for water use and material costs, but sociology and psychology.
Haunted gypsy rings, a portal to the realm of the immortals and creepy '40s dolls that promise to "come alive" will soon have to find a new home, along with nearly 100,000 other products, after eBay announced it would be banning the sale of items classed as metaphysical.
A bay area entertainer got a bit of a shock when he discovered his recently gifted iPad was a) stolen and b) actually belonged to the late Steve Jobs.
is an excellent game, but also a deliberately cautious one, the development and release of which seems more driven by Nintendo's need to sell systems than its designers' passion for creating something new.
After my accounts were hacked and my devices deleted, here's how I restored most of my data.
Things are moving along nicely for the Curiosity rover team. Less than two weeks after a pitch-perfect landing on Mars, the rover is getting ready to roll along the Martian soil and pull out it rock-shooting laser for the first time.
A cave-dwelling creature named Trogloraptor sounds like the villain of a B-horror film, but it?s actually a newly discovered type of spider.
The W3C's CSS Working Group is hard at work bringing the mythical beast known as the CSS Variable to life. The latest proposal may not be what most were expecting, but CSS Variables still promise to give web developers a powerful new set of tools.
Three women from punk feminist group Pussy Riot have been sentenced to two years in prison for their church protest against Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Police in Australia are investigating a breach of half a million credit card numbers that reports say was conducted by the same gang that struck the Subway restaurant chain in the United States.
Last year, the four-star Army general once in charge of all U.S. military operations in Africa was quietly reduced in rank for unexplained reasons. Now we now why William ?Kip? Ward?s career ended in disgrace.
Researchers have stored an entire genetics textbook in less than a picogram of DNA, or one trillionth of a gram . It's an advance that could revolutionize our ability to save data.
Today we celebrate the birthday of French mathematician Pierre de Fermat (1601-1665). His achievements were many. His work with tangents was the basis of differential calculus. His work with Pascal became the foundation of probability theory. And above all, his most significant contributions were in the field of number theory. But what I love about this mathematician is his contribution to the world of puzzlers: He claimed to have multiple proofs that he never bothered to share, leaving the rest of us in the dark for centuries.
Norman is an ordinary kid who happens to be able to see and talk to ghosts. This habit earns him a few things: nicknames like "Freak" and "Abnorman" among his peers, the constant attention of the thugs and bullies (especially oafish Alvin, voiced by Christopher Mintz-Plasse), equal servings of concern and exasperation from his parents (Leslie Mann and Jeff Garlin), and a lot of embarrassment and hostility from teenage sister Courtney (Anna Kendrick).
When Spanish photographer H?ctor Mediavilla first walked into the remains of the Grande Hotel in Beira, Mozambique, he says he was immediately struck by the ghost-like quality of the building. The hotel, which originally opened in 1955 as one of, if not the most, luxurious hotels in Africa, has been decimated over the years and is now home to somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 squatters who have nowhere else to live.
While reinventing so many other aspects of our lives, the web never really overturned the world of academic publishing. More than thirty years on, we're still relying on old fashioned peer-reviewed academic journals to share research among the world's leading thinkers. But Ijad Madisch wants to change that. In 2008, the former medical student and virology Ph.D. candidate founded a web service called ResearchGate, which seeks to replace peer-reviewed journals with a kind of Facebook for scientists.
People freak out over end-of-the-world scenarios involving everything from resource scarcity to chemicals and disease. Here?s why they should know better.
GPS-enabled car service Uber usually gets rave reviews from passengers when it cruises into a new town, but its arrival also prompts taxi companies and city regulators to start dusting off pitchforks with equal enthusiasm. Never mind that every city where Uber has launched thus far ultimately calms down and lets Uber go on its ...
In an earthquake -- even The Big One -- the all-new fourth bore in the Oakland/Berkeley hills might be the safest spot in the San Francisco Bay Area.
There's something about the simplicity of Square that seems almost too magical. The design fan in me wants to believe it's just someone finally shaking up the stodgiest of businesses -- credit cards -- with a little user-centered thinking. But the journalist in me wonders, what's the catch?
The band that fractured into Pinback and The Black Heart Procession is back with an EP composed of the "odd men out" from the group's 2010 reunion album. What's more, the trio is hitting the road for a handful of rare live shows. Download a free track.
The photos Curiosity rover has sent back to Earth are truly amazing. But the ones that really change a faraway mission into a real, tangible experience, are the ones with bits of the rover itself sitting on the Martian soil. Here are some of our favorite self-portraits that will make you feel like you're standing next to Curiosity, awaiting the signal to start the trek to Mt. Sharp.
ackthpt writes "A network of fixed buoys and solar powered surfing robots called Wave Gliders are set to track Great White Sharks in the Pacific, off the California coast near San Francisco, between Monterey Bay and Tomales Point. According to PhysOrg, 'The self-propelled wave and solar-powered glider is part of a new network of data receivers on fixed buoys will pick up signals from acoustic tags on animals passing within 1,000 feet and transmit the data to a research team on shore, led by Stanford University Marine Sciences Prof. Barbara Block.' Related to the project is 'Shark Net,' a new iOS app 'available free of charge at the Apple app store, created by Dr. Block and her colleagues with developers from TOPP, EarthNC and Gaia GPS to enable a direct, personal connection between the public and wild marine animals and to raise public awareness of the ocean wilderness teeming with life just off North America's West Coast.'"
Trailrunner7 writes "The iPhone SMS app contains a quirky bug that could allow someone to send a user a text message that appears to come from any number that the sender specifies. The researcher who discovered the bug said it could be used by attackers to spoof messages from a bank or credit card company and send the victim to a target site controlled by the attacker. The issue lies in the way iOS implements a section of the SMS message called User Data Header, which has a number of options, one of which allows the user to change the phone number that the text message appears to come from. The advent of mobile banking apps, some of which use SMS messages for out-of-band authentication, makes this kind of attack vector perhaps more worrisome and useful for attackers than it would seem at first blush."
Nancy_A writes "The U.S. astronomy budget is facing unprecedented cuts, including the potential closure of several facilities. A new report by the National Science Foundation's Division of Astronomical Sciences says available funding for ground-based astronomy could undershoot projected budgets by as much as 50%. The report recommends the closure – called 'divestment' in the new document — of iconic facilities such as the Very Long Baseline Array and the Green Bank Radio Telescope, as well as shutting down four different telescopes at the Kitt Peak Observatory by 2017."
prakslash writes "The Sydney Morning Herald reports that diplomatic cables they obtained show the U.S. investigation into possible criminal conduct by Julian Assange has been ongoing for more than a year, despite denials by the U.S. State Department and the Australian Foreign Minister. Further, the Australian diplomats expect that the U.S. will seek to extradite Assange to the U.S. on charges including espionage and conspiracy relating to the release of classified information by WikiLeaks."
An anonymous reader writes "A research team led by Paulo Lozano at MIT's Space Propulsion Lab and Microsystems Technology Lab have shown off a microthruster array capable of powering small satellites. The tiny, flat design could obviate the need for bulky propellant tanks. 'To explain how the thruster works, Lozano invokes the analogy of a tree: Water from the ground is pulled up a tree through a succession of smaller and smaller pores, first in the roots, then up the trunk, and finally through the leaves, where sunshine evaporates the water as gas. Lozano's microthruster works by a similar capillary action: Each layer of metal contains smaller and smaller pores, which passively suck the ionic liquid up through the chip, to the tops of the metallic tips. The group engineered a gold-coated plate over the chip, then applied a voltage, generating an electric field between the plate and the thruster's tips. In response, beams of ions escaped the tips, creating a thrust. The researchers found that an array of 500 tips produces 50 micronewtons of force — an amount of thrust that, on Earth, could only support a small shred of paper. But in zero-gravity space, this tiny force would be enough to propel a two-pound satellite.'"
sl4shd0rk writes "Upon examining the PDF Engine behind Google Chrome, Google employees Mateusz Jurczyk and Gynvael Coldwind discovered numerous holes. This led them to also test Adobe Reader, which turned up around 60 holes which could crash the PDF reader, 40 of them being potential attack vectors. The duo notified Adobe, who promised fixes, but as of the latest updates (Tuesday of this week) for Windows and Macintosh, 16 of the reported flaws are still present (the Linux version has been ignored). To prove it, Mateusz and Gynvael obfuscated the info and released it, saying the unpatched holes could easily be found. The Google employees therefore recommend that users refrain from opening any PDF documents from external sources in Adobe Reader."
An anonymous reader writes "A new spear-phishing attack targeting a number of specific companies in a few industries, including the energy sector, has been spotted by several security companies. Dubbed 'Shamoon' due to a string of a folder name within the malware executable, the attack ends up with delivering destructive malware on the targeted computers that ends up making them unusable. The interesting part of this malware is that instead of staying under the radar and collecting information, the malware was designed to overwrite and wipe the files and the master boot record of the computer."
Starting in September bidders won't be able to snipe curses, spells, or potions on eBay anymore. The company has decided to ban the sale of magic and magic items. “EBay regularly reviews categories and updates our policies based on customer feedback,” a statement from the company read. “We are discontinuing a small number of categories within the larger metaphysical subcategory, as buyers and sellers have told us that transactions in these categories often result in issues that can be difficult to resolve.”
New submitter samnorsk writes "I've long been a lifetime account holder of an old textdrive (now Joyent) cloud hosting account. I remember purchasing the account back in college for a few hundred bucks when I really didn't have the money to spend. At the time, I thought that the opportunity to have a persistent lifetime shell / web hosting account would be valuable. This would be a resource I could fall back on no matter what my current situation was. Now, I just received an email stating that Joyent intends to shut down my lifetime account. Quoting: 'We appreciate and value you as one of Joyent's lifetime Shared Hosting customers. As this service is one of our earliest offerings, and has now run its course, your lifetime service will end on October 31, 2012.' They do offer a 512MB cloud machine for one year, but presumably if we don't take that, we're done. In any case, our lifetime commitment would still be dropped in one year if we take that offer. How is it fair or legal for a 'lifetime account' to end when it is no longer convenient for the company? For reference, this was the original offer. In it, they state: 'How long is it good for? As long as we exist.'"
Project Byzantium calls itself Ad-hoc wireless mesh networking for the zombie apocalypse. It's also potentially useful for less-thrilling emergencies, such as floods, earthquakes, and political uprisings (or getting everyone at the office their /. fix when the network goes down). The latest version debuted at the HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference in July, 2012. You can download your very own copy of Byzantium any time you like. Hopefully you will then burn a dozen or so CDs (it's compact enough that it doesn't need a DVD) for friends and neighbors, so that if you suddenly see zombies approaching and your regular ISP has already been overrun and isn't working, you can set up a wireless mesh network and coordinate your anti-zombie efforts. And you won't even need to use the command line. (slides and audio of their presentation)
bbianca127 writes "Kentucky mandated that schools include tests that are based on national standards, and contracted test maker ACT to handle them. Legislators were then shocked that evolution was so prominently featured, even though evolution is well-supported and a central tenet of modern biology. One KY Senator said he wanted creationism taught alongside evolution, even though the Supreme Court has ruled that teaching creationism in science classes is a violation of the establishment clause. Representative Ben Wade stated that evolution is just a theory, and that Darwin made it all up. Legislators want ACT to make a Kentucky-specific ACT test, though the test makers say that would be prohibitively expensive. This is just the latest in a round of states' fight against evolution — Louisiana and Tennessee have recently passed laws directed against teaching evolution."
fistfullast33l writes "The Associated Press is reporting that the Justice Department, FCC, and New York State Attorney General approved portions of a deal between Verizon Wireless and cable companies Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Bright House Networks and Cox to sell parts of the wireless spectrum to Verizon for $3.9 billion. However, the Justice Department rejected the agreement between the two groups to allow Verizon to market cable services in its stores in markets where it also offers FIOS service. The spectrum will be used to increase Verizon's 4G LTE network coverage. Verizon will also sell some spectrum to T-Mobile. Consumer groups were very concerned about the cross-marketing by Verizon: 'When it comes to home broadband, Verizon Communication Inc.'s FiOS provides the only significant competition to cable in many areas. Yet FiOS is costly to build out, and Verizon's commitment to the technology has faltered. Consumer groups and unions that opposed the deal between the cable companies and Verizon said it showed that Verizon was further giving up on FiOS and yielding the home broadband market to cable.'"