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Q&A: Exclusive Interview With the Phoenix Mars Lander

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.
Condi Hooks Up With KISS — In Sweden, No Less

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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News from Portfolio.com

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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

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

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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.