Hubble telescope fails; NASA to delay shuttle

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) -- NASA said Monday that it is delaying its mission to the Hubble Space Telescope until next year because of a serious breakdown of the observatory in orbit.
The Atlantis team was scheduled to blast off October 14 to make other repairs and upgrades on the Hubble.

Space shuttle Atlantis had been scheduled to blast off in just two weeks, but an unexpected problem with the Hubble appeared Saturday night, when the telescope stopped sending science data.
That potentially means a new repair issue for the astronauts to confront, one they haven't trained for and never anticipated.
The failure of the command and data-handling system for Hubble's science instruments means the telescope is unable to capture and beam down the data needed to produce its stunning deep space images.
Early Monday afternoon, NASA announced that the October 14 launch had been postponed until at least early next year, possibly February.
When Atlantis does fly, NASA may send up a replacement part for the failed component.
It would take time to test and qualify the old replacement part and train the astronauts to install it in the telescope, NASA spokesman Michael Curie said. NASA also would have to work out new mission details for the astronauts who have trained for two years to carry out five Hubble repair spacewalks.
"The teams are always looking at contingencies, and this is just something that has cropped up we have the ability to deal with. They're just trying to decide what direction we want to go," Curie said.
There is a backup channel for the science instruments' command and data-handling system, and NASA may be able to activate it successfully so that data transmission resumes, Curie said. But if NASA relies solely on the backup channel, there would be no other options if it malfunctioned.
Work has begun to switch the telescope to the backup channel. It is a complicated process; the backup channels on the various modules that must be switched over have not been turned on since the late 1980s or early 1990, right before Hubble was launched. The Hubble team hopes to complete the job by the end of the week.
Curie stressed that the telescope is not in trouble; it just cannot send science information to ground controllers. That means NASA is unable to receive the dramatic pictures Hubble is known for.
The mission by Atlantis and a seven-person crew will be the fifth and final servicing mission to Hubble.
Now, Endeavour will be the next shuttle up, on a trip to the international space station in November. Endeavour is at the launch pad; it was supposed to serve as a rescue ship for Atlantis in case of trouble

Phoenix lander spots falling snow on Mars

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- NASA's Phoenix spacecraft has discovered evidence of past water at its Martian landing site and spotted falling snow for the first time, scientists reported Monday.
With summer waning, less sunlight is reaching the spacecraft's solar panels on Mars.

Soil experiments revealed the presence of two minerals known to be formed in liquid water. Scientists identified the minerals as calcium carbonate, found in limestone and chalk, and sheet silicate.
But exactly how that happened remains a mystery.
"It's really kind of all up in the air," said William Boynton, a mission scientist at the University of Arizona at Tucson.
A laser aboard the Phoenix recently detected snow falling from clouds more than two miles above its home in the northern arctic plains. The snow disappeared before reaching the ground.
Phoenix landed in the Martian arctic plains in May on a three-month mission to study whether the environment could be friendly to microbial life. One of its biggest discoveries so far is confirming the presence of ice on the planet.
Scientists long suspected frozen water was buried in the northern plains based on measurements from an orbiting spacecraft. The lander also found that the soil was slightly alkaline and contained important nutrients and minerals.
Scientists think there could have been standing water at the site in the past or the ice could have melted and interacted with the minerals.
"Is this a habitable zone on Mars? I think we're approaching that hypothesis," said chief scientist Peter Smith of the University of Arizona. "We understand, though, that Mars has many surprises for us and we have not finished our investigation."
Mars today is frigid and dry with no sign of water on the surface, but researchers believe the planet once was warmer and wetter.
NASA extended the three-month mission through the end of the year if Phoenix can survive that long. With summer waning, less sunlight is reaching the spacecraft's solar panels.
Phoenix will be out of touch with ground controllers briefly in November when the sun is between Earth and Mars, blocking communications.
Scientists are racing to use the remaining four of Phoenix's eight tiny test ovens before the lander dies. The ovens are designed to sniff for traces of organic, or carbon-based compounds, that are considered the building blocks of life. Experiments so far has failed to turn up definitive evidence of organics.

Medical-chopper crashes alarm investigators

Saturday's crash of a medevac helicopter in Maryland was the eighth fatal EMS chopper accident in the past 12 months, alarming investigators. Many crashes occur in darkness, and a shortage of night-vision goggles for pilots may be exacerbating the problem. full story

BT to kick off fresh Phorm trial

Telecoms giant BT is about to start further trials of a controversial internet advertising technology.

Developed by Phorm, the Webwise system watches what people do online and shows adverts tuned to their interests.

From 30 September, a sample of BT's customers will be invited to "opt in" to a trial of the technology.

Early trials ran without the consent of customers which led to complaints from rights groups who said this broke laws governing the interception of data.

Technical test

The third trial was originally scheduled for March but has been repeatedly delayed.

Those that are invited to take part will see a special webpage appear when they start browsing the web. In a statement BT said customers would be able to opt in, opt out or ask for more information via the pop-up page.

A spokesman for BT said the trial would run for "at least" four weeks and that it hoped 10,000 customers would take part.

He said the technical trial would help BT assess whether the Phorm Webwise technology works well in the field.

Earlier trials of the technology suggested that BT would have to commit a lot of resources, potentially 300 servers, to use the system for all customers.

"If it goes according to plan it's our expectation that we will roll it out across the entire broadband customer base," said the spokesman.

No decision had yet been taken on whether Webwise would be "opt in" when the finished system is rolled out, he added.

The web browsing traffic of those that "opt out" will pass through the Webwise system will not be profiled or copied by it, he added.

BT was also working on a separate system that let people opt out at a network level so their traffic avoided Webwise more completely, he said.

As well as serving up targeted adverts, BT said the Webwise system would also help to tackle fraud by warning people when they are about to visit a page that has been flagged as dangerous.

BT said it would make another announcement prior to starting the full roll-out of the service.

Children's web watchdog launched

A new internet watchdog has been launched to help protect children from "harmful" web content, such as cyber-bullying and violent video games.

The UK Council for Child Internet Safety (UKCCIS) brings together social networking sites and technology firms.

It aims to teach children about web dangers, target harmful net content and establish a code of conduct for sites featuring material uploaded by users.

Gordon Brown said the move was a "landmark" in child protection.

'Minimum restrictions'

The prime minister said the growing importance of the internet in young people's lives meant the task for government and society was to strike a balance between safety and freedoms on the web.

"The challenge for us is to make sure young people can use the internet safely and do so with the minimum of restrictions but the maximum of opportunities," he said.

He went on to say the internet offered "a world of entertainment, of opportunity and knowledge" to children.

This is the first in the world - it will be path-breaking and already I have been talking to prime ministers in other countries who are interested in this Gordon Brown

"But just as we would not allow them to go out unsupervised in playgrounds or in youth clubs or in swimming pools, so we must put in place the measures we need to keep our children safe online," he said.

Mr Brown added that the responsibility for protecting children from online danger lay with the whole of society.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, also at the launch, said: "We are determined to do all we can to ensure that the internet environment is safe for children to use."

The council, which will report to the prime minister, will have a membership of more than 100 organisations, including technology companies such as Microsoft and Google, websites such as Facebook and mobile phone companies such as O2.

They will work together to create a child internet safety strategy to be published next year.

The strategy will:

• Establish a public awareness safety campaign
• Establish measures to protect children and young people, such as taking down illegal internet sites
• Promote responsible advertising to children online
• Establish voluntary codes of practice, with an an examination of how websites handle videos or messages posted by users.

The move follows a government-commissioned report by psychologist Tanya Byron earlier this year, which called for the setting up of a child safety council, as part of a drive to protect children using the internet and digital technologies.

'Path-breaking'

Mr Brown praised Dr Byron's report and her efforts in bringing the diverse organisations together as one council.

"This is the first in the world. It will be path-breaking and already I have been talking to prime ministers in other countries who are interested in this," he said.

John Carr, from UKCCIS, told the BBC the council offered a last chance for the online world to police itself.

All social networking companies and internet companies have very stringent terms of service Camille de Stempel AOL Europe

"There are continuing levels of anxiety amongst parents, teachers and so on, about kids getting access to material they really shouldn't be seeing on the internet.

"If the internet industry doesn't respond and do this - clean up its act on a voluntary basis - they're going to get legislation and compulsion."

But Camille de Stempel, policy director of AOL Europe, which owns social networking site Bebo, told the BBC the industry was already doing a lot to protect children.

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"You install a lot of things like parental controls, education programmes, easy reporting mechanisms so people can report easily disturbing content, so it can be taken down.

"All social networking companies and internet companies have very stringent terms of service."

Alarm sounded on second-hand kit

For less than a pound a security expert has got front-door access to a council's internal network.

Andrew Mason from security firm Random Storm bought some network hardware from auction site eBay for 99p.

When he switched it on and plugged it in, the device automatically connected to the internal network of Kirklees Council in West Yorkshire.

Kirklees council called the discovery "concerning" but said its data had not been compromised.

Privileged access

For 99p Mr Mason bought what is known as a virtual private network (VPN) server made by the firm Cisco Systems that automates all the steps needed to get remote access to a network.

Many staff working overseas or off-site use a VPN to connect back to corporate systems.

On powering it his new hardware Mr Mason expected that the device would need network settings to be input but, without prompting, it connected to the last place it was used.

Subsequent investigation found that the internet, or IP, address to which it connected was owned by Cap Gemini, in a range of addresses allocated to Kirklees Council.

"It is like having a long ethernet cable from the Council office to anywhere where I connected the device," said Mr Mason.

A connection such as this allows privileged access to networks. In the wrong hands, such as criminally-minded hackers, it would allow them to conduct reconnaissance and find out if the network had any vulnerabilities worth exploiting.

High profile cases have underlined the dangers of losing data

Internal network access permitted the credit card detail theft from retailers TK Maxx last year and Cotton Traders in June.

A spokesman for consulting firm Cap Gemini said it managed Kirklees Council's network from 2000 to the end of May 2005. At that point, he said, control was handed back to the council which had decided to manage the network itself.

A Kirklees council spokesperson said: "The council is deeply concerned with this report but is confident that multiple layers of security have prevented access to systems and data.

"In the meantime the disposal process has been suspended until an investigation can be carried out and appropriate action taken."

Data danger

A spokesperson for Cisco Systems said that "we do provide clear guidelines that explain how to reset products to their factory default settings.

"If followed correctly, these processes eliminate both the configuration and backup configuration of the product preventing subsequent users from connecting with a previous user's configuration."

According to Mr Mason the last change to the connection details on the server were made in November 2006, after Cap Gemini's involvement with the council's network ended.

Mr Mason bought the bought the server in August from an eBay seller called selectronicstore which deals in second-hard hardware.

The server connected to an IP address registered to the council

The eBay selling account selectronicstore is registered to Cheshire-based Manga-Fu, a firm that specialises in the destruction of mass storage devices such as hard drives.

Manga-Fu managing director Gary Cronnolley was unable to trace the origins of the server, as the company does not track the serial numbers of low-value equipment.

However, he says that clients are told to remove data such as passwords and connection details from devices like the VPN server, which has no such mass storage.

"We've done our job 100% to what we've been requested to do, to the book," Mr Cronnolley says.

Robert Winter, chief engineer of data recovery at Kroll OnTrack, said that sensitive data that leaked out from a company could easily prove damaging in the wrong hands.

"Every company should have a proper data disposal process," he said. "I don't think there's any reason why a company would not have that in place now."

Electrically flipped magnets point to better memory

Physicists in Japan have come up with a new way to manipulate magnetisation, which could produce less energy-hungry memory for future computers.

Inside magnetic materials, tiny regions known as domains behave like individual magnets, and can have their north-south orientation flipped by a magnetic field.

Today's computer hard discs work by using electromagnets to flip clumps of domains back and forth between the two possible orientations to encode digital 1s and 0s. The most advanced forms of temporary memory – RAM – use a similar approach.

But Japanese researchers have proved it is possible to manipulate magnetic domains in a semiconductor without using magnets. They simply use an electric field, generated by applying voltage to a nearby electrode, to shift magnetic domains.

That suggests flipping magnetic memory could become simpler and more efficient than it is now, allowing more compact and faster memory. Instead of using current to power an electromagnet to flip domains – an inefficient process – the middleman can be cut out and domains flipped directly.

Sound forces liquid lenses into faster focus

Using sound to manipulate low-cost liquid lenses could improve the small cameras built into mobile phones, say US researchers.

Demand for high-performance cameras – and hence lenses – in consumer gadgets like cellphones is still growing.

Liquid lenses, composed of a single droplet of water, are tipped to become more popular with manufacturers because surface tension makes the drops almost perfectly spherical – something hard to achieve cheaply with hard materials.

Earlier this year liquid lenses made by Varioptic, in Lyon, France, appeared in a cheap webcam. In this device, an electric current curves the boundary between oil and water into a lens that focuses light.

But Amir Hirsa at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, points out that the Varioptic lens and other existing liquid lens technologies must use brute force to overcome surface tension and refocus a liquid lens.

Space 'taxis' could cut the cost of spaceflight

IN 1982, an Australian spy plane snapped photographs of a miniature space shuttle being fished out of the Indian Ocean by a Soviet ship. The craft turned out to be a BOR-4, which the Russians were testing as part of their short-lived space shuttle programme.

So intrigued was NASA by the photographs that it developed its own mini-shuttle, the HL-20 - intended as a possible astronaut rescue vehicle until the project's funding was cut in the early 1990s.

But a modified version of the HL-20, called Dream Chaser, could yet reach the final frontier, if its developer, SpaceDev, has its way. Dream Chaser is one of a number of commercial vehicles in the pipeline that may dramatically lower the cost of access to space.

Not only could these vehicles give tourists a taste of space, they could also carry cargo and crew to the International Space Station after the space ...

A new era for wave energy

LONDON, England (CNN) -- The renewable energy sector has received a boost with the inauguration of the world's first commercial wave power project off the Portuguese coast.

It is hoped that the Pelamis Wave Energy Converters will provide energy for 15,000 homes.

more photos »

Developed by a Scottish engineering company, Pelamis Wave Power Limited, the Pelamis Wave Energy Converters (PWEC) have been towed into position three miles off the coast of Agucadoura in north Portugal.

The first phase of the project is using three PWEC to generate 2.25 megawatts of power at a cost of nine million euros.

If successful, a second phase will see energy generation rise to 21 megawatts from a further 25 machines providing electricity for 15,000 Portuguese homes.

The project is a joint venture between Pelamis Wave Power Limited, Babcock and Brown Ltd -- a global specialist asset manager, Energias de Portugal (EDP) and Portuguese energy group EFACEC.

Named after the sea snake Pelamis, each machine measures 140 meters in length, is 3.5 meters wide and sits partially submerged in the sea.

Babcock and Brown's Anthony Kennaway explained to CNN how the PWEC work.

"Effectively what you have is four long sections making up one machine. Between those sections are three small generating motors," he said.

"The four sections are all joined by hydraulic rams. As the waves run through the machine it pushes the rams in and out. The action of the rams going to and fro pushes hydraulic fluid into a high-pressure reservoir. That high-pressure reservoir then releases the fluid at a steady rate through a generating motor."

This power is fed down to a cable on the sea bed which then links back to a sub-station on shore where it is converted into useable electricity.

The PWEC are, of course, reliant on the weather. Depending on the wave resource, Pelamis predict that the machines will on average produce 25-40 percent of their full power output over the course of a year.

When the full array of 25 machines are in place it is calculated that around 60,000 tons of CO₂ will be displaced.

If wave power was fully exploited, the British Wind Energy Association estimates that one-two billion tons of CO₂ could be displaced every year.

Ian Fells, emeritus professor of energy conversion at Newcastle University in England, gave this latest development in wave power a cautious welcome.

"It's extraordinarily difficult to design a machine that will cope with the extreme violence of waves. Some wave machines are under the surface all the time -- but they are not as well developed as yet. Pelamis lies in the surface and it remains to be seen how successful it will be," he told CNN.

"But good luck to them. We'll just have to see how it operates over time and how it copes with serious weather conditions."

Professor Fells, a founding chairman of the New and Renewable Energy Center (NaREC) at Blyth, Northumberland, is convinced of the potential of wave power engineering but says it is still in its infancy.

"A few years ago when I was talking about a 500-kilowatt Wavegen machine, I was asked by a reporter how many of these we would need to replace the two nuclear power stations in Scotland, and the answer is 10,000. That puts things into perspective

Google offers $10 million for helpful ideas

CNN) -- Got an idea that could change the world, or at least help a lot of people? Google wants to hear from you -- and it will pay as much as $10 million to make your idea a reality.

Google Inc. will award $10 million to solicit ideas it believes could benefit the world.

To help celebrate its 10th birthday, the ambitious Internet giant is launching an initiative to solicit, and bankroll, fresh ideas that it believes could have broad and beneficial impact on people's lives.

Called Project 10^100 (pronounced "10 to the 100th"), Google's initiative will seek input from the public and a panel of judges in choosing up to five winning ideas, to be announced in February.

Google announced the project live on CNN on Wednesday morning.

"These ideas can be big or small, technology-driven or brilliantly simple -- but they need to have impact," Google said in a news release. "We know there are countless brilliant ideas that need funding and support to come to fruition."

Those are ideas such as the Hippo Water Roller, which Google cited as the kind of concept the company would be interested in rewarding. Developed in Africa, where it is most used, the Hippo Water Roller is a barrel-shaped container, attached to a handle, that holds 24 gallons of water and can be rolled with little effort like a wheelbarrow, making it easier for villagers on foot to transport critically needed fresh water to their homes.

People are encouraged to submit their ideas, in any of 25 languages, at www.project10tothe100.com through October 20. Entrants must briefly describe their idea and answer six questions, including, "If your idea were to become a reality, who would benefit the most and how?"

Google employees, with the help of an advisory board, will narrow the submissions to 100 semifinalists by January 27. Between January 27 and February 2, the public will vote online for their favorite ideas. A panel of as-yet-unnamed judges will then review the top 20 ideas and announce up to five winners in mid-February.

Funding, from a pool of $10 million, will be awarded in May. If the judges decide to reward five winning ideas, each will receive $2 million. If only two ideas are chosen, each will receive $5 million, and so on.

A Google spokeswoman was reluctant to set parameters for the submissions, although the project's Web site suggests that successful ideas should address such issues as providing food and shelter, building communities, improving health, granting more access to education, sustaining the global ecosystem and promoting clean energy.

"We don't want to limit it at all. We want a wide range of ideas," said Bethany Poole, product marketing manager at Google, who announced the project Wednesday on CNN along with Andy Berndt, managing director of Google's Creative Lab. "We think great ideas come from anywhere."

To cite Google's own example, Google News began after the September 11 terrorist attacks, when an engineer became frustrated that he couldn't aggregate news sources from around the world in one place.

By opening the project to anyone -- not just laboratories or universities -- Google is embracing "crowdsourcing," the Internet-age notion that the collective wisdom of mass audiences can be leveraged to find solutions to design tasks.

Project 10^100 is not unlike the Google-sponsored Lunar X PRIZE, a $30 million international competition to safely land a robot on the surface of the moon, travel 500 meters over the lunar surface, and send images and data back to Earth. The first team to land on the moon and complete the mission objectives will be awarded $20 million. At least 16 teams are competing.

Those who submit winning Project 10^100 ideas will not be required to have the technical expertise to implement them, Poole said. Google has not determined how winning projects will be sustained financially after the initial prize money runs out, she said.

People may submit more than one idea. Through its online submissions, Google also hopes to connect people with good ideas to charitable organizations who could help implement them, Poole said.

Technologies for Public Safety and Security: Activities at the National Institute of Standards and Technology

In the aftermath of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is playing a key role in enhancing the nation’s homeland security. Through projects spanning a wide range of research areas, NIST is helping the millions of individuals in law enforcement, the military, emergency services, information technology, airport and building security, and other areas protect the American public from terrorist threats.

As a non-regulatory agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, NIST develops and promotes measurement, standards, and technology to enhance productivity, facilitate trade, and improve the quality of life. As part of this mission, NIST scientists and engineers continually refine the science of measurement, making possible the ultraprecise engineering and manufacturing required for today’s most advanced technologies. They also are directly involved in standards development and testing done by the private sector and government agencies.
Through a wide variety of standards committees, NIST is leading efforts to develop enabling technologies for protecting dams, bridges, telecommunications networks, water systems, and the electrical power grid from terrorist attacks.

These capabilities long have provided a foundation for America’s technological edge in the global marketplace. Now they are proving vital in the nation’s effort to develop and implement technologies to prevent, respond to, and mitigate terrorist attacks.

Below are examples of NIST’s research, standards development, and partnership projects related to improving homeland security

Antitrust status conference on tap for Microsoft

Microsoft and antitrust regulators will be back in federal court on Thursday, for a regularly scheduled status conference on the software giant's compliance with the final judgment order stemming from its historic consent decree.

In preparation for the upcoming hearing, which will be held in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., Microsoft, the Department of Justice, and state antitrust regulators filed a joint status report late last week.

The parties will again address improving the technical documents that Microsoft provides to third-party licensees, which are meant to aid them in making their software interoperable with the Redmond giant's operating system.

Antitrust regulators and the technical committee expressed concerns at the last joint status hearing back in June that Microsoft's overview documents were not sufficient. Microsoft, as a result, drafted additional "system" documents that aimed to provide more details on the interaction between the protocols in various complex scenarios. But after reviewing the templates, regulators and a court-appointed technical committee found they needed revisions.

Once the templates are finalized, Microsoft plans to publish all 19 system document drafts by the end of March, with the final version expected by the end of June.

Meanwhile, Microsoft recently informed the technical committee that the next version of Windows, Windows 7, will have a number of protocol changes and, as a result, will have a number of new and modified technical documents. The technical committee expects to see these documents later this year, according to the joint status report.

During the hearing, the parties may also touch on a complaint made prior to November last year, which the states and the DOJ are investigating. Microsoft declined to comment on the investigation.

Dell launches global charitable initiative

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Dell made a move to expand its charitable giving overseas on Tuesday, launching its YouthConnect Initiative.

Dell YouthConnect plans to focus on education and digital inclusion in emerging technology countries such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China.

In addition, the computer maker plans to increase its overall charitable donations to 1 percent of its pre-tax profits by the beginning of February 2010. The contributions will come in the form of corporate cash, in-kind giving, and employee directed giving.

Vista opens new dawn for security

Hi-tech criminals are looking forward to the consumer release of Windows Vista, say security experts.

Vista will be the big event in computer security in 2007, say experts and add that it will have a profound effect on both sides of the security world.

Many organised crime gangs are already tearing the new version of Windows apart looking for ways to exploit its weaknesses, say some.

Others are expecting to see Vista attacked soon after it debuts.

Fresh target

While Microsoft's business customers have been able to buy Vista since 30 November, consumers are being forced to wait until late January 2007 to get their hands on the next version of the Windows operating system.

Microsoft has said that the whole development process of the operating system has been run with better security in mind.

Within Vista are several technologies that could stop many people falling victim to the most common sorts of malicious attack, said Kevin Hogan, director of security operations at Symantec.

In particular, he said, the way Vista handles user accounts will limit the freedom malicious programs have to run and install themselves surreptitiously.

Increasingly, said Mr Hogan, hi-tech criminals were booby-trapping benign looking webpages with code that slips through vulnerabilities in the various versions of Windows. It should also help stop people being caught out by malicious attachments on e-mail messages.

"That'll deal with a lot of the current threats we are seeing," said Mr Hogan.

Mikko Hypponen, F-Secure
Hypponen: Cyber criminals are translating their wares to work on Vista
Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at security firm F-Secure, said the warnings that these account controls display when malicious code tries to install itself will prove useful.

"It'll become much more obvious when they get infected," he said.

But, said Mr Hypponen, as well as stopping some of the threats hitting users, Vista is also likely to spur many hi-tech criminals to step up their research efforts and translate their old malicious wares to the new software.

"None of the existing bots, backdoors, trojans in general run on Vista," said Mr Hypponen.

Already security experts are seeing exploits for Vista vulnerabilities being sold on underground websites and proof-of-concept code appearing on discussion boards.

Gerhard Eschelbeck, chief technology officer at security firm Webroot, said he expected the hi-tech criminals to start exploiting the many ways that Vista tries to warn people about security threats.

He said it was only a matter of time before cyber criminals find a way to mimic the security warnings that Vista uses to try to trick people into installing a malicious program.

"They are thinking how to attack the user directly rather than try to penetrate the applications," he said.

Old iron

While Vista might help many users stay safer online, many criminals would be happy targeting the tens of millions of people who own older versions of Windows, said Mr Eschelbeck.

Man typing on keyboard, Eyewire
Hi-tech criminals are targeting web-based databases
In 2007 he said he expected to see malicious code turning up on many different types of sites - many of which looked completely benign.

Those behind malicious programs were also more interested in having their creations hang around longer, said Mr Eschelbeck.

"The goal is to stay undetected for a long time," he said. "It's being driven by people looking for financial gain."

The diversity of the hi-tech underground was also shown by the new targets many were going after, said Paul Davie, chief executive of security firm Secerno.

He said many hi-tech criminals were now targeting web shops that use a database to handle orders in a bid to steal valuable information they can sell or use.

Many attackers, he said, were using sophisticated techniques to squeeze information out of databases.

"These attacks - examples of which include hackers exposing hundreds of thousands of credit card numbers worldwide - certainly will increase sharply in 2007," he said.

"The security sector is coming to terms with the fact that it is dealing with highly financially motivated, technologically advanced and professional database infiltrators," he said.

Business Technology Examiner

Google makes its long-awaited entry into the mobile phone market today. The Dream - the first phone to use Google's Android operating system - is being unveiled in New York by T-Mobile, and it will go on sale next month.

Officially, the phone is known as the T-Mobile G1. But while T-Mobile may be the carrier, it's the Google name that is synonymous with the phone, which is expected to be priced at $199.

Michael Gartenberg, vice president of Jupitermedia, said the G1 should sell between 250,000 to 450,000 units by the end of 2008.

Research firm Strategy Analytics says 400,000 units would amount to about 4 percent of the "smartphones" expected to be sold in the last three months of this year.

Here's a gallery of photos of the G1. And here's an earlier article about the phone, complete with video of the Android OS.

JILA scientists create first dense gas of ultracold 'polar' molecules

Scientists at JILA, a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU-Boulder), have applied their expertise in ultracold atoms and lasers to produce the first high-density gas of ultracold molecules—two different atoms bonded together—that are both stable and capable of strong interactions.

The long-sought milestone in physics has potential applications in quantum computing, precision measurement and designer chemistry.

Described in the Sept. 18 issue of Science Express,* JILA's creation of ultracold "polar" molecules—featuring a positive electric charge at one end and a negative charge at the other—paves the way for controlled interactions of molecules separated by relatively long distances, offering a richer selection of features than is possible with individual atoms and potentially leading to new states of matter.

	Artist's conception of a gas of ultracold potassium (K) and rubidium (Rb) molecules. The atoms are about 10,000 Bohr radii apart. (One Bohr radius is about 1/20th of a nanometer.)
	Lowering the magnetic field leads to the creation of extremely loosely bound molecules. Atoms in these large, fluffy molecules are about 300 Bohr radii apart.
	Creation of ground-state polar molecules. Two lasers locked to different lines in the same frequency comb coherently transfer the loosely bound molecules into tightly bound molecules in the low-energy "ground" state.
	Ground-state polar molecules with a permanent positive charge at the Rb and a permanent negative charge at the K, which means their behavior can be studied and controlled with electric fields. These molecules are in the lowest-energy (ground) state and their atomic nuclei are about 8 Bohr radii apart.
	Possible future applications of ground-state polar molecules. Because of their potential for strong interactions, ground-state polar molecules could play a role in data processing in quantum computers, controlling reaction rates in ultracold chemistry, and magnifying sub-nanoscale effects in precision measurement problems. Credit: G. Kuebler/JILA View hi-resolution image

"Ultracold polar molecules really represent now one of the hottest frontiers in physics," says NIST/JILA Fellow Jun Ye, an author of the paper. "They are potentially a new form of matter, a quantum gas with strong interactions that vary by direction and that you can control using external tools such as electric fields."

The authors say atoms are like basketballs, round and somewhat featureless, whereas molecules are more like footballs, with angles, and characteristics that vary by direction.

"This is really a big deal," says NIST/JILA Fellow Deborah Jin, another author of the new paper. "This is something people have been trying to do for a long time, using all kinds of different approaches."

Jin and Ye are adjoint professors of physics at CU-Boulder and both teach undergraduate and graduate students. Other authors of the paper include a NIST theorist at the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland and a theorist at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Two types of atoms are found in nature—fermions, which are made of an odd number of subatomic components (protons and neutrons), and bosons, made of an even number of subatomic components. The JILA group combined potassium and rubidium, which are different classes of atoms (a slightly negative fermion and a slightly positive boson, respectively). The resulting molecules exhibit a permanent and significant differential in electric charge, which, along with the ultracold temperatures and high density, allows the molecules to exert strong forces on each other.

The molecules are in the lowest possible vibrational energy state and are not rotating, so they are relatively stable and easy to control. They also have what is considered a long lifespan for the quantum world, lasting about 30 milliseconds (thousandths of a second).

JILA's ultracold polar gas has a density of 10 quadrillion molecules per cubic centimeter, a temperature of 350 nanoKelvin above absolute zero (about minus 273 degrees Celsius or minus 459 degrees Fahrenheit), and a measurable separation of electric charge.

The process for making the molecules begins with a gas mixture of very cold potassium and rubidium atoms confined by a laser beam. By sweeping a precisely tuned magnetic field across the atoms, scientists create large, weakly bound molecules containing one atom of each type. This technique was pioneered by Jin in her 2003 demonstration of the world's first Fermi pair condensate.

At this stage the molecules are very large and possess a high amount of internal energy, which allows them to decay and heat up rapidly, both undesirable effects for practical applications. The scientists faced the considerable challenge of efficiently converting atoms that are far apart into tightly bound molecules, without allowing the released binding energy to heat the gas.

In a process that Jin describes as "chemistry without explosions," scientists used two lasers operating at different frequencies—each resonating with a different energy jump in the molecules—to convert the binding energy into light instead of heat. The molecules absorb near-infrared laser light and release red light. In the process, more than 80 percent of the molecules are converted, through an intermediate energy state, to the lowest and most stable energy level.

A key to success was the development of detailed theory for the potassium-rubidium molecule's energy states to identify the appropriate intermediate state and select the laser colors for optimal control. In addition, both lasers were locked to an optical frequency comb, a precise measurement tool invented in part at NIST and JILA, synchronizing the two signals perfectly.

The research described in Science Express is part of a larger NIST/JILA effort to develop techniques to understand and control the complex features of molecules and their interactions. Practical benefits could include new chemical reactions and processes for making designer materials and improving energy production, new methods for quantum computing using charged molecules as quantum bits, new tools for precision measurement such as optical molecular clocks or molecular systems that enable searches for new theories of physics beyond the Standard Model, and improved understanding of condensed matter phenomena such as colossal magnetoresistance (for improved data storage and processing) and superconductivity (for perfectly efficient electric power transmission).

JILA researchers are now working to improve the efficiency of producing tightly bound polar molecules and extend molecule lifetimes. They also plan to apply the new molecules to explore new scientific directions.

blue divider NIST and Partners Identify Tiny Gold Clusters as Top-Notch Catalysts

For most of us, gold is only valuable if we possess it in large-sized pieces. However, the “bigger is better” rule isn’t the case for those interested in exploiting gold’s exceptional ability to catalyze a wide variety of chemical reactions, including the oxidation of poisonous carbon monoxide (CO) into harmless carbon dioxide at room temperatures. That process, if industrialized, could potentially improve the effectiveness of catalytic converters that clean automobile exhaust and breathing devices that protect miners and firefighters. For this purpose, nanoclusters—gold atoms bound together in crystals smaller than a strand of DNA—are the size most treasured.

Using a pair of scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) instruments for which spherical aberration (a system fault yielding blurry images) is corrected, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Lehigh University (Bethlehem, Pa.) and Cardiff University (Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom) for the first time achieved state-of-the-art resolution of the active gold nanocrystals absorbed onto iron oxide surfaces. In fact, the resolution was sensitive enough to even visualize individual gold atoms.

The work is reported in the Sept. 5, 2008, issue of Science.

Surface science studies have suggested that there is a critical size range at which gold nanocrystals supported by iron oxide become highly active as catalysts for CO oxidation. However, the theory is based on research using idealized catalyst models made of gold absorbed on titanium oxide. The NIST/Lehigh/Cardiff aberration-corrected STEM imaging technique allows the researchers to study the real iron oxide catalyst systems as synthesized, identify all of the gold structures present in each sample, and then characterize which cluster sizes are most active in CO conversion.

The research team discovered that size matters a lot—samples ranged from those with little or no catalytic activity (less than 1 percent CO conversion) to others with nearly 100 percent efficiency. Their results revealed that the most active gold nanoclusters for CO conversion are bilayers approximately 0.5-0.8 nanometer in diameter (40 times smaller than the common cold virus) and containing about 10 gold atoms. This finding is consistent with the previous surface science studies done on the gold-titanium oxide models.

A.A. Herzing, C.J. Kiely, A.F. Carley, P. Landon and G.J. Hutchings. Identification of active gold nanoclusters on iron oxide supports for CO oxidation. Science, Vol. 321, Issue 5894, Sept. 5, 2008.

Hawking unveils 'strangest clock'

A £1m clock called the "time eater" has been unveiled at Cambridge University by Professor Stephen Hawking.

The author of A Brief History of Time was guest of honour when the unique clock, which has no hands or numbers, was revealed at Corpus Christi College.

Dubbed the strangest clock in the world, it features a giant grasshopper and has 60 slits cut into its face which light up to show the time.

Its creator John Taylor said he "wanted to make timekeeping interesting".

The Corpus Clock will stand outside the college's library and will be on view to the public.

Tribute

Dr Taylor is an inventor and horologist - one who studies the measurement of time - and was a student at Corpus Christi in the 1950s.

He has given the clock as a gift to his former college.

The grasshopper or "chronophage", meaning "time eater", advances around the 4ft-wide face, each step marking a second.

Its movement triggers blue flashing lights which travel across the face eventually stopping at the correct hour and minute.

But the clock is only accurate once every five minutes - the rest of the time the lights are simply for decoration.

Europe plans asteroid sample grab

Science reporter, BBC News

Marco Polo is one of a number of competing ideas

European scientists and engineers are working on a potential new mission to bring back material from an asteroid.

The venture, known as Marco Polo, could launch in the next decade, and would be designed to learn more about how our Solar System evolved.

The plan is to select a small asteroid - less than 1km across - near Earth and send a spacecraft there to drill for dust and rubble for analysis.

Mission plans are being worked on by UK Astrium and OHB in Germany.

Both satellite manufacturers have been asked to undertake a feasibility study, to assess the type of spacecraft architecture that would be needed to carry out the project.

A final decision on whether to approve the mission will be made by the European Space Agency (Esa) in a few years' time. The mission would launch towards the end of the next decade, in about 2017.

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Esa says the mission could fly towards the end of the next decade

Asteroids are the debris left over from the formation of the Solar System about 4.6 billion years ago.

Studying their pristine material should provide new insights on how the Solar System came into being and how planets like Earth evolved.

Asteroids are the rubble left over after the planets formed Rosetta probe makes asteroid pass

"We'll be looking at the best solution for getting there and back," UK Astrium's Dr Ralph Cordey told BBC News.

"We've got to look at all elements of the mission - how we would design the mission, how to design the trajectory to one of a number of possible asteroids, how to optimise that so we use the smallest spacecraft, the least fuel and the smallest rocket."

Marco Polo might work like this:

• After the launch on a Soyuz rocket from Europe's Kourou spaceport, a propulsion unit would take the mission out to its target asteroid

• The main spacecraft unit would undertake a remote-sensing campaign, gathering key information on shape, size, mass, spin and global composition

• It would then attempt to land, drilling a few cm into the surface. Up to 300g of dust and pebbles would be stored away in a sealed capsule

• After lifting off the asteroid, the spacecraft would put itself on a homeward trajectory, releasing the capsule close to Earth for a re-entry

• The capsule would land without parachutes. It would be opened in a clean facility to ensure there was no Earth contamination

Marco Polo would map the asteroid as well as grabbing a sample

Esa has an exploration roadmap for the missions it wishes to conduct in the coming years. Marco Polo is being considered under its Cosmic Visions programme, and is one of a number of competing ideas in a class of missions that could cost in the region of 300 million euros.

It is quite possible that Marco Polo, if approved, could be undertaken in partnership with Japan.

Sample return missions are of significant interest to scientists. Although in-situ measurements provide remarkable insights, so much more would be learnt if materials were brought back to Earth laboratories, where the full panoply of modern analytical technologies can be deployed.

The small return capsule would be released just prior to re-entry

An asteroid sample return mission would have huge scientific merit in its own right but it would also help develop the technology needed for the more challenging task of getting down and up from a large planetary body that has a much bigger gravitational pull - such as Mars.

Not that getting down on to a small, low-gravity body is easy. The wrong approach could crush landing legs or even result in the vehicle bouncing straight back off into space.

Such problems were amply demonstrated by the recent Japanese attempts to grab samples off the surface of Asteroid Itokawa.

It is still not clear whether Japan's Hayabusa spacecraft managed to capture any material and the probe's return to Earth is still haunted by uncertainty.

The Americans deliberately crash-landed their Near-Shoemaker probe on to Asteroid Eros at the end of the spacecraft's mission in 2001.

They have also sent the Dawn spacecraft to rendezvous with Asteroid Vesta in 2011 before going on to visit Asteroid Ceres in 2015. But these are remote-sensing ventures, not sample return attempts.

Europe, itself, is no novice in the field of asteroid study. Its Rosetta probe, which is en route to a comet, took close-up pictures of Asteroid Steins during a flyby earlier this month.

Ultimately, it is possible that astronauts could visit an asteroid. The US space agency is currently studying how this might be done; but even if approved, such a mission would not happen for many decades.

Hi-tech help for children at risk

Children suffering abuse will soon be able to contact the NSPCC's ChildLine via text messages and the internet.

The NSPCC hopes to reach more at-risk children by making use of the technology that youngsters are comfortable and familiar with.

Early trials by the NSPCC show that boys and girls seek help with family problems in very different ways.

IT at sea: Google to launch a computer navy

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Forget the Royal Navy and the U.S. Marines -- the 'computer navy' is on its way, and digital media on the high seas are set to make a steaming comeback.

New home? Barges like this one could soon play host to Google's massive data centers.

1 of 2

It seemed that floating media firms were a thing of the past when the United Kingdom's last major offshore pirate radio station, Radio Caroline, followed other European and American examples and died out in the early 1990s.

But, fast-forward 20 years and enter Internet giant Google.

According to a patent application seen by London newspaper "The Times," Google is considering launching barges up to seven miles (11km) offshore to host the massive data centers required to run its Internet search engines.

The plan would likely see the data centers -- which consist of huge supercomputers -- use wave energy to power and cool themselves while stationed at sea.

In the application Google states: "Computing centers are located on a ship or ships, anchored in a water body from which energy from natural motion of the water may be captured, and turned into electricity and/or pumping power for cooling pumps to carry heat away."

Energy consumption is undoubtedly a massive issue for these giant data centers.

Sony's portable game machine gets a makeover

TOKYO, Japan (AP) -- Sales are improving in Japan for Sony Corp.'s PlayStation Portable handheld video game machine, and a beefed up version with a clearer display is expected to add momentum, a senior executive said Tuesday.

The PSP-3000 has an improved liquid crystal display and a built-in microphone.

The portable game machine faces tough competition from Nintendo DS -- the handheld machine from the Japanese manufacturer of Pokemon and Super Mario games.

Nintendo also has a big hit in the Wii home console that's battering Sony's PlayStation 3 in sales.

The revamped PlayStation Portable with the improved liquid crystal display and a built-in microphone will go on sale October 16 in Japan at $180, the same price of the previous model, said Shawn Layden, president of Sony Computer Entertainment Japan.

The machine called PSP-3000 is also being promised for the U.S. and Europe next month.

Layden said the PSP was gaining popularity in Japan, nearly doubling in sales for this year's first eight months compared to the previous year.

People are increasingly using it to listen to music, watch video and access the Internet on the go, he said at a Tokyo hotel.

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• Coming soon: 'Wallet phones' from Japan

"The PlayStation Portable can be called a PlayStation Personal," he told reporters. "It has become a lifestyle tool for owners."

Sony also unveiled a service planned for later this year in Japan that will allow several PSP machines to play games together, even if they aren't in the same room, by connecting to the Internet through PlayStation 3 machines. Layden said details will be released later.

Competition among game makers is intensifying ahead of the year-end shopping season.

Sony has sold about 41 million PSP machines globally -- 10 million in Japan. Nintendo has sold 77.5 million Nintendo DS handheld devices worldwide, nearly 23 million in Japan.

On top of that, Nintendo has scored success with its predecessor GameBoy series, selling more than a 100 million GameBoys cumulative worldwide.

On Monday, price cuts for Japan were announced for Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360 home consoles. The Xbox 360 has been struggling in Japan, a market dominated by the locals, Sony and Nintendo.

Microsoft doesn't disclose how many of the cumulative 20 million Xbox 360 machines sold worldwide were Japan sales. But it is widely viewed to be fewer than numbers sold elsewhere.

The Wii console has been popular, selling 29.6 million worldwide so far. PS3 sales have lagged at fewer than half of the Wii at 14.4 million.

Also shown Tuesday was footage from game software planned for the PlayStation Portable later this year, including "Gundam Vs. Gundam" from Bandai Namco Games and "Dissidia Final Fantasy" from Square Enix Co.

Google turns 10, raises monopoly concerns

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California (AP) -- When Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google Inc. on September 7, 1998, they had little more than their ingenuity, four computers and an investor's $100,000 bet on their belief that an Internet search engine could change the world.
Craig Silverstein, the first employee hired by Page and Brin, lays on his beanbag chair at Google headquarters.

Craig Silverstein, the first employee hired by Page and Brin, lays on his beanbag chair at Google headquarters.

It sounded preposterous 10 years ago, but look now: Google draws upon a gargantuan computer network, nearly 20,000 employees and a $150 billion market value to redefine media, marketing and technology.

Perhaps Google's biggest test in the next decade will be finding a way to pursue its seemingly boundless ambitions without triggering a backlash that derails the company.

"You can't do some of the things that they are trying to do without eventually facing some challenges from the government and your rivals," said Danny Sullivan, who has followed Google since its inception and is now editor-in-chief of SearchEngineLand.

Google's expanding control over the flow of Internet traffic and advertising already is raising monopoly concerns.

The intensifying regulatory and political scrutiny on Google's expansion could present more roadblocks in the future. Even now, there's a chance U.S. antitrust regulators will challenge Google's plans to sell ads for Yahoo Inc., a fading Internet star whose recent struggles have been magnified by Google's success.

Privacy watchdogs also have sharpened their attacks on Google's retention of potentially sensitive information about the 650 million people who use its search engine and other Internet services like YouTube, Maps and Gmail. If the harping eventually inspires rules that restrict Google's data collection, it could make its search engine less relevant and its ad network less profitable.

A new way to find online videos

By Yi-Wyn Yen

There’s a ton of videos to watch on the Web. YouTube uploads 13 hours of video each minute. But finding what to watch isn’t easy.

Video search is one of the biggest challenges on the Internet today. A number of online video companies are trying to figure out how to find and discover content for viewers, but a debate rages on the best method to deliver results.

VideoSurf is the latest startup that claims it has solved the video search problem. Major video search players like Blinkx, Truveo, and Everyzing rely on tagging video clips with descriptions and analyzing the audio portion of clips to make videos searchable through text. Google (GOOG) and Microsoft’s Live Search (MSFT) are also making headway with speech-to-text technology to index videos. VideoSurf cofounder Lior Delgo, a former Yahoo search executive, says his company has made a video search breakthrough by scanning and analyzing the images within videos as a way to organize the content.

Analyzing a video is an incredibly complex problem. VideoSurf does the heavy lifting for web viewers with algorithms that identify people and backgrounds in videos and then converts them into thumbnail frames that summarize sections of the video.

Visual computer scanning means search results will be more relevant, says Delgo. “Before this, there was no way to navigate videos visually. You had to rely on tagging content surrounding the video. But video is not text,” he says. “If you can visually see what a video is about, you can make better decisions about whether you want to watch it or not.”

For example, say you want to watch clips that feature Republican vice president nominee Sarah Palin on The Daily Show. VideoSurf will pull up video results and display frames in which Palin is shown. Viewers can then click on the frames and jump to a particular scene on the video. VideoSurf indexes video content from a number of top news and entertainment sites, including Comedy Central (VIA), Hulu, YouTube, and CNN (owned by Fortune’s parent company, Time Warner.) VideoSurf launched its new product last week and currently requires viewers to sign up to use the service.

VideoSurf is not the only company that uses visual scanning technology to index videos. Digitalsmiths has been cataloging digital videos for movie and TV studios for the past three years and is now providing its technology for web-based videos.

Last month Warner Bros. (which also is by Time Warner) launched TheWB.com and runs Digitalsmiths’s search technology so that viewers can find every scene, say, where Joey Tribbiani says “How you doin?” on Friends. TMZ.com (another Time Warner property), a popular celebrity blog, also powers Digitalsmiths to archive its videos.

The top search engines are pushing for more videos to be included in text-based searches. For example, when a search for Jamaican Olympic gold medalist Usain Bolt is entered, at least one video pops up in the first 10 results for Google, Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft’s Live Search.

Search engines have the computing power to process the massive amounts of video data, but don’t have the technology, which is why Gartner digital media analyst Allen Weiner predicts VideoSurf and Digitalsmiths will be acquired soon by the one of the major engines. “The search engines have been waiting for the next generation of technology to come alone. You can only do so much by metadata and tags. This is going fuel a lot of interest in acquisitions,” Weiner says.

Both VideoSurf and Digitalsmiths provide similar technology for video search, but their business approach is different. Digitalsmiths partners with media publishers to allow them to customize its video search products. VideoSurf, like YouTube, is essentially a destination site for consumers. Digitalsmiths CEO Ben Weinberger says, “Nobody should think they’re so powerful that you’ll be the place that everyone wants to come watch videos.”

Online video analysts say both VideoSurf and Digitalsmiths are making video search better, but there’s still a long way to go. “The reality is, when you compare performing a typical [text-based] web search on Google to searching for videos on any of the engines, it’s nowhere near as good,” says Will Richmond, a broadband video analyst for VideoNuze. “You’ve got speech-to-text, facial scanning, and tagging. There’s a real art to figure out which of these will yield the best result. At the end of the day, you can really only measure the approach by the quality of the results.”

Microsoft retires Seinfeld ad campaign

SEATTLE, Washington (AP) -- TV viewers can return to their favorite programs without fear of seeing Bill Gates shaking his tushie now that Microsoft Corp. has retired a bizarre two-week-old ad campaign featuring the software giant's chairman with comedian Jerry Seinfeld.

Jerry Seinfeld did a series of oddball commercials with Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

Bloggers and online media have suggested that the Redmond, Washington-based company yanked the Seinfeld ads after they were poorly received. The ads show Gates and Seinfeld trading banter at a mall shoe store and while living with a suburban family, trying to get in touch with regular people. Seinfeld asks Gates nonsensical questions about the future of computing, and Gates responds with "signs" that he's on the right track, including "adjusting his shorts," as Seinfeld called the awkward hip shake, and doing "the robot," a dance move.

However, a senior vice president in Microsoft's central marketing group, Mich Mathews, contended in an interview Thursday that it was always the plan to replace the Seinfeld-Gates ads with ones that focus on Windows.

"The notion that we're doing some quick thing to cancel (the Seinfeld ads) is actually preposterous," Mathews said. "Today was always the day. ... Media buying is something you have to do months in advance."

Mathews described the three Seinfeld spots as ice breakers with a limited shelf life, designed to grab people's attention in a tongue-in-cheek way without the pressure of having to talk about the product.

"We wanted to be sure that when we do come out with our major message, today, 'Life Without Walls,' more people would be paying attention than they would otherwise," Mathews said. "My goodness, did we do that."

The Windows-focused campaign attempts to turn Apple's "I'm a Mac" ads on their head. A new TV ad set to debut during "The Office" on NBC Thursday evening begins with a Microsoft engineer who looks like the PC character in Apple's ads saying "Hello, I'm a PC, and I've been made into a stereotype." He's followed by a montage of real-life PC users, celebrities and Microsoft Windows engineers who all repeat the "I'm a PC" mantra.

Microsoft also has ads queued up for print, Web and public spaces that focus on the way Windows, Windows Mobile, Microsoft's Live services and its TV platform connect.

The $300 million campaign was designed by ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Microsoft said the company is "exploring options" with Seinfeld for new ads, but that no ads beyond the three that aired hav

Mystery ship washes ashore in Alabama after Hurricane Ike

FORT MORGAN, Alabama (AP) -- When the waves from Hurricane Ike receded, they left behind a mystery: a ragged shipwreck that archeologists say could be a two-masted Civil War schooner that ran aground in 1862 or another ship from 70 years later.

A ragged boat from 1862 or 1933 washed ashore in Fort Morgan, Alabama, after Hurricane Ike.

The wreck, about 6 miles from Fort Morgan, had been partially uncovered when Hurricane Camille cleared away sand in 1969.

Researchers at the time identified it as the Monticello, a battleship that partially burned when it crashed trying to get past the U.S. Navy and into Mobile Bay during the Civil War.

After examining photos of the wreck post-Ike, Museum of Mobile marine archaeologist Shea McLean agreed that it is probably the Monticello, which ran aground in 1862 after sailing from Havana, Cuba, according to Navy records. iReport.com: See video of the ship from iReporter Tammy Brewer

"Based on what we know of ships lost in that area and what I've seen, the Monticello is by far the most likely candidate," McLean said. "You can never be 100 percent certain unless you find the bell with 'Monticello' on it, but this definitely fits."

Fort Morgan was used as Union forces attacked in 1864 during the Battle of Mobile Bay.

Other clues indicate that it could be an early 20th-century schooner that ran aground on the Alabama coast in 1933.

The wrecked ship is 136.9 feet long and 25 feet wide, according to Mike Bailey, site curator at Fort Morgan, who examined it this week. The Monticello was listed in shipping records as 136 feet long, McLean told the Press-Register of Mobile.

CIA, FBI push 'Facebook for spies'

When you see people at the office using such Internet sites as Facebook and MySpace, you might suspect those workers are slacking off.

A social-networking site for the world of spying officially launches for the U.S. intelligence community this month.

But that's not the case at the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency, where bosses are encouraging their staff members to use a new social-networking site designed for the super-secret world of spying.

"It's every bit Facebook and YouTube for spies, but it's much, much more," said Michael Wertheimer, assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analysis.

The program is called A-Space, and it's a social-networking site for analysts within the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies.

Instead of posting thoughts about the new Avenged Sevenfold album or Jessica Alba movie, CIA analysts could use A-Space to share information and opinion about al Qaeda movements in the Middle East or Russian naval maneuvers in the Black Sea.

The new A-Space site has been undergoing testing for months and launches officially for the nation's entire intelligence community September 22.