News From Yellow Business Pages » Wired: Top Stories

Wired: Top Stories (359 unread)

Five People Who'll Make You Feel Good About the Future

Posted: May 31st, 2008, 2:00pm EDT by wired science

Tags: [edit]

When contemplating the world's environmental problems, it's sometimes hard not to feel like humanity is screwed. But then you attend an event like Future Cities, a panel of sustainability experts at the World Science Festival, and it seems like we might just figure out how to thrive on this planet after all.

Hacker Changes News on Mars Lander's Website

Posted: May 31st, 2008, 1:30pm EDT by Associated Press

Tags: [edit]

A hacker takes over the Phoenix Mars Lander mission's public website during the night and changes its lead news story.

Why Are Senior Female Scientists So Heavily Outnumbered by Men?

Posted: May 31st, 2008, 1:00pm EDT by wired science

Tags: [edit]

Why is there such a discrepancy in the number of male vs. female scientists in academia? Wired Science considers the funny math in the world of academic science.

Democrats' FlipperTV Fuels Anti-McCain Mash-ups Online

Posted: May 31st, 2008, 12:30am EDT by Threat Level

Tags: [edit]

In his bid for president, John McCain seeks to portray himself as a straightforward person of integrity. But recent TV footage from FlipperTV highlights McCain's inconsistencies. In one video, he praises an electioneering group that's been issuing disingenuous attack advertisements about Barack Obama's foreign policy positions.

Study: Bone Loss Drug Fights Spread of Breast Cancer

Posted: May 31st, 2008, 12:15am EDT by Associated Press

Tags: [edit]

Doctors make an exciting discovery that a drug used to prevent bone loss during breast cancer treatment also substantially cuts the risk that the cancer will return.

What the CIA Learned From Get Smart

Posted: May 31st, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Jennifer Hillner

Tags: [edit]

Maxwell Smart always "missed it by that much," but some of those dopey spy shows of the '60s were right on the money. "Many of the devices first seen in movies and on TV actually came about," says Robert Wallace, former head of the CIA's covert skunk works, the Office of Technical Services. "Remember the Cone of Silence? We built shielded enclosures that did the same thing. And the pen communicator in The Man From U.N.C.L.E.? That evolved, 10 years later, into short-range agent communication." Wallace, who was basically the agency's real-life Q, reveals these gadgets and more in his new book, Spycraft, the first comprehensive look at the technical achievements of American espionage from the 1940s to the present. "Here's the laboratory," Wallace used to tell new recruits. "The only thing that is going to limit what you can do is your imagination." It seems they took him at his word.

1940s Cigarette gun
Lipping this pistol disguised as a cigarette, an agent could easily release the safety pin. Rotating the filter end counterclockwise armed the gun, and a push of the thumb caused it to fire a single .22-caliber bullet. It really worked.

Illustration: Steve Sanford

An ordinary-looking bound notebook contained pages of Pyrofilm and came packaged with an incendiary pencil. To prevent notes from falling into the wrong hands, an agent could simply pull the eraser out of the pencil, causing the notebook to burst into flames.

Illustration: Steve Sanford

During an hour-long procedure, techs embedded a 3/4-inch transmitter in the skull of a live cat. An antenna made of very fine wire was woven into the cat's fur, and a microphone was placed in its ear canal. After setting the kitty free, agents could listen in on nearby conversations undetected. Cats being cats, however, the system proved unreliable.

Illustration: Steve Sanford

When it comes to a "dead drop" — a hiding place where spies leave messages — nothing's better (or deader) than a dead rat. Who's going to look inside unless they have to? CIA techs gutted a rat carcass, inserted secret missives wrapped in foil, and then stitched the animal back together. To ward off scavengers, the rodent was often doused in Tabasco.

Illustration: Steve Sanford

A working Seiko timepiece concealed the world's smallest point-and-shoot camera. The device held a 15-inch strip of auto-advancing film and could snap about 100 crisp shots. A quick twist of the watch face revealed a 4-millimeter-diameter lens. It was a successful and widely used spy tool in its day.

Illustration: Steve Sanford

A remotely piloted aerial vehicle disguised as a dragonfly could carry cameras and audio sensors right into the lion's den. This mobile eavesdropping bug never got off the ground.

Illustration: Steve Sanford

The Persistence of Vision: A Story of Freakish Perception

Posted: May 31st, 2008, 12:00am EDT by wired science

Tags: [edit]

Neurologist and author Oliver Sacks speaks at the World Science Festival about the deterioration of his sight following a bout with a rare and malignant form of cancer behind his right eye.

Q&A: Exclusive Interview With the Phoenix Mars Lander

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 7:10pm EDT by Wired Science

Tags: [edit]

In this question-and-answer session, we talk with the Twitter persona of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, then reveal the true identity of @MarsPhoenix.

Plastic Shield Protects Your TV From Your Wii

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 7:00pm EDT by Gadget Lab

Tags: [edit]

Wiimotes and other accidentally airborne objects can wreak havoc with delicate HDTV screens. Enter TV-Armor: A heavy-duty acrylic shield designed to protect your TV's sensitive parts.

Video: Smart Card Hacker's Tools Include Acid, Red Nail Polish

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 6:50pm EDT by Threat Level

Tags: [edit]

Fresh from a high-profile civil trial that cleared his former employer of piracy charges, satellite TV hacker Christopher Tarnovsky opens the door of his private lab to show Wired.com how he circumvents security on smart cards. Please don't try this at home.

Japan's Hotshot Game Designers Bet on Indie Gore

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 6:00pm EDT by Game|Life

Tags: [edit]

Upstart videogame developer Platinum Games goes against the grain, creating a gory Wii game, a complicated space adventure for Nintendo DS and other glorious wonders.

Blacktop Gets Greener

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 5:00pm EDT by Autopia

Tags: [edit]

Hussain Bahia has been studying asphalt for 20 years and says he knows how to make it more ecologically friendly.

Apple Bans Teens From Stores for Downloading iPhone Game

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 5:00pm EDT by Epicenter

Tags: [edit]

Four Palo Alto teens found themselves chased down a street and detained by Apple store security for 2.5 hours after they downloaded a third-party game onto a store phone.

Apple Core Stops Selling Apple TV Hacking Dongle

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 4:40pm EDT by Gadget Lab

Tags: [edit]

Apple Core, makers of a third-party Apple TV upgrade, abruptly withdrew its product from the market yesterday, citing unspecified copyright concerns. Company representatives say they were not pressured to do so by Apple or any other party.

Permalink for 'Wired__Top_Stories/2008/05/30/Condi_Hooks_Up_With_KISS___8212__In_Sweden__No_Less'

Condi Hooks Up With KISS — In Sweden, No Less

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 4:10pm EDT by Listening Post

Tags: [edit]

Is the Apocalypse upon us, or is this just our generation's equivalent of the Nixon-Elvis summit? Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and KISS just happen to be Sweden at the same time -- so naturally she paid a call on the guys. In their hotel room. Said she was thrilled to meet them. It happened: there are pictures.

Comcast Is Hiring an Internet Snoop for the Feds

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 4:00pm EDT by Danger Room

Tags: [edit]

Wanna tap e-mail, voice and Web traffic for the government? Here's your chance. Comcast, the country's second-largest Internet provider, is looking for an engineer to handle "reconnaissance" and "analysis" of "subscriber intelligence" for the company's "National Security Operations."

Neuroscientist: Poetry Comes From Synesthesia, Tree-Climbing

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 3:20pm EDT by Wired Science

Tags: [edit]

A prominent neuroscientist told a crowd at the World Science Festival that the curious phenomenon of synesthesia -- in which some people "taste" colors or "hear" smells -- is simply a consequence of the aptitude humans evolved for abstraction.

More Rapper Excess: A Seinfeld Mixtape?

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 3:17pm EDT by Listening Post

Tags: [edit]

Things have been getting interesting for Wale, who's gone from fascinating, free mixtapes to touring with producer Mark Ronson and getting signed to Interscope Records. But before all this, there was a pet project by the rapper called "The Mixtape About Nothing," inspired by –- you guessed it –- Seinfeld.

Brazil's Remote Amazon Tribes Besieged by Modernity

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 3:10pm EDT by Associated Press

Tags: [edit]

Primitive tribes who prefer isolation to assimilation are increasingly endangered by the encroachment of modern civilization, the Brazilian government says.

Review: Book Defends 'This Gaming Life'

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 2:45pm EDT by Game|Life

Tags: [edit]

Author Jim Rossignol makes a case for videogames' amazing potential in a world filled with doubters.

Did Hackers Cause the 2003 Northeast Blackout? Umm, No

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 2:00pm EDT by Threat Level

Tags: [edit]

The latest cyberterrorism fairy tale circulating in Washington posits that Chinese government hackers were responsible for the worst power failure in U.S. history. Next week: How Chinese hackers caused Hurricane Katrina, the mortgage crisis and climate change.

Risky Netflix Strategy Has Investors Twitchy

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 1:45pm EDT by Daniel Sorid, Portfolio.com

Tags: [edit]

News from Portfolio.com

Also on Portfolio

If Phoenix Finds Life on Mars, Do You Cheer or Cry?

Another Airline Bites the Dust

McClellan: He's Both Right and Wrong

Subscribe to Portfolio magazine

By virtue of mathematical coincidence, every million dollars that Netflix C.E.O. Reed Hastings spends to build a digital download service for his DVD-by-mail company sucks away roughly one penny of profit from each share of its stock.

The simplicity of the calculation could grow increasingly inconvenient for Hastings as he and his management team fend off criticism from investors who prefer profits in their pockets rather than risk building a parallel business of streaming movies and TV shows over the internet.

"We're spending a lot of money," Chief Financial Officer Barry McCarthy said at an analyst conference earlier this week, "and if we fall on our face I have no doubt investors will vote us off the island."

The death of the DVD looms over Netflix like an elderly uncle who pays the rent. When he finally moves on, Netflix had better have another source of income.

But at what cost? Hastings spent $40 million last year to build up a library of 10,000 movies and TV shows that its 8 million subscribers can watch online. He's partnering with consumer electronics companies to build Netflix streaming capabilities into TVs, DVD players and set-top boxes.

As inspirational as it sounds, transformation costs money—as much as $70 million this year, or 70 cents a share in 2008 profits. And investors want to know in the cold language of accounting what the financial benefit is for each dollar spent on buying the rights to show a movie online.

Hastings this week asked investors to bear with him for a few years as he primes the pump for a new business model. To that end, he invented a metric that he asks analysts to use in judging his online strategy: The number of TVs and other Internet-connected consumer electronics with Netflix software built in.

Hastings calls it the Dolby model—making Netflix reception as ubiquitous as the noise-reduction technology. LG Electronics, the South Korean company, is already on board, as is a start-up company called Roku that makes a $100 Netflix-on-TV box.

"I think the way to measure us is the number of millions of Netflix-ready devices installed in homes," Hastings told investors. "If that's a big number at the end of '09, then our strategic investment has greatly paid off. If it's a small number, you have every right to be whiny about management having wasted a lot of money."

Analysts were not convinced. Michael Pachter, who covers Netflix for Wedbush Morgan Securities, said he would prefer that Netflix stick to selling movie-rental subscriptions, not giving investment analysis. "I don't really care what they think we should focus on," he said. "I would never presume to tell them how to do their job."

Pachter has pushed the company to disclose more about the nuts and bolts of its online investment. He points out that if Netflix spends $70 million this year for a service used by 100,000 customers, it works out to $700 per customer.

"I would say they're crazy; it's not worth it," Pachter said. The math only makes sense as the number of users increases dramatically, he added. At 7 million users of Netflix online, for example, the annual investment comes to $10 per customer, or 85 cents a month. "I would support that," Pachter said.

For now, Netflix doesn't disclose these kinds of figures. The $70 million figure is Pachter's estimate based on data in the company's first-quarter earnings release. He reckons that more than 1 million Netflix subscribers have tried the online feature, but there's no official word from the company. "They have an overdeveloped sense of secrecy in the name of competitive disadvantage," Pachter said.

If enough analysts go for it, Hastings' pro-forma figure of installed Netflix-ready devices would be a stroke of investor-relations brilliance. The company could win enough support to fend off short-term-minded investors who want to be rich and retired in Hawaii by the time the DVD business dies in 20 years.

Hastings may already know that he's got this pro forma figure covered. Pachter, who also covers video games, says he is confident that Netflix will soon unveil a partnership with Microsoft to make its service available on Xbox 360 consoles—of which there are 10 million in the U.S. (Hastings sits on Microsoft's board.)

"I'm kind of baffled why the two companies don't think they should announce that before it's up and ready for the consumer," Pachter said.

Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey declined to comment on unannounced partners.

How the Ideas and Events of 1993 Created the World We Live in Today

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 12:00pm EDT by Adam Rogers

Tags: [edit]

Oh, what a year! 1993 contains the seeds of a new world -- the military nails down GPS, awareness of climate change dawns, a bunch of kids in Illinois code the first useful browser for the web, Sears discontinues its paper catalog, the X-Files debuts and Wired magazine is born.

From the Eye of a Legal Storm, Murdoch's Satellite-TV Hacker Tells All

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 11:00am EDT by Kim Zetter

Tags: [edit]

SAN DIEGO -- Christopher Tarnovsky feels vindicated. The software engineer and former satellite-TV pirate has been on the hot seat for five years, accused of helping his former employer, a Rupert Murdoch company, sabotage a rival to gain the top spot in the global pay-TV wars.

But two weeks ago a jury in the civil lawsuit against that employer, NDS Group, largely cleared the company -- and by extension Tarnovsky -- of piracy, finding NDS guilty of only a single incident of stealing satellite signals, for which Dish was awarded $1,500 in damages.

"I knew this was going to come," Tarnovsky says. "They didn't have any proof or evidence."

The trial was years in the making, yet raised more questions than it answered. It came down to testimony between admitted pirates on both sides who accused each other of lying. Now that it's over Tarnovsky, who was fired by NDS last year, is eager to tell his side of the story.

Dressed in loose jeans, flip-flops and a T-shirt, Tarnovsky, 37, spoke with Wired.com by phone and in an air-conditioned lab in Southern California where he's been running a consultancy since losing his job. Surrounded by boxes of smart cards and thousands of dollars worth of microscopes and computers used for researching chips, he talked excitedly at lightning speed about his strange journey, which began in a top-secret Pentagon communications center, and ended with him working both sides of a heated electronic war over pay TV.

Satellite-TV hacker Chris Tarnovsky opens his laboratory to Threat Level reporter Kim Zetter, providing a unprecedented peek into the world of smart-card hacking.
Editor: Annaliza Savage
Camera: Steve Raines

His story sheds new light on the murky, morally ambiguous world of international satellite pirates and those who do battle with them.

The stakes are high: Earnings in the satellite-TV industry reach the billions. In the first quarter of this year alone, U.S. market leader DirecTV announced revenue of $4.6 billion from more than 17 million U.S. subscribers. Dish Network earned $2.8 billion from nearly 14 million subscribers. Although satellite piracy has greatly diminished from its peak seven to 10 years ago when the events detailed in the civil lawsuit took place, the two companies lost millions in potential revenue, and spent millions more to replace insecure smart cards used in their systems and track down dealers selling pirated smart cards.

Those smart cards are at the center of the controversy over NDS, a British-Israeli company and a majority-owned subsidiary of Murdoch's News Corp. The company makes access cards used by pay-TV systems, most prominently DirecTV -- itself a former Murdoch company. Nagrastar, a plaintiff in the case and NDS's chief competitor, makes access cards used by Dish Network and other runners-up in the market.

According to allegations in the lawsuit, in the late '90s NDS extracted and cracked the proprietary code used in Nagrastar's cards, a fact that NDS doesn't contest. What happened next, though, is hotly disputed. Nagrastar says Tarnovsky used the code to create a device for reprogramming Nagrastar cards into pirate cards, and gave the cards to pirates eager to steal Dish Network's programming. Tarnovsky was also accused of posting to the internet a detailed road map for hacking Nagrastar's cards.

Nagrastar says NDS had an obvious motive for these antics: Their own chip, the so-called P1 or "F Card," had already been thoroughly cracked by pirates, and the company wanted to level the playing field with its competitors.

NDS denied the allegations at trial. The company declined to comment for this article or to confirm details of Tarnovsky's employment other than to say it was pleased that the verdict "ended in a resounding affirmation of NDS and its business ethics and proper conduct."

Tarnovsky began his pirating career in the '90s while serving in the U.S. Army. He had a top-secret SCI security clearance working on cryptographic computers in Belgium for NATO headquarters, and spent a year at Ft. Detrick in Maryland providing support to the National Security Agency for satellite transmissions to Europe.

In 1996, he was stationed in Germany when his colonel sold him a used satellite-TV system, along with two pirated access cards, neither of which worked. Tarnovsky began posting on online pirate forums, and developed contacts in the community, ultimately learning how to fix the cards to access English-language programs from Sky in the United Kingdom.

After leaving the Army and returning to the States, he got a call from Ron Ereiser, a Canadian pirate who'd heard about him through the grapevine. Pirates had found a back door in the P1 card and were vigorously exploiting it to get DirecTV content. But the cards kept failing. In a game of pirate pingpong, DirecTV periodically deployed electronic countermeasures, or ECMs, in the satellite stream that killed the cards in their set-top boxes. Ereiser needed someone to fix the cards.

There was serious black-market money on the line. In Canada, where pirating of U.S. satellite services wasn't considered illegal until 2002, syndicates of dealers did enough business that they could afford to chip in about $50,000 to hire a programmer to reverse engineer the latest cards. Pirate cards would sell for about $200 each, with the profit split between the investors and engineers. Tarnovsky claims Canadian pirate dealers could make $400,000 in a weekend; when Reginald Scullion, a notorious pirate in Canada, was raided in 1998, authorities seized $5.5 million from his bank accounts and safe-deposit boxes, though not all of it was from piracy.

Ereiser, who now works as a consultant to Nagrastar, concedes that the money from piracy was good, but insists that nobody became an overnight millionaire. "It was lucrative," he said in a telephone interview. "But to suggest that millions were being made in a month is an absolute crock."

DirecTV's countermeasures were a nagging drag on this lucrative trade. Every time an ECM was deployed, Ereiser and other dealers would be harangued by customers demanding to have the cards fixed and their TV programs restored.

Tarnovsky, who was known online as "Big Gun," says Ereiser offered him $20,000 to fix cards that were killed by ECMs, and he agreed. Each time NDS created a countermeasure, Tarnovsky would analyze the code and find a way to circumvent the countermeasure. He did it while working full-time as a software engineer for a semiconductor company in Massachusetts.

"I'd be at work and I'd check the IRC (channel) to see if they'd launched their Thursday countermeasure yet," he says. "It was like a chess game for me. I couldn't wait for them to do a countermeasure because I would counter it in minutes."

Tarnovsky suffers from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which he says helped with the detailed work.

"I think so fast," he says.

It wasn't long before NDS came courting. Tarnovsky had a contact at the company to whom he'd begun passing information about holes in its software, even supplying patches to fix them. NDS offered him a job earning $65,000 a year. By the time the company fired him last year, he was earning about $245,000 in salary and bonuses and had another $100,000 in stock options, he says.

The company set him up in a lab in Southern California equipped with a computer, some DirecTV set-top boxes, sample DirecTV cards and NDS source code. There was no fancy equipment at first, but his relationship with NDS and the lab grew over the decade he worked with them. Tarnovsky says the job was a dream come true. While living in Europe he'd once seen a news report showing an engineer at a French satellite company writing countermeasures, sitting in a lab with smart cards piled around him on his desk.

"I always thought it would be so cool to be that guy," Tarnovsky says. "Finally I got the chance."

Tarnovsky had two roles at NDS -- to find holes in its software and work undercover with pirates to discover what they were doing against NDS technology.

To conceal his relationship with NDS from pirates, few people at the company knew his identity. He used the name "Michael George" and for the first four years was paid through other companies, including, for about five months, HarperCollins, the Murdoch-owned book publisher.

"It was very hush-hush, because we didn't know who could be an inside informant," he says.

Part of his job was developing ECMs for NDS. He'd examine pirate NDS cards to determine how they worked, then send instructions to engineers in Israel to create a kill for them.

"I didn’t actually load the gun and pull the trigger but I got to make the bullet," Tarnovsky says.

Among the countermeasures he says he created was one known among pirates as the "Black Sunday" kill -- an elaborate scheme that destroyed tens of thousands of pirate DirecTV cards a week before Super Bowl Sunday in 2001.

Instead of being delivered all at once like other measures, the Black Sunday attack code was sent to pirate cards in about five dozen parts over the course of two months, like a tank transported piece by piece to a battlefield to be assembled in the field. "They never expected us to do this," Tarnovsky says.

The kill didn't last long before pirates found a way to jump-start the cards. But it holds an enduring position in pirate lore; for the first time, they could see a cunning mind at work on the other side.

While Tarnovsky was killing cards, however, he was also helping pirates fix them.

Days before Tarnovsky began working for NDS, the company began phasing in its latest-generation smart card, the P2, which was thought to be virtually uncrackable. But word reached the company that two Bulgarian hackers working for Ereiser had cracked the P2. On NDS's instructions, Tarnovsky met with Ereiser undercover in Calgary to get the code. When he got there, Ereiser offered him $20,000 to work for him fighting whatever countermeasures NDS and DirecTV cooked up to thwart their P2 hack.

NDS considered it a great opportunity for Tarnovsky to maintain his pirate identity, but DirecTV insisted on some controls. Under "Operation Johnny Walker," as they dubbed it, Tarnovsky gave Ereiser a program to create pirate NDS cards, but encrypted it so no one could copy it. The program worked only with a dongle attached to Ereiser's computer and created a limited number of cards that could be killed at any time.

But, according to Nagrastar, Tarnovsky wasn't just helping NDS fight piracy by working undercover and creating ECMs, he was also committing piracy against NDS's competitors to weaken their place in the market.

After NDS engineers in Israel hacked the Nagrastar code in the late '90s, Nagrastar says Tarnovsky created a "stinger" program that turned Nagrastar cards into pirate cards. He allegedly gave the program to a Canadian named Al Menard in 1999 who sold reprogrammed Nagrastar cards for $350 each. Then in December 2000, someone anonymously posted code and detailed instructions for hacking Nagrastar's card to two websites, one of them run by Menard, exposing Dish Network to even more piracy. It was estimated in court testimony that between 100,000 and 165,000 pirated Nagrastar cards were released to the market in the wake of this posting.

Nagrastar says Menard began sending Tarnovsky cash from the sale of the pirate cards. At the end of August 2000, authorities acting on an anonymous tip seized two boxes destined for a mail drop Tarnovsky rented in Texas. Inside, they found a CD and DVD player with $20,000 and $20,100 concealed inside.

The boxes were sent from a phony address for "Regency Audio" in Vancouver to C.T. Electronics at Tarnovsky's address. A customs form for a third package that wasn't seized indicated that it was sent from Menard to Tarnovsky and also contained electronic goods.

Tarnovsky was in Israel at the time, and says he didn't know anything about the packages until he was notified that they'd been seized. He thinks they were sent by someone in Nagrastar's camp who was trying to frame him. He says Nagrastar's accusations about the "stinger" program were baseless, and that he never gave Menard any software.

On Feb. 9, 2001, U.S. Customs agents appeared at his doorstep. On advice of a lawyer, he declined to let them search his house without a warrant. Tarnovsky was never arrested or charged with any crime, but suspicions against him were mounting. NDS gave Tarnovsky a polygraph test, but asked only two, self-interested questions that never touched on the Nagrastar accusations: Had Tarnovsky sold any modified NDS smart cards, or company secrets, since he'd been working for the company? Tarnovsky answered no, and passed the test.

He continued to work for NDS for six years. But then last year, Nagrastar confronted NDS with a sheriff's report showing that fingerprints lifted from the seized electronics equipment sent to Tarnovsky's Texas mail drop belonged to an associate of Menard, raising suspicions again that Tarnovsky might have sold pirate Nagrastar cards without NDS's knowledge. NDS fired him.

Tarnovsky says his termination proves he and NDS weren't conspiring against Nagrastar. Had they been, NDS would have done anything to keep him happy, and quiet. He says the fact that Nagrastar lost the case shows he wasn't pirating on his own either.

"I've never sold a single Nagra card, ever," he says.

Although he was angry at NDS for abandoning him, he told Wired.com before the trial ended that he hoped to work for the company again.

"I want to make sure that NDS wins this lawsuit because that will clear my name," he said at the time.

When it was suggested that someone might view this as motivation for him to lie on NDS's behalf, he disagreed.

"That's crazy. I could go to jail," he said. "I would never perjure myself for some company."

Since NDS fired him he's been consulting for two semiconductor companies and a manufacturer of dongle tokens, but he misses his life in electronic warfare. If NDS doesn't want him, he says he'd be happy to work for Nagrastar -- jumping sides once again.

"I could design a whole entire chip for them like I did for NDS," he says. "NDS thinks today that their technology is superior to everybody else's and it probably is, because they're 17 years ahead of Nagra technologically. But Nagra could catch up overnight if they used my services.

"I'm a very valuable asset as far as smart-card technology goes," he adds. "I know everything about (NDS) as far as their intellectual property models go."

He offered his services to the company last year, while the lawsuit was pending. Nagrastar declined.

Asia, Notebooks Boost Dell Q1, But Is Uplift a Fluke or Trend?

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 9:15am EDT by Associated Press

Tags: [edit]

Dell's best expectation in the first quarter based on growth in Asia and a 43 per cent increase in notebook sales from Q1 last year, sending shares up. But shareholders will have to determine if this is evidence that Michael Dell's turnaround strategy is working -- or if this is just a one-time wonder.

May 30, 1898: Krypton Discovered, Decades Before Superman Arrives

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Randy Alfred

Tags: [edit]

1898: Two British researchers discover the element krypton. It's real, but it would inspire fantastic fiction.

William Ramsay, a Scot, and his student Morris Travers, an Englishman, were searching for gases in the helium family. They boiled a sample of liquefied air until they got rid of the water, oxygen, nitrogen, helium and argon. Then they placed the residue in a Plücker tube connected to an induction coil. It produced a spectrum with bright yellow and green lines.

Because they had suspected its presence, but had to look for it by removing all that other stuff, Ramsay and Travers gave the element with atomic number 36 the name krypton, from the Greek kryptos for hidden (think cryptography or encryption).

Within weeks, the scientifically dynamic duo had detected a duet of other noble gases: neon and xenon. Ramsay was already responsible for discovering helium (with Lord Rayleigh) in 1894 and argon in 1895, giving him ownership of nearly an entire column of the periodic table. (The noble gases used to be called the inert gases, but they have been found to be slightly reactive, forming compounds such as krypton difluoride and xenon tetroxide.)

King Edward VII made Ramsay a Knight Commander of the Order of Bath in 1902. Ramsay received the 1904 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Krypton has a variety of uses today: in flashes for high-speed photography, in fluorescent lights in combination with argon, and to make so-called neon signs that have a greenish-yellow light. (Neon itself glows red.) Between 1960 and 1983, the meter was defined as 1,650,763.73 wavelengths in a vacuum of the orange-red radiation of the krypton 86 isotope.

When Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman in Action Comics No. 1 (published June 1938), they named their superhero's home planet after the chemical element discovered 40 years earlier. Retellings of Superman's origins place his arrival on Earth around the time of World War I, a mere 20 years after Ramsay and Traver's discovery of krypton.

Siegel and Shuster may have been inspired by the element's cryptic name, its ghastly glow or perhaps just its sound, like George Eastman favoring the strength of the letter K.

Regardless, Superman and his legion of fans have made the fictional planet Krypton far better known than the real element. The fictional mineral kryptonite, which threatens Superman's strength and vitality, even has a real-life counterpart, almost.

Mining researchers in Jadar, Serbia, in 2007 unearthed some sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide and learned that's what's written on a case of rock containing kryptonite in the film Superman Returns. "The new mineral does not contain fluorine," a mineralogist told the BBC, "and is white rather than green but, in all other respects, the chemistry matches that for the rock containing kryptonite."

But the miners named it jadarite, because the mineral does not contain the element krypton, and internationally accepted rules of nomenclature thus prevented it from being named kryptonite.

Spoilsports.

Then again, doesn't Jadar sound like the name of one of Superman's cousins or something on the planet Krypton?

Source: Various

Is There Any Country That Doesn't Have a Space Program?

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Ben Perreau

Tags: [edit]

As technology makes the world smaller, it's also helping more countries escape to the heavens. (Ground control to Major Olawale!) But don't start daydreaming of UN meetings on Mars and space walks for peace: These space programs are all about blasting surveillance tech, comet chasers, super telescopes, and celestial probes into the (increasingly crowded) cosmos.

Nigeria
Program Founded: 1998
Budget: $93 million (initial funding)
Yes, Nigeria actually has its own space agency. The organization sent up its first satellite, a weather unit, back in 2003. In May 2007, China assisted in the launch of NigComSat-1, which helps provide Internet access to rural areas of the country.

Algeria
Program Founded: 2002
Budget: Unknown
France helped establish a constellation of desert launch sites more than 60 years ago. In 2002, the newly formed Agence Spatiale Algerienne blasted up Alsat-1, a 200-pound cube that has beamed back more than 1,000 photos as well as intel for disaster relief.

Israel
Program Founded: 1983
Budget: $50 million (est.)
Israel's Shavit launch vehicle is used primarily for communications, imaging, and research satellites — always over the Mediterranean to avoid flying above hostile neighbors. The first Israeli astronaut, Ilan Ramon, died aboard the NASA shuttle Columbia.

India
Program Founded: 1972
Budget: $1 billion
India's space agency is racing to be the sixth program to reach the moon (after Russia, the US, Europe, Japan, and China) with Chandrayaan-1 — an $83 million lunar orbiter carrying NASA and ESA instruments. India aims to send up its own manned lunar mission by 2020.

Iran
Program Founded: 2003
Budget: $100 million
In October 2005, Iran launched its first satellite, Sina-1, aboard a Russian rocket. Earlier this year, the country fired its own rocket, Kavoshgar-1, designed to scout future orbital paths. By 2010, Tehran expects to deploy four additional satellites.

Brazil
Program Founded: 1994
Budget: $125 million
In 2003, an explosion on the launch pad took 21 lives. But Brazil rebounded the next year, when a VSB-30 rocket reached an altitude of 160 miles. In 2006, Marcos Pontes became the first Brazilian in space, floating aboard the International Space Station for eight days.

Japan
Program Founded: 2003
Budget: $2.5 billion
Japan has yet to build a spacecraft fit for humans. But it did send the first journalist into space: 18 years ago, Toyohiro Akiyama spent a week on the Russian space station Mir. The Japanese are eyeing a lunar landing in 2020 and hoping to build a base on the moon by 2030.

China
Program Founded: 1993
Budget: $2 billion (est.)
From the Gobi Desert, China sent its first human into orbit in 2003 — becoming the fourth agency to do so. Today, manned missions are taking off on a regular basis. Officials are planning China's first space walk this fall and expect to launch a moon rover by 2012.

European Space Agency
Program Founded: 1975
Budget: $5 billion
On the ESA's plate: launching the James Webb Space Telescope (with NASA and Canada) in 2013. The following year, its Rosetta spacecraft will meet up with 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko for the first long-term analysis of a comet.

Russia
Program Founded: 1920s
Budget: $1.5 billion
Russia helps fund its space program by licensing its rocket tech and assisting other countries' initiatives. (South Korea paid $25 million to send up its first citizen.) A joint effort with China aims to launch a soil-collecting satellite to the Martian moon Phobos in 2009.

* Wired apologizes to those countries funding space exploration that we did not mention, such as Argentina, Australia, Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Indonesia, Italy, Kazakhstan, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, the UAE, the UK, and, likely, North Korea and Iraq.

Clive Thompson on How Man-Made Noise May Be Altering Earth's Ecology

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Clive Thompson

Tags: [edit]

Bernie Krause listens to nature for a living. The 69-year-old is a field recording scientist: He heads into the wilderness to document the noises made by native fauna — crickets chirping in the Amazon rain forest, frogs croaking in the Australian outback.

But Krause has noticed something alarming. The natural sound of the world is vanishing. He'll be deep inside the Amazon, recording that cricket, but when he listens carefully he also hears machinery: The distant howl of a 747 or the dull roar of a Hummer miles way.

Krause has a word for the pristine acoustics of nature: biophony. It's what the world sounds like in the absence of humans. But in 40 percent of the locations where Krause has recorded over the past 40 years, human-generated noise has infiltrated the wilderness. "It's getting harder and harder to find places that aren't contaminated," he says.

This isn't just a matter of aesthetics. The contamination of biophony may soon become a serious environmental issue — Krause says that man-made sounds are already wreaking havoc with animal communication. We worry about the carbon emissions from SUVs and airplanes; maybe we should be equally concerned about the racket they cause.

Krause's argument is simple. In a biophony, animals divide up the acoustic spectrum so they don't interfere with one another's voices. He shows me a spectrogram of a wilderness recording, in which all the component noises are mapped according to pitch. It looks like the musical score for an orchestra, with each instrument in its place. No two species are using the same frequency. "That's part of how they coexist so well," Krause says. When they issue mating calls or all-important warning cries, they aren't masked by the noises of other animals.

But what happens when man-made noise — anthrophony, as Krause dubs it — intrudes on the natural symphony? Maybe it's the low rumble of nearby construction or the high whine of a turboprop. Either way, it interferes with a segment of the spectrum already in use, and suddenly some animal can't make itself heard. The information flow in the jungle is compromised.

Krause has heard this happen all over the world. For example, the population of spadefoot toads in the Yosemite region of the Sierras is declining rapidly, and Krause thinks it's because of low-flying military training missions in the area. The toad calls lose their synchronicity, and coyotes and owls home in on individual frogs trying to rejoin the chorus.

And as Krause has discovered, it doesn't take much to disrupt a soundscape. California's Lincoln Meadow, for example, has undergone only a tiny bit of logging, but the acoustic imprint of the region has completely changed in tandem with the landscape, and some species seem to have been displaced. The area looks the same as ever, "but if you listen to it, the density and diversity of sound is diminished," Krause says. "It has a weird feeling."

Biologists were initially skeptical of Krause's theory, but he's slowly gaining converts. Now even bigwigs like Harvard's E. O. Wilson have gone on record in support.

So how do you quiet an increasingly cacophonous world? Perhaps we should be developing not just clean tech but "quiet" tech, industrial machinery designed to run as silently as possible. More regulations could help, too. Cities have long had noise ordinances; wilderness areas could benefit from tighter protections as well.

Some of this is just about educating ourselves. We all recognize ecological tragedies by sight — when we see pictures of clear-cut areas, say, or melting Arctic ice shelves. Now we need to learn to listen to the earth, too.

Last year, Krause brought biophony to the masses by creating an extraordinarily cool add-on for Google Earth. Download it from his WildSanctuary.com site and you can click on dozens of locations worldwide to hear snippets of their soundscape.

I select the Amazon rain forest and my office is suddenly filled with a mesmerizing mix of hoots, cries, and rustling. It's spooky — like nothing I've ever heard before.

And like nothing I'll ever hear again, if we don't watch out. "Earth has a voice," Krause says. "We can't let it go silent."

Email clive@clivethompson.net.

Permalink for 'Wired__Top_Stories/2008/05/30/D_Link_MediaLounge_Extender___151__Like_Apple_TV_For_Windows_PC'

D-Link MediaLounge Extender — Like Apple TV For Windows PC

Posted: May 30th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Gadget Lab

Tags: [edit]

D-Link's newest media extender acts a lot like an Apple TV. Too bad an Xbox 360 can do the same job for the same amount of money and play both videogames AND DVDs.

Android Comes to Life: Video, Pics of Google's iPhone Challenger

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 8:00pm EDT by monkey_bites

Tags: [edit]

Check out our exclusive screenshots of Android, Google's nascent operating system for next-generation mobile phones. When it's released later this year, it's sure to give the iPhone a run for its money.

Making Renewable, Carbon-Neutral Gasoline ... From Algae

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 7:10pm EDT

Tags: [edit]

A San Diego start-up says it's using algae to create "green crude" that is chemically identical to petroleum and can be refined into renewable, carbon-neutral gasoline. Energy experts say it might be on to something big.

Automate Your Home With Open-Source Software

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 7:00pm EDT by How-To Wiki

Tags: [edit]

Forget to turn the lights off? Want to warm up the hot tub while you're still on the slopes? Use free software and inexpensive wiring components to control your home appliances from afar. In Wired's How-To Wiki.

Waterproof Gadgets for Summer Fun

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 6:50pm EDT by Gadget Lab

Tags: [edit]

With summer coming up, it's time to take a look at the best -- and worst -- waterproof gadgets. We've got a handful of the highlights, from the Sony Walkman to waterproof flash media cards.

Prosthetic Robot Arm Wows the Crowd

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 6:15pm EDT by Gadget Lab

Tags: [edit]

Inventor Dean Kamen shows a video of the robotic, mind-controlled prosthetic arm he's working on at the D6 conference in Carlsbad, California today. The video shows an arm with an impressive range of motion, and enough sensitivity that it can pick up a grape without crushing it.

Military Recruits Thousands More Warbots for New Unmanned Surge

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 6:05pm EDT by Danger Room

Tags: [edit]

Up to 4,000 more bomb-handling robots could be headed to Iraq and Afghanistan in a new, unmanned surge. It's part of a $400 million deal that's the biggest military contract of its kind, ever.

Comcast.net Hijacked, Redirected

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 6:00pm EDT by Threat Level

Tags: [edit]

Cable giant Comcast was the victim of a DNS hijacking beginning late Wednesday and into early Thursday. The hacker group Kryogeniks claimed responsibility for the stunt, which blocked Comcast customers from accessing their webmail service. Customers were redirected to a page in which the hijackers boasted of the ploy.

The Dawn of Free Internet Access?

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 4:45pm EDT by Epicenter

Tags: [edit]

The FCC is considering auctioning off a slice of spectrum with a free provision -- meaning millions of Americans could eventually enjoy free, broadband web access.

Comcast Hijackers Say They Warned the Company First

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 4:45pm EDT by Threat Level

Tags: [edit]

In an interview with Wired.com, the DNS hijackers who took over ownership of Comcast.net say they told the company about the security hole that made the attack possible. When Comcast allegedly hung up on them, they got mad.

Custom-Built Gaming PC Performs Like a Ferrari, Sounds Like a Mack Truck

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 3:10pm EDT by Gadget Lab

Tags: [edit]

We asked boutique PC-maker Puget to build us its best gaming PC. $9,600 later they delivered. But the greatest cost isn't the price tag; it's the blow-dryer-loud sound the cooling system makes.

New Report Reveals Huge Variation Between Cities' Carbon Footprints

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 2:25pm EDT by Wired Science

Tags: [edit]

A new report shows that urban dwellers have a smaller carbon footprint than their rural neighbors, but that even greater variations exist between cities.

Thanks for Nothing: Fans Rip Metallica a New One

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 2:00pm EDT by Listening Post

Tags: [edit]

Metallica does seem like it is trying to make amends from its full-court press against file sharing circa 2000. But fans are treating the new stance like a case of too little, too late, and when we wrote about this the other day the venom started pouring out. Are Lars & Co. beyond redemption? Take our poll.

A Robot to Conquer Antarctica? Maybe

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 11:15am EDT by Associated Press

Tags: [edit]

They're effective in space and in the deepest oceans, but there is yet to be a robot built that can handle the brutal conditions of Antarctica. That may be about to change.

Mercenaries Sue San Diego

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 11:14am EDT by Danger Room

Tags: [edit]

San Diego doesn't seem to want Blackwater to build a training facility in their fair city. The firm many think of as a bunch of mercenaries -- but which calls itself "a great American company that provides innovative private sector solutions to US Government and non US Government clients" -- is fighting back, with a lawsuit. We hope this doesn't, er, escalate.

Ancient Martian Ocean Would Have Been Salty 'Dead Sea'

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 11:00am EDT by Wired Science

Tags: [edit]

As scientists and space fans around the world wait to see if the Phoenix Lander will discover water on Mars now, a separate group of scientists have some bad news about the possible presence of life in ancient Martian oceans: The water was probably too salty and acidic to allow life to develop.

Update Your Mac, Find the iPhone 2.0 Easter Egg

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 10:49am EDT by Gadget Lab

Tags: [edit]

Don't put off that Mac software update: There's a new icon Mac OS X 10.5.3 that may reveal the form factor of the new iPhone, which nobody has confirmed is coming out in 11 days. If you believe your eyes it's a big squarer and narrower, like the iPod Touch. Hmmmm ...

Tech Industry Fueling Palestinian Economic Hopes

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 10:40am EDT by Associated Press

Tags: [edit]

The talent and desire are there, but the region's torment has retarded economic growth, especially in the tech sector. But the Palestinians are reaching out to foreign partners to jump-start things, and finding them -- even Israelis.

VIA Nano: Prepare for Ludicrous Ultraportable Speed

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 9:52am EDT by Gadget Lab

Tags: [edit]

The Via Nano processor starts shipping today. Why do you care? Imagine running Photoshop on your ultraportable without a hiccup. Or playing Blu-ray without a snag. Yes, size does matter -- but power even more.

Facebook, The Princess Phone and a Mattress for Sergey and Eric

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 8:21am EDT by Epicenter

Tags: [edit]

How hip (or young) do you have to be not to know what a Princess Phone is? It doesn't matter, if you're Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, the top faces at Facebook. When Barry Diller calls you the "Princess Phone of our generation" you go out and buy one and present it to Kara Swisher as she's about to interview you at D6.

Best Animated Videos: Pass It On

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 8:06am EDT by Listening Post

Tags: [edit]

Listening Post gets a heads-up on a video for "Sideways Here We Come" from our favorite Kiwi post-punkers Die! Die! Die! -- and it's a cardboard cutout good time. Gets us thinking about other interesting animated shorts that have functioned as videos. Too bad it's a work day ...

Yahoo Not Under Siege: Yang

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 7:35am EDT by Associated Press

Tags: [edit]

Yahoo is not operating under a siege mentality, the management team is focussed on being "incredibly relevant" to customers and the company is reorganizing around four pillars: home page, search, mail and mobile services. That was Jerry Yang's story at D6, and he stuck to it.

Is Microsoft Stuck With a Norwegian Herring?

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 12:30am EDT by Liz Gunnison, Portfolio.com

Tags: [edit]

News from Portfolio.com

Also on Portfolio

Gawker Media Rumor Control

A Feisty Ad Server Catches Google's Eye

Lawyers: Can't Anybody Speak English?

Subscribe to Portfolio magazine

Even as it agreed in January to plunk down $1.23 billion to buy a promising but problematic search company in Norway, Microsoft knew that the company had some accounting matters to address.

Now, it appears, the acquired company, Fast Search & Transfer, may have some criminal matters to work out: Suspicions about the Norwegian search-engine company's revenue reporting are now in the hands of the Oslo police.

Norway's financial supervisory authority, Kredittilsynet, said its review of Fast Search's previously disclosed accounting problems not only appeared to have violated accounting standards, they may have broken the law too.

The development is bad news for Microsoft, which snapped up Fast Search as a potential Google-buster. Fast Search, which for a while was also known as the Google of Norway, had search-engine technology that industry experts said was better than Google's and could handle truly massive corporate projects.

Goldman Sachs estimated last year that the company would grow its revenue 27 percent in 2007. Over the years, Fast Search appeared to benefit from big contracts with customers such as AT&T, Comcast, and the Walt Disney Co.

At one point, Intel was interested in buying the Norwegian rising star, but Microsoft grabbed the prize. At the time, Microsoft was still digesting it $6 billion acquisition of the digital-advertising company aQuantive—a deal that came just one month after Google said it would pay $3.1 billion for DoubleClick.

In its haste to grab Fast Search, however, Microsoft looked past the company's problems: They include, but aren't limited to, accounting irregularities that began to appear as Microsoft began to look over its books.

In the second quarter of 2007, Fast Search reported an operating loss of $38 million on revenue of only $35 million—a full $20 million below forecasts. The loss widened in the following quarter, leading the Norwegian stock exchange to delist Fast Search on December 12.

That same day, Fast Search said it would review its accounting for all of 2006 and 2007. The latest unaudited results show revenue growth of 7 percent for last year, which is far below Goldman's forecast.

Still, Microsoft pursued the acquisition, completing the deal on April 28.

Kredittilsynet, the supervisory agency, was equally determined. It referred Fast Search to investigators at Økokrim, the Norwegian National Authority for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime.

Økokrim last week concurred that the nature of the irregularities and the amount by which Fast Search apparently inflated its accounts were serious matters warranting prosecution. But the agency said it was too busy to open a criminal investigation.

Rather than let the matter rest, the market supervisor turned it over to the Oslo police for investigation. Aftenposten, a Norwegian newspaper, characterized Kredittilsynet's decision to involve the police as an unprecedented step in that country.

As of now, it's unclear what the Oslo police have in store for Fast Search—or for former company C.E.O. John Markus Lervik, who is now the vice president for enterprise search at Microsoft.

Methane Poses Climate Risk, Energy Opportunity

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Eliza Strickland

Tags: [edit]

Methane reserves deep in the ocean and in arctic permafrost might trigger runaway global warming. But they've also got the potential to provide huge amounts of power, a possibility that is attracting the interest of energy companies.

Methane hydrate, a strange form of natural gas, has recently become a fascination for energy-hungry nations from the United States to Japan and India. Hydrate is found in oceans across the world, where the gas is trapped in icy structures below the seabed, and also lies beneath the Arctic's permafrost.

A paper published this week in Nature suggests that the release of methane hydrates, also known as clathrates, may have triggered a very rapid period of global warming 635 million years ago -- and may do so again. But those same hydrates are also a tempting target for energy production.

"What we've been asked to do is to make this a viable option for the policy makers in the future, and to figure out what's available to us," says Ray Boswell, a researcher with the U.S. Department of Energy's methane hydrates R&D program. "You don't want to find out that you need it, and then find out that you're 30 years down the science and technology curve."

The Gulf of Mexico is estimated to hold more than 6,500 trillion cubic feet of hydrate in sandstone reservoirs, currently the best candidates for commercial exploitation, according to the U.S. Minerals Management Service. If only 5 percent of that hydrate could be tapped, it would yield more than 300 trillion cubic feet of gas. By comparison, the United States' reserve of conventional natural gas is currently estimated at 211 trillion cubic feet.

Researchers romantically call methane hydrates "the fire in the ice," since the frosty chunks burn if you set a match to them. But it's not just romance that's drawing energy companies to the frozen fuel. While methane hydrates have previously been too expensive to extract on a commercial scale, the increasing price of oil -- now more than $130 per barrel -- means the hydrates might soon become a profitable energy source. Chevron has been involved in the gulf research, and BP is exploring for hydrates in Alaska. Japanese engineers reportedly pumped hydrates from a test well in Canada's Northwest Territories this last winter.

"Everybody knows there's a lot of it," Boswell says. "Now, our goal is to understand the ramifications: Does it have potential as an energy resource, and if so, how would you go about getting it? And how does it fit into climate issues?"

It's that last question that opens up the can of worms. Even as some researchers wonder whether methane hydrate could play an important role in powering the 21st century, others ask whether it has played a critical part in catastrophic climate shifts in the past -- and if it could do so again.

The troubling questions arise from prehistoric climate blips that researchers are still struggling to understand.

The most recent abrupt climate change occurred 55 million years ago during the Eocene greenhouse event, when ice disappeared from the poles and trees grew in Antarctica. From analyzing the fossil record, researchers determined that there were very high levels of methane in the atmosphere at that time.

Some paleoclimate researchers hypothesize that a gradually warming climate brought oceans to a temperature tipping point around 55 million years ago, which caused icy methane hydrate structures to melt and let the gas bubble up to the ocean's surface in a long, enormous burp. Since methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, if it were released into the atmosphere in a huge gush, it may have caused temperatures to spike dramatically.

This theoretical precedent has led to speculation in popular science books that our current bout of man-made global warming could cause another catastrophic methane release. But the dominant scientific paradigm is that methane is more likely to be an issue over the long term.

David Archer is an ocean chemist at the University of Chicago who called methane the "crouching tiger of the carbon cycle" on a respected climate blog.

"It's predicted that with a doubled [carbon dioxide] concentration, the deep ocean could eventually change its temperature by about three degrees," Archer told Wired.com. "Three degrees would eventually get rid of all the methane in the ocean. But at what rate -- that's the question."

After conducting his most recent modeling experiments, Archer says that methane released from the ocean could accelerate global warming over a time frame of thousands of years. But we don't have a serious cause for alarm within our lifetime, he says. Smaller releases of methane hydrate are likely as the Arctic permafrost thaws during this century, "but those are equivalent to a volcano eruption," Archer says. "It's not a doomsday thing."

But the lead author of the new Nature paper, Martin Kennedy of the University of California at Riverside, explicitly called a release of methane hydrate "a doomsday scenario for the climate," and called for far more research into methane's role in the world's climate.

While U.S. scientists are proceeding fairly slowly, investigating both the risks and benefits of methane hydrates, other countries are on a faster track.

Japan, South Korea, China and India are all determined to make methane hydrates a viable energy source. India spent $35 million on a 2006 expedition to explore deposits along its coasts, while South Korea, which currently relies on imported natural gas to fuel most of its power plants, has pledged to start commercial production by 2015.

The world may have found a successor to the gold rush and the oil boom: the methane bubble.

May 29, 1935: Hoover Dam Set in Concrete

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Tony Long

Tags: [edit]

1935: The last concrete is poured at the Hoover Dam site, four months before President Franklin Roosevelt dedicates one of the largest hydroelectric projects in U.S. history.

Hoover Dam was conceived in the early 1920s as a way of reclaiming California's flood-prone Imperial Valley, improving water supply to the seven Colorado River-basin states, and generating electric power for Southern California, which was already growing rapidly.

Because the site chosen -- on the Colorado River about 30 miles southeast of Las Vegas -- was adjacent to Boulder Canyon, the undertaking was christened the Boulder Canyon Dam Project.

It was a formidable project. At the time of its completion, Hoover Dam was the world's largest concrete structure, a distinction it held until 1942 when the Grand Coulee Dam opened. It was also, at the time, the largest public-works program in U.S. history.

Construction began in 1932 with the diversion of the Colorado River around the site and the building of two cofferdams to protect against flooding. The surrounding canyon walls were cleared of loose rock and reinforced, and the first concrete was poured in June 1933.

Owing to the problems of uneven cooling and contraction -- which could cause the dam face to crack under stress -- concrete was poured in five-foot increments rather than continuously, to assure structural integrity. A special system of cold-water pipes sped the cooling of the concrete.

The dam stands 725 feet high, now ranking it second behind California's Oroville Dam. Its 17 turbines generate up to 2,074 megawatts of hydroelectric power. (Capacity was increased incrementally until 1961.) The damming of the Colorado River also created Lake Mead, named for the dam's project manager, Elwood Mead.

The dam was built at considerable human cost: 112 workers died from various causes, including accidents, heat stroke and heart failure. A brief workers' strike in 1931 failed, although working conditions improved in its wake. The Six Companies, which ran the project, began providing water on a regular basis: probably a good idea, because temperatures at the work site routinely reached 120 degrees.

The real controversy came later. Although originally referred to as the Boulder Canyon Dam Project, it became known as Hoover Dam after President Hoover's interior secretary, Ray Wilbur, so named it during a speech at the site. Given Hoover's unpopularity at the time -- his policies were widely blamed for helping start the Great Depression -- it was not a popular choice.

Nevertheless, the name stuck, even appearing on official documents, until Hoover was swept out of the White House by FDR in 1932. Roosevelt's interior secretary, Harold Ickes, no fan of Hoover's, officially changed the name to Boulder Dam. It remained that way until President Truman, under pressure from Congress, restored Hoover's name in 1947.

(Source: PBS)

Gallery: Inside the Architecture of Authority

Posted: May 29th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Keith Axline

Tags: [edit]

: Courtesy Richard Ross

A new book by photographer Richard Ross, Architecture of Authority, examines the way institutional buildings exert power over people. Ross managed to gain impressive access to all kinds of secretive or high-security buildings, from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, to the supermax high-security Pelican Bay prison in California. Ross credits his unprecedented access to a combination of persistence and sincere curiosity. "Many of these people want to show you these places once they know that you're interested in their world," he says.

To question the pervasiveness of intimidating, "disgusting" architecture, the images in Ross' book are both striking and inviting. Ross intentionally makes the photos of oppressive structures look seductive. "You can convince people a lot easier by whispering in their ear rather than hitting them over the head," says Ross.

Following is a selection from the book along with Ross's commentary. Ross has an exhibition at the Aperture Gallery in New York which is now open to the public.

Left: Pictured is the prison's lethal injection chamber. "Ninety percent of inmates who enter Angola [Louisiana State Penitentiary], never leave," Ross says. Inmates work on the prison farm and are not allowed to eat the cows they raise because the quality of the meat is too high. Meals at Angola can cost as little as 17 cents per person since so much of the food is grown on site. Twice a year, inmates enjoy a rodeo on the prison grounds with barbecues and bull riding.

: Courtesy Richard Ross

Pelican Bay prison holds some of the most dangerous inmates in California. Inmates are often accompanied by four guards during transport within the facility. The light coming through the ceiling in this photo is likely the only sunlight that inmates see during their sentence. In spite of the immense security, Ross says, prisoners are still able to get messages to the outside world to carry out deals and assassinations.

: Courtesy Richard Ross

Opened in 1829, the Eastern State Penitentiary is one of the oldest prisons in the United States. When it was built, the word 'penitentiary' signified that prisoners were to be penitent in the eyes of God. Even the design of the walls was meant to resemble those of a church.

"In the Eastern State Penitentiary they had skylights and natural light come in because they equated the idea of light and God as one," Ross says. He draws visual parallels in his book between prisons, churches and law enforcement institutions as places where people are intended to seek some form of redemption.

: Courtesy Richard Ross

Nothing is private in this isolation room, a fact conveyed by the prominent camera in the corner. Ross says the use of rooms like these is at the extreme of an authority continuum that begins in preschool (also featured in his book):

"Situations evolve without anybody noticing," Ross says. "Civil liberties are taken away piecemeal but they're rarely given back. So it starts with kids giving up some of their independence to sit on the circle at Montessori school, and that's socialization, or learning to live within a group, but at some point it gets a lot rougher than that."

: Courtesy Richard Ross

There is often a third party present in interrogations, Ross says, who sits behind the interrogator. This adds an ominous element of uncertainty. The prisoner is left to wonder whether this person has the ability to intervene, and if so, whether it would be on his behalf or not:

"It's almost as if they act like an omnipotent presence. The silent voice. It's almost Buddhist. They don't say anything. The person being interrogated could look over at that person and wonder if this person is going to tip the scales. Are they going to intercede at any point? At what point do they intercede? At what point do they stop being a neutral, silent observer? Their role is always confused there. The uncertainty assists in the interrogation process."

: Courtesy Richard Ross

In photographing military and law enforcement buildings, Ross never directly requests to photograph the most sensitive areas.

"When I go to a Secret Service interview room, I would never say to them, 'Could I see your interrogation room?' They would bristle and I wouldn't get in," he explains.

In the case of Abu Ghraib prison, the notorious scene of torture and abuse of prisoners, this was particularly important:

"If you look at a continuum of a conversation, an interview, interrogation and torture, where's that line?" Ross asks. "By the time prisoners are in Abu Ghraib, that's an interrogation room. They're not fucking around and they're not standing on ceremony."

: Courtesy Richard Ross

Ross' father was a New York City police officer at this precinct. "I grew up there," Ross says. Though he died 20 years ago, Ross says his father would be amused that he is able to make a living by photographing these institutions.

: Courtesy Richard Ross

Though the cells in this prison have been removed, it is a classic example of a panopticon, where prisoners are controlled by the actual or perceived gaze of guards at a central position. One of the most efficient architectures of authority, the simple design allows many people to be controlled by very few.

: Courtesy Richard Ross

For Ross, this is the signature photo of the project. Shot in August 2005 in almost 120-degree heat, within a window of five minutes, the photo was almost prohibited by the officers on-site.

: Courtesy Richard Ross

The curtain in this photo segregates the women from the men in a small corner of the mosque. Ross says he wanted to give an idea of the way women are weighted or valued in these buildings.

: Courtesy Richard Ross

"These mosques are the architecture of our world. They're really gorgeous," Ross says. "In any of the mosques there's never any image of anything figurative. There's no idol worshipping in a mosque."

: Courtesy Richard Ross

"I was in there photographing that room. It was empty and then a kid, probably in his early twenties who is Arabic, Iraqi, comes in and says, 'Are you a photographer?' We need someone to help us document the birth of the Iraqi constitution," Ross says.

"I ended up going with them for several days photographing sheiks, the president, Muqtada al-Sadr, al-Maliki, with real flexibility of going from one side of the yellow tape to the other," Ross says.

"They were really cool about that. They were great people. I would be having lunch with the oil minister and he would be saying things like 'Thank you for liberating our people,' and I said, 'Don't thank me, I had nothing to do with it, and I would've voted against it.'"

Why Do We Accept Signatures by Fax?

Posted: May 28th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Bruce Schneier

Tags: [edit]

Aren't fax signatures the weirdest thing? It's trivial to cut and paste -- with real scissors and glue -- anyone's signature onto a document so that it'll look real when faxed. There is so little security in fax signatures that it's mind-boggling that anyone accepts them.

Yet people do, all the time. I've signed book contracts, credit card authorizations, nondisclosure agreements and all sorts of financial documents -- all by fax. I even have a scanned file of my signature on my computer, so I can virtually cut and paste it into documents and fax them directly from my computer without ever having to print them out. What in the world is going on here?

And, more importantly, why are fax signatures still being used after years of experience? Why aren't there many stories of signatures forged through the use of fax machines?

The answer comes from looking at fax signatures not as an isolated security measure, but in the context of the larger system. Fax signatures work because signed faxes exist within a broader communications context.

In a 2003 paper, Economics, Psychology, and Sociology of Security, professor Andrew Odlyzko looks at fax signatures and concludes:

Although fax signatures have become widespread, their usage is restricted. They are not used for final contracts of substantial value, such as home purchases. That means that the insecurity of fax communications is not easy to exploit for large gain. Additional protection against abuse of fax insecurity is provided by the context in which faxes are used. There are records of phone calls that carry the faxes, paper trails inside enterprises and so on. Furthermore, unexpected large financial transfers trigger scrutiny. As a result, successful frauds are not easy to carry out by purely technical means.

He's right. Thinking back, there really aren't ways in which a criminal could use a forged document sent by fax to defraud me. I suppose an unscrupulous consulting client could forge my signature on an non-disclosure agreement and then sue me, but that hardly seems worth the effort. And if my broker received a fax document from me authorizing a money transfer to a Nigerian bank account, he would certainly call me before completing it.

Credit card signatures aren't verified in person, either -- and I can already buy things over the phone with a credit card -- so there are no new risks there, and Visa knows how to monitor transactions for fraud. Lots of companies accept purchase orders via fax, even for large amounts of stuff, but there's a physical audit trail, and the goods are shipped to a physical address -- probably one the seller has shipped to before. Signatures are kind of a business lubricant: mostly, they help move things along smoothly.

Except when they don't.

On October 30, 2004, Tristian Wilson was released from a Memphis jail on the authority of a forged fax message. It wasn't even a particularly good forgery. It wasn't on the standard letterhead of the West Memphis Police Department. The name of the policeman who signed the fax was misspelled. And the time stamp on the top of the fax clearly showed that it was sent from a local McDonald's.

The success of this hack has nothing to do with the fact that it was sent over by fax. It worked because the jail had lousy verification procedures. They didn't notice any discrepancies in the fax. They didn't notice the phone number from which the fax was sent. They didn't call and verify that it was official. The jail was accustomed to getting release orders via fax, and just acted on this one without thinking. Would it have been any different had the forged release form been sent by mail or courier?

Yes, fax signatures always exist in context, but sometimes they are the linchpin within that context. If you can mimic enough of the context, or if those on the receiving end become complacent, you can get away with mischief.

Arguably, this is part of the security process. Signatures themselves are poorly defined. Sometimes a document is valid even if not signed: A person with both hands in a cast can still buy a house. Sometimes a document is invalid even if signed: The signer might be drunk, or have a gun pointed at his head. Or he might be a minor. Sometimes a valid signature isn't enough; in the United States there is an entire infrastructure of "notary publics" who officially witness signed documents. When I started filing my tax returns electronically, I had to sign a document stating that I wouldn't be signing my income tax documents. And banks don't even bother verifying signatures on checks less than $30,000; it's cheaper to deal with fraud after the fact than prevent it.

Over the course of centuries, business and legal systems have slowly sorted out what types of additional controls are required around signatures, and in which circumstances.

Those same systems will be able to sort out fax signatures, too, but it'll be slow. And that's where there will be potential problems. Already fax is a declining technology. In a few years it'll be largely obsolete, replaced by PDFs sent over e-mail and other forms of electronic documentation. In the past, we've had time to figure out how to deal with new technologies. Now, by the time we institutionalize these measures, the technologies are likely to be obsolete.

What that means is people are likely to treat fax signatures -- or whatever replaces them -- exactly the same way as paper signatures. And sometimes that assumption will get them into trouble.

But it won't cause social havoc. Wilson's story is remarkable mostly because it's so exceptional. And even he was rearrested at his home less than a week later. Fax signatures may be new, but fake signatures have always been a possibility. Our legal and business systems need to deal with the underlying problem -- false authentication -- rather than focus on the technology of the moment. Systems need to defend themselves against the possibility of fake signatures, regardless of how they arrive.

---

Bruce Schneier is Chief Security Technology Officer of BT, and author of Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World.

Business Never Far From the Surface at D6

Posted: May 28th, 2008, 8:35pm EDT by Epicenter

Tags: [edit]

Arianna Huffington is blogging from the lobby. Jeff Bezos is wandering around looking crumpled. Security is thick at the All Things Digital conference, and business is never far from the surface -- even if Jeff Bewkes won't talk about his plans for an AOL property because Rupert Murdoch is in the front row.

'Spore' Creature Stage Pictured, Detailed

Posted: May 28th, 2008, 7:55pm EDT by Game|Life

Tags: [edit]

Crawling out of the primordial goo and gathering DNA points -- that's evolution, Will Wright-style.

Recycle Your E-Waste

Posted: May 28th, 2008, 7:35pm EDT by How-To Wiki

Tags: [edit]

The lifespan of the average tech gadget is about a year, usually less. But yesterday's must-have device will live on long after you're gone as landfill fodder unless you learn to recycle it properly. Got an ancient CRT in the closet? A shoebox full of batteries? Follow our guide to proper disposal.

Tesla v1.5: 'Really Phenomenal' Torque, Better Range

Posted: May 28th, 2008, 7:00pm EDT by Autopia

Tags: [edit]

Tesla's new and improved Powertrain 1.5 delivers the torque to make good on the Roadster's promised 0-60 time of four seconds. It also pushes the car through the quarter mile in 12.9 seconds. So how'd they do it?

Android's Slick Debut Steals the Show at Google I/O Conference

Posted: May 28th, 2008, 6:25pm EDT by monkey_bites

Tags: [edit]

Google chose its developer conference in San Francisco to debut key features within its Android mobile operating system for smartphones. By showing off a few apps that clearly challenge Apple's iPhone, the demo won the favor of the attendees. Google also announced some enhancements to the developer products Gears, App Engine and Google Web Toolkit.

Garmin Edge 705 GPS Offers Maps, Metrics for Data-Happy Cyclists

Posted: May 28th, 2008, 6:00pm EDT by Gadget Lab

Tags: [edit]

Yeah, there are tons of GPS units available for the use in the car, but what about when you're riding a bike? Garmin has the answer with the 705 Edge, a handlebar-mounted GPS companion that guides as you ride.

Cat Saves Japanese Railway

Posted: May 28th, 2008, 4:10pm EDT by Autopia

Tags: [edit]

The Wakamaya Electric Railway Co. was losing money hand over fist. Then it made Tama the cat a stationmaster, and ridership went through the roof. Now Tama's a "super-stationmaster" with her own office. But she's still paid in cat food.

With Wireless Carriers, Breaking Up Is Still Hard to Do

Posted: May 28th, 2008, 3:40pm EDT by Bryan Gardiner

Tags: [edit]

Breaking up with your wireless provider just got a bit easier -- but as with the termination of any bad relationship, timing is everything.

Following a spate of announcements from Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile earlier this year, AT&T officially began pro-rating its early termination fees on Sunday. According to the company, instead of paying one single flat fee of $175 to jump ship, you'll now be able to shave off $5 from that amount for every month completed of your one- or two-year contract.

"We have not yet provided specifics on our new approach," an AT&T spokesperson said on Tuesday, "but we remain committed to the idea that wireless customers who leave their contract early should not pay a flat early-termination fee."

Unfortunately, this new policy does not extend to those who signed up for a contract prior to May 25, 2008.

So why the sudden change of heart? According to most wireless analysts, this newfound flexibility on the part of AT&T and the rest of the industry is largely the result of a number of pending class action lawsuits, in several states, by customers who claim they were either misled or charged excessive penalty fees.

"If you take a look at what AT&T did, they basically matched Verizon's current policy," says Current Analysis analyst William Ho. "You can argue that this is carriers being proactive against pending legislative penalties and the coming open access environment, but to me, this is really about staying competitive. With everyone else agreeing to pro-rate their termination fees, AT&T didn't want to be seen as the bad guy."

Verizon, which currently faces a $1 billion suit related to its early termination fee policy, is actually in the midst of proposing two separate remedies to the FCC, Congress and various other consumer groups.

The first is similar to what all major U.S. carriers are already planning on doing: pro-rating their ETFs over the course of a given contract. The alternate option would have carriers agreeing not to charge any termination fee during the first month of a contract; after that, all bets would be off.

Theoretically, these half-measures would give carriers some degree of wiggle room when it comes to any pending and future ETF-related lawsuits.

For years, U.S. carriers didn't seem to mind the "bad guy" label and justified early cancellation fees based on the fact that the majority of customers still purchased subsidized handsets.

Many customers rightly assume the cheap phone they get in the deal is a part of entering into a one- or two-year contract with a given carrier, but subsequently forget that breaking that contract can mean parting with a significant chunk of change.

"In essence, it's the carrot-and-stick approach," says Ho, "where the carrot is the subsidy and the stick is the early termination fee."

Things are starting to change, albeit very slowly. Currently, the ongoing ETF legal battles are being waged at the state level, but the FCC announced last week it will be holding its own hearing in mid-June to decide whether the government should in fact take over jurisdiction of the fees -- the theory being that one national policy applicable to all wireless carriers would eliminate much of the confusion and lawsuits.

In the foreseeable future, you can bet on one thing: If there's a contract or a subsidy involved when you sign up with a new carrier, expect to get whacked with some manner of ETF should you decide to walk away early. The only difference is it might not hurt as much as it used to.

Could Methane Trigger a Climate Doomsday Within a Human Lifespan?

Posted: May 28th, 2008, 3:25pm EDT by Wired Science

Tags: [edit]

Researchers have released new evidence for the idea that Earth's climate can rapidly shift from glacial to tropical when rising temperatures trigger the thawing of frozen methane.

Researchers Recover 1,000-Year-Old Viking DNA

Posted: May 28th, 2008, 2:40pm EDT by Wired Science

Tags: [edit]

Researchers in Denmark have recovered DNA from skeletons in a Viking graveyard that dates to 1000 AD. Besides sounding like the beginning of a Hollywood blockbuster, the discovery is notable for the extreme measures the researchers took to avoid contaminating the DNA samples.

Weezer's Memetastic Video Director Spills the 'Pork and Beans'

Posted: May 28th, 2008, 1:20pm EDT by Underwire

Tags: [edit]

What's it like wrangling a herd of web celebs for a music video shoot? Motion Theory's Mathew Cullen tells the story behind the hit viral clip.

Sony, Cable Company Pact May Spell Doom for Set-Top Boxes

Posted: May 28th, 2008, 11:52am EDT by Associated Press

Tags: [edit]

Sony and the National Cable Television Association have come to an agreement that may spell the end of those dreaded set-top boxes consumers hate to rent and love to hate. No word from Sony on when it might be making cable-card-ready TV sets, and no comment yet from the FCC.

Video: Inside the Musee Mecanique

Posted: May 28th, 2008, 11:15am EDT by Game|Life

Tags: [edit]

Vintage arcade attractions lured protogamers with hangings, nudie shots and other lurid subjects, a penny at a time. Take a tour of San Francisco's museum of classic amusements.

Warlord Laptops: Not Handled with Care

Posted: May 28th, 2008, 9:47am EDT by Associated Press

Tags: [edit]

They often contain irreplaceable evidence but somehow the laptops -- and cell phones -- of captured warlords and rebels in Colombia go missing. Recent case in point: the digital peripherals of 14 suspects extradited this month to the United States to stand trial for drug trafficking were not immediately secured.

Windows 7: Multi-Touch, Pie Menu And a Piano

Posted: May 28th, 2008, 7:39am EDT by Gadget Lab

Tags: [edit]

We have our first glimpse of Windows 7: There are discernible influences from the iPhone (a multi-touch screen with pinch-to-zoom, and cover art flow) and Google's mapping acumen. The OS will also sport a circular pop-up menu that appears wherever you touch.

Metallica Repents, Sort Of

Posted: May 28th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Listening Post

Tags: [edit]

So close, and yet ... actually close, really. Metallica's course correction from essentially criminalizing its fan base isn't yet a total reversal. But the band that sued Napster has launched a new website loaded with goodies -- and a DRM-free cut.

May 28, 585 B.C.: Predicted Solar Eclipse Stops Battle

Posted: May 28th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Randy Alfred

Tags: [edit]

585 B.C.: A solar eclipse in Asia Minor brings an abrupt halt to a battle, as the warring armies lay down their arms and declare a truce. Historical astronomy later sets a likely date, providing a debatable calculation point for pinning down some dates in ancient history.

This was not the first recorded solar eclipse. After failing to predict one such in 2300 B.C., two Chinese astrologers attached to the emperor's court were soon detached from their heads. Clay tablets from Babylon record an eclipse in Ugarit in 1375 B.C. Later records identify total solar eclipses that "turned day into night" in 1063 and 763 B.C.

But the 585 B.C. eclipse was the first we know that was predicted. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that Thales of Milete predicted an eclipse in a year when the Medians and the Lydians were at war. Using the same calculating methods that predict future eclipses, astronomers have been able to calculate when eclipses occurred in the past. You can run the planetary clock in reverse as well as forward. To coin a word, you can postdict as well as predict.

The most likely candidate for Thales' eclipse took place on May 28, 585 B.C., though some authorities believe it may have been 25 years earlier in 610 B.C. Hundreds of scholars have debated this for nearly two millenniums.

Predicting a solar eclipse is not easy. You need to calculate not only when it will happen, but where it will be visible. In a lunar eclipse, when the moon passes through the Earth's huge sun shadow, the event is visible on the whole side of the Earth that's in nighttime, and totality often lasts more than an hour. But in a solar eclipse, the moon's shadow falls across the Earth in a relatively narrow path, and the maximum duration of totality at any given place is only about 7½ minutes.

So you need to know the moon's orbit in great detail -- within a small fraction of a degree of arc. The early Greeks did not have this data.

We do not know the method Thales used to make his prediction. The method may have been used only once, because we have no other records of the Greeks of this era accurately predicting further eclipses. Thales is believed to have studied the Egyptians' techniques of land measurement (geo metry in Greek) later codified by Euclid. One has to wonder whether Thales made the famous eclipse prediction himself, or if he simply borrowed it from the Egyptians.

However he made the prediction, and however precise or vague it may have been, the eclipse occurred. Aylattes, the king of Lydia, was battling Cyaxares, king of the Medes, probably near the River Halys in what is now central Turkey.

The heavens darkened. Soldiers of both kings put down their weapons. The battle was over. And so was the war.

After 15 years of back-and-forth fighting between the Medes and the Lydians, the kings of Cilicia and Babylon intervened and negotiated a treaty. The River Halys, where the Battle of the Eclipse was fought, became the border between the Lydians and the Medes.

Source: NASA, Crystalinks

Alt Text: Fighting the Good Fight -- 'Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe' Videogame

Posted: May 28th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Lore Sjöberg

Tags: [edit]

I'm looking forward to the upcoming Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe videogame. I'm not looking forward to playing it, as such. I'm not really into fighting games, mostly because they have these huge lists of moves that I feel I have to memorize in order to get anywhere. The actual game ends up like an extremely fast, violent trivia contest:

"For 45 Hit Points: What is the proper response when your opponent is launching a Double Chainsaw Uppercut Blast?"

Alt Text Podcast

Download audio files and subscribe to the Alt Text podcast.

"Well, Bob, I believe the answer would be GAAAARGH GOODBYE STERNUM I'LL MISS YOU!"

So while I'm probably not going to buy the game, I am looking forward to it existing as an actual product in the real universe, because the whole concept is nose-pokingly ludicrous.

To begin with, there's Superman.

Superman-based interactive entertainment products tend to be very bad, because an accurate Superman game would have one button labeled "Use Powers" and you would press it and win.

With the upcoming Mortal Kombat vs. DC videogame on the horizon, you may be asking everyone around you, "I wonder what other matchups would make for a good fighting game?"

Video produced by Annaliza Savage and edited by Michael Lennon
For more, visit video.wired.com.

How long is Sub-Zero going to stand up against someone who can picnic on Pluto? Even considering that Subby's powers are magic, and thus can actually affect Superman, then all Supes has to do is fly into the upper atmosphere (Up, Up, High Punch) and fry Zero with his heat vision from 50 miles away (Down, Back, Down, Low Kick, Give Opponent the Finger). From Sub-Zero to Well-Done in eight seconds flat.

Yeah, some of the Mortal Kombat characters are gods and stuff, but the fact remains that they can be torn in half by a movie star, a vulnerability that is not on Superman's bizarre list of weaknesses.

But that's great! I'm tired of reasonable matches. I was exhausted by Enterprise vs. Imperial Star Destroyer arguments 10 years ago, but I'm terribly amused by the idea of an Imperial Star Destroyer against, say, the Kon-Tiki. Especially if you can figure out a scenario in which the raft wins.

So let's make this happen! I desire an endless series of videogames that pit an overpowered team against hapless underdogs! Here are a few to get you started, game-designing people.

DC vs. AC/DC

If a guy named "Reptile" has a chance against any given member of the Justice League, then Australia's crowd-mooningest rockers should have a shot as well. Just as it looks like Angus Young is down for the count, he can use his ultimate final move: YouTube AMV Barrage! Nobody can stand up to dozens of crappy homemade videos for "Highway to Hell"!

Street Fighter vs. Strawberry Shortcake

Old version, new version, banned Penny Arcade version, whatever. I just want to see Plum Puddin' take on M. Bison. I also want them to come out with a series of scented Street Fighter dolls. Zangief smells like jellied veal!

SoulCalibur vs. Animal Crossing

This is a game that I would definitely play, but not against other people, or for that matter against the computer. I would just set Tom Nook up as the second character and have him stand there, then I'd play Astaroth and slice him into Tanuki Patties over and over again. Here's your mortgage payment, Nook! I'll just make the check out to "Pulpy Mass of Laceractions!"

Mortal Kombat vs. Frightened Grocery Store Employees

Who will win the battle? An undead ninja or a middle-age, cowering cashier? Can Raiden possibly stand up to the awesome power of a catatonic bag boy? If you can beat all the main characters, you finally face down the big boss: the lifeless corpse of Barney Kroger!

Everyone vs. the Guy in This Coffee Shop Who's Running His Entire Business by Cellphone in a Very Loud Voice

Seriously guy, shut up.

- - -

Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a street fighter, a street sweeper and a streetwalker.

Interview: Founder Louis Rossetto on Wired's Part in the Digital Revolution

Posted: May 27th, 2008, 11:00pm EDT by Video.wired.com

Tags: [edit]

The founder of Wired magazine describes how the publication was formed out of San Francisco's early '90s digital underground. Its beat (the transformation of the planet), its mission (to deliver reality), its optimism (way optimistic). It got some things wrong (the death of politics and advertising) and some things right (tech changed how we relate).

In a Letter to His Kids, Wired's Founding Editor Recalls the Dawn of the Digital Revolution

Posted: May 27th, 2008, 11:00pm EDT by Louis Rossetto

Tags: [edit]

Dear Orson and Zoe,
Fifteen years ago, when your mom and I started Wired, you weren't even born. And now look at you — you guys were playing Go Fish with the original crew at the magazine's 15th anniversary party.

Back in 1993, we had only the slightest glimmer of what the Internet would eventually become. But we had a very clear idea what Wired was supposed to be about: the people, companies, and ideas driving the Digital Revolution. The results of that revolution — Googling your homework, iChatting with your cousins in Paris, buying your Lego NXT off eBay — seem like so much background noise to you now, but back then it was a big deal. In the very first issue, I wrote, "The Digital Revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon."

Got a lot of grief for that typhoon reference — as if it were a pretentious exaggeration instead of the understatement it turned out to be. Should have said the Digital Revolution was ripping through our lives like the meteor that extinguished the dinosaurs. Practically every institution that our society is based on, from the local to the supranational, is being rendered obsolete. This is the world you are inheriting.

Louis Rossetto, the founder and former publisher of Wired, tells how the magazine was formed out of San Francisco's early '90s digital underground.

Video produced by Annaliza Savage and edited by Niall McKay.
For more, visit video.wired.com.

We at Wired saw it coming, because our mission was to connect our readers to the reality of our times. It's the evolutionary function of media: Those individuals/tribes/societies that are most connected to the larger world, as it really is, are most likely to survive and thrive — and move on to the next level in the big game of life. We were successful as an enterprise not because we used eye-popping fluorescent colors (although that didn't hurt) but because we did the hard work of accurately describing the world as it was changing. Of course, we didn't get everything right.

Here are three things we got wrong, 1993-2008:

1. The End of History
Francis Fukuyama proclaimed that history ended with the demise of the Soviet Union. The future would be characterized not by the literal but only the figurative war of ideas. We believed him.

We were wrong. Wired failed to see how a new generation of fanatical geeks would use the Internet in their effort to take over the world. Instead of ending, history looped back on itself, and we are now confronted by a recrudescent and particularly virulent religious ideology straight out of the Middle Ages.

We recognized a world in transition, but we missed the danger in front of us. We eschewed conventional wisdom, but we couldn't escape it. Takeaway: Be contrarian, and then be contrarian again.

2. The Death of Media
We predicted the demise of what we called Old Media (aka mainstream/lamestream/dinosaur media) over and over again, and yet it's still alive. True, we said the Internet would erode Old Media's monopoly on interpreting reality, and we were right about that: If you're surfing Boing Boing, you're not reading the paper edition of The New York Times. The result is imploding Old Media and exploding Google ad revenue.

But we underestimated how slowly Old Media would auger in — and how irresponsible it would become in its death throes. As John Perry Barlow put it on our first TV show, the purpose of media isn't, ultimately, to inform; it's to sell our eyeballs to advertisers. And how better to do that — if your monopoly is being eroded by this newfangled Internet — than to scare the shit out of us? Then we're so paralyzed that we stick around through the commercials.

Faced with fierce competition for those eyeballs, Old Media is hawking the apocalypse: The world is inundated by war, poverty, destruction, fascist Republicans! It's about to be swept away by tidal waves unleashed by melting polar ice caps! More on how this is humanity's own fault — after the break.

Wired Promo From 1993: This publicly aired promotion for Wired in its debut year, 1993, shows a style that was frantic but advanced for its time, swiftly conveying the mission and content of the magazine.

For more, visit video.wired.com.

3. The Death of Politics
We envisioned the eclipse of the nation-state. Electronic networks were enabling the friction-free movement of capital and ideas. This would take power out of the hands of politicians and bureaucrats and put it in the hands of super-empowered individuals and networked communities.

Wrong. Governments are still here, presumptuous and bossy as ever. And what's worse, although the zoo door was pried open and the monkeys peered out, we chose not to step into the brave new tomorrow, preferring to go on playing games inside our cage.

So instead of spending a decade rebuilding civil society — reinventing how we resolve conflicts and build consensus — we got MoveOn and Daily Kos and Soros-funded 527s that divert immense energy into the mud of politics, all in the naked pursuit of political power. This has resulted in one of the most toxic and least productive eras of public discourse in our history.

Good thing we got some stuff right:

1. We Called the Long Boom
In 1997, we published "The Long Boom." Some pundits snarked that it was dotcom-stock boosterism. Instead, it pinpointed what was behind the unprecedented increase in material well-being for most of humanity: the spread of liberal democracy, globalization, and technological revolutions. The boom began with the introduction of the personal computer, and it will continue until at least 2020, when you two might have kids of your own.

Skeptical? Recent reports say that illiteracy worldwide has fallen by half since 1970 and is now at an all-time low of 18 percent; more people live in free countries than ever before; the number of armed conflicts worldwide has declined by almost half since the early '90s. Indeed, the average human born in 2025 will live to be 73 — 25 years longer than one born in 1955.

There's a lot of noise in the media about how the world is going to hell. Remember, the truth is out there, and it's not necessarily what the politicians, priests, or pundits are telling you.

Wired Promo From 1997: A later promotional video from 1997 features some of the big players, such as co-publisher Jane Metcalfe, cofounder Louis Rossetto, executive editor Kevin Kelly, designers John Plunkett and Barbara Kuhr, deputy editor John Bartelle, and associate publisher Drew Schutte, discussing the challenges and rewards of putting out the magazine.

For more, visit video.wired.com.

2. We Foresaw the One Machine
We didn't name it; founding executive editor Kevin Kelly came up with the term only recently. But we certainly predicted a new planetary consciousness based on humans using ever-more-powerful PCs and networks. Take our current hardware/wetware mashup: 1 billion CPUs on the Internet; 8 terabytes of traffic with 2 million emails per second; 3 billion cell phone users; 264 exabytes of magnetic storage. The One Machine now has a million times as many transistors as your brain has neurons. Let's say that gives it processing power equivalent to a single human brain — 1 HB; by 2040, the One Machine should surpass 6 billion HB, exceeding the processing power of humanity. In an era when even progressives are trying to stop time to preserve some notion of planetary perfection, it's clarifying (and humbling) to note that evolution has not ceased — and that we are not evolution's ultimate product.

3. We Knew Tech Would Change How We Relate
We wrote about how every institution — businesses, schools, churches, the courts — was being pounded to obsolescence by the Digital Revolution. So we stressed the need to join together and not just vote but directly rebuild civic society — how we live together as human beings — for the 21st century.

We tried to describe new ways of relating to one another — how we do business, how we invest, how we can defend, educate, cure, shelter, and govern ourselves. We coined the term Netizen to describe this new social actor. We invented the Digital Nation, the Netizens' new homeland. And we championed new heroes, chronicled new successes, and encouraged those struggling to create this new world.

Millennial Moments: In an unusual, Zen-like campaign, Wired tells us, "This is the age where you can finally do it all."

For more, visit video.wired.com.

Fair trade, the organic movement, pressure on manufacturers to improve conditions for their workers overseas, blogging, social networks, Surfrider Foundation, One Economy, Amnesty International, One Laptop per Child, networked homeschooling, cracking the human genome, YouTube social media as a means of creating new political consciousness, distributed artistic expression, up to and including the One Machine — these are all reinventions of the institutions we rely on as social animals.

So what's next? You are.

If Wired was the Scout for a generation, Kevin Kelly was the scout for Wired. One chewy chunk of fresh kill he brought back early on was a book by William Strauss and Neil Howe called Generations. It concluded its generational history of the United States with the Millennials, members of the next major demographic cohort, the first of whom were born around 1980.

Strauss and Howe's description of Millennials inspired us: "This generation will show more teamlike spirit and more like-mindedness in action than most Americans then alive will recall ever having seen in young people... Millennials will carry out whatever crisis mission they are assigned — as long as they can connect it with their own secular blueprint for progress. If crisis brings war, soldiers will obey orders without complaint. If it involves environmental danger or natural resource depletion, young scientists will make historic breakthroughs. If the crisis is mostly economic, the youthful labor force will be a mighty engine of renewed American prosperity. Whatever their elder-bestowed mission, these rising youths will not disappoint. Assuming the crisis turns out well, Millennials will be forever honored as a generation of civic achievers."

One of the original visionaries of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly, reflects on where it all started and how it's evolved in 15 years.

Video produced by Annaliza Savage and edited by Niall McKay.
For more, visit video.wired.com.

What's heartening to me, Orson and Zoe, is that even though you and your peers have grown up watching your parents become self-absorbed, hypocritical, and now plain crotchety and rancorous (not Jane and me, of course), and even if you stand in the rubble of the social institutions toppled by the Digital Revolution, your response is not the me-me-me of your parents' generation but us-us-us. Whether you're addressing climate change or serving in Iraq, you are simultaneously more traditionalist and future-forward, more practical and idealistic, than your parents.

The challenge is obvious, the dangers present, the need great. But be optimistic. I would say that, wouldn't I, since we were often accused during my time at Wired of being overly optimistic. But optimism is not false hope, it's a strategy for living. If you are optimistic about the future, you will step up and take responsibility and attempt to make it better for yourselves and your own children.

Yes, we didn't know it at the time, but we were making Wired for you.

All love, Dad

Phoenix Lander Presents: Mars in High-Res

Posted: May 27th, 2008, 8:00pm EDT by Alexis Madrigal

Tags: [edit]

The Phoenix Mars Lander, which completed a heart-stopping, autonomous landing on the Martian surface on Sunday, has begun beaming pictures the millions of miles back to Earth.

If you missed the landing, this gallery should provide a photographic catch-up on a mission that is likely to allow scientists to examine extraterrestrial water for the first time ever during this initial exploration of a Martian polar region.

Now that the lander is in position, NASA will use the craft's robotic arm to dig into the red planet's regolith to look for the subsurface ice that scientists believe exists there. If they find it, instruments aboard the craft will melt the ice and analyze the water to look for organic compounds, which contain carbon, the building block of life.

These photos take an amazing path to get to your desktop. First, the Surface Stereoscopic Imager snaps them. Then the Lander sends data at about 15 kilobytes a second via an UHF antenna to two spacecraft orbiting Mars. The orbiters relay the data to NASA's Deep Space Network antenna arrays in Canberra Australia, Madrid, and in California's Mojave Desert.

Raw images are sent to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and posted to the Phoenix Mars Mission website.

Left: The small blue object in the center of the Martian Arctic plain pictured is NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, as seen from above by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The lander touched down safely and scientists have been delighted to find all its instruments in working order. Now, NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory and University of Arizona scientists will race to do as much research as possible over the next three months before the Martian winter incapacitates the lander.

This image shows where the Phoenix Mars Lander touched down in the desolate northern polar region of Mars. The region was targeted as part of NASA's long-stated "follow the water" exploration strategy for Mars. Scientists believe that ice exists underneath the flat surface of this plain. The "polygonal cracking" visible in the picture has also been observed in permafrost terrains like the Siberian tundra, so scientists believe it results from seasonal freezing and thawing of surface ice.

While the Mars Phoenix Lander does not have a true video camera, NASA scientists can pan around a very high resolution image to create a video like this one of the Martian arctic plain.

In a space-exploration first, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured the Phoenix Lander, and its parachute, during its descent to the Martian surface. It marks the first time that a spacecraft has visualized the descent of another craft.

After two previous landers were lost entering the Martian atmosphere, the Phoenix mission has gone smoothly.

In an image that has circulated around the world, this picture shows one of the Phoenix Mars Lander's "feet" settled on Martian rock and soil. It was essential that the craft land in an area where it could dig into the soil because the lander, unlike the Mars rovers, can't move. It appears that the area within the lander's reach -- a mere 160 square feet -- will provide scientists with their shot at touching Martian ice.

The lander touched down at 4:53 pm Pacific Time on May 25 in an arctic region called Vastitas Borealis. Some scientists believe the area was once covered with water in the distant Martian past. Now, it features polygonal patterns that look similar to icy ground in earth's arctic regions.

This image was one of the first color images released by NASA.

After nine months and 422 million miles of travel, the lander reached the ground near its intended touchdown spot. The Martian landscape around the landing site is barren except for small pebbles and polygonal lumps that are widely associated with permafrost regions on Earth.

Here we see one of the Phoenix Mars Lander's octagonal solar panels. After it touches down, the two panels unfold on either side of the spacecraft to unveil a total solar-cell area of 45 square feet. The panels are the sole means the craft has of recharging its two 25-amp-hour lithium-ion batteries. Each battery stores about five times as much power as your correspondent's MacBook battery, so the lander has about 10 MacBooks' worth of stored power.

This image shows a small-scale polygonal pattern in the ground near NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander. It was acquired on what NASA is calling Sol 0, the first Martian day of the mission.

While the rocky, lifeless surface is similar to images delivered by the Mars rovers, scientists believe the warping of the land is due to water ice under the surface. The prospective ice has raised hopes that some liquid water, which is required for life as we know it, exists under the surface.

"There's this idea that there are reservoirs of liquid water down there and as soon as you see liquid water, you say, 'Why couldn't there be microbes?'" Edward Young, the principal investigator of the UCLA IGPP Center for Astrobiology, told Wired.com. (Young is not involved with the Phoenix mission.)

Mars is roughly half the size of Earth, yet the Phoenix Mars Lander will only end up excavating a tiny living room-sized slice of the planet. Still, the lander is loaded with a variety of instruments, including a gas analyzer and a weather station, that scientists hope will turn this barren landscape into a rich scientific tapestry that adds whole new chapters to what we know about Mars, the rest of the solar system and the possibility for life on other planets.

After a decade of tough luck for Martian missions, Phoenix team members celebrate the craft's landing on Mars, May 25, 2008. Wired.com brought you live coverage of the team's giddy press conference.

This image is a screen capture taken from NASA TV just after radio signals were received from the lander.

: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Now, with the initial excitement of the landing over, the Phoenix team is settling in to do the heavy scientific lifting that got the mission $420 million in funding. Digging for ice could begin as early as next week, and that investigation could provide a host of surprises about the history of the water and life on Mars.

Like previous missions, the Phoenix Mars Lander has a message for future Martian explorers in the form of the mini-DVD that you see next to the American flag. It was created by the Planetary Society and contains video of Earth's visionaries like Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke talking about the future. For the earthbound present, NASA has embraced Twitter to send out status messages on the mission. The Mars Phoenix Twitter stream has amassed almost 8,000 followers.

'Mass Effect' Gets a Makeover for PC

Posted: May 27th, 2008, 8:00pm EDT by Game|Life

Tags: [edit]

Better visuals and increased customization options make the new release even better than the Xbox 360 version. BioWare bigwigs deliver the lowdown on the upgrade.

Supreme Court OKs Cellphone Unlocking Suit

Posted: May 27th, 2008, 7:30pm EDT by Threat Level

Tags: [edit]

The U.S. Supreme Court is dashing a bid by T-Mobile and AT&T to stave off a class-action lawsuit challenging the carriers' policies against unlocking mobile phones. The justices declined to review an October decision by the California Supreme Court that cleared the way for a lawsuit that attorneys claimed could represent "millions" of California customers. In response to similar lawsuits, Verizon and Sprint, both CDMA carriers, have agreed to provide the software code to unlock cell phones after customers nationwide have completed their original contract.

Man Allegedly Bilks E-Trade, Schwab of $50K by Collecting Lots of Free 'Micro-Deposits'

Posted: May 27th, 2008, 6:20pm EDT by Threat LEvel

Tags: [edit]

In a penny-wise computer caper, a California man allegedly wrote a computer program that opened 58,000 online brokerage accounts and linked them to his bank accounts. The brokerage companies automatically send small deposits to newly-linked accounts to verify they're working, and it all adds up.

Meet Tom Ryan! The Fake Superdelegate!

Posted: May 27th, 2008, 6:00pm EDT by Threat Level

Tags: [edit]

Hoards of emotionally-invested supporters of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have been lobbying an actor who's been pretending to be a superdelegate from Scranton, Pennsylvania, as part of a new online show called The Party. It's all part of an audience-building program for the show, its creator Howard Thomas says.

Why the 'Biggest Drawing in the World' Is Probably Fake

Posted: May 27th, 2008, 5:45pm EDT by Gadget Lab

Tags: [edit]

Swedish artist Erik Nordenenkar claims to have created the "biggest drawing in the world" by sending a GPS-equipped plastic briefcase on a squiggly, looping trip around the world via DHL, tracing out an unbroken line across the planet. Here are five reasons why it's almost certainly a fake.

Robot + Super Gun = 'Crowd Control'

Posted: May 27th, 2008, 5:00pm EDT by Danger Room

Tags: [edit]

Electronic-gun developer Metal Storm has been working with iRobot to develop a rapid-fire bot capable of firing up to a million rounds per minute. Such advanced technology could be applied to border patrol or crowd control.

Review: Orb Home-Theater System Brings Well-Rounded Sound

Posted: May 27th, 2008, 5:00pm EDT by Gadget Lab

Tags: [edit]

Customizable speakers are usually pricey affairs prone to having crap audio quality. Orb's newest sound system may be customizable, and it may be pricey, but it definitely brings the goods when it comes to high quality fidelity.

Pentagon Watchdogs Swamped by Military Spending: $152 Billion a Year

Posted: May 27th, 2008, 5:00pm EDT by Threat Level

Tags: [edit]

The Pentagon's internal watchdogs can't keep up with the explosive growth in military spending. Which means $152 billion's worth of contracts annually isn't being reviewed for fraud, abuse and criminal interference by the Defense Department's Inspector General.

Adobe Releases Free Betas of Creative Suite 4's Web Dev Tools

Posted: May 27th, 2008, 4:30pm EDT by monkey_bites

Tags: [edit]

Software maker Adobe has released free preview downloads of three of its tools for web developers: Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Soundbooth. The company hasn't released any details about the next versions of Photoshop or Illustrator, but the improvements seen in the first three betas show promise for those to follow.

Delicious Library 2 Arrives, Adds More Than Just Eye Candy

Posted: May 27th, 2008, 3:45pm EDT by monkey_bites

Tags: [edit]

The latest version of the media-cataloging application Delicious Library has been released. The update not only shows off Mac OS X Leopard's impressive animation capabilities, but it also includes much-requested functionality like iTunes integration, faster performance and library sharing.

Its a Bus. It's a Train. It's Both!

Posted: May 27th, 2008, 3:30pm EDT by Autopia

Tags: [edit]

Toyota joins a Japanese railway system to combine the versatility of a bus with the speed of light rail in a rail that can run on both roadways and railways.

How to Hack a Nintendo DS to Make an Awesome Digital Sketchbook

Posted: May 27th, 2008, 3:20pm EDT by How-To Wiki

Tags: [edit]

Turn Nintendo's handheld videogame machine into a 21st-century Etch A Sketch powerful enough to reproduce Rembrandt. In Wired.com's How-To Wiki.

Review: 'Pokemon Mystery Dungeon' Is Charming but Dull

Posted: May 27th, 2008, 2:00pm EDT by Game|Life

Tags: [edit]

This cute little Nintendo DS game flips the franchise on its head, letting you play a pocket monster.

Japan Warns Against Too Much Cellphone Use

Posted: May 27th, 2008, 1:30pm EDT by Associated Press

Tags: [edit]

Japanese parents are being urged by the government to limit what has become almost obsessive cellphone use among kids. "In Japan, cellphones have become an expensive toy," an official says.

Supreme Court Rejects T-Mobile Appeal Barring Class Actions

Posted: May 27th, 2008, 11:26am EDT by Associated Press

Tags: [edit]

The Supreme Court upholds an Appeals Court ruling which found T-Mobile's contractual requirement that customers use arbitration and cannot band together to sue in a class action is unenforceable.

Skydiver Stranded When Balloon Leaves Early

Posted: May 27th, 2008, 11:15am EDT by Associated Press

Tags: [edit]

A skydiver hoping to set a new free-fall record may never get the chance to try, now that the balloon that was supposed to carry him into the stratosphere left without him and his capsule.

Yahoo Sues Lottery Phishers -- Identities Unknown

Posted: May 27th, 2008, 10:29am EDT by Associated Press

Tags: [edit]

Yahoo sues an unknown group of defendants it alleges operated a lottery scam that invoked the internet company's name as a "coordinator." Yahoo has no idea who the people behind the scheme are, but hopes to find out from third-party e-mail companies during discovery.

The Birth of a Virus, In Pictures

Posted: May 27th, 2008, 9:34am EDT by Wired Science

Tags: [edit]

Scientists have for the first time photographed the birth and early development of a virus, an advancement which could help unlock the secrets of not only HIV but all viruses. The technique, described in the journal Nature, is also said to have almost limitless application throughout biology.

Kazoo 2.0: Actually, Nothing's Changed in 100 Years

Posted: May 27th, 2008, 8:49am EDT by Associated Press

Tags: [edit]

Modernize, Digitize, Monetize: none of these internet-era platitudes apply in Eden, New York, where the Original Kazoo Company still makes those little submarine-shaped "musical instruments" they way they were in 1900. And, they are still going strong.

Deutsche Telekom To Investigate Monitored Journalist Calls

Posted: May 27th, 2008, 8:26am EDT by Associated Press

Tags: [edit]

Deutsche Telekom is accused of monitoring calls involving managers and journalists to trace potential leaks; CEO Rene Obermann pledges a thorough investigation and "severe consequences" if any laws were broken.

Google Calls YouTube Suit a Threat to Online Communication

Posted: May 27th, 2008, 8:01am EDT by Associated Press

Tags: [edit]

Google, in a legal filing, says Viacom's $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube threatens legitimate information exchange on the internet.

Chip Company Unveils Open Source PC Design

Posted: May 27th, 2008, 6:00am EDT by Dylan Tweney

Tags: [edit]

Call it the Tom Sawyer approach to selling CPUs.

VIA Technologies, the self-proclaimed No. 3 maker of Intel-compatible processors, has unveiled a new "reference design" for ultra-portable computers based on the company's own low-power chips.

Making a reference design is common fare in the high-tech industry. Chipmakers like Intel have been doing it for years as a way of proving the technical viability of a product concept. What sets VIA's approach apart is that the company is posting the computer-aided design (CAD) files for its OpenBook PC under a Creative Commons license. Anyone with design skills and a burning desire to get into the PC business can download the files, modify the design and go into business selling ultra portables.

Taiwan-based VIA will even help aspiring Michael Dells find Asian manufacturers to do the hard work of turning those CAD files into real, plastic-and-silicon products.

VIA's design is on the commercial end of a growing spectrum of "open source" hardware. On the other, more noncommercial end are hackable hardware kits like the Arduino platform, which was used by many exhibitors at the recent Maker Faire in San Mateo, California. Open source aficionados were also buzzing last week about the release of the OGD1, a development kit that could be used to create open-source graphics cards.

If VIA's idea takes off, it could help add more juice to the already-humming market for ultra portables. That market, which had long foundered on the impractical aspirations of a tiny minority of mobility-obsessed hardware geeks, took off in earnest last year with the success of the Eee PC, Asus' $400, Linux-based ultra portable.

For industrial designer Scott Summit, VIA's move is part of a gradual shift toward more highly-customized manufacturing, in which small companies and even individuals are able to design and build their own products, thanks to the decreasing costs of fabrication.

"The idea of open source manufacture is taking shape, and we're going to see more of it because the barriers (to highly customized production) are really starting to evaporate," says Summit.

VIA's design calls for a 2.2-pound PC with an 8.9-inch screen, a webcam, up to 2GB of RAM, an 80GB or larger hard drive, and built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (or, optionally, WiMax or 3G cellular data). It's not wanting for ports, either, with an Ethernet jack, three USB ports and an SD card slot.

The design is aimed at smaller design-manufacturers and upstart PC companies rather than big PC manufacturers like HP or Dell, who create their own designs (like HP's new MiniNote) from scratch.

"When we look at reference designs, they're helpful, they're insightful, they give us an optimal layout from an engineering perspective -- but they don't target what we're aiming for," says Stacy Wolff, a notebook design director for HP.

VIA's hope is that its design will encourage new designers to make ultra portables that are a little less ugly than the usual fare. It's a bet that the PC market will soon follow in the footsteps of the cellphone market, where what's under the hood is less important than how it looks.

"It's not really about the components inside at all," says VIA vice president Richard Brown. "It's personal jewelry."

Almost makes the idea of starting your own computer brand sound a little sexy, doesn't it? And for the chipmaker, it's not far from the notion that if you want to get a fence painted, start painting it yourself and try to make it look fun.

Wired.com Interviews Carly Fiorina on McCain's Radical Transparency

Posted: May 27th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Threat Level

Tags: [edit]

Former HP Chairman and CEO and Republican National Committee Victory '08 Chairman Carly Fiorina talks to Threat Level about what a McCain administration would look like.

The Beauty of Bridges

Posted: May 27th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Randy Alfred

Tags: [edit]

The bridge is among our most ancient technologies. The moment some distant ancestor thought to place a log where he (or she) wanted to cross the stream, and not where the logs happen to have fallen, the bridge was born.

A bridge inspires us. A bridge overcomes an obstacle and connects someplace to someplace else, with strength and often with grace and beauty. A bridge lets us go to the other side.

The spiritual connection is old. The high priest of ancient Rome carried the title of Chief Bridgemaker, or Pontifex Maximus. The head of the Roman Catholic Church still carries that Latin title, pontiff or pope in English.

The bridge can give reassurance to lovers holding hands, hope to the thwarted and consolation to the broken-hearted. The bridge connects, physically. It unites the divided. It makes one of what had been two.

The world has millions of bridges. To say Happy Birthday to the Golden Gate Bridge, we share with you a dozen of our other favorites.

Left:

Really Old: Ponte Vecchio It's in the nature of bridges that they draw traffic, and it's in the nature of real estate (especially commercial real estate) that value is based on location, location, location. "You want to cross the river, you're going to have to see my goods." Thus, people built shops (with homes above) on many medieval bridges. The old London Bridge of nursery-song fame is one such and Venice's Rialto another.

The Ponte Vecchio (Old Bridge) across the River Arno in Florence, Italy, dates back to Roman times, but the current bridge (so to speak) dates back to 1345 (by Taddeo Gaddi), with the long upper gallery added by the great Renaissance architect Giorgio Vasari in 1564. It is probably the oldest segmental-arch (that is, the arches are not the full semicircles of Roman design) bridge in Europe. It is certainly among the most romantic.

Photo: DuccioBartolozzi/Flickr

Be not deceived by its Gothic design. This iconic London landmark was designed in 1884 and built from 1886 to 1894. Architects Horace Jones and John Wolfe Barry solved the problem of access for ship traffic on the Thames with two gigantic hydraulic bascules, or drawbridge spans. The side spans are suspension design. The high-level walkways were designed to allow pedestrians to cross even when the bascules were up.

There's a story that the buyer of the old London Bridge thought he was buying this one to move to Arizona, but it's apparently just a story. Both buyer and seller have denied it.

Photo: Christopher Chan/Flickr

The asymmetrical main pylon of Erasmus Bridge inspires Rotterdam residents to call it the Swan. Like other cable-stayed bridges, the 1996 structure also evokes a harp or lyre. Architect Ben van Berkel's design crosses the River Maas. Sidewalks, bicycle lanes, streetcar rails and vehicle lanes connect the old city with new development to the south. It's 456 feet high and 2,631 feet long, including a 292-foot bascule that allows large ships to pass beneath.

Photo: Blond Avenger/Flickr

The Gateshead Millennium pedestrian and bicycle bridge crosses the River Tyne between Newcastle and Gateshead in northern England. It's both a cable-stayed bridge and a drawbridge. Completed in 2000, the unique design by Wilkinson Eyre Architects (with Gifford & Partners engineering) rotates on its longitudinal axis (counterclockwise in this view). The arched upper span tilts downward (about 45 degrees) as the curved pathway tilts up, so that both are high enough above the water to allow boats to pass beneath. Locals compare it to a winking eye. It stands just downstream from a series of historic low- and high-level road and rail bridges.

Photo: Pickersgill Reef/Flickr

When I first saw pictures of the Forth Bridge, I thought it ungainly, even ugly. After learning its history and seeing it in person, I realized I was wrong. The 1890 rail bridge across the Firth of Forth near Edinburgh is strikingly beautiful, its muscular cantilever structure robustly suited to its task and its time.

Designed by John Fowler and Benjamin Baker, its three 330-foot towers carry two clear spans of 1,710 feet each. The main structure is 5,350 feet long, not counting the approaches, and the bridge still carries up to 200 trains a day, connecting Edinburgh to the north of Scotland.

Photo: Simon Bradshaw/Flickr

What fun! It may look like an amusement-park ride, but the Magdeburg Water Bridge carries a canal on a 748-foot span across the River Elbe in eastern Germany. Originally conceived in 1919, it finally opened in 2003. It connects the Elbe-Havel Canal to the important Mittelland Canal, linking Berlin to the Rhine-Ruhr industrial heartland. The main span directly above the river is 348 feet long.

Photo: Chris Lori/Flickr

The Millau Viaduct carries the A75 motorway across the valley of the river Tarn in southern France, allowing a major north-south route to bypass a tangle of mountain roads. Designed by Norman Foster and completed in 2004, it's the world's longest cable-stayed bridge, at 8,660 feet, and the world's tallest, at 1,125 feet. It's taller in fact than the Eiffel Tower, which remarkably was built by the same firm.

Photo: chericbaker/Flickr

Kintaikyo (Kintai bridge) near Iwakuni City was first built in 1673. It washed away in a flood the next year. Its replacement lasted until a typhoon destroyed it in 1950. The new bridge was built in 1953. The five graceful arches each span 131 feet for a total length of 656 feet across the Nishiki River. Because of its beauty, the bridge got its name from kintai, or gold brocade sash.

Photo: kamoda/Flickr

The Akashi Kaikyo Bridge, the world's longest and tallest suspension bridge, links the city of Kobe with Awaji-shima Island, as part of the highway connecting the Japanese islands of Honshu and Shikoku. Completed in 1998, it stretches 12,828 feet across the stormy Akashi Strait. The center span is 6,527 feet, more than half again as long as the Golden Gate Bridge. The towers are 928 feet high.

Photo: kamoda/Flickr

The Oresund Bridge carries rail and road traffic between Copenhagen, Denmark, and Malmö, Sweden. The bridge-tunnel combo is the longest border-crossing structure in the world. Completed in 2000, the 10-mile length includes an artificial peninsula at the Danish end, a 2.2-mile tunnel, a 2.5-mile artificial island and a 4.9-mile cable-stayed bridge. The toll for a passenger car is about $50.

Photo: Lauri Väin/Flickr

That's Asia on the right and Europe on the left -- with Istanbul's Ortaköy Mosque. The suspension bridge links the ancient city with its Asian suburbs. Completed in 1974, the Bosporus Bridge is just short of a mile long end-to-end, with a center span of 3,524 feet. Venus Williams played an exhibition tennis game on the bridge deck in 2005, with the volleys crossing from one continent to the other.

Photo: pictalogue/Flickr

Australia's Sydney Harbor Bridge doesn't link continents, but symbolizes one. Its 1,650-foot steel-arch span used to be the world's largest, but Chinese bridges now surpass it. Completed in 1932, the Sydney Harbor Bridge connects Australia's biggest city with its northern suburbs, carrying rail, vehicle and pedestrian traffic. It used to get called the Coathanger a lot, but that name seems to be fading. Perhaps, like the Parisians with their at-first-reviled Eiffel Tower, the Aussies are getting used to it at last.

Photo: semuthutan/Flickr

John A. Roebling's masterpiece, the Brooklyn Bridge, killed him in a construction accident in 1869, soon after work began. The composite of suspension and cable-stayed design (hence its trademark criss-cross cables) enabled a bridge 50 percent longer than any other suspension bridge when it was completed in 1883. It pioneered bridge-construction technology both with pneumatic caissons below the water and steel cables in the air.

The bridge celebrated its 125th birthday last Saturday, but from its beginning has inspired artists and writers. Edward Steichen and Walker Evans photographed it. Georgia O'Keefe painted it. Hart Crane praised it: "O harp and altar." Jack Kerouac had his "Brooklyn Bridge Blues" there.

Poet Marianne Moore sang of it: way out; way in; romantic passageway
first seen by the eye of the mind,
then by the eye. O steel! O stone!
Climactic ornament, a double rainbow

The Brooklyn Bridge inspired politicians, too. So firmly did the bridge link the separate cities of New York and Brooklyn, they merged in 1898 to form Greater New York.

The bridge is what we see in it. It is what we wish it to be. And it's also still a workaday way to get from the Lower East Side to Brooklyn Heights.

Photo: ehpien/Flickr

May 27, 1937: A Bridge Over the Gate? Are You Crazy?

Posted: May 27th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Tony Long

Tags: [edit]

1937: After nearly four-and-a-half years of construction, the Golden Gate Bridge opens to pedestrians. Approximately 18,000 people are waiting to walk across the span when it officially opens at 6 a.m.

The bridge opened to automobile traffic the following day, when President Franklin Roosevelt -- at the White House 3,000 miles away -- pressed a telegraph key that simultaneously announced the fact to the world.

That was the easy part.

The idea to span the Golden Gate, the mile-wide strait connecting the San Francisco Bay with the Pacific Ocean, was originally proposed by a madman. Joshua Norton -- a San Francisco merchant who went bankrupt and lost his marbles, declaring himself Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico -- decreed the building of the bridge in 1869.

A few years after Norton's decree, railroad magnate Charles Crocker, a lot less endearing but a lot more influential than the good emperor, presented the first concrete plan, with cost estimates, for spanning the Golden Gate. Despite his clout, Crocker got about as far with his plans as his dotty predecessor did.

It wasn't until 1916, when a proposed design for a bridge published by the San Francisco Call caught the eye of the city's chief engineer, Michael O'Shaughnessy, that serious planning began. The original cost estimate came in at a staggering $100 million (nearly $2 billion in today's money). That might have deep-sixed things again if not for the appearance of Joseph B. Strauss, a structural engineer with 400 bridges under his belt, who said he could complete the project for around $30 million.

Things simmered on the back burner while United States ran off to the World War, but in 1921 Strauss came back again with a formal $27 million bid and won the contract. The 1920s were spent lining up political ducks, fiddling with design proposals and dealing with the War Department, which had final say on the construction of anything that might affect ship traffic or military logistics.

By late 1929, the Golden Gate Bridge District was formed, and Strauss' original prosaic cantilever-suspension hybrid design had been replaced by an all-suspension bridge. Irving Morrow, a local architect, is the man responsible for the Golden Gate Bridge's graceful art deco design, as well as choosing its distinctive color: international orange (which contrasts with the surrounding sea, sky and land regardless of weather or season). The structural calculations provided by consulting engineers Charles Ellis and Leon Moisseiff persuaded Strauss to abandon his own design in favor of Morrow's, for which the world can give eternal thanks.

With things nearly set to go, along came the Great Depression. That, along with additional soil testing and political infighting that eventually cost Ellis his job, delayed the start of construction until January 1933. It was a testament to the Bay Area's faith in the project that, only a year into the Depression, voters overwhelmingly approved a $35 million (about $450 million today) bond to finance the project.

(Emperor Norton, beloved and coddled by his fellow citizens, had also ordered a bridge to be built connecting San Francisco with the East Bay. And eventually the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was built -- at the same time as the Golden Gate Bridge.)

The Golden Gate Bridge was an engineering marvel. The site alone -- buffeted by high winds and split by the swirling currents of the Golden Gate -- made construction treacherous. The sheer size of the bridge (the longest suspension bridge in the world until the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge opened in 1964) required several innovations in bridge-building technology, especially where it came to constructing the two colossal anchorages in -- and under -- turbulent water.

Of all the mind-boggling statistics surrounding the bridge's construction, and there are plenty, perhaps the most jaw-dropping involves the two main suspension cables. Each measures 7,659 feet in length and each used hundreds of pencil-thick wires bound together to make a cable just over three feet in diameter. In all, more than 80,000 miles of steel wire was needed, enough to circle the earth three times.

Since a fall from the roadbed practically guaranteed death (a fact that more than a thousand suicide jumpers have confirmed), an enormous safety net was slung under the main span at a cost of $180,000. It was money well spent: At least 19 lives were saved as a result of the net.

In fact, it looked as though the bridge would be finished without the cost of a single life until tragedy struck only several months from the end. In October 1936, Kermit Moore, an ironworker, was crushed to death by a falling beam. Then, the following February, 11 men plunged to their deaths when the platform they were working on fell off the bridge and tore through the safety net.

Yet the work continued, and the bridge was finished ahead of schedule and under budget. On the first day it was opened to automobile traffic, an estimated 32,300 cars crossed the span between noon and midnight. That number is slightly higher today.

Source: PBS, City of San Francisco

Life, Death and Twitter on the African Savannah

Posted: May 27th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Emily Meehan

Tags: [edit]

NAIROBI, Kenya -- For veteran wildlife ranger Joseph Kimojino, the traditional tools of his trade -- binoculars, off-road jeep and a rifle -- have been supplemented by Twitter, Flickr and a blog.

A ranger in Kenya's acclaimed Mara Triangle wildlife park, Kimojino is a member of the Masai tribe. He first learned how to click a computer mouse in November. Now he blogs about the Mara Triangle and posts wild animal photos on Flickr nearly every day.

Kimojino's online outreach is an effort to raise awareness and money for the park, and it's urgent: Without the funds he raises online, his employer, the Mara Conservancy, would go broke. Admission fees from park visitors are the conservancy's primary source of revenue, but tourism dropped to almost zero during Kenya's post-election violence, and hasn't snapped back.

But the park's online efforts are working. Despite relatively modest traffic, the blog raised $40,000 from donations in March. Kimojino's Facebook page drew about $2,000; and a handful of safari companies bought advertising on the blog in exchange for sponsoring rangers.

"All the rest has been from single donations from individuals around the world, from donations as small as $5 to our biggest, which was $5,000," says William Deed, the experienced blogger behind the park's online outreach effort.

Kenya's wildlife is seriously threatened by poaching, except in parks like the Mara Triangle, which employs rangers to protect animals. The rangers' salaries are paid from park fees, but tourism has dropped 90 percent. To keep the conservancy running, the park's online outreach needs to raise $50,000 a month until the tourists return -- a job that's fallen into Deed's lap.

Two years ago, Deed, 28, was an office temp in Rotherham, England, "a really shitty, shitty town near Sheffield," he says. Deed was so bored with his lot, he started a blog about the banalities of waiting in line.

The blog became popular, and within months, Deed was recruited by the conservationist blog network WildlifeDirect, brainchild of famed Kenyan conservationist Richard Leakey and his son-in-law, Emmanuel De Merode.

Deed's assignment: Help wildlife rangers set up blogs about mountain gorillas and other animals in the Congolese guerrilla stronghold of North Kivu.

Eastern Congo was much less boring than Rotherham, Deed found. After surviving more than a dozen evacuations and being ultimately driven out of the park by Laurent Nkunda's rebels, Deed found a more peaceful but no less adventurous assignment with the Mara Conservancy.

Now Deed is the producer of the conservancy's expanding online presence, always looking for compelling storylines about animals and rangers, and coaching Kimojino on the possibilities of online communication tools. Deed likes to text in news from ranger patrols to Twitter, like this message from April 9: "Three poachers have been caught, found with dried meat from a hippo."

The duo's blog, Flickr page and tweets from the savannah make for an unfolding plot, like a reality television show -- with ads asking for donations. It's the kind of material that earnest animal lovers eat up.

It's more dangerous work than most bloggers are used to. In late April, Kimojino's blog reported on an hourlong gun battle between cattle rustlers and park rangers. One ranger was shot twice during the raid and had to be airlifted to a hospital in Nairobi, where his life was saved by an infusion of four pints of blood.

Most of Kimojino's work is a little less violent. A gentle man devoted to the animals of the park he works for, Kimojino takes a drive every morning at 6:30 to check on the predator population that has been attracting tourists and documentary filmmakers to the Triangle for more than two decades. Kimojino notes the weight and behavior of lions and cheetahs that his sharp eyes spot in the vast fields of tall grass, and takes photographs.

On a game drive one morning, the ranger stops his car in front of a herd of antelopes and whips out a camera. "I have never had a Coke's Hartebeest on Flickr," he says, taking a picture.

The publicity project started in February when the conservancy's purse emptied of emergency buffer funds. The first month, Deed says the blog had only five to 10 hits a day, but through frenetic online promotion and press, Deed says the audience has grown to 450 unique visits per day.

Kimojino's Flickr page has more than 520 contacts from the world over. Before he finishes tagging and naming his pictures one Sunday in April, there are already adoring comments from a woman in the United States about his pictures of cheetah cubs. Flickr's analytics report that he had 1,688 views the previous week.

Getting online has not been without its risks for Kimojino. He explains that for him to be speaking about the park to the public, instead of his boss, breaks traditional Kenyan decorum and was at first difficult for him. But he got used to being the public face of the Mara Triangle.

Deed mentions that after a few months of this online activity, Kimojino went to the optometrist -- he was worried the computer would damage his eyesight, hindering him from spotting, for example, a leopard in a tree two kilometers away, as he did during my visit. (I couldn't even see the spots with an 84mm zoom lens.)

Will Kimojino keep blogging after the tourists return? "If I stop as soon as we have enough money, people will say -- these guys, they were just doing it for the money," he says. "I must continue."

American Airlines Takes On Additional Baggage

Posted: May 27th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Joe Brancatelli, Portfolio.com

Tags: [edit]

News from Portfolio.com

Also on Portfolio

For What We've Paid for the Iraq War the U.S. Could've Bought...

Vodafone Gets the Call

Born to Run Out: Why Americans Are Driving Less

Subscribe to Portfolio magazine

If you ran the airline with the nation's worst on-time record and one of the worst lost-luggage rates, would you begin charging your customers for the privilege of checking a bag?

You probably wouldn’t, but it's Gerard Arpey who runs American Airlines, the nation's largest airline. So beginning next month, American and American Eagle, its wholly owned commuter carrier, will charge most passengers $15 to check a piece of luggage.

As that comic says, you can't fix stupid. And this fee is going into the Airline Stupid Hall of Fame. Not only will it infuriate flyers—who are already annoyed with American’s lousy operating efficiency and its recent maintenance snafus—it's likely to further erode American's on-time and baggage-handling rates. And it probably won’t generate any additional cash for American.

It goes without saying that American needs the scratch. Its $328 million first-quarter loss was, uh, fueled by what the company says was a $665 million year-over-year increase in energy costs. As the price of oil skyrockets, Arpey is so desperate that he's cutting American’s route network by more than 10 percent, grounding dozens of aging, fuel-guzzling aircraft, and laying off thousands of workers.

To Arpey, baggage must seem like an easy target for quick cash. Many European airlines charge for checked luggage and, in the increasingly à la carte world of U.S. aviation, baggage is the next logical candidate for unbundling. And American did have a moment of clarity: When Arpey announced the $15 first-bag fee at last week's annual meeting of AMR, American's parent company, he was careful to exempt full-fare customers (its most profitable segment), elite frequent fliers (its most loyal) and international passengers (who get a mulligan due to competitive and logistical factors). Arpey aimed the $15 fee directly at the travelers who pay the lowest fares and contribute the least to American’s bottom line.

But that’s where rational thinking ended. Arpey set the fee to kick in on tickets purchased beginning June 15, the start of the busy summer-travel season. That means travelers will have to adjust with just three weeks' notice. American's frontline staffers have no more of a cushion, since they were only informed of the move a few hours before Arpey publicly unveiled it.

And American seems to have imposed the fee without actually calculating how much revenue it could raise. When asked, Arpey couldn't say how many checked bags will fall into the charge-to-check category and was vague about the revenue target.

Worse, the customers targeted with the fee are the ones most likely to try to duck the $15 addition by using larger carry-ons. That's dangerous because these less-experienced fliers (think families and once-a-year vacationers) think any bag with wheels qualifies as a carry-on. It doesn’t. American's website says the largest acceptable carry-on bag is no larger than 45 linear inches (length plus width plus height) and weighs no more than 40 pounds.

So be prepared for time-consuming arguments at the ticket counters and check-in kiosks. Unless it’s prepared to countenance ticket-counter madness, American will have to deploy additional staff to do the baggage triage. There goes some of that extra revenue Arpey was counting on.

Then there's the stress that more carry-on bags will cause at security checkpoints. Fliers who would have normally checked their lotions-and-potions and other troublesome checkpoint items will now have them in their carry-ons. That'll mean more time spent preparing for the screening process and clearing security.

Once these slowed-down, baggage-laden fliers reach their departure gate, they'll run into dozens of other travelers who've also maxed out their carry-on allowance. With airlines running 80 percent full, that means a free-for-all for available carry-on space. American's overworked flight attendants will have to police the planes, often going row by row to ensure that travelers have loaded bins effectively and used their under-seat space. That's sure to delay flights—American ran an industry-trailing 62 percent on time in March—and delayed flights cost money. There goes more of Arpey's $15-a-bag revenue stream.

But, wait, it gets worse. No matter how efficiently passengers and flight attendants arrange luggage, some passengers probably won’t have room to stow their gear. That means American’s gate agents will be required to gate-check the extras. That’s a time-consuming process. An agent must get a luggage tag, affix it to the bag, then hand it off to a baggage handler on the ramp, who must then stow it in the belly of the aircraft. More time lost.

How much time? No one really knows, but an international airline executive tells me that his flights have run an average of 15 minutes later since the carrier adopted a pay-for-bags system two years ago. "I don’t know how much is due to extra carry-on bags, but it’s a factor. It’s eating into the ancillary revenue we get from the baggage charges."

Now the big fly in Arpey's revenue ointment: The high cost of delayed and lost baggage created by too much carry-on luggage. Delayed flights mean missed connections and missed connections mean more of what the industry euphemistically calls mishandled bags. (American already mishandles 7.32 bags per 1,000 passengers; American Eagle's rate is 13.08 per 1,000.)

My sources tell me it costs an airline about $60 in labor costs and trucking fees to return a late bag to a customer. That means each additional delayed bag American creates will wipe out the revenue of four checked bags. And woe to American if it loses more bags. Airlines are on the hook for as much as $3,000 in liability for lost luggage. Carriers rarely pay fliers that much, of course, but let’s say a lost bag eventually costs American $2,250 in cash payouts and administrative costs. At that rate, each additional bag that American loses will wipe out the revenue from 150 checked bags.

Like I said, you can’t fix stupid. You can only wait for Arpey to realize that charging $15 for a checked bag isn't enough. Then he'll raise to it $25, leading even more customers to try to fly only with carry-on bags, thus starting the cycle all over again.

The fine print: None of American's direct competitors—United, Delta, Northwest, Continental or US Airways—have yet matched the $15 checked-bag fee. But history indicates that they will. On the other hand, Southwest Airlines, the industry's only profitable major carrier, has announced that it will continue to allow travelers to check two bags for free.

Where It All Began: Images From Wired's Early Days

Posted: May 27th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Allison Roeser

Tags: [edit]

CNN introduced Wired magazine in January 1993 by saying it was "a combination of high technology with rock 'n' roll delivery." Rossetto & Co.'s initial advertising campaign -– wild postering and bus signs in five cities -– had the tagline: "Finally, a Magazine for the Digital Age." Here, Wired's cofounder Louis Rossetto talks with CNN in December 1992, just before the launch.

Photos courtesy of Louis Rossetto

Creative director John Plunkett (left) and his design partner/wife (and soon to be HotWired creative director) Barbara Kuhr (center) examine proofs of the magazine on the press check for the first issue in Danbury, Connecticut, in late December 1992. The duo already had an established graphic design firm, Plunkett+Kuhr, when they joined Wired to create its look and feel. (Their firm remains in business today and recently designed the TED 2008 program.)

Executive editor Kevin Kelly collates Wired's heuristics from assembled senior staff during Wired's first retreat soon after the 1993 launch. On the list were a number of business and editorial standards, some of which were revolutionary for the magazine publishing industry back then and remain so even today: "a place people want to work," "entrepreneurial spirit," "should look like a large home office," "no editorial calendar, not marketing driven," "lead, not follow," "stay lean and mean," and "legendary contributor relations."

A man falling into a seemingly never-ending city appeared on the cover of Wired's third prototype. The collage is by artist Stuart Cudlitz.

The January/February 1980 issue of Language Technology, Rossetto and Metcalfe's first magazine venture, was published in Amsterdam with a small global circulation. Rossetto edited, and Metcalfe directed ad sales. The art director was Max Kisman, who would later join Wired TV and design many of its stunning visuals. Language Technology was about the people and companies creating and using technology to handle word-based information, from word processing to machine translation of natural languages. Kevin Kelly saw in this magazine what eventually happened with Wired: "It wanted to be bigger."

The cover of "The Wired Manifesto"—the first prototype of the magazine—featured one of its earliest and most prominent contributing writers, John Perry Barlow. The prototype was put together in a four-day charette in April 1992 by Rossetto, Metcalfe, Plunkett, and Kuhr in photographer Neil Selkirk's New York studio in Chelsea. Wired was one of the first publications to put writers on the covers, beginning with Bruce Sterling on the very first issue.

The magazine's first offices were located in the South Park area of San Francisco's SOMA (South of Market) neighborhood. The figure at the desk in the foreground is then-managing editor John Battelle, who later founded The Industry Standard, and more recently Federated Media. Kevin Kelly is silhouetted behind him by the window. And creative director John Plunkett is over to the left. The current Wired office sits not too far away along Third Street in SOMA—an industrial and tech-heavy neighborhood.

HotWired, which launched in late October 1994, was the first Web site with original content and Fortune 500 advertising. Rossetto's answer to the Web magazine, HotWired was editorially independent of the print publication and generated all its own content. It was also visually conceived by Barbara Kuhr and John Plunkett. The icons are by Max Kisman.

The lofty, technicolored HotWired office in 2005 was located one floor up from its current location at 520 Third Street in San Francisco. There are 125 people in this picture — average age 24. Suck, the first blog, was born here, too.

The stock certificate, from when Wired Ventures attempted to go public in 1996 contained (in very tiny type) the quote from Alfred North Whitehead: "It is the business of the future to be dangerous." The Goldman Sachs-led IPO failed, but the innovative and complex design was a clear success. The certificate was designed by Erik Adigard and art directed by John Plunkett.

Bot Psychology: The Blogging About Blogging Edition

Posted: May 26th, 2008, 2:20pm EDT by Underwire

Tags: [edit]

Underwire writers Jenna Wortham and Angela Watercutter discuss hot topics in tech and culture. This week's discussion revolves around the blog backlash to former Gawker writer Emily Gould's piece in The New York Times Magazine.

Chelsea Hotel: Rock's Vortex of 'Death and Destruction'

Posted: May 26th, 2008, 1:45pm EDT by Listening Post

Tags: [edit]

Back in the day, it was ground zero for sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Now New York's Chelsea Hotel is back in the spotlight, as the subject of both a film documentary and photo essay. There's a lot to work with.

What's Inside: Foamalicious, Vaporlicious Easy-Off Oven Cleaner

Posted: May 26th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Patrick Di Justo

Tags: [edit]

Butane
Oven schmutz is usually encased in a nearly impenetrable charred-carbon crust, which is best breached by an organic solvent. Enter butane. Also an aerosol propellant, liquid butane loosens carbon molecules that conglomerate when other elements evaporate at high temps. One of the most commonly abused inhalants, butane poses severe health risks. But that's not a worry here: Huffing fumes from the other ingredients would almost certainly kill you first.

Monoethanolamine
Exhibiting properties of both an alcohol (mixes with water, has a high boiling point) and an amine (has a high pH, absorbs water, smells like ammonia), MEA can undergo reactions common to either group of compounds. It breaks down the gunk on oven surfaces, neutralizing some fatty acids and turning others into grease-cutting solvents. Another reason to not inhale this cleaner: MEA is a volatile organic compound, which can cause confusion, nosebleeds, and cancer in humans and animals alike.

Diethylene Glycol Monobutyl Ether
A major component of brake fluid, hair coloring, and floor sealer, DEGBE's job here is to delay evaporation of monoethanolamine, letting it work longer to vanquish baked-on mess. But like any good wingman, DEGBE has skills of its own: It helps dissolve some of the fats and grease loosened by MEA. Breathing DEGBE vapors while consuming excessive alcohol can lead to kidney and liver problems. So remember, friends don't let friends drink and clean.

Sodium Hydroxide
You know that scene in Fight Club where Brad Pitt explains what happens when you mix lye with melted animal grease? That's exactly what happens when you spray this stuff into your oven. Butane and MEA soften the hard organic coating, allowing the sodium hydroxide to attack the underlying fatty triglyceride molecules. That reaction gives off heat and results in a simple form of soap. Incidentally, don't use Easy-Off on aluminum — the metal serves as a room-temperature catalyst, breaking down the NaOH and releasing flammable hydrogen gas.

Diethanolamine
Manufacturer Reckitt Benckiser will neither confirm nor deny this, but the patent information for at least one version of Easy-Off indicates that diethanolamine can be used in place of up to 60 percent of the monoethanolamine. This makes sense because Easy-Off is foamy when it comes out of the can, and DEA is much more foamalicious than MEA. And this isn't just to create the impression of a sudsy, effective cleaner; the foam smothers the other ingredients and prevents them from evaporating, forcing them to slave away at making soap and dissolving grease. The problem is that while DEA is technically not a volatile organic compound, it has been shown to limit brain development in the fetuses of pregnant laboratory mice. Just don't use Easy-Off to clean your kid's Habitrail.

Military Secrets Help Produce the Ultimate Synthetic Fishing Rod

Posted: May 26th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by William Snyder

Tags: [edit]

Andy stone meets me in front of a small building in Manchester, Vermont, a Green Mountain hamlet known for factory outlets and maple syrup. He's wearing busted Carhartts, a flannel shirt, and a thick backwoods beard. As he guides me to the industrial freezer around back, Stone is so excited that I'm starting to fantasize about what's inside (gallons of Ben & Jerry's?). The door opens, and I see a shelf stacked with what appears to be rolls of black paper towels.

"I know it doesn't look like much," he says, "but that stuff is worth several hundred thousand dollars." The "stuff" is unidirectional carbon fiber — not the ubiquitous carbon mesh found everywhere from dashboards to tennis racquets, but a new superlight variety that was, until recently, a highly classified concoction. I start to copy information from a label when Stone barks, "Don't write down the manufacturer's name," and slams the door shut.

It's not just trade secrets he's protecting — it's national security. The composite is used in Predator drones and spy satellites for the US military. Stone, along with colleagues at the outdoors supplier Orvis, use it to build a fly-fishing rod. Called Helios, its story began nearly three years ago when Stone, Jim Lepage, and another man — so entrenched in top-secret contracts that nobody would even tell me his name (we'll call him Deep Trout) — set out to build the ultimate rod: lighter than anything ever made but strong enough to land the big one.

Through his network of black-ops eggheads, Deep Trout learned about a new type of composite the military was using. Traditional sheets of carbon fiber are woven to create a matrix that's strong in every direction. The advanced brew's tapered pieces of graphite employ a high-temperature epoxy and eliminate the need for a grid, decreasing the number of fibers and cutting weight by up to 25 percent.

It's a long cast from bamboo, which until recently was the preferred material for top-shelf poles. No synthetic could surpass its light touch and ability to maneuver a tiny fly. But bamboo is a total pain in the ass to work with: It can take 80 hours to craft a single rod. And because of all that labor, fine bamboo rigs sell for around $1,500.

As early as the 1940s, rod makers started experimenting with fiberglass, but it couldn't match the mighty grass. In the '70s, they looked to graphite, but it felt dead. Then, as government aerospace contracts started drying up in the mid-'80s, "guys who had been developing military systems started sending us their resumes," Lepage says. They brought with them the secrets of carbon fiber. "We realized that if we could perfect carbon fiber," he says, "it would make bamboo obsolete." But though the new composite could outcast bamboo, it lacked the feel.

They worked for years with composite, never quite matching nature. Finally last year, Orvis rolled a tube from the unidirectional material. It was less than half the weight of bamboo, just as bendy, and substantially stronger: The Helios was born. It's so light — 2.1 ounces for a 9-foot rod — it's even more precise than the panda food. Bamboo was bested — especially considering that a Helios costs only about $750.

Of course, engineers now have another problem: The Iraq war makes it tough to get their secret stuff. "Since we're using the raw materials of Apache helicopter blades, it's not easy to secure an order for fishing rods," Lepage says. If the carbon-fiber supply does dry up, there's a riverbank not far from the shop where bamboo grows like crazy.

Lamest Fetish Items Ever: Gear Lust Gone Bad, 1993 - '95

Posted: May 24th, 2008, 6:00am EDT by Nate Ralph

Tags: [edit]

15 years of Wired Fetish. That's 442 pages of obsessive gear lust. We were bound to make a few bad selections...

Proceed CD Library Premiere Issue 1993 $12,000
Holds 100 CDs. Costs 12 grand.

: May/June 1993 Under $100
Back stock snapped up by Jaron Lanier.

: Nov 1993 $699
Most misunderstood gadget ever? Or biggest flop? Both.

: Feb 1994 $400
Keyboard neck and "strummer veins" did not rock.

: Feb 1994 $5,000
We called this patent collection "The most significant body of information ever published in electronic format. "Oops!"

: Mar 1994 $1,999
Frankly, it was no Newton.

: Jul 1994 $100
Translated bass to vibrations on your chest. Feel the music.

: Aug 1994 $6,000
Personal workspace shielded you from coworkers' scorn.

: Sep 1994 $85,000
Personal underwater craft featured a three-day air supply.

: Oct 1994 $3,615
Tattoo removal seems like a job best left to professionals.

: Feb 1995 $9,000 a pair
Instead of a big ugly box, a big ugly tube.

: Aug 1995 Shirt: $34.50, Pants: $24
Mosquitoes less repelled than incapacitated by own laughter.

: Oct 1995 $5,198
All the fun of a coin-op car wash, at home!

: Oct 1995 $15
Too bad the Legos were sold separately.

: Dec 1995 $4,869
This is what the future looked like in the mid-'90s.

Inside the Scandal That Rocked the Formula One Racing World

Posted: May 24th, 2008, 6:00am EDT by Mark Seal

Tags: [edit]

Of all the copy shops in all of England, Trudy Coughlan had the rotten luck of walking into Document Image Processing.

It was June 2007 in sleepy Surrey County, and Coughlan, a statuesque blonde, sauntered through the door of the shop holding a sheaf of 780 pages. Scan them onto two CDs, she told the clerk, a forgettable middle-aged guy in a forgettable office park in the middle of nowhere. Nothing strange about the order, unless you happened to be a Formula One fan and happened to take a close look at the material: schematic drawings, technical reports, pictures, and financial information — enough insider dope to design a Formula One race car. Each page was emblazoned with one of the most famous logos in the world: the prancing black horse of Ferrari.

Surrey is McLaren country, just down the road from what locals call the Spaceship, the futuristic, top-secret, half underground headquarters of the McLaren Formula One racing team. But as it happened, the copy clerk was a rabid Ferrari fan — among the legion who worshipped Ferrari's star F1 driver Michael Schumacher and agonized over the fact that the Ferrari team was lagging behind top-ranked McLaren that summer.

"Trudy Coughlan," the woman said when he asked her name.

When she left, the clerk Googled.

First he Googled Trudy Coughlan and discovered she was the wife of Michael Coughlan, chief designer of ... McLaren's Formula One racing team.

Then he Googled Ferrari until he found the name and email address of the company's Formula One sporting director, Stefano Domenicali, in Maranello, Italy.

"Dear Mr. Domenicali," the clerk typed. He proceeded to spill the strange tale of the woman with the stack of what appeared to be top-secret Ferrari documents.

The next morning, as Domenicali sifted through his inbox, he came to the missive from Surrey. He immediately forwarded it to Ferrari security.

A few days later, Trudy Coughlan picked up the two CDs, along with the 780 pages of documents. Following her husband's instructions, she destroyed the papers in a home shredder and burned the remains in their back garden.

Thus began the biggest scandal ever to rock the world of Formula One racing.

Formula One is a deafeningly loud, extraordinarily expensive, rock-star-meets-the-road spectacle. It's a multinational pastime in Europe, where hundreds of thousands of fans pay up to $1,000 a ticket to watch 22 drivers from 11 teams go around complex circuits at 200 miles per hour. In a series of 18 races (or Grand Prix) in Monaco, Turkey, Japan, Brazil, Bahrain, and elsewhere, the drivers compete for points based on their place at the finish of each race. At the end of every March-to-November season, the circuit's highest point earners are crowned in two ways: by team (the Constructors' Championship) and by driver (the Drivers' Championship).

While the drivers with multimillion-dollar contracts command the attention and acclaim, the real competitors in Formula One are the cars themselves: ultralight, mid-engine, open-cockpit marvels of precision engineering, power, and speed. "The difference in raw driving ability between the fastest and the slowest driver is unlikely to be more than one second per lap," says Autosport writer Mark Hughes. "The difference between the fastest and slowest car is perhaps three or even four seconds per lap. So the fastest driver in the slowest car would still be nowhere, whereas the slowest driver in the fastest car would be quite successful."

The McLaren MP4-22 Mercedes (foreground) edging out the Ferrari F2007 (rear)
Photo: LAT Photographic

Unlike Nascar, which keeps the field evenly matched by restricting what race teams can do to their cars, Formula One is all about fine-tuning the vehicles. There are a few general regulations (called the formula), which dictate things like the number of cylinders an engine can have and the car's maximum length. Everything else can be tweaked. The top teams — which have thousands of employees — can blow more than $400 million a year trying to make their cars go a few milliseconds faster.

Formula One cars are made from more than 6,000 components, almost all of them custom-made. Every aspect is aerodynamically designed, from the body to the driver's helmet, and the cars can go from 0 to 100 mph then come to a complete stop, all in less than five seconds. Like jets, the cars rely on wings, or spoilers, in the front and back. But while an aircraft's wings provide lift, an F1 vehicle's spoilers, along with its sloping upper body shape and intricate underbody surfaces, do just the opposite: They create downforce, giving the vehicle wicked-fast cornering speeds and massive amounts of braking power. The downforce is so strong that the cars could theoretically drive upside down on the roof of the tunnel at Monte Carlo, Hughes says. Meanwhile, almost every other aspect of an F1 car — the arrow-shaped body, the low-slung suspension — is designed to reduce drag and maximize straight-line propulsion.

Of course, savvy engineering isn't the only way to get an edge in this fiercely competitive world. It also helps to know what your rivals are up to. F1 teams routinely sneak peeks at one another's cars, mostly in tacitly condoned ways: hiring photographers at the opening of each season to document competitor's cars, watching news feeds of vehicles being lifted by cranes for transport to estimate weight distribution, exchanging gossip and secrets with insiders from other teams. Such light espionage has long been part of the game. And if a team goes too far? Usually nobody cares. When two former Ferrari employees were found guilty in spring 2007 of corporate espionage (passing a limited amount of Ferrari design information to the perennial also-ran Toyota Formula One team), they got only a suspended sentence from the Italian court and not even a handslap by Formula One's governing body.

But when news got out last summer that McLaren, the number-one-ranked team, had hundreds of pages of Ferrari technical documents, the cheating wasn't dismissed so easily. Instead, the story landed on the front pages of newspapers across Europe, and the two F1 teams involved launched an offtrack battle as competitive as anything that happens on the racecourse. At the center were two characters far from the spotlight of superstar drivers and superpowered cars. Up from McLaren's design department and Ferrari's mechanics bay came Michael Coughlan and Nigel Stepney.

Ferrari's home is Maranello, population 15,000, in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy. This is where both the company's F1 and road cars are designed, built, tested, and shipped. To drive into Maranello is to drive into Ferrari's big red pulsating heart. Most everyone here works for Ferrari or is related to someone who does. The streets, restaurants, and bars are filled with mechanics, drivers, support staff, executives, and wide-eyed fans, many dressed in Ferrari red, all proclaiming their allegiance to the most dominant team in Formula One history. At lunch, the faithful pack in at Montana, a restaurant whose walls are crammed with so much Ferrari memorabilia, it's considered an unofficial Ferrari museum. In the background, patrons can hear the constant rumble of race cars roaring around Ferrari's test track a quarter mile away.

As the head of Ferrari's 30 F1 mechanics, Nigel Stepney walked through Maranello like a king. Big and burly, with neatly cropped hair and goatee, he had been an integral part of Ferrari's "dream team" for 15 years, helping them capture five consecutive world championships from 2000 to 2004. The British-born Stepney brought order to the chaos that was Ferrari's nearly all-Italian F1 pit when he joined in 1993. "The pit stops were disorganized before he got there, and he worked well with technical director Ross Brawn in bringing structure and discipline," says someone who knows Ferrari well. "Nigel was exactly what Ferrari needed: someone who could whip the team into shape."

By 2006 Stepney, who had earnings estimated to be upwards of $1 million a year, held enormous clout, deciding which mechanics went on the road — earning them a bump in salary — and which stayed home. He was one of the many intensely competitive, highly strung men who mark their lives by the F1 season, so dedicated to the team that he didn't complain when, at one race, Michael Schumacher roared out of the pit and slammed into him, breaking his ankle. Stepney bled red.

Then, at the end of 2006, Stepney's world, along with the greatest team in Ferrari history, fell apart. First came the news that Schumacher would retire at the end of the season. Then highly respected Ross Brawn announced that he was going on sabbatical. Stepney, who had been Brawn's right hand and a key member of the Brawn-Schumacher inner circle, reportedly hoped that he might get the technical director's job, with its multimillion-dollar salary and infinite esteem.

But Stepney wasn't an engineer. He was a mechanic without a college degree. The Ferrari brass chose as technical director Mario Almondo, an Italian promoted from human resources. Almondo had previously served as Ferrari's head of industrial development of racing, but Stepney still didn't think Almondo had the technical savvy to lead the team's overall car development. Ferrari insiders say Stepney was furious with the choice — so much so that he went public with his grievances.

"I'm looking at spending a year away from Ferrari," he told Autosport in February 2007. "I'm not currently happy within the team. I really want to move forward with my career, and that's something that's not happening right now."

The players, clockwise from top left: McLaren CEO Ron Dennis, McLaren chief designer Michael Coughlan, former Ferrari chief mechanic Nigel Stepney, and FIA head Max Mosley
Photos: AP, Sutton Images, LAT Photographic, LAT Photographic,

Speaking out against the house of Ferrari can be punishable by immediate dismissal. Alain Prost, a four-time Formula One world champion, learned this the hard way in 1991 when he essentially said that his Ferrari was driving like a truck. He was fired midseason. Strangely, though, when Stepney spoke out, the Ferrari brass didn't fire him or even publicly comment on his betrayal. And when, out of pique, Stepney asked for a factory-based job, which wouldn't require him to go on the road with the team, his request was granted.

But according to Stepney, that ended up being even worse than getting fired. "Ferrari is unique in Italy; if you go against it, it's like going against the Vatican," Stepney would later tell London's Independent newspaper. "I began to feel like I was some sort of traitor because I no longer wanted to travel. People became scared to talk to me ... the situation was unbearable."

In May 2007, Ferrari caught Stepney seeming to do the unthinkable: attempting to sabotage Ferrari's F1 cars. Suspicions were aroused when mechanics found powder around the refueling tank for a car being readied for the Monaco Grand Prix. They feared someone might have put something in the tank, and Ferrari officials called the police. Stepney was subsequently searched and, sure enough, powder was found in his pockets.

His pants were confiscated, resulting in an absurd scene at police headquarters. "There is a carabinieri marshal in uniform and a Ferrari engineer in his underwear," wrote the newspaper Corriere della Sera. "It is May 18 and the missing pants are those belonging to Nigel Stepney, former coordinator of the mechanics in Maranello."

An F1 gas tank is an intricate, multichambered system designed to ensure that the car never runs out of fuel before its pit stop. Should someone slip powder into this highly pressurized and precise mechanism, it would be catastrophic. Yet there was Stepney, literally with his pants down. Police lab tests soon showed that the powder in his pockets matched the powder found in and around the refueling tank. Closed-circuit TVs also showed Stepney milling about the tank just before the powder was discovered. Police raided Stepney's home and discovered yet more powder matching the residue found in the Ferrari refueling tank and Stepney's pockets. Denying all, Stepney claimed to be the victim of a "dirty tricks campaign" by Ferrari in retaliation for his speaking against the company.

Then, a few weeks later, Domenicali received the email from Surrey, and Ferrari officials realized that the powder might have been the lesser crime.

Ferrari filed a civil lawsuit, and police raided Stepney's home a second time. After analyzing Stepney's laptop, investigators discovered that, at some point, he had printed out the soul of the 2007 Ferrari F1 car: 780 pages that, as court documents would later reveal, constituted "technical documents for designing, engineering, building, checking, testing, developing, and running a Formula One racing car." These included schematic drawings, technical reports, photographs, budget sheets, planning materials, and more. As one Ferrari team member who insisted on anonymity told me, the papers were enough to give an opposing F1 team intimate knowledge of how Ferrari's cars performed. "When you are playing poker, it is important that you know you have an ace. But it is even more important that you know the other guy has two aces. Therefore, you know what you have to do. That is why the consequences of this theft will last for years."

Soon it became clear that Stepney had not only taken some of Ferrari's deepest secrets, he had likely leaked them directly to Ferrari's archrival McLaren, which that spring and summer was dominating F1.

Ron Dennis, McLaren's chair, CEO, and part-owner, carries a Ferrari chip on his shoulder as big as Italy. "I think Ron's always seen Ferrari as the main competition, like the enemy," says John Barnard, who became McLaren's technical director when he, Dennis, and another partner took over the organization in 1980. "I think he's always tried to figure out how Ferrari created so much aura. Why does the name mean so much? Why is the prancing horse one of the most recognized symbols in the world along with Coca-Cola?"

The rivalry goes back to the days of Ferrari founder Enzo Ferrari, who in the 1950s called upstart British teams like McLaren garagisti — garage teams. How galling that label must have been for Dennis, who dropped out of school at 16 to go to work in a garage in Surrey, eventually making his way into F1. Even then Ferrari was a dominant team in the sport and had been since F1 was founded. Ferrari's drivers were heroes, its records unmatched. And when Dennis, Barnard, and another partner acquired McLaren to finally challenge this superiority, some say, Ferrari found new and creative ways to win: "They used their political clout to get the rules changed to try and eliminate some of the advantage that the British teams were getting because of superior aerodynamics," says Barnard, who served as technical director at Ferrari and Benetton after leaving McLaren.

But Dennis persevered. In 1983 he partnered with a Saudi-born French entrepreneur named Mansour Ojjeh, who put up the cash for McLaren to completely rework its engine. The next year the team won both the Drivers' and Constructors' world championship titles — McLaren had arrived. By 2004, Dennis had opened the $600 million McLaren Technology Centre — a space-age cathedral of motor racing designed by Lord Norman Foster and christened by no less than the Queen of England — and filled it with multimillion-dollar cars and superstar drivers. He also started a lucrative partnership with DaimlerChrysler to create the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren, one of the world's most expensive road cars. Today McLaren is thought to be worth more than $1 billion.

All of it is the result of Dennis' legendary focus on perfection. His fanaticism is so intense that to make sure he never sees a burned-out light in his team's gargantuan Technology Centre, Dennis hired a man whose sole job is to change out bulbs. To keep the Spaceship free of cooking smells, he installed an expensive air pressure system in the staff cafeteria. And to be certain that he never drives over a dirty rock at home, he regularly has the gravel in his considerably long driveway gathered up and washed.

In 2007, as Dennis reached 60, everything in his life seemed to be, well, perfect. He had a fortune estimated at $500 million, made in part by selling half of his original 30 percent stake in McLaren. He traveled to and from races in a $30 million Challenger 604 jet. His family life, which included a 21-year marriage and three children, seemed flawless. Best of all, his F1 team, his life's mission, had reconfigured its car, landed two star drivers — Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton — and was trouncing the competition. By June, McLaren was number one, ahead of BMW-Sauber and, even more important, ahead of Ferrari.

But despite his obsession with perfection, despite his desire to get everything just right, Dennis made one mistake that would undo it all: hiring Michael Coughlan.

In 2002, Coughlan showed up to a job interview at fanatical, formal, straight-laced McLaren in a jacket, jeans, and no socks. A fun-loving career designer, Coughlan's Formula One journey was filled with stints in several different design departments. Nevertheless, he seemed to have the credentials, talent, and drive. Dennis made him chief designer.

"Mike is enormously self-confident, and nothing appears to faze him," writes Steve Matchett in his book The Mechanic's Tale. "He's a big, tall chap and radiates great presence. He can walk into a pub a complete stranger and within minutes the landlord and the four locals at the bar will be chatting with him like they've known him for years."

Coughlan had worked at Ferrari with Stepney, and to learn more about Coughlan (both men declined to participate in this story), I visited John Barnard, who had been their boss for part of that time. Barnard and Coughlan worked together in a satellite design office in England, out of which Barnard later ran his own design company. Stepney worked in Italy. Barnard showed me the cubicle where Coughlan would spend days hunched over a drawing board sketching a faster, sleeker F1 car — something that could take him out of the shadows and into the limelight, possibly getting him promoted all the way to technical director.

Coughlan and Stepney were close, especially on the road, Barnard says. They had worked together since the early 1980s, first at Lotus, then at Benetton, then at Ferrari. "They got along quite well," Barnard says. "They both like to joke, go out and have a drink, and both of them could party pretty hard ... tough, durable characters brought up in racing from their teens."

So it seems natural that when Stepney was feeling betrayed by Ferrari, he reached out to his old pal Coughlan. By then, Coughlan had been chief designer at McLaren for five years. He was responsible for the drawing office, producing renderings and computer models of the company's Formula One car. It was a position with major responsibility and sweet pay: reportedly around $600,000 a year.

During his first call to Coughlan at the beginning of March 2007, Stepney vented his frustration about Ferrari's new technical director. Coughlan listened intently. He was even more intrigued when, later that month, in three emails, Stepney expressed concerns "that certain features of [Ferrari's] car did not comply with the FIA Formula One technical regulations. These details related to a floor device" — a spring mechanism that moves the floor for improved aerodynamic performance when the car reaches a certain speed — and a rear wing flap separator that, in Stepney's view, was illegal.

For Coughlan, the insider information Stepney was offering could be priceless in a quest for a better job, either with his current employer, McLaren, or with someone else. Better yet, Stepney wasn't merely talking, he had proof: details of the floor device. He emailed the schematics to Coughlan, who showed the drawings to a key member of McLaren's executive committee without saying where he'd gotten them. After the renderings of the potentially illegal floor device made the rounds, McLaren's engineering director finally decided to forward them to the regulatory body of Formula One, the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile. But while the FIA determined that the floor device did indeed fall outside Formula One's permissible design regulations, it didn't initiate any action against Ferrari. "As far as we are aware, Ferrari ran their cars with this illegal device at the Australian Grand Prix, which they won," Dennis later complained to the media.

As details of Stepney's deepening rift with Ferrari emerged in F1 gossip circles, Coughlan went to see his superior, Jonathan Neale. He would later say that he had become wary of Stepney by this time, but Ferrari insiders contend that Coughlan was trying to use Stepney's information to leverage his way to a better job at McLaren. After hearing Coughlan's story, though, Neale was sufficiently concerned that he told Coughlan, and later McLaren's IT department, that the company should block any further emails from Stepney. Coughlan says he suggested to Neale that he meet with Stepney and "ask him to stop communicating to me." (Investigators would later ask: What's wrong with just making a telephone call?) When arranging this meeting, however, Coughlan apparently used the opportunity to solicit a further piece of insider information about Ferrari's braking system, which Stepney provided.

In April, Coughlan flew to Barcelona, where Stepney was vacationing, ostensibly to ask Stepney to stop sending him insider information on Ferrari's car.

"After I arrived at Barcelona airport, he took me to a restaurant in the marina," Coughlan said in an affidavit. "Whilst we were having a coffee, Mr. Stepney produced, unsolicited, a diagram of a brake balance assembly used by Ferrari." Then lunch arrived. When they were finished, Coughlan asked Stepney to drive him to the airport. They got into the car, but before putting it in gear, Stepney pulled out the mother lode: a stack of 780 pages of Ferrari documents.

Take a look at this, Stepney said.

"My engineering curiosity got the better of me, and I foolishly took the documents from him," Coughlan said in his affidavit. "I casually flicked through them over the course of the 25-minutes-or-so journey it took for Mr. Stepney to drive me to the airport. I kept hold of the documents and took them home with me."

Coughlan's engineering curiosity apparently intensified. Soon after their meeting in Spain, he and Stepney met for dinner in England, where Stepney gave his old friend what he said were drawings of Ferrari's brake disc. To whom Coughlan showed these documents, and how deeply they burrowed into the perfect McLaren world Ron Dennis had built, would later become the subject of much debate. For now, one thing was clear: Mike Coughlan and Nigel Stepney had information that each might be able to parlay into a new job, perhaps even a posting as technical director for a Formula One team.

Coughlan once again met with Neale for breakfast "to discuss my future with McLaren and the concerns I had," Coughlan said. At the end of the breakfast, Coughlan showed Neale "two or so digital color images from the material that Mr. Stepney had given to me." It was only for a couple of seconds, but long enough for Neale to react with, essentially, What the hell are you doing with that? And Get rid of it, quick.

But Coughlan didn't ditch his trove. Instead, on June 1 he and Stepney met with the CEO of Honda's F1 team at Heathrow Airport, for Stepney "to discuss a possible career opportunity for him at Honda," Coughlan said, adding that he tagged along to see what Honda might have available for him. What were they asking for? "Silly money," one insider says. "Coughlan would be chief designer, and Stepney would be technical director, or vice versa. But they would effectively be the two chief people at Honda. Probably that move was destroyed by the fact that Nigel went in there just asking for silly, silly money."

Before either could strike a deal with a new company, however, Stepney was accused of attempting to sabotage a Ferrari car. Then Trudy Coughlan stepped into the copy shop in Surrey, and the scandal exploded into the Formula One world.

In early July 2007, the bucolic silence of Coughlan's Surrey estate — known as the Barn — was broken by an army of investigators, lawyers, and computer specialists armed with a civil search warrant. They interrogated the Coughlans and searched their house, looking for the two CDs of Ferrari documents, as well as computers, mobile phones, USB devices, BlackBerrys, phone storage cards, and other devices.

McLaren suspended Coughlan, and Ferrari released news that Stepney had been fired. On July 4, the FIA announced it had begun an investigation. The scandal made international headlines, and the two spies, Stepney and Coughlan, became household names in what came to be called Stepney-gate or, in Italy, the Spy Story.

Instead of slinking away, Stepney went on the offensive. He held a conference call with a group of British journalists. "I have no idea how Mike Coughlan got the documents, and I have no idea what exactly he is supposed to have," he said. "I categorically deny that I copied them or that I sent them to Mike Coughlan."

"I admit it looks blatantly obvious," he added. "But something is happening inside Ferrari." He had the papers legitimately, he insisted, because he needed them for his work in the racing simulator. Stepney claimed that after the discovery of the papers and the powder, he was spied upon, harassed, and followed. He went so far as to claim that his life and the lives of his family members were in danger. "There have been high-speed chases," he claimed. "I had no option but to get out of Italy."

He insisted that Ferrari was trying to discredit him because he knew all of Ferrari's secrets. "Ferrari is terrified that what I have in my mind is valuable," he insisted. "I guess I know where the bodies are buried from the last 10 years, and there were a lot of controversies in that time." He still hasn't revealed which bodies he was talking about or where they were buried. Though when I was trying to get him to answer questions for this article, he did email me to say, "You'll have to read the book." It might be a long wait: As of this writing, he is still supposedly searching for a publisher.

At the British Grand Prix in Silverstone, England on July 8, Ferrari driver Kimi Räikkönen won, and McLaren's drivers came in second and third. Thanks to the points they earned, McLaren was now leading the Formula One Constructors' Championship with 128 points. Ferrari was in second place with 103 points. The growing scandal, however, overshadowed McLaren's well-deserved celebration.

"I live and breathe this team; there is no way anything incorrect would ever happen to our team," Dennis told the media at a party after the race. What should have been a glorious event turned into a glum one. Even the caterers seemed to conspire against him, serving a wine labeled Spy Valley.

Shortly after he returned to Surrey, Dennis' Spaceship came under siege. FIA investigators and computer experts scoured the place, interviewing 20 engineers, accessing 22 personal computers of McLaren team members, and retrieving 1.4 terabytes of data stored on the central computer system of McLaren Racing. Ever the perfectionist, Dennis had his team comply completely with the investigators, hoping to prove that McLaren was innocent and that the Ferrari information had only been accepted by a rogue employee out to land a better job.

On July 26, the World Motor Sport Council of the FIA ruled that the McLaren team was in breach of the International Sporting Code. However, the FIA also said that the stolen information appeared to be limited to Coughlan and didn't penalize the entire team. But Ferrari refused to let the matter die; they prevailed on the Italian motorsports authority to file an appeal. Dennis was incensed. "The World Championship should be contested on the track, not in courts or in the press," he wrote to the president of the Italian motorsports authority. And why, Dennis and others would later ask, should McLaren be punished for the actions of a single employee while Ferrari, whose employee passed along the information, went untouched?

By the Hungarian Grand Prix in the first week of August, Dennis was starting to feel better. His team was still in first place, after all, and the Coughlan mess was beginning to pass.

Then, during the qualifying round, McLaren's upstart star Lewis Hamilton refused to let the team's world-champion driver Fernando Alonso pass him. Alonso retaliated by blocking Hamilton in the pit lane to hurt the rookie's time. Alonso was immediately penalized — instead of beginning the grand prix in pole position, he would have to start from sixth place. At a press conference that afternoon, Alonso and Hamilton launched into a public argument over what had happened.

The next day, before the grand prix started, Alonso marched into McLaren's mobile conference center and vented his rage at Dennis. The Spaniard insinuated he had information that would be disastrous for McLaren, and he would release it to the FIA unless Dennis made things right. It was Dennis' worst nightmare: What Alonso was saying meant that not only had Stepney's documents gone beyond Coughlan, they had been passed so deep within his team that even the drivers had access to them.

"Stop!" Dennis says he told Alonso after the driver made "specific reference to emails from a McLaren engineer."

After Alonso left, Dennis asked his chief of staff, Martin Whitmarsh, if any of what Alonso had said could be true. "We have been too thorough in talking to the engineers," Whitmarsh assured him. "He cannot have been telling the truth."

Dennis couldn't leave it at that. His meticulous nature wouldn't allow it. So he called FIA president Max Mosley. Dennis and Mosley were hardly friends — Mosley had subtly suggested that Dennis was "not the sharpest knife in the box" at a press conference in 2004. Still, Dennis picked up the phone and essentially ratted McLaren out. "I was upset and angry, but mainly upset," he would later say at a meeting with the FIA. "Max calmed me down ... If he felt there is any real validity in what Fernando had said, he would contact me prior to taking any action."

Nearly a month later, without warning Dennis, Mosley sent a letter to McLaren's three top drivers, demanding that they turn over any confidential Ferrari technical information they might have.

"We don't call him Mad Max for nothing," says Paul Stoddart, an Australian millionaire, airline mogul, and former owner of the Minardi racing team. Mosley is the son of Oswald Mosley, late leader of the British Union of Fascists, who married Max Mosley's mother, the famous Diana Mitford, in 1936. The wedding took place at the home of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, with Adolf Hitler attending as a guest of honor.

On September 13, 2007, the lawyers and principals on both teams were called to the FIA's Paris headquarters for an "extraordinary meeting," as the FIA put it. For the first time, all the evidence poured forth. Not only did the FIA have records of 288 SMS messages and 35 phone calls between Coughlan and Stepney, it also had a series of damning emails — discussions of the stolen papers and the Ferrari "mole" from no less insiders than McLaren's own drivers.

From McLaren test driver Pedro de la Rosa to Coughlan on March 21, 2007: "Hi, Mike, do you know the Red Car's Weight Distribution? It would be important for us to know so that we could try it in the simulator. Thanks in advance, Pedro. p.s. I will be in the simulator tomorrow."

De la Rosa later confirmed that Coughlan replied by text message with precise details of the Ferrari's weight distribution.

De la Rosa later sent an email to Alonso describing Ferrari's weight distribution, to which Alonso replied on the same day with an email that included a section headed "Ferrari": "Its weight distribution surprises me; I don't know if it's 100% reliable, but at least it draws attention."

Soon after, De la Rosa emailed Alonso, passing on information from Coughlan about the CO2 Ferrari used in its tires, ending with, "We'll have to try it, it's easy!" Alonso replied that it is "very important" that McLaren give the gas a test.

De la Rosa emailed Coughlan on April 12: "Hi Mike, I hope you are well. Can you explain, as much as you can, about Ferrari's braking system ... Are they adjusting from inside the cockpit?" Coughlan replied two days later with a technical description.

And an email from one senior McLaren engineer to another: "Is the Ferrari wheelbase an accurate figure? Did it come from photos or our mole?"

Most damning of all was this email from De la Rosa to Alonso: "All the information from Ferrari is very reliable. It comes from Nigel Stepney, their former chief mechanic — I don't know what post he holds now. He's the same person who told us in Australia that [Ferrari driver] Kimi [Reäikkönen] was stopping in lap 18. He's very friendly with Mike Coughlan, our Chief Designer, and told him that."

This new information led the FIA to conclude that Ferrari insider information and documents had, in fact, found their way to several McLaren engineers and drivers. Not only did the engineers know that confidential Ferrari information had come from a Ferrari mole; they were prepared to use it to McLaren's advantage, if they hadn't already done so.

Mosley delivered the harsh verdict: McLaren would be stripped of all manufacturers' points (team points) for the '07 season. This meant the Constructor's Championship, which McLaren had been leading, was now lost. Then came the fine: $100 million, the biggest in the history of Formula One. Finally, and most embarrassingly for McLaren, a technical delegation would be dispatched to inspect McLaren's 2008 cars to determine whether any Ferrari information had been incorporated into the vehicles.

"I do not fear the task at all," Dennis stoically insisted of the inspection. "I care only about the McLaren name."

What did McLaren actually get from Stepney? It's debatable. Of course, McLaren received inside information about Ferrari's pit stop strategy, finances, personnel, and other elements that might have given the team a few seconds' advantage on the track. "If you can second-guess their pit stop strategy, without them knowing yours, you're at an obvious advantage," F1 writer Hughes says.

The aerodynamic map of the car would enable McLaren to show "what drag and downforce Ferrari was getting for given ride height and wings," Hughes says. Downforce and drag are always at odds in Formula One, one delivering better handling, the other increasing speed. Knowing how an opponent has managed this issue, Hughes points out, can help you determine how to adjust your own car and can be vital to knowing where the other team is going to be weak.

Another questionable area is tires and tire gas. In 2007, all teams were required to use Bridgestone tires. Ferrari had long ridden on Bridgestones, but McLaren was used to Michelins. Knowing how Ferrari dealt with these tires would certainly be helpful to McLaren. Until that point, McLaren had been filling its tires with nitrogen. But McLaren at least considered filling its tires with CO2 , just as Ferrari was doing.

But much of the data — like wheelbase measurements and weight distribution — had been deduced long ago by the subtle spying all teams do. Was the new information enough to get a unique advantage? Maybe, but many experts find it unlikely. The truth is, Ferrari almost certainly got more from the exchange than McLaren did: a way to trounce McLaren in public and through the FIA.

"FIA stands for Ferrari International Assistance," quips Stoddart, the former Minardi owner. Mosley, he says, came down hard on Dennis for the kinds of activities that nearly all of the teams have engaged in at one point or another. "To say the punishment fits the crime? The crime hasn't been proven in any reputable court of law. It hasn't been tried." He then recites for me a laundry list of FIA biases in favor of Ferrari and against McLaren, and the fate of those who dare challenge Ferrari.

The last race of the 2007 season was the Brazilian Grand Prix on October 21 in Se3o Paulo. It would determine the Drivers' Championship. McLaren was leading the event, and the team was prepared to extract some degree of solace for the bloody season it was leaving behind. McLaren's young superstar, Lewis Hamilton, had a four-point lead over teammate Alonso and was seven points ahead of Ferrari's Reäikkönen, whom Ferrari had poached from McLaren the previous year with a record-setting, three-year, $150 million contract. All Hamilton had to do was finish in fifth place or better and the Drivers' Championship would be his and McLaren's.

But the prancing horse would not go down. A gearbox problem slowed Hamilton, who fell to seventh place. Alonso got trapped on Hamilton's left and finished third. When the checkered flag fell, it was Re4ikkoenen in first, giving Big Red the Drivers' Championship by a single point. The streets of Maranello, where giant screens showing the race were erected in the town square, went nuts. "It was the most important victory in Ferrari history," says Enzo Ferrari biographer Leo Turrini. "It was like a revenge when you need to be repaid after you suffer an injustice."

But 2008 brings a new season. As of this writing — three races in — BMW is leading the Constructors' Championship with 30 points, Ferrari is second with 29, and McLaren is third with 28.

Eager to stay above reproach, McLaren told the FIA that it would avoid using anything that even looked like it came from Ferrari, including quickshift (a type of gearbox), fast fill (a fueling technique), and CO2 as a tire gas. Ferrari president Luca Cordero di Montezemolo was hardly forgiving. "Whoever wins the title will do so either with a little bit of Ferrari or with a proper Ferrari," he said. "Because the new McLaren is a silver Ferrari."

Stepney, who recently became director of race technologies for onboard camera company Gigawave, could still face criminal charges for the alleged doping of the F1 cars (he still denies all charges). Coughlan, who was officially fired from McLaren in March 2008, hasn't found a new position and is facing civil charges.

For his part, Mosley finds himself embroiled in a scandal of his own. International headlines exploded in early April, when the British newspaper News of the World posted a video of him in an underground S&M "torture dungeon" in the Chelsea district of London. The FIA head, according to the paper, was conducting a bizarre five-hour "Nazi-style" orgy with five prostitutes, reenacting a concentration camp scene and spanking at least one women with a leather strap while counting out the strokes in German. (Mosley denies there was a Nazi theme and has filed a lawsuit against the paper.)

The apparent disgrace of Mosley might offer Ron Dennis some comfort. But Dennis' meticulously constructed life has all but fallen apart. The team he spent more than 25 years building has been besmirched, tagged as a bunch of cheaters. There was even talk of his leaving McLaren. And in early 2008, Dennis and his wife announced their separation.

"Ron Dennis aims to be the best there is," John Barnard says. "To have the best team, the smartest team, the cleanest garage. Everything that he can change by spending more than the other guys, he will do. But with all of that, he still didn't win the championship last year. Ferrari got him again. Ferrari took the championship off of McLaren. Then, on top of that, Ferrari managed to create a political situation, which ended up costing McLaren 50 million quid [$100 million]. They've scored two out of two!"

The final insult is that the whistle-blower came not from Ferrari's headquarters in Maranello but from a Ferrari fan in McLaren's own backyard. What is it about Ferrari? Dennis is still no closer to answering this question.

I recently drove from McLaren's futuristic headquarters, which rises from the fields outside Woking, to a low-slung office building that houses a copy shop where, sources had assured me, Trudy Coughlan had taken the infamous documents. I rang the buzzer but got no answer. After a few minutes, a middle-aged man in a well-worn navy blue sweater hustled out. I mentioned the name of the informant from the court documents, and he answered, "Yes, that's me."

When I told him that I wanted to hear about his role in the F1 scandal, he blanched. "I get that all the time," he said, backpedaling. "But it's not me."

He added that he wished it had been him being hailed as a hero in Maranello by no less than Ferrari president Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, who dedicated the team's 2007 victory to "our fans who believe in the fairness of sport and to this English gentleman" who outed the stolen documents. "Without him," Montezemolo told Ferrari fans after one race, "it would have never been possible to shine the light onto one of the worst pages in the history of motor sport."

The more I grilled him, the more the guy in the sweater clammed up. Finally he walked away, faithful, like all red-blooded Ferrari fans, to the team's history, victories, and most of all, its secrets.

Mark Seal (markseal1@aol.com) is working on a book about the life and murder of Kenyan filmmaker Joan Root, to be published by Random House in 2009.

Super Hero Rides Get a Redesign: Go, Speed Racer!

Posted: May 24th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Adam Rogers

Tags: [edit]

Heroes are only as good as their rides. Think of James Bond's Aston Martin DB5 (ejector seat!). Wonder Woman's invisible jet (stealth!). Roy Rogers' Trigger (skinned!). So it's no surprise that as Hollywood "reimagines" various action heroes, their vehicles get overhauled, too. They have to keep pace with the state of the art in fanciful awesomeness ... and maybe sell a few toys. Here's a look at the power-ups for the 2008 model line.

1) Knight Rider
1982: KITT
Superpowers: Flamethrowers and tear gas launcher rain computerized fury on members of Devon's shit list. Turbo boost!
Alter ego: 1982 Pontiac Trans Am — a classic.

2008: KITT
Superpowers: The oscillating red Cylon scan strip returns. The vehicular robot shape-shifts Transformer-style into a lower, angrier attack mode. It hacks computers, is impervious to conventional munitions, and fires lasers. Most important, KITT speaks with the voice of Val Kilmer. Nobody feels the need for speed like Iceman (except for Goose ... poor, poor Goose).
Alter ego: Unfortunately, Pontiac ditched the Trans Am in 2002 (sniffle), so Knight Industries had to create its new overclocked crime-fighter out of a 2008 Ford Mustang Shelby GT500KR.

2) The Dark Knight
1966: The Batcycle
Superpowers: Er ... the detachable sidecar for Robin? Wing-shaped fairings?
Alter ego: The Caped Crusader's go-to bike was actually a batted-out 1966 Yamaha Catalina 250.

2008: The Batpod
Superpowers: Twin machine guns and massive wheels with growling engines in the hubs. Self-righting, thanks to an onboard gyroscope. Suspension lowers Batman behind the tires for cover. "The thing needs to feel tough," production designer Nathan Crowley says. "You've got to feel like you could crash it, and it would survive."
Alter ego: None, but seven Batpods do exist: four flat-out racers, one that does the lowering trick, a tracking vehicle for close-ups, and the super-skidder from the movie's trailer. Only one stuntman in the world can drive them.

3) Speed Racer
1966: Mach 5
Superpowers: Hydraulic jacks for sweet jumps, whirling saw blades, and a robot homing pigeon.
Alter ego: None, but its cartoon curves resemble those of a 1960s Corvette.

2008: Mach 6
Superpowers: T180 steering lets every wheel move independently. "We used that to create a new look for drifting," says the film's visual effects supervisor John Gaeta. "A super-drift, if you will." Plus, the spinning saw blades and jacks are back, along with all the Mach 5's onboard accoutrements: tire crampons, bulletproof cockpit and wheel shields. They enable the extreme-sports-style vehicle-to-vehicle combat that Gaeta's team calls car-fu.
Alter ego: Nada. The Mach 6 exists only inside the Wachowski brothers' digital render garage.

Care For Your Lawn, Save the Environment

Posted: May 24th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by How-To Wiki

Tags: [edit]

Still spraying pesticides, fertilizers and industrial weed-killers? Our guide in the How-To Wiki shows you how to break the habit. And while you’re at it, ditch the riding mower. Who are you, Hank Hill?

Permalink for 'Wired__Top_Stories/2008/05/23/Honda_Sells_Its_60_Millionth___8212__Yes__Millionth___8212__Cub'

Honda Sells Its 60 Millionth — Yes, Millionth — Cub

Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 7:00pm EDT by Autopia

Tags: [edit]

The venerable Cub is the most successful vehicle in history, a tireless workhorse that gave rise to Japan's dominance in the motorcycle industry and brought affordable personal transportation to millions of people. Fifty years later, it still rolls on.

Google, Facebook in Stalemate Over Social Data

Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 7:00pm EDT by Associated Press

Tags: [edit]

As Google continues to try to gain traction in the social networking world, it runs into fierce resistance from the innovators at Facebook, who has blocked the search engine leader's new Friend Connect system from its site.

Good News for a Change: Humpback Population Rising

Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 5:50pm EDT by Associated Press

Tags: [edit]

Humpback whales, once hunted to the brink of extinction, are bouncing back in big numbers, a new study says.

Teen Science Whiz Isolates Plastic-Bag-Munching Bacteria

Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 5:00pm EDT by Wired Science

Tags: [edit]

A 16-year-old in Ontario defies scientific odds and conventional wisdom by decomposing a plastic bag with dirt, yeast and tap water.

'Dollhouse' Fans Campaign to Save Show -- Before 2009 Airdate

Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 4:30pm EDT by The Underwire

Tags: [edit]

Fearing Joss Whedon's latest show, Dollhouse, is destined to build a dedicated following only to be dropped, Whedon fans are organizing an online 'save this show' campaign eight months before it even airs.

Peer-to-Peer IT Admin Convicted in Federal Case

Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 3:30pm EDT by Listening Post

Tags: [edit]

A 25-year-old Brooklyn man who managed servers for an underground file sharing service has been found guilty of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement in what the RIAA says is the first case of its kind to result in conviction at jury trial. Barry Gitarts faces up to five years in jail and a $250,000 fine.

Deadly Earthquake Doesn't Shake China's Internet Censors

Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 3:10pm EDT by Threat Level

Tags: [edit]

The Chinese government's response to an earthquake that left 55,000 dead included deploying "Jing Jing" and "Cha Cha" -- cartoon characters that pop up on web forums to remind you not to criticize management of the disaster.

Put Steve McQueen's Porsche in Your Driveway

Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 3:00pm EDT by Autopia

Tags: [edit]

Got $2 million burning a hole in your bank account? It might be enough to put you behind the wheel of the Porsche that Steve McQueen raced in one of the best endurance races ever. But you still won't be as cool as he was.

Hookers, Teens, & Halo: Story Was Too Good to Be True

Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 3:00pm EDT by Epicenter

Tags: [edit]

The story had legs -- hooker's legs -- plus teens, stolen credit cards, and Halo. It got Dugg, play on Fox News and was widely blogged. It was also made up -- and the original "story" has a disclaimer to that effect (of course, you'd have to read it, and to the bottom). So internet marketer Lyndon Antcliff, who whipped this all up, is having the last laugh.

Linux Brings Open Source to the .car Era

Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 2:00pm EDT by Autopia

Tags: [edit]

Wind River and Intel are working on an open source Linux platform for cars, a move that would spur development of infotainment appls while bringing cooperation to the emerging but fractured in-car multimedia market.

Does M. Night Shyamalan Have a Thing for the Pixies?

Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 1:30pm EDT by Listening Post

Tags: [edit]

Hitchcock had Bernard Herrman to add depth and dimension to his films and M. Night Shyamalan has ... the Pixies? It might be a bit of a stretch, but there are some tantalizing clues that the alternative rock band which disbanded 15 years ago is a muse to the cultish filmmaker.

Weezer Taps Internet Stars for Its New YouTube Channel

Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 1:00pm EDT by Listening Post

Tags: [edit]

The video for "Pork and Beans" puts web celebs like Tay Zonday and Chris Crocker in the pop culture blender.

Robot Boats, Sonic Blasters Come Ashore for NY Fleet Week

Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 1:00pm EDT by Danger Room

Tags: [edit]

It's Fleet Week in New York, which means Times Square is filled with sailors and leggy retro-pinup models. Oh, and there's a robotic boat (complete with gun detectors and sonic blaster).

Review: 'LostWinds' WiiWare Game Is Sweet, but Very Short

Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 10:30am EDT by Game|Life

Tags: [edit]

Engrossing gameplay, novel use of the Wiimote, flute-filled soundtrack -- riding the wind was never so much fun. Too bad the ride ends so quickly.

To Have or Have Not: Fibre Creates a New Digital Divide

Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 9:20am EDT by Associated Press

Tags: [edit]

The rollout of fiber connections to the internet is creating a new digital divide between "haves" and "have-nots." Fiber is something like 10 times faster -- and can easily be 100 times faster -- than plain vanilla broadband. But the only major carrier swapping out the copper is Verizon, whose FIOS service is or will be in only 17 states.

Iphone 2.0 To Incorporate Photo Geotagging

Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 8:53am EDT by Gadget Lab

Tags: [edit]

Version 2.0 of the iPhone rumored to be due out in, oh, 17 days or so will include geotagging for photos. It isn't clear whether this will be done by GPS or by the iPhone's current triangulation methods.

Toyota building $192 Million Green Car Battery Plant

Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 8:08am EDT by Associated Press

Tags: [edit]

Toyota says it is teaming up with Matsushita to build a $192 million plant in Japan that will build batteries for hybrid cars. The plant will produce nickel-metal hydride batteries, now in the Prius. Meanwhile, a press report in Japan reports that Toyota is building another plant to make lithium-ion batteries.

Yahoo, Icahn in Sights, Postpones Annual Meeting

Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 7:39am EDT by Associated Press

Tags: [edit]

Yahoo postpones its annual meeting, an indication it wants its place in the world a bit more settled than would be likely by July 3. Carl Icahn, who blames Yahoo for the collapse of the Microsoft deal, is leading a shareholder mutiny and Microsoft is still trying to get into the act. No new date was set, but the meeting is now expected in late July.

Sex Drive: Social Media Eat Porn's Lunch (Again)

Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Regina Lynn

Tags: [edit]

Newsweek sparked a conflagration among conservative Christians last week by pointing out that Christian dating site BigChurch.com is owned by Penthouse Media Group.

This wouldn't have been big news to BigChurch members who bothered to look under the site's hood. The Christian dating site has been operated by social networking giant Various, Inc. (which runs AdultFriendFinder.com, Bondage.com and Penthouse.com) for years. Penthouse Media Group acquired BigChurch, along with dozens of other niche social networking sites, when it purchased Various last December.

As a result of the purchase, Penthouse is now just one brand among many in a corporation that focuses on social networking, says Penthouse Media Group CEO Marc Bell.

Some people still think of Penthouse as Playboy's dirty cousin, even though Penthouse changed hands in 2004 and is now trying to be one step raunchier than Maxim rather than one step classier than Anal Sluts 13.

But when an old-guard porn kingpin like Penthouse becomes just another niche, you know that times have changed. This focus on social networking supports my ongoing argument that the fantasy of porn will continue to yield to the fantasy of sex, and that savvy adult companies will keep up with these changing consumer expectations.

I also think the fantasy of sex, served by both mainstream dating sites and adult social networks, will open our wallets in ways online porn hasn't for years.

Of course, social media does not guarantee sex any more than porn does. But it provides the anticipation of sex, the possibility of sex, the idea that you just might get lucky. It's the premise of porn, manifested in reality. Almost.

Social networking promises a new experience each time. And free porn can only be an advantage in an adults-only social networking context. Just ask YouPorn.

If customers find themselves flirting and even cybering on a regular basis, they return again and again, paying for premium memberships until disillusionment sets in (why am I not getting laid for real?). Those who hook up in person remain members as long as the nookie is more fun than the drama.

Old-style softcore simply can't compete with that. Not because we don't like to look at it, but because we don't like to pay for it -- especially when we can see the same thing on the social networking sites while chatting with the women in the pictures.

It's not like BigChurch isn't about sex. It's just more subtle than a site that's explicitly aimed at swingers. BigChurch's function is to connect people whose concepts of sex are tied so closely to faith and doctrine that it can be difficult to meet potential partners in more traditional settings.

Many people who identify as Christians have a fairly secular attitude toward premarital sex, while others believe in sexual pleasure within marriage. A handful still relegate sex to procreation, and God forbid that you (or at least, she) enjoy it.

With all this variation, it's possible that Christians benefit more from online dating than even kinky people do, in that they don't waste as much time chatting up people who don't share their particular beliefs. After all, with an online matchmaker, it's just a matter of checking the right boxes.

Whether BigChurch can survive the public link to Penthouse Media Group remains to be seen. I'm not sure Penthouse would miss BigChurch if a membership exodus killed the Christian dating site. BigChurch says it has a mere half-million members, while AdultFriendFinder alone claims about 24 million.

Even selling BigChurch might be a challenge now, as the URL will carry the taint of blatant sexuality, unless whoever buys it can pull off a "saving BigChurch from the devil" marketing campaign.

Given that Penthouse Media Group owns all of the FriendFinder and Spring Street Networks sites, as well as the legendary Danni.com and several webcam networks, it's hard to see how losing one small property would make much of a dent.

It's the corporate version of the Question of Our Age: "What if my day job learns about my sex blog?" Only this time, sex will win, either way.

See you in a fortnight,

Regina Lynn

- - -

Regina Lynn shows you how to have more fun with sex in her new book, Sexier Sex: Lessons From the Brave New Sexual Frontier, available now.

Murder, His Hard Drive Wrote

Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Marty Graham

Tags: [edit]

SAN DIEGO -- Forget everything you've seen on CSI. In the information age, crime scene forensics are beginning to take a back seat to the science of recovering and sifting through evidence hidden on computers, cellphones and thumb drives.

Nowhere is that shift clearer than at the FBI's Regional Computer Forensics Lab here, which once lifted traces of incriminating Google searches from a suspect's hard drive to help convict him of murder. This week the lab became the sixth computer forensic lab in the nation to be accredited by the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors, in another sign that computer forensics is no longer just about investigating hacker attacks.

"We've found video of gangsters rapping a song about a murder they committed," RCFL examiner John Leamons says.

The growth of law enforcement computer labs is an indication of how technology is increasingly involved in, or on the periphery of, criminal activity. San Diego-area law enforcement agencies founded the first regional forensic lab in 1998; there are now 14 such labs in the United States, with two more coming online this year. Last year the labs collectively performed more than 13,000 forensics examinations. The San Diego lab alone handled more than 1,000 requests from 40 law enforcement agencies in 2007, including 171 child pornography cases and 160 murder investigations.

In its early days, the RCFL examiners not only recovered the data, they analyzed it for evidentiary value based on the particulars of the case. But with exponentially growing data and caseloads, the 22 examiners here now focus on collecting and preserving data in a manner that will hold up in court, then hand that data back to the police agency for analysis.

Not surprisingly, the most valuable information comes from the files that suspects thought they had deleted, but which remained hidden in the nooks and crannies of their hard drives. "The key to computer forensics is unallocated space," says Leamons, who is on loan to the lab from the San Diego Police Department.

No one can remember a case being kicked because the lab made an error, but they can remember cases where they found evidence that exonerated people charged with crimes, Leamons says.

Cellphones pose a particular challenge, says Rebecca Adimari, one of the five examiners who work on them.

"Each has its own operating system and frequency -- there's probably over 500 makes and models and not many of them are the same," she explains. "There can be so much evidence on there."

From the unique ringtone caught on camera during a holdup -- to the accidentally recorded conversations on voice notes, to the Israeli thug keeping notes of extortion visits on his PDA -- the way people use their phones can be pretty incriminating.

"When they arrested the Arellano Felix people (a gang of Mexican drug lords later convicted of murder and drug crimes in 2007), they recovered 14 phones including one with a photo of a machine gun," Adimari says.

She has hundreds of power and data cables, since they're all peculiar to individual phones. And she has a special box that blocks signals on the phones in the lab, so no information is lost or compromised.

Examiner Patrick Lim, from the Naval Criminal Investigative Services, says he recently recovered data from a hard drive that had been burnt to a crisp. Asked if it was from an arson or a murder, Lim says he can't reveal the details.

"It was burned. That's all I can say."

May 23, 1962: Give That Kid a Hand!

Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Randy Alfred

Tags: [edit]

1962: A team of 12 doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston reattaches the severed arm of an injured boy. It is the first successful reattachment of a human limb.

Freckle-faced Everett "Red" Knowles had been trying to hop a freight train in Somerville, Massachusetts. He was thrown against a stone wall that ripped his right arm off cleanly at the shoulder. Knowles walked away from the tracks, using his left hand to hold his right arm inside a bloody sleeve. A police ambulance rushed the 12-year-old across the Charles River to Boston, where emergency-room staff discovered the extent of his injury.

Surgeons had successfully attached partly severed limbs before, but never had the ideal candidate for a complete reimplantation, or replantation. Mass General's 30-year-old chief surgical resident, Dr. Ronald Malt, had Knowles' arm put on ice, and he assembled the team of experts he needed. All of the techniques they used that day had been used before, but never in the complete combination that saved an entire limb.

In hours of surgery, doctors reconnected the blood vessels, pinned the arm bone together, and grafted skin and muscle together, but they decided to wait to reattach the nerves. To their delight, Knowles' hand turned pink and a pulse returned to the wrist.

Malt became a celebrity. Knowles became a celebrity. The Little Leaguer got souvenirs and letters from Major Leaguers.

In September, doctors reattached four major nerve trunks. Within weeks, Knowles was complaining of severe pain in the arm, which in the unusual circumstances was a good sign.

A year after the surgery Knowles' arm and fingers were sensitive to heat, cold and touch, and he could move his fingers and bend his wrist. He could also play first base -- but only with his one good hand. The year after that, he was playing tennis and baseball. After four years of recovery, Knowles had the same use of his right arm and hand as a natural lefty. He eventually drove a six-wheel truck and lifted sides of beef at his job.

By 1966, surgeons had performed dozens of similar operations, failing at least half the time. That led to a editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggesting that limb replantation be performed only if the patient is under 30 with no other major injury, with the severed limb in good shape, and is in a hospital with top-flight medical facilities. For all other cases, JAMA wrote, an artificial limb might be the better solution.

Source: Various