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Word War III: Google vs. Governments
In how many ways did Google respond to this week’s letter (PDF) from the data protection authorities of nine countries criticising the company’s approach to privacy? The first response came in the form of a statement from Google’s official PR operation. Predictably, it was blander than bland. “We try very hard to be [...]
04.24.10 -
Building a Buzz at The Roosevelt Field Mall
On April 9th,10th and 11th hundreds of LEGO enthusiasts and volunteers from as far as Virginia, joined Dan “The Master Builder” to build an 8 foot tall Buzz Lightyear model. That’s Dan up there with the small scale model of Buzz. You can read an interview with Dan in the January issue [...]
04.24.10 -
Al Jarnow’s Celestial Navigations Merge Art, Science
You’ve probably seen his short films about science and art, which aired on public television in the ’70s and ’80s. You might even have played with his interactive exhibits in museums. But you probably don’t recognize the name of the multimedia maestro whose avant-garde creations are collected on the new DVD Celestial Navigations: The Short Films [...]
04.24.10 -
Babylonian Twins Journey From the Amiga to the iPad
In software terms, Babylonian Twins is practically ancient. When it was first created, you (or maybe your parents) were finally playing Mortal Kombat on the Sega Genesis (or perhaps the bloodless version on the SNES). It was the age of a slew of newfangled game consoles like the 3DO and the Atari Jaguar. What, you [...]
04.24.10 -
Reader Photo Gallery: Your Desk Celebrates Hubble’s 20th Anniversary
The Hubble Space Telescope’s journey crossed the double-decade mark today, and our readers and followers are celebrating the beloved satellite with their desktops. For the past five weeks, we’ve asked followers of @wiredscience on Twitter to change their computer backgrounds to some of our favorite Hubble images and send us a photo of their workstations.This week, [...]
04.23.10 -
Secretly Filmed Movie Highlights Tehran’s Gutsy Rock Scene
Long before Iranian civilians tapped Twitter to alert the world about bloodshed on the streets of Tehran, the country’s young music fans routinely subverted the nation’s rigid regime by going online to get transfusions of American rock ‘n’ roll. The fruits of those furtive sessions can be seen, and heard, in No One Knows [...]
04.23.10 -
Police Investigating iPhone Prototype Leak
Police are investigating the loss of what appears to be an iPhone prototype, purchased and originally published this week by the tech site Gizmodo. A law enforcement official told CNET today that the incident could have violated criminal laws. In an unprecedented security leak for the Cupertino-based corporation, one of its engineers reportedly took the prototype to [...]
04.23.10 -
Hands-On: Left 4 Dead 2 Mutates With The Passing
The first expansion for Left 4 Dead 2 tweaks the co-operative zombie shooter in all the right ways, introducing new game modes and a big twist to the subtle plot without fundamentally changing the gameplay. The new downloadable content, known as The Passing, was released Thursday by Valve for Xbox 360 and PC. It unspools in [...]
04.23.10 -
Feds Finalize Fisker’s Financing
It’s official — Uncle Sam is lending Fisker Automotive $528.7 million to help build the super-luxe Karma plug-in hybrid and a more affordable model dubbed Project Nina. The Department of Energy announced today that it has closed a loan made through the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program. That’s the same program that loaned Tesla Motors $465 [...]
04.23.10 -
Bill Gates and Friends Make Case for Energy R&D
Bill Gates and a host of other corporate heavy hitters have founded a new organization to push for more research and development into clean energy technology. Gates and former DuPont CEO Charles Holliday heralded the launch of the American Energy Innovation Council with an unusually clear and concise argument for increased government support for green tech [...]
04.23.10
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Alien Prequel Will Tell Space Jockey’s Story
An Alien prequel that unspools the back story of the mysterious Space Jockey — the giant, fossilized creature with the burst-open chest from the first movie — is definitely going to happen, according to Ridley Scott. “It’s fundamentally about going out to find out ‘Who the hell was that Space Jockey?’” the director told MTV News. [...]
04.23.10 -
‘Smears’ Turn Milbloggers on Their Frontline Hero
To military bloggers and conservative hawks, Michael Yon was a super hero — a fearless Green-Beret-turned-citizen-journalist who spent years on the frontlines of Iraq and Afghanistan when most big media outlets kept their reporters at home. But now, those same military bloggers are turning their sights on Yon, after he began savaging America’s top general [...]
04.23.10 -
Man Indicted for ‘Cyber-Extortion’ Threat Against Insurance Firm
A California man was hit with an extortion charge this week for allegedly threatening to send out millions of e-mails criticizing his insurance company, if the firm didn’t pay him as much as $3 million. Anthony Digati, 52, faces a maximum two-year prison term if convicted of charges the Federal Bureau of Investigation is calling “cyber-extortion” (.pdf). The [...]
04.23.10 -
5 Reasons Cellphones and Mobile VoIP Are Forging an Unlikely Truce
The battle to deliver your wireless phone calls once seemed to have all the makings of an epic showdown between cellphone carriers and mobile voice-over-IP upstarts like Skype. Instead, the war has evolved into a surprising truce, as fring, Skype, Vonage and a chorus of “me too” voice-over-IP (VoIP) providers already let people call each other [...]
04.23.10 -
Video: Ride Along With Ferrari’s New King of the ‘Ring
Porsche 911s and Nissan GT-Rs and Corvette ZR1s are very nice cars and quite quick around the Nürburgring Nordschleife. But they must bow before the new king of the ‘Ring, the Ferrari 599XX. The 700-horsepower über-Ferrari is the first-ever production-derived sports car to break the 7-minute barrier at the classic 20.832 kilometer Nordschleife (North Loop), a [...]
04.23.10 -
Today Facebook, Tomorrow the World
With a dizzying array of announcements this week, it seems almost inevitable that the web will become, at least for the near future, an extension of Facebook. Like it or not. In some ways it’s a great development, making it simpler to connect what you read, watch and listen to. But there’s a nagging suspicion that [...]
04.23.10 -
Fair and … Carbon Neutral?
In the Fox News universe, the world is definitely not warming. Quite the opposite: Climate change is “bunk,” a spectacular hoax perpetrated on the rest of us by a cabal of corrupt scientists. But while embracing climate skepticism may be good for ratings, the execs at Fox News’ parent company, News Corp., don’t see it [...]
04.23.10 -
Chevrolet Volt Gets a Bigger Brother
General Motors rolled into the Beijing auto show with a crossover utility vehicle based on the Chevrolet Volt range-extended electric vehicle we’ll see at the end of the year. It’s just a concept, but the odds are good we’ll see it in showrooms. The Chevrolet Volt MPV5 is essentially a Chevrolet Volt stretched and squared to [...]
04.23.10 -
SMS Fights Malaria Scourge in Africa
Can texting help reverse Africa’s malaria epidemic? The answer seems to be a resounding “Yes.” Using a mix of text messages, Google Maps and cloud software, organizers of a pilot program backed by IBM, Novartis and Vodafone believe they saved hundreds of lives in a few short months on the malaria-wracked African continent. Simply by tracking [...]
04.23.10 -
DNA Day is This Sunday- Have You Had Your Genetic Work-up Done?
23andme is a new service that can check for over 100 common genetic medical conditions such as a predisposition to Parkinson’s or to breast cancer. Even more amazing, it can also find your genetic relatives, including the ability, with the permission of you and the other person, to link you up with distant relatives who [...]
04.23.10
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Video: 99-Year-Old Enjoys Her New iPad
The latest YouTube star is Virginia Campbell, a 99-year-old Lake Oswego, Oregon resident who’s in love with her iPad. Campbell suffers from glaucoma, which makes it difficult for her to read. Now, with the help of the iPad, she’s reading books and writing limericks. “The thing that’s so neat is there’s nothing between you and the screen,” [...]
04.23.10 -
Gadget Lab’s New Comment System
Comments are an integral part of new-media publishing. As bloggers and journalists, we’re conversation starters, not just reporters, and we judge our success in part on the volume and quality of the conversations that our stories kick off. We know that the comment system on Wired.com leaves something to be desired. It’s too easy for spam [...]
04.23.10 -
Alt Text: Are Videogames Art? Time Will Tell
Roger Ebert is at it again, declaring that videogames can’t be art. It’s a bit of an odd choice for a crusade, given that the topic is not up for a vote or anything. There isn’t a Secret Treehouse for Real Artists that Ebert — as the screenwriter of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls [...]
04.23.10 -
Wow! Celebrate Hubble’s 20th With Best Space Image Ever
We were already dreading the day Hubble dies, but this mind-blowing new image released to celebrate the space telescope’s 20th anniversary makes us wish for eternal life for the famous satellite even more. This new gem rivals what may be Hubble’s most famous image, a shot of the Pillars of Creation taken in 1995. The shot [...]
04.23.10 -
Official: Target to Stock Kindle from Sunday
After speculation and rumor, Target has at last confirmed that it will sell Amazon’s Kindle in its bricks and mortar stores. It will cost the same $260 as Amazon would charge you, but you at least get to try before you buy, and you don’t have to wait for the mailman to show up. And this [...]
04.23.10 -
Solar Car Makes an Ice Road Round Trip
What’s left to do after a record-setting journey crossing Canada’s infamous ice road in a solar car? Turn around and break your own record with a return trip, of course. The appropriately-named Marcelo da Luz was behind the wheel of the Power of One (X of 1) solar car when it rolled into Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories. [...]
04.23.10 -
Nook Software Update Adds Web Browser, Chess
Barnes & Noble has updated the firmware of its Nook e-reader to v1.3. The update tweaks existing features and adds a few brand new ones. The most exciting is the addition of a web browser, classified as “experimental”, just like the one on the Kindle. It uses the e-ink screen, not the touch-sensitive color one at [...]
04.23.10 -
Strong Initial Demand For Nissan’s Electric Leaf
Early demand for the Nissan Leaf electric vehicle is strong, with 6,635 people reserving cars in just three days — a figure that represents more than 10 percent of the Leafs Nissan will build in its first year of production. Nissan started taking reservations for the four-door, five-passenger EV on Tuesday afternoon, and almost instantly people [...]
04.23.10 -
Review: D&D Player’s Handbook 3 + PHB1 & 2 Giveaway!
The Player’s Handbook 3. The very name implies a “C” list of offerings that somehow didn’t rate getting in the first two. At first glance, a casual page-flipper might find confirmation in some of the entries. New classes Ardent and Battlemind don’t seem as iconic as some of the classes we saw in previous PHBs. [...]
04.23.10 -
Evolution’s New Foe: Timid School Administrators
Evolution education is under attack in Weston, Connecticut, but not from the usual direction. Nobody is promoting intelligent design in the curriculum, or asking schools to teach evolution’s “strengths and weaknesses.” There’s just an administration afraid that teaching third graders too much about Charles Darwin will cause trouble. “They might have just been looking to avoid controversy, [...]
04.23.10
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Obama Revives Rumsfeld’s Missile Scheme, Risks Nuke War
The Obama administration is poised to take up one of the more dangerous and hare-brained schemes of the Rumsfeld-era Pentagon. The New York Times is reporting that the Defense Department is once again looking to equip intercontinental ballistic missiles with conventional warheads. The missiles could then, in theory, destroy fleeing targets a half a world [...]
04.23.10 -
The Shared World Bestiary and Shared Worlds Writing Camp for Teens
This is the stuff that my teenaged dreams were made of. Jeff VanderMeer, assistant director of Shared Worlds and an author of much renown, posted today about the Shared Worlds Bestiary hosted by Wofford College with contributions from a truly amazing group of writers including Cory Doctorow, Lev Grossman, Jay Lake, Gail Carriger, and Elizabeth Bear. [...]
04.23.10 -
iPad Camera Connection Kit Delivered, Un-Boxed
IPad owner Jerrod H finally received his iPad Camera Connection Kit and did what any self-respecting geek does with brand new kit: He posted un-boxing photos. The kit is one of very few accessories which use the USB-ness of Apple’s Dock Connector to hook up to external hardware. In the box, as you can see from [...]
04.23.10 -
Dork Tower Friday
As you read above, today’s official Dork Tower could be considered slightly NSFW because it uses some very specific imagery to point out the absurdity of an ad campaign many geeks may be familiar with. We think it’s hilarious, but then we’re geeks. Read all the Dork Towers that have run on GeekDad. Find the Dork Tower [...]
04.23.10 -
Take A Stroll With Star Walk For The iPad
If you were one of the first in line to pick up an iPad this month, then you know there were only a handful of decent apps vying for your attention at launch time. One, which caught some attention, was port of the award-winning astronomy app, Star Walk, from the makers of the popular Solar [...]
04.23.10 -
IPad Desktop Runs Multiple Apps Together
Let’s be honest. When most people moan about the lack of multitasking on the iPhone or iPad, what they really want is multiple windows. IPhone OS4 won’t fix that, but Desktop, an appropriately named iPad app from Aqua Eagle, has a pretty good try. The App is actually an application suite, offering a split screen interface [...]
04.23.10 -
Are Carbon Offsets Really Offsetting Anything?
Every year on or around Earth Day, the subject of carbon comes up. What exactly is carbon though? We reference it in many different ways, from reducing our “carbon footprint” to the carbon in the air and the carbonite that Han was frozen in. So what is carbon? Carbon is the chemical basis for all known [...]
04.23.10 -
Air Force Launches Secretive Space Plane; ‘We Don’t Know When It’s Coming Back’
The Air Force launched a secretive space plane into orbit Thursday night from Cape Canaveral, Florida. And they’re not sure when it’s returning to Earth. Perched atop an Atlas V rocket, the Air Force’s unmanned and reusable X-37B made its first flight after a decade in development shrouded in mystery; most of the mission goals remain [...]
04.23.10 -
This Week in the Clone Wars: Boba Fett Is Here
2010 is shaping up to be the year of Boba Fett in the Star Wars universe. It’s the 30th anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back; there’s a mail-in promotion for a Boba Fett action figure with working rocket launcher coming this summer; and LEGO is releasing a refreshed Slave I in August. So [...]
04.23.10 -
The BeetleCam: Remote Controlled Camera-Car Survives Lion Attack
There’s more than one way to shoot a cat, as Will and Matt Burrard-Lucas proved when they went on safari to Tanzania. Instead of loading up on giant lenses to project their eyes artificially into the middle of the animal action, the brothers chose to get their cameras up close to the African wildlife. But [...]
04.23.10
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DSi Ware’s Game and What?
Game and Watch games are what formed the heart of Nintendo. Zelda, Mario, Donkey Kong, they all started as little Liquid Crystal Burned outlines on these diminutive handheld devices. It’s no bad thing then that these are getting a fresh airing via DSi Ware - these are the games you can download straight to your [...]
04.23.10 -
Apple Makes MagSafe MagSafer
Apple’s plastic MagSafe power adapter is certainly a big improvement on the old bullet-tipped model, but it is still prone to breakage. Exhibit A: My own power-adapter, which frayed internally and eventually stopped passing precious electrons to my MacBook a few weeks back. Apple has hopefully fixed this with updated MagSafe tips for the 85 Watt [...]
04.23.10 -
Recycle Your Old Gadgets on Wired.com With YouRenew
It’s Earth Day, which makes it a good time to announce a new partnership between Wired.com and YouRenew, a start-up that buys back old gadgets and recycles what it can’t resell. Lots of companies these days provide take-back programs that let consumers get rid of old gear responsibly. We’ve got nothing against that, and more companies [...]
04.22.10 -
Hollywood Doesn’t Get Games, Avatar Producer Says
LOS ANGELES — Avatar producer Jon Landau says getting game developers to work directly with forward-thinking filmmakers is the solution to Hollywood’s long-standing videogame problem. The process for developing movie-themed games “can’t be studio-driven,” Landau told Wired.com. “It has to be filmmaker-driven. I think [game companies] need to go find the Jim Camerons, Steven Spielbergs and [...]
04.22.10 -
Review: Zoe Saldana Nearly Redeems The Losers
Zoe Saldana’s got it going on, as anyone who’s seen Star Trek or Avatar can attest. In those movies, she probed outer space aboard the starship Enterprise and saved Pandora from colonization. In The Losers, opening Friday, Saldana may not rescue an alien world, but she does salvage the movie with her portrayal of Aisha — [...]
04.22.10 -
E. Rex Is a 3-Wheeled Electric Hooligan
The E. Rex is the three-wheeled, electric equivalent of … well, we’re not quite sure. Something absurdly fast, ridiculously fun and more than a little impractical. But then that describes just about any vehicle capable of zero to 60 in less than 5 seconds. Silicon Valley startup OptaMotive is building the E. Rex for the Progressive [...]
04.22.10 -
Navy Converts Biofuel Into Noise to Celebrate Earth Day
It’s starting to feel like hardly a week goes by without getting a press release regarding a jet flying on a new biofuel somewhere in the world. The Navy and Boeing did manage to time this latest move well by flying an unmodified F/A-18 Super Hornet on Earth Day with a 50/50 blend of camelina [...]
04.22.10 -
The Nanometer Matterhorn
Those crazy IBM research engineers, what will they create at the nanoscale next? To demonstrate a new material etching technique that could allow for ever smaller computer chip components to be made, they created a model of the Matterhorn that stands just 25 nanometers tall. That’s 17,912,000,000,000 times smaller than the 14, 691-foot real mountain. [...]
04.22.10 -
Richard Clarke’s Cyberwar: File Under Fiction
Readers of Richard Clarke’s new book Cyberwar who want to jump to the steamy parts should start at page 64 in the chapter “Cyber Warriors.” It’s there you’ll find the Book of Revelation re-written for the internet age, with the end-times heralded by the Four Trojan Horses of the Apocalypse. Chinese hackers take down the Pentagon’s classified [...]
04.22.10 -
Video: Boeing’s 787 Suffers Through Deep Freeze in Florida
Boeing has begun cold-soak testing of the new 787 Dreamliner at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. The testing takes place in the McKinley Climatic Chamber, a massive hangar where the temperature can be controlled to simulate everything from the deep freeze of high altitudes to the baking heat of the deserts. Boeing expects the [...]
04.22.10
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Hulu’s Reported Subscription Plans Portend Cable Showdown
Subscriptions are by far the most popular way to watch television in this country, where most households pay for cable or satellite programming. But nowhere is it written in stone that they’ll continue to pay cable or satellite television companies, because those are merely the delivery mechanisms, and the studios now have a more direct [...]
04.22.10 -
Playlist: Charlotte Gainsbourg Talks Music, Movies and Her Favorite Tunes
Actress and singer Charlotte Gainsbourg talked about the music and films that have influenced her when she stopped by the Wired studio recently to guest-DJ the Playlist podcast. Playlist Podcast: Episode 24 Subscribe on iTunes » Gainsbourg, who starred in Lars von Triers’ Antichrist last year, played a track from her latest record, IRM, which was co-written and [...]
04.22.10 -
The Future of American Combat Aviation: FUBAR?
The future of American combat aviation is wrapped up in a single jet, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. And right now, that future is looking pretty damn cloudy, with skyrocketing costs, missed deadlines, and slowed production rates. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairmen Admiral Mike Mullen tells Danger Room he’s “concerned about the increasing costs of the [...]
04.22.10 -
McAfee Probing Bungle That Sparked Global PC Crash
McAfee said Thursday it was trying to determine how it bungled a security update that crashed perhaps tens of thousands of PCs across the globe. Computers from Australia and Kentucky to the United Kingdom began freezing up late Wednesday after the Santa Clara, California, security firm released an updated definition file for its corporate antivirus software. The update mistakenly identified [...]
04.22.10 -
Vintage Pics of the BRE 240Z In All Its Glory
This is the BRE Datsun 240Z that proved the Japanese could build sportscars — and race cars — that could compete with the best from the United States and Europe. Forty years ago John Morton and Brock Racing Enterprises won the SCCA National Championship in this very car. It was the first time a Japanese production-based [...]
04.22.10 -
Sea Creatures Travel Far to Colonize After Volcanic Eruptions
When volcanic eruptions wipe out life at hydrothermal vents, some of the new species that set up camp afterward may come from as far as 200 miles away. “We don’t understand how they get from one vent to another,” said biological oceanographer Lauren Mullineaux of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. “But because we now see that they [...]
04.22.10 -
Hitler Reacts to Hitler Parodies Being Yanked From YouTube
Who could possibly have seen this coming? [via Boing Boing] Follow us on Twitter: @lewiswallace and @theunderwire. See Also: Hitler Downfall Videos Being Pulled From YouTube Banned From YouTube: Parody Guitar Videos Hitler Remixes Are Big — on YouTube
04.22.10 -
Op-Ed: The DIY Genius of the Original Earth Day
I’ve come to believe that Earth Day is the least understood famous event in modern American history. Every April 22, we pay ritual homage to the planet. This year, the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, the hosannas are likely to be especially loud. But few people appreciate what made Earth Day great. Even environmentalists have [...]
04.22.10 -
Question for Afghanistan Vets: Non-Lethal Weapons?
A quick question for anyone who recently been in Afghanistan — or is still over there. Have you seen any non-lethal weapons or “escalation of force” kits used at checkpoints? I’m talking anything from laser dazzlers to vehicle-stopping nets to simple caltrops and loudspeakers. Drop me a line either way.
04.22.10 -
China Could Wipe Out Recycled Toilet Paper
The paperless, global economy may have an unexpected downside for your backside: The reduction of high-quality white paper use may hurt the quality of the recycled toilet paper made from it. Printer and copier paper retain the nice, long fibers that make the best recycled toilet paper. But a resurgent Chinese economy and domestic waste reduction [...]
04.22.10
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South Park Airs Censored Episode After Muslim Threat
LOS ANGELES — Satirical animated TV show South Park beeped out the words “Prophet Muhammad” and plastered its Wednesday episode with the word “CENSORED” after being issued a grim warning by a U.S. Muslim group. The irreverent comedy show on Comedy Central also substituted a controversial image seen last week of the Prophet Muhammad in a [...]
04.22.10 -
Pandora and Facebook: So Happy Together
The leading online radio service and world’s biggest social network have forged a bond that will solidify both companies’ dominance, while offering music fans a way to share music with each other that appears to lack any significant downside. Pandora pays copyright holders, and integrating your Pandora and Facebook accounts won’t pollute your Facebook stream with [...]
04.22.10 -
Origin of Life Chicken-and-Egg Problem Solved
A chicken-and-egg paradox at the foundations of life may finally be solved. Scientists have wondered how the first simple, self-replicating chemicals could have formed complex, information-rich genetic structures, when replication was originally such an error-prone process. Every advance would soon be lost to copying errors. According to a new study, the answer may lie in the fundamental [...]
04.22.10 -
Crystal-Covered Protester Arrested After Nuclear Break-In
Ordinarily, James Richard Sauder spends his time writing books like Underground Bases and Tunnels: What is the Government Trying to Hide? and Kundalini Tales, “which deals with paranormal and mind control themes.” But earlier this month, Sauder took a break from his investigations to scale the fence of a nuclear [...]
04.22.10 -
Can Algorithms Find the Best Intelligence Analysts?
The U.S intelligence community has a long history of blowing big calls — the fall of the Berlin Wall, Saddam’s WMD, 9/11. But in each collective fail, there were individual analysts who got it right. Now, the spy agencies want a better way to sort the accurate from the unsound, by applying principles of mathematics [...]
04.22.10 -
Disney Fetes Earth Day With Wondrous Nature Doc Oceans
Looking for an eye-popping, mind-frying way to celebrate Earth Day? Dive deep into the dream states of Oceans, the new nature documentary that opens Thursday. It promises to be a refreshingly new experience for, well, pretty much everyone. “Less than 5 percent of the ocean has been seen by human beings,” says oceanographer Sylvia Earle, also [...]
04.22.10 -
Why Progressive Transportation Policies Are Good For Gearheads
Today is Earth Day, a day when people reflect on the environment and their part in it. It’s also a good time to reflect on the strides the United States has made toward a progressive transportation policy, and what it means for auto enthusiasts. Federal transportation planners have decreed that pedestrians and cyclists are equal to [...]
04.22.10 -
Treating Climate Change as a Curable Disease
Nearly 200 scientists from 14 countries met last month at the famed Asilomar retreat center outside Monterey, California, in a deliberate bid to make history. Their five-day meeting focused on setting up voluntary ground rules for research into cloud-brightening, giant algae blooms and other massive-scale interventions to cool the planet. It’s unclear how significant the [...]
04.22.10 -
Facebook Adopts Open Standard for User Logins
SAN FRANCISCO — As we predicted, Facebook is switching to an open standard to handle user authentication across its entire platform of connected websites and applications. Facebook is ditching its proprietary Facebook Connect system, which lets people use their Facebook username and password to log in to other sites around the web. In its place, the [...]
04.21.10 -
Boeing 787 Passes Critical Step in Flight Test Program
A little more than four months after its first flight, Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner has surpassed 500 hours of total flight time. And more importantly, Boeing received the expanded type inspection authorization (TIA) for the 787 this week from the Federal Aviation Administration. The initial TIA was given back in February and supported the flutter testing [...]
04.21.10
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Stereoscopic Gaming Is Already Here, Nvidia Says
LOS ANGELES — 3-D gaming isn’t just pie-in-the-sky talk. It’s already here — if you’ve got the right equipment. More than 400 current PC games, including Battlefield: Bad Company 2, World of Warcraft and Borderlands, can be played in stereoscopic 3-D if you’ve got the necessary specialized hardware, said Phil Eisler, Nvidia’s general manager of 3-D [...]
04.21.10 -
Adding Facebook ‘Like’ Buttons to Your Site Is Damn Easy
I want to offer a quick look inside the technology behind Facebook’s Open Graph initiative to show how easy it is to mark up your website and let Facebook users interact with it. This is only a part of the broad Open Graph strategy the company announced at its 2010 F8 developer conference. (Read our full [...]
04.21.10 -
ACTA Backs Away From 3 Strikes
A proposed global intellectual-property treaty no longer nudges the international community to develop “three strikes” protocols to suspend internet connections of customers caught downloading copyrighted works, according to a draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement released Tuesday. The official draft of the proposed intellectual property accord was released after months of leaks and assertions by the [...]
04.21.10 -
The Guild Comic Dives Into Web Series’ Origins Story
The second issue of Felicia Day’s comic book The Guild digs further into the back story of Cyd Sherman, the intrepid gamer whose misadventures drive Day’s Streamy Award-winning web comedy series. The middle installment in a three-part prequel, The Guild No. 2 packages its tale behind two variant covers. Kristian Donaldson’s cover design (above left) presents [...]
04.21.10 -
Firefox Quarantines Video Plug-ins to Stop Browser Crashes
Mozilla has announced a new beta of Firefox 3.6.4, an incremental update which adds one significant new feature to Firefox 3.6 — Flash and other plug-ins now run in separate processes. That means if Flash crashes, it won’t cause the entire browser to crash with it. To give the new beta a try, head on over [...]
04.21.10 -
Adobe Revamps Flash Player for Netbooks, P2P, Private Browsing
Adobe has released the first beta for Flash 10.1, the next major milestone for the Flash Player plugin. Flash 10.1 is an important update not just for its enhanced speed and new features, but also for Adobe to show that there is in fact still a place for Flash on the web. Flash’s ubiquity as the [...]
04.21.10 -
Iron Man Goes Dirty Dancing
With Iron Man 2 hitting theaters next month, Shell-Head is popping up all over the place. Iron Man dances with Patrick Swayze in the spoofy Dirty Dancing clip above, and punches Hugh Grant in the Bridget Jones’s Diary takeoff below. There will undoubtedly be more mashups as we zip toward Iron Man 2’s May 7 U.S. [...]
04.21.10 -
Facebook Shows Off New Tools to Socialize the Entire Web
SAN FRANCISCO, California — Facebook is launching a new suite of tools that bring the Facebook social experience to any site on the web. The company is releasing a set of products called Social Plugins, which any web publishers can drop into their website using one very simple line of code. These plug-ins will let visitors [...]
04.21.10 -
Sleep Is Death Turns Gamers Into Storytellers
Like a videogame mix of Dungeons & Dragons and improv comedy, an innovative new indie game lets players create their own plots on the fly. Sleep Is Death, a multiplayer storytelling game released Tuesday, was developed by Jason Rohrer. He’s the man behind 2007’s intriguing Passage, a five-minute exploration of life that Wired.com columnist Clive Thompson [...]
04.21.10 -
Facebook Tags Everyone at F8 with RFID Chips
Meet your friendly Facebook RFID tag. Here at Facebook’s F8 developer’s conference, each attendee has a small plastic token attached to their badge. Inside the token is an RFID chip. On the back, there’s a ten-character unique ID code. We’ve all been instructed to go to facebook.com/presence and enter our personal code to activate it. Once your [...]
04.21.10
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The Guardian’s Emily Bell Splits to Head Columbia Journalism School’s Digital Center
The Journalism School of Columbia University tells Wired.com it has hired away a key figure from the field of online news. As director of digital content for British newspaper and website The Guardian, Emily Bell spearheaded online efforts for the past decade and cultivated an audience of nearly 37 million visitors a month for a [...]
04.21.10 -
Top Officer Fears Cyberwar, Hearts Karzai, Tweets With Help
ANDREWS AIR FORCE BASE, Maryland — America’s top military officer believes there’s a cyberwar already in progress. He believes that the Defense Department’s controversial new Cyber Command should become the “engine” of our national network security — not just the builder of better Pentagon firewalls. He believes it’s time to end Afghanistan’s drug war. He [...]
04.21.10 -
Beyond the iPad: Massive MultiTouch Displays Have Big Social Potential
Apple appears to have been right in betting that people would embrace a big version of the iPod Touch; the increased sense of intimacy with no keyboard or mouse chaperons is palpable. But even larger touchscreens, like the one the Finnish company MultiTouch let us play around with last week, can track each fingertip of [...]
04.21.10 -
Five for Fighting 4/21/10
* Army: arm our small drone * Gates: make sense of military exports * “Space Station lightsaber-sparring hoverdroids to be upgraded” * Internet security’s privacy impact? Classified, CYBERCOM says. * Al Qaeda leader is dead. Does that mean he was real?
04.21.10 -
Atari in Japan: Akihabara’s Classic American Game Machines
TOKYO — The days before the launch of the Family Computer in 1983 must have been seriously confusing for the first wave of Japanese gamers. Besides all of the domestic game machines that were being produced in the early part of the decade by companies like Epoch and Bandai, many of the consoles that were popular [...]
04.21.10 -
Avatar Sequel Will Plumb Depths of Pandora’s Oceans
Having thoroughly explored Pandora’s ground-level flora and fauna in Avatar, director James Cameron plans to plumb the distant moon’s watery depths in the sequel. In the follow-up to his 3-D sci-fi blockbuster, which is set for DVD release on Thursday, Cameron and his team will go deep, and wet, to conjure a vision of aquatic [...]
04.20.10 -
Hitler Downfall Videos Being Pulled From YouTube
YouTube has begun deleting satirical videos based on the 2004 Hitler movie Downfall after a copyright claim from a German studio. The subtitled videos, which take a current event — such as DC Comics’ talk of a Watchmen sequel (above) — and overlay der Führer’s over-the-top reaction to the news, have turned into a genuine [...]
04.20.10 -
Coachella: 3 Days of Music, Mayhem and Amazing Spectacle
INDIO, California — This year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival began Friday like most before it — insane lines, scorching sun and 75,000 attendees in ever-dwindling clothing. For the next three days, Coachella provided the kind of musical spectacles this California festival is known for, with mind-blowing sets from Jay-Z (pictured above), LCD Soundsystem, [...]
04.20.10 -
Second Banker Accused of Stealing High-Frequency Trading Code
It was only a matter of time before another banker, lured by the prospects of riches, would get busted on allegations of stealing source code connected to a high-frequency, stock-and-commodities trading platform. The latest arrest concerns a former Societe Generale trader who was being detained Tuesday on New York federal court charges of stealing the computer [...]
04.20.10 -
Wise Up With The Apples in Stereo’s Space and Time Math-Pop
Is there a bigger pop music geek than The Apples in Stereo’s Robert Schneider? We asked him, but had to wait till he got back from “mathemagician” Martin Gardner’s annual conference for our answer. The Apples in Stereo’s Travellers in Space and Time, out Tuesday, is a futuristic recording influenced by both science and sci-fi, all [...]
04.20.10
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Javelin Talks Bee Pollen, Hologram Clones and the Art of Songwriting
Javelin’s music is all over the map, but all of it’s skillfully made, as much as the duo behind it would like to pretend otherwise. Using our grandmother’s recorders (I’ll explain below), vintage guitars, thumb pianos, Appalachian dulcimer, cheap synths, drums and whatever other instruments they can get their hands on, the pair make experimental pop [...]
04.20.10 -
Left 4 Dead 2 Expansion The Passing Coming Thursday
Round up your favorite online zombie-blasting buddies: New downloadable content for Left 4 Dead 2 is coming out Thursday. The Passing, the first addition to Valve’s popular cooperative zombie shooter, will cost $7, Xbox Live community manager Major Nelson said Tuesday. The expansion promises to feature an appearance by survivors from the first Left 4 Dead. New [...]
04.20.10 -
Minority Report Blu-ray Explores Spielberg’s Futuristic Vision
He rarely does much in the way of DVD commentary, but director Steven Spielberg weighs in on the making of Minority Report as part of an hour-plus package of new bonus material packaged with Tuesday’s Blu-ray re-release of the 2002 tech thriller. Set in 2054, the Tom Cruise sci-fi flick follows a “precrimes” fighter charged with [...]
04.20.10 -
Up Next For Facebook: Expect More Open Interactions
Facebook essentially copies a bunch of services that are already available on the open internet — chat, e-mail, media sharing, profiles — for its 400 million active users. But it also provides tools to help those users interact with each other while they’re outside Facebook’s walls, and there are signs the company is ready to [...]
04.20.10 -
Apple Reverses, Allows App From Pulitzer-Winning Cartoonist
Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist Mark Fiore now has an iPhone app available to the masses, less than a week after news broke that Apple had rejected his app for satirizing public figures. “Looks like some guy named Steve Jobs was able to nudge my app past the gatekeepers,” Fiore told Wired.com by e-mail. Fiore’s NewsToons app was [...]
04.20.10 -
EA Revives Ultima as Free-to-Play Browser Game
A new free-to-play game based on the Ultima role-playing series puts players in control of a medieval city. The browser-based Lord of Ultima, a massively multiplayer strategy game, was launched Tuesday by Electronic Arts. For lack of a better term, I’ve come to call games like Lord of Ultima “Travian-likes,” due to their similarities to the German [...]
04.20.10 -
Q&A: Geeking Out With The Apples in Stereo’s Robert Schneider
We celebrate sonic geeks like The Apples in Stereo’s Robert Schneider whenever possible. It’s hard not to when he pounds out punchy pop albums like Travellers in Space and Time, out Tuesday. In the following e-mail interview, the math-smart singer and musical tinkerer changed our mind (slightly) about Auto-Tune’s lameness, while geeking out over The [...]
04.20.10 -
Google: U.S. Demanded User Info 3,500 Times in 6 Months
Search engines and ISPs have for years refused to tell the public how many times the cops and feds have forced them to turn over information on users. Google broke that unwritten code of silence Tuesday, unveiling a Government Requests Tool that shows the public how often individual governments around the world have asked for user [...]
04.20.10 -
Report: Google Hackers Stole Source Code of Global Password System
The hackers who breached Google’s network last year were able to nab the source code for the company’s global password system, according to The New York Times. The single sign-on password system, which Google referred to internally as “Gaia,” allows users to log into a constellation of services the company offers — Gmail, search, business applications [...]
04.20.10 -
Etrian Odyssey-Themed Atlus-Mobile Rolls Into Akihabara
TOKYO — I don’t think you’re supposed to go up to white vans offering candy, but this one seems okay. Parked in a back lot of Akihabara over the weekend was this rolling advertisement for the DS game Etrian Odyssey III, released earlier this month in Japan. A video screen featured footage of the game for [...]
04.20.10
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Reader Photo Gallery: Your Desk Celebrates Hubble’s 20th Anniversary
04.23.10 -
Air Force Launches Secretive Space Plane; ‘We Don’t Know When It’s Coming Back’
04.23.10 -
High-Tech Underwear for Adventurous Geeks
04.21.10 -
Wow! Celebrate Hubble’s 20th With Best Space Image Ever
04.23.10 -
Hands-On: Left 4 Dead 2 Mutates With The Passing
04.23.10 -
Video: Ride Along With Ferrari’s New King of the ‘Ring
04.23.10 -
Today Facebook, Tomorrow the World
04.23.10 -
Chevrolet Volt Gets a Bigger Brother
04.23.10 -
Bill Gates and Friends Make Case for Energy R&D
04.23.10 -
‘Smears’ Turn Milbloggers on Their Frontline Hero
04.23.10 -
Review: Zoe Saldana Nearly Redeems The Losers
04.22.10 -
Alt Text: Are Videogames Art? Time Will Tell
04.23.10 -
5 Reasons Cellphones and Mobile VoIP Are Forging an Unlikely Truce
04.23.10 -
Pandora and Facebook: So Happy Together
04.22.10 -
Man Indicted for ‘Cyber-Extortion’ Threat Against Insurance Firm
04.23.10 -
Police Investigating iPhone Prototype Leak
04.23.10 -
New Space Telescope Delivers First Mind-Blowing Video of the Sun
04.21.10 -
Apple Makes MagSafe MagSafer
04.23.10 -
Origin of Life Chicken-and-Egg Problem Solved
04.22.10 -
Obama Revives Rumsfeld’s Missile Scheme, Risks Nuke War
04.23.10
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