PEERING OVER THE FIREWALL AT GAWKER
"The reality is most of them are just a bunch of immature kiddies "
Quite. And while in the past these sorts of kids would have limited their trouble making to a fight in a school playground and ultimately been given a slap by their teacher or parents, they can now cause trouble to major organisations anonymously on the internet backed up by nothing more than the typical teenage mix of self righteousnous, narcissism and naivity with there being little chance of any punishment coming their way for it.
By the time they've grown up enough to realise how foolish they've been they'll have caused a huge overeaction by governments and corporations and will have precipitated a massive online crackdown leading to everyones online freedom being curtailed.
Unfortunately the old saying of you can't put an old head on young shoulders has never been more appropriate. When I see what groups like anonymous and the like are doing I just want to weep - they just dont' see the ultimate consequences of their actions.
Read the article THE REGISTER/Gawker rooted by anonymous hackers
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Personally, I use a single low security password, a separate password for my TrueCrypted folders and a nice password file in that for the rather large variety of passwords I use for the higher security things. No fancy software, just a ridiculously high encrypted plaintext file with padding.
If someone manages to gain access to the TrueCrypt folder, they'd have access to all my passwords and the usernames for the websites I use are mostly fairly easy to guess (The banking site being the exception to the rule, I keep that username as hardcopy but it isn't stored digitally by me).
So I'm quite well secured against compromises of various websites.
Read the article THE REGISTER/Gawker rooted by anonymous hackers
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"If one is using a non-trivial password they should be safe"
No, they cracked 1.3 million users passwords and posted them online and then got bored and left the other 200,000 to the internets to crack. Gawker used an old, insecure method, most likely because they were cheap and/or lazy. If you comment on Gawker or any of their sites, then your user name, password and email have been available for anyone, all day.
All of their servers, databases, private chatrooms and internal messaging service and admin accounts and corresponding passwords were also posted online.
Read the article PBS/Gawker data breach could lead to attacks on government agencies
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Where are our emails from Gawker, exactly, notifying us that accounts on Gawker have been compromised? Why exactly are other sites such as hint.io doing your job? Not everyone logs into Gawker on a daily basis, and I'm willing to be there are a lot of people out there who signed up for an account on a whim, and never returned. They only reason they might know their information is now on the internet, available for mass torrenting, is because some random website (not affiliated with Gawker) might have emailed them. Or because they've been hacked.
Regardless of how stupid their passwords may have been, and unwise they might have been for not creating different passwords for each accounts- the peasants at least deserve a heads up.
Read the article GAWKER/Gawker security breach:We're here to help
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Kinda sad to learn a lot of people used Password as their password. Internet wisely my friends.
Read the article GAWKER/Gawker security breach:We're here to help
SPACE-X TRIUMPHS WITH FLIGHT OF THE DRAGON
SpaceX website
This is far from a small step..This in fact is a huge one as SpaceX has launched and recovered a craft that can in fact return a crew from a Mars or outer asteroid return mission as it can survive higher reentry velocities that the Orion craft cannot and will be manrated soon to do so.
Considering that SpaceX's CEO and chief designer Musk stated today that the motive of SpaceX is to explore space and NOT maximizing profit, this is unique in the annals of private businesses.
Here are a collection of brilliant engineers with a unified goal to do just this and deserve our unalloyed gratitude and congratulations for their incredible labour of love. It is to all of our benefit in the end.
Musk wants humans to be a multi planetary species and that is what many of us wish for. It is not a pipe dream and it shall happen with people like those at SpaceX working for such an ideal. This is not a modest step. It is gigantic. It is a revolution for us all.
Read the articleECONOMIST/We have lift-off
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This launch is amazing and exciting in many ways, but here is one of the most remarkable. This company built an entire manned space program capable or orbiting up to 7 astronauts from scratch for about what it takes NASA to launch a single space shuttle mission.
After watching the launch this morning I am once again feeling some glimmer of optimism for the future of manned spaceflight.
Read the article NEW YORK TIMES/Private spacecraft returns safely from orbit
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Free(commercial) markets will do more to drive down the cost of space flight than anything else.
Government too often gets burdened down. Politically the governments and politicians view risk as unacceptable which is not
possible in programs such as space exploration. The risk space flight poses are real and when there are accidents it is viewed as failure, not progress, by the government and the public.
Commerical markets understand this better(not always but most of the time). Risk is always part of the game in any venture, just more so in space exploration. Read the article MSNBC/SpaceX success - " Dragon is on Orbit"
This shows that private enterprise can use rockets to place useful payload in orbit and, eventually, even send probes to other bodies in the solar system. Rocket science is just not rocket science anymore. However, this does not solve the big problem with rocket propulsion: it is slow, primitive, dangerous and prohibitively expensive. As a species, we are not going to colonize the solar system, let alone the star systems beyond, with cockamamie rockets. You can bet on it. Obviously, our space transportation technologies will need to evolve way beyond our antiquated Newtonian understanding of motion.
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What is wrong with Newton’s laws of motion, you ask? For one, they do not explain what causes a body in motion to remain in motion, something that Newton himself acknowledged. A new analysis of the causality of motion reveals that Aristotle was right to insist that motion is caused. As a result, we are immersed in an immense lattice of energetic particles. In other words we are swimming in energy, lots and lots of clean energy.
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In the not too distant future, we will learn how to tap into this energy field for super fast transportation and unlimited energy production. Our future vehicles will have no need of wheels. They will move at tremendous speeds and will negotiate right angle turns without slowing down and without incurring any damage due to inertial effects. Floating sky cities, New York to Beijing in minutes, earth to Mars in hours. That the future of travel and energy.
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Google “Physics: The Problem with Motion” if you’re interested in the fantastic future of transportation and space exploration. You don’t understand motion even if you think you do.
Read the article WIRED/SpaceX launches cargo spacecraft into orbit
ARSENIC-CHOMPING MICROBES SHOW THAT LIFE CAN BE DIFFERENT
Well, it's easy to ask the question. Far more difficult to prove it, quantitatively and experimentally. Biologists, geochemists, geobiologists, astrophysicists, etc. have all speculated about chemical substitutions in alternative life forms, so they are certainly not closed-minded or ignorant of the possibilities.
When you substitute one element for another that has similar properties on the periodic table, the small differences are enough to change the electronic properties of a molecule so that is reactions then with other molecules could be messed up -- so you have to consider the metabolism and full biochemistry of the whole organism. How to make it work is not trivial, although its easy to speculative in a merely qualitative manner.
What Felisa Wolfe-Simon has done with her discovery is demonstrate experimentally that arsenic is part of this organism's metabolism -- while it's poison to us, it's food to this microbe.
Now the harder part comes next: how is that arsenate bound with the proteins and other biological molecules? Why do the arsenic-fed microbes have even a different shape from the mainly phosphorus-fed microbes.
How does it work at the molecular scale and even at the quantum level? That is what is significant about this work: real, hard data.
Read the article NEW YORK TIMES/Subsisting on arsenic, a microbe may redefine life
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I don't see why this is such a revelation. I remember having the following conversation with my father at the Science Museum as a pre-teen:
Me: Why isn't there life on other planets?
Dad: Well, there might be, but most other planets don't have water or oxygen, which all animals need to live.
Me: Couldn't there be animals that don't need those things to live?
Dad: I don't think so.
I remember thinking this was so stupid - if the theory of evolution is correct (duh!), we assume that life finds a way. Life developed on this planet to utilize the ingredients available. It's common sense that life could adapt elsewhere in a similar way, using other ingredients. Scientists are too limited in their assumptions: "Life requires six elements." Who says?
Read the article NEW YORK TIMES/Subsisting on arsenic, a microbe may redefine life
This NYT article is pure hype. The study authors demonstrated that a specialized bacterium that normally utilized phosphorus could manage to substitute the chemically similar element arsenic, an impressive-enough finding to justify a Science paper, but in no way a complete rewriting of the book of life.
The relevance to life on other planets is dubious at best, because it is not at all clear that such life forms could have evolved in the first place without phosphorus or the other favorable conditions present here on Earth. As for the comments above that decry 'rules' in biology, while there are undoubtable many incredible phenomena remaining to be observed, and paradigms to be discarded, the basic rules of chemistry and physics will still apply, here and in other regions of the universe.
And the great thing about science is, if you have doubts about these 'rules' you are more than welcome to become a scientist and test them yourself!
Read the article NEW YORK TIMES/Subsisting on arsenic, a microbe may redefine life
NASA reported a really cool experiment today, but the extraterrestrial hype is nauseating. What they did:
They isolated a bacterium from a lake that contains high levels of arsenic. Then they sought grow this bacterium in the lab on ever increasing levels of arsenate (levels much higher than were in the lake) but with only small traces of phosphate. The lack of phosphate is important because phosphate is a regular piece of each DNA nucleotide (and other cellular components). The idea that arsenate could replace phosphate in DNA and elsewhere is a big finding. However, it important to remember these bacteria were sick in this high arsenate broth: they divided really slowly. Also, the bacteria scavenged for all phosphate scraps it could find. So much so that only one in 25 phosphates was replaced. Well short of the 'arsenic-based' life forms I've read on the internet today. It would be like saying that for a human who survived on eating old leather because no food was around had novel nutritional requirements.
However, as usual it was terribly overhyped. Now this doesn't mean that there isn't a life-form out there that uses arsenate, but it doesn't say there is either. It is still pretty cool ...
Read the article WALL STREET JOURNAL/Arsenic-based microbes challenge chemistrry of life
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Take a look at the periodic table of the elements. Arsenic (As) is right below phosphorus (P), which means it has the same outer-electron-shell structure, the primary determinant of chemistry. The same thing is true of silicon and carbon.
This experiment breathes life into all the old science-fiction stories about possible silicon-based life forms. It also makes you wonder why arsenic is so poisonous to us and most other mammals. Are we on a main track of evolution or a sidetrack? Occam's Razor suggests a main track, as phosphorus and carbon are the lighter, simpler and more common elements, at least on our world.
One thing is certain. Experiments like this will teach us a lot about organic and biochemistry that we never knew. They may also teach us why outer-electron-shell structure is not the whole story of chemistry, at least for complex, folded molecules like DNA and proteins.
P.S. Actually, I'm not sure about carbon being more common than silicon. There's an awful lot of rock and sand out there. Maybe the difference is that silicon is heavier and takes more energy to move around, and possibly to bond.
Read the article WALL STREET JOURNAL/Arsenic-based microbes challenge chemistrry of life
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Sagan had a small area of his book "Cosmos" in which he discussed how different life may be in other parts of the universe. This group of researchers has found a completely new type of biochemistry on our own planet, and it is very exciting to me as a biochemist.
There has been a lot of talk in the current exoplanet finds about a Goldilocks zone, because we are compelled to be biased towards our own biochemistry. What we will eventually find, I believe, is that life can be very exotic and doesn't need a Goldilock chemistry or temperature or solvent system.
Read the article NPR/Bacterium lives without phosphorous; may later thinking on life
READ MORE COMMENTS AT THE ARCHIVES: NOVEMBER 2010
