We sure do throw out a lot of electronic junk. The Environmental Protection Agency today said its recycling program, eCycling, collected and recycled close to 67 million pounds of used electronics in 2008, nearly a 30% increase over 2007. Read more
A couple of speeches this week by FBI and Department of Justice executives are warning that if law enforcement and others connected with keeping the Internet a secure and safe place to do business and socialize the world could be headed toward a cyber-based economic meltdown -- cybergeddon.
Computer attacks pose the biggest risk "from a national security perspective, other than a weapon of mass destruction or a bomb in one of our major cities," Read more
The National Science Foundation is furthering its search for highly interpretive technology to help all manner of government and private researchers evaluate the massive amounts of data generated in health care, computational biology, security and other fields. Read more
The FBI this week said it was embarking on a major hiring binge - almost 3,000 jobs - but the response to the openings has apparently overwhelmed to agency's servers.
Currently if you go to the FBI's Careers page you get this message: Based on the overwhelming response to our Hiring Initiative, the applicant hiring system is being enhanced to facilitate more efficient processing of your application and will be available shortly. The deadline for applications will be extended to accommodate this brief interruption. Read more
It's not Armageddon but a NASA-funded study is showing some of the first clear economic data that quantifies the risk extreme weather conditions in space have on the Earth.
The study, conducted by the National Academy of Sciences notes that besides emitting a continuous stream of plasma called the solar wind, the sun periodically releases billions of tons of matter called coronal mass ejections. These immense clouds of material, Read more
The FBI today challenged anyone in the online community to break a cipher code on its site. The code was created by FBI cryptanalysts. The bureau invited hackers to a similar code-cracking challenge last year and got tens of thousands of responses it said. Read more
Researchers are looking to build self-configuring network technology that would identify traffic, let the network infrastructure prioritize it down to the end user, reallocate bandwidth between users or classes of users, and automatically make quality of service decisions. The system will have a minimum of 32 levels of prioritization. These prioritization levels will be configurable and changeable at the system level in an authenticated method. Data with a higher priority will be handled more expeditiously than traffic with a lower priority. Read more
Layer 8 is Network World's coffee break for your head but sometimes it feels more like a relief from reality. This year we had shape shifting robots, unbelievably hard math problems and submersible airplanes to contend with. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Read on HERE!
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Top 5 ways to stop Social Security Number identity theft
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Social Security numbers are arguably the most often abused and costly bit of personal information identity thieves like to snatch. And snatch they do with increasing ease and frequency from all manner or transactions and databases. Read more
The X Prize Foundation and Google today brought the number of teams competing for its $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE to 15 by adding representatives of China, Germany, Denmark and Sweden to the roster of teams competing in the Read more
The National Science Foundation is looking for a few good artificial intelligence revolutionaries. The agency today updated its call for new research to advance and integrate research of artificial intelligence, computer vision, human language research, robotics, machine learning, computational neuroscience, cognitive science and several areas of computer graphics. Read more
Can the steaming pile of bad economic news continue to grow? You betcha. The stench today: Federal bankruptcy filings hit 1,042,993 for the 12-month period ending September 30, 2008, up more than 30% over 2007. Read more
Despite the daily drum beat of new and improved hardware or software, the tech industry isn't all bits and bytes. Some interesting things happen along the way too. Like floating data centers, space geekonauts, shape shifting robots and weird bedfellows (like Microsoft and Jerry Seinfeld). What we include here is an example of what we thought were the best, slightly off-center stories of 2008. Go here to see our slide show. Read more
It really isn't a big enough penalty and the company admitted no guilt but Sony BMG Music Entertainment today agreed to pay $1 million as part of a settlement to resolve Federal Trade Commission charges that it knowingly violated the privacy rights of over 30,000 underage children.
Specifically the FTC said the company violated the agency's Children's Online Privacy Read more
The Federal Trade Commission today got a court to at least temporarily halt a massive "scareware" scheme, which falsely claimed that scans had detected viruses, spyware, and pornography on consumers' computers. Read more
It might not have the scary folks on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list but the Environmental Protection Agency says it wants its new Web tool to have the same sort of impact: tracking down fugitives accused of violating environmental laws.
The Web site - the first of its kind in the Federal realm to list environmental fugitives -- includes photos of accused environmental violators, summaries of their alleged environmental encroachments, and information on each fugitive's last known whereabouts. The alleged violations include smuggling of ozone-depleting substances, illegally disposing of hazardous waste, discharging pollutants into the air and water, laundering money and making criminally false statements. Read more
If you have that person on your holiday list that's just impossible to buy for, perhaps Purdue University has just the furry ticket for you. The University today said it would auction the naming rights to several new species of bat, just in time for Christmas. Read more
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