Throughout the planet’s history, ocean levels and temperatures have had a fairly straightforward relationship: when the earth cools down, ocean levels drop; when it heats up, they rise. The basics of this dynamic are pretty simple. When the climate is warm, land-based ice melts, and much of that water winds up in the oceans. The water in the oceans also occupies more volume, since water expands when it heats up. Cooling the climate reverses both of these processes.

Consistent with the rise registered in global temperatures, various measurements have shown that the oceans have been rising for at least the last century. Yet the steady rise that has been observed covers a fairly complex system, with seasonal variability and changes in the relative contributions of different factors. If we’re to provide accurate forecasts of how the ocean levels might respond to further changes in the climate, it will be essential that we understand this complexity. A panel at February’s meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science tried to tackle the issue.

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Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser has made impressive market share gains in Europe over the past few years. In the latest marketshare report released by StatCounter, Firefox 3 has finally surpassed Internet Explorer 7 as the most popular browser in Europe in a breakdown by version number.

Firefox 3 holds 35 percent and IE 7 has 34 percent in that region. The recent decline of IE 7 in the past week can largely be attributed to the release of IE 8, Microsoft’s new browser. According to StatCounter, IE 8 has grown to 2.3 percent in Europe, with most of those users upgrading from IE 7. This change was enough to put Firefox 3 on top. IE 6, however, still has 11 percent marketshare, which means that all users of Microsoft’s browser across all versions still outnumber the total number of Firefox users.

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Ars has just one question for PhD student Arvind Narayanan and his advisor Vitaly Shmatikov: why must you continually shatter our illusions? Despite the all-seeing, all-knowing panopticon that is the Internet, some of us like to dream our simple dreams of anonymity and privacy; we choose to believe that our Netflix movie recommendations do not identify us; and we hold on to the belief that we can remain comfortably anonymous behind the veil of our Pumpalumpkin Twitter account.

But like the yapping Toto at the end of the Wizard of Oz, Narayanan and Shmatikov take delight in ripping back the curtain, exposing the great and terrible Oz as nothing more than a scrawny academic.

Their newest paper, “De-anonymizing social networks,” is yet another attack on the idea that data can be easily anonymized by stripping out a few bits of personally identifiable information (PII). Much of their work over the last few years is built on the premise that PII extends far beyond names and addresses; in many datasets, the very structure of the data provides all sorts of clues that can be deciphered with only a few bits of information.

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Jimmy Wales is best known for his role in founding Wikipedia, but he is also involved in Wikia, a startup focused on fostering online communities that take a wiki-like approach to community-driven content. In that role, he has to balance his commitment to open information against profitability and the potential for growth, a balancing act made more difficult by the current economic downturn. The hard economic realities hit home this week, as Wales announced the termination of a project, Wikia Search, that he has spent several years developing and promoting.

Wikia search was first announced back in 2006; the following year, it purchased a distributed search indexing service called Grub. In keeping with the emphasis on open information, the Grub project was made open source, allowing anyone to look over the algorithms involved in generating search results. After an extended test period, the site finally went live last year.

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Charlie Nesson isn’t one for small gestures—the Harvard law professor is known as “Billion Dollar Charlie,” after all, and he was one of the lead lawyers in the famous industrial dumping case that became the book (and then the movie) A Civil Action. So when he took on the defense of a 25-year old Boston University physics grad student who was accused of sharing copyrighted music online, the case suddenly promised to be more than usually interesting. It has not disappointed so far.

But it has also seemed like a bit of a circus, what with attempts to depose lawyers from the other side, the filing of official apologies, motions on webcasting the trial, threats of judicial sanctions, and Nesson’s desire to record everything—including typically-private lawyer-to-lawyer conference calls. Things grew strange enough that even noted RIAA scourge Ray Beckerman wrote, “To you law students and young lawyers out there; please don’t think you can learn anything from this case. Just ignore everything you are seeing from both sides. I have seen more bizarre filings from both sides’ lawyers than I would imagine possible.”

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Imaging this. You’re a huge company whose name rhymes with Oogle. You release a phone that is sold both locked and unlocked, so that it can theoretically be used with any GSM-compliant carrier. The phone is also used, however unofficially, in many countries where tethering is perfectly permissible. You advertise your platform as open and welcoming.

Now imagine this: some registered developers create a tethering application and submit it to your Oogle marketplace. What do you do? Do you (a) let it be, and trust the customers to use or not use it according to their contracted terms of service? Or do you (b) yank the application from sale and cite a part of the development agreement that says, “These distribution agreements may require the involuntary removal of Products in violation of the Device manufacturer’s or Authorized Carrier’s terms of service”?

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Judge Janet Half of the US District Court for the District of Connecticut made history on March 31 when she sentenced Ovidiu-Ionut Nicola-Roman, a 23-year-old native of Romania to 50

months in prison followed by three years of supervised release. This is the first time a foreign national has been tried and convicted as a phisher in the United States,

which may be why Judge Half chose the sentence that she did. The intended message is quite clear—if we catch you at this, you’re going to pay for it.

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Of all the expanded investigative powers authorized by Congress since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, few have proved as controversial—or as consistent a source of embarrassment to federal law enforcement—as National Security Letters. Though audits by the Inspector General have uncovered widespread improprieties in the use of the investigative tool which allows the FBI to demand certain telecommunications and financial records without the need for a court order, a 2007 effort to further constrain NSLs stalled in committee.

Now, with a new administration and a sturdier Democratic majority in place, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) on Monday reintroduced the National Security Letters Reform Act. The bill would significantly tighten the rules for NSLs—which can currently be used to obtain records “relevant” to an investigation, whether or not they pertain to someone even suspected of wrongdoing—and the gag orders that typically accompany them.

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In recent months, most of the news about Google focused on the cutbacks it has made to both staff and experimental projects. On Monday, however, the search giant announced a major expansion, a venture capital fund with full Google branding: Google Ventures. In contrast to some of the efforts of Google.org, these investments will be all about profit, and the company is taking great pains to ensure potential investees that the money will come with no strings attached. Those assurances, however, come in a message that’s fairly mixed.

This is not Google’s first foray into investing, but the company’s past efforts were placed under its charitable arm, Google.org. These investments were mixed with grants, and had a clear focus on things like alternative energy and emerging diseases. Google Ventures, in contrast, doesn’t appear to have any specific goals beyond “making money from the investment.” There is the possibility that there will be some overlap—areas of interest highlighted by the announcement include clean tech, biotech, and health care—but those investments will be made alongside those in software, consumer Internet, and other businesses. Google promises that its ventures will borrow “the best practices of top-tier, financially focused venture capital firms.”

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<img vspace=”4″ hspace=”4″ border=”0″ align=”right” src=”http://www.slashfeed.com/media/03-31-09/locks-thumb-230×130-2057-f.jpg” alt=”companion photo for Ericsson to enable wireless kill switch for laptops” />

A laptop remote-kill switch has long been a fantasy of those paranoid about theft and service providers alike. And now, with the latest wave of subsidized notebooks coming out of wireless carriers, said switches are coming in the form of a new mobile broadband card from Ericsson. The card, designed to work on HSPA/GPRS/EDGE networks, is slated for release in June, and carries with it a number of innovative features. But the most interesting is that it supports certain security options that work with Intel’s anti-theft technology, allowing carriers to send a signal that will lock down the machine and make it unusable.

Ericsson’s F3607gw module boasts reduced power consumption, prolonged battery life, and increased integration with the OS. Ericsson specifically highlights the F3607gw’s wake-on-wireless feature, which allows users to remotely wake the notebook at specific times, like when an important message is received or the computer has been stolen.

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The Mono project, which is developing an open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET framework, has announced the release of Mono 2.4 and MonoDevelop 2.0.

According to a blog entry by lead developer Miguel de Icaza, the new version of the Mono runtime is faster and more scalable. Key features include improved SIMD support, more efficient threading, and improvements to the DataGridView control in Mono’s Windows Forms implementation.

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Last week, we reported on the case of three Pennsylvania teens threatened with prosecution as child pornographers after school officials discovered cell-phone photos of the scantily-clad girls being traded by male students. Monday, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order, finding that the girls (and their mothers) were likely to prevail in a civil rights lawsuit against Wyoming County District Attorney George Skumanick, and enjoining Skumanick from making good on his threat to file felony charges against the girls unless they agreed to participate in a five-week “educational” program.

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A group of companies and organizations have published a document that they call the Open Cloud Manifesto. It aims to provide an outline of core principles that are intended to boost interoperability among various cloud computing technologies. The manifesto, which is strongly supported by IBM, has faced criticism for the secrecy and lack of inclusiveness that characterized its creation.

Cloud computing is an amorphous buzzword that encompasses several broad categories of network-based computing, ranging from hosted software to scalable grid services, where applications or units of computing resources are sold on an as-needed basis. There are a wide range of open and proprietary technologies that are used to provision computing resources, deploy and manage software in a cloud environment, and move data among various cloud services and networks.

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While the buzz at GDC was about a possible price break on the PlayStation 3, today all the rumors about a Sony price drop have been confirmed… for the PlayStation 2. Starting April 1, new PS2 hardware will cost $99.99, coming in below the magical $100 price point. Compared to $400 for the PS3, that’s almost an impulse purchase.

“PlayStation 2 set the industry
standard for worldwide mass market adoption and is a clear embodiment of Sony’s
commitment to platforms that deliver 10-year product lifecycles. It’s a tribute
to outstanding technology, great consumer value and unprecedented development
support that we’ve now been able to do twice what no one else has ever
accomplished,” said Jack Tretton, president and CEO, SCEA. “Demand
for PlayStation 2 remains strong throughout the world, and the new $99 price
point will bring in new consumers who will discover how PlayStation platforms
are an outstanding choice for their gaming and home entertainment needs.”

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The clock is ticking down towards Conficker.C’s reported April 1 launch date, but an 11th-hour discovery by Team White Hat may substantially improve an IT shop’s chance of catching the

bug early and stomping on it. The full technical details on the Conficker scanner are being witheld for roughly 24 hours (we’ll link the paper when it arrives). If the scanner works as

advertised, the security industry will be able to track the spread of Conficker much more effectively than before and neutralize it that much faster.

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GDC 2009 marked the second anniversary of the PlayStation Home announcement, and Ars was invited to speak with Jack Buser, director of PlayStation Home for Sony Computer Entertainment of America, and Peter Edward, director of the Home platform. I started by asking how far we’ve come since that announcement. “I think everyone gets it, we’re starting to see large numbers of people in there. The user base is active. Content is constantly coming in… when you have the Guitar Hero space you pretty much know you’ve made it. The fact of the matter is, every major publisher for the PS3 now has some kind of plan for Home,” Buser tells Ars.

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The Entertainment Consumers Association is a non-profit started by industry professional Hal Halpin to help consumers understand their rights, while also being a voice for those who buy and play video games in the industry. When the FTC held a conference to discuss DRM, the ECA was there, and at GDC 2009 we chatted with Halpin about that conference and the future of PC gaming. Ultimately, the ECA has two main positions on gaming and copy protection: 1) DRM needs to be disclosed, and 2) End-User Licensing Agreements need to be both simple and standard.

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Ocean City, Maryland is a resort town, drawing vacationers to its beaches from nearby states. As such, many of the multiunit condos are used for summer rentals, with short-term occupancy the rule. In the era of the laptop and netbook, providing free Internet access is a selling point, and OceanNet offered building owners the opportunity to have someone else install and manage a WiFi network for the guests. Unfortunately, it appears that OceanNet kept its service cheap by getting unauthorized access to Comcast’s residential service, and the cable giant is not amused—it’s suing to recover the ill-gotten gains of the WiFi provider.

We’ll leave aside the whole issue of why someone would accept technical services from a company with a website that looks like a fourth grader’s school project, and calls one page descriptions of its installs “whitepapers.” OceanNet claims to require access to a phone closet for installation of its equipment; from there, it can run its wiring and place its equipment in the ceiling or in other closets in order to provide complete coverage.

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The International
Astronomical Union has deemed this
year the International
Year of Astronomy 2009 and hopes
that programs carried out around the world will help “citizens of the world
rediscover their place in the Universe
through the day- and night-time sky, and thereby engage a personal
sense of wonder and discovery.” One of the IAU’s cornerstone projects
for the IYA2009 is the 100
Hours of Astronomy, which is set to begin on
April 2nd. By looking up and observing the wonders of our Universe, the IAU hopes that people can get the same sense of amazement that Galileo
felt 400 years ago, when mankind first started to gain a deeper
understanding of the cosmos.

In 1609, Galileo Galilei built his first telescope based on the
description of one built by Hans Lippershey a year earlier.
With his simple device, Galileo would revolutionize the field of
astronomy and help usher in the scientific revolution. His
observational contributions include the discovery of the four of
Jupiter’s moons—now named the Galilean moons—the
rings of
Saturn, sunspots, and the phases of Venus. In the process, he lent key pieces of
evidence to the shift away from geocentric universe
models—the fact
that the moon is a rough rock analogous to Earth, among others—and helped change humanity’s thoughts on our place in that universe.

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Are you indecisive? Did you have trouble picking whom to vote for, what to have for lunch today, or even whether to respond to these rhetorical questions? Hunch, a new site in private beta from Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake, is designed to get to know its users well enough to help them make just about any decision imaginable.

Put simply, Hunch is a “decision-making tool that’s customized for you.” The site presents a myriad of real-world topics, such as “Is my partner cheating on me?” or “Should I accept an early retirement offer?” then provides a series of questions to help you determine the best answer(s). Topics are organized into a broad array of categories, such as autos, personal care, electronics, hobbies, local, politics, sports, travel, and more. The site’s founders claim that after asking you just 10 questions on topics like whether alien abductions are real and which of four types of art you prefer, Hutch will “provide a concrete result for decisions of every kind.” Users can submit their own topics, recommend new questions for existing topics, and otherwise contribute to help make Hunch a smarter tool that, ideally, gets to know you and provide better answers.

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Gmail Labs has been enhancing our inboxes for nearly a year now, and on Wednesday, April 1, Gmail itself turns five. With an estimated base of 150 million users and all the webmail power features and customizability that one could ask for, Google has done quite well with what began as a “20 percent time” project. With the anniversary approaching, Ars Technica spoke with Todd Jackson, Gmail Product Manager at Google, about how far Gmail has come, the state of Gmail Labs, and that damn “beta” badge.

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On Monday, Western Digital announced it had acquired SiliconSystems Inc. in a $65 million cash deal. The new deal will give WD the means with which to form its own solid

state disk (SSD) product divisions; effective immediately, SiliconSystems will be known as the WD Solid-State Storage business. SiliconSystems is a bit of a dark horse as far as an

acquisition target goes; the company was founded in 2003 and has focused on building business relationships with the Enterprise System OEM market.

According to the company,

“SiliconDrive products are designed to exceed the rigorous demands of applications in the netcom, industrial, embedded computing, data center, military and medical markets.”

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Less than six months after Netflix imposed a $1 surcharge for Blu-ray lovers, the company has decided to jack up its rates once again. In an e-mail sent to subscribers today, Netflix said that it would be raising its Blu-ray access charge to as much as $9 per month on top of a normal subscription rate. The changes will go into effect on customers’ billing statements on or after April 27, 2009 unless they remove the option from their accounts.

“The number of Blu-ray titles has increased significantly and will continue to do so. As we buy more, you are able to choose from a rapidly expanding selection of Blu-ray titles,” reads the e-mail from Netflix. “And as you’ve probably heard, Blu-ray discs are substantially more expensive than standard definition DVDs.”

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As of early this past Saturday, astute readers may have noticed the commenting system on Ars performing a little better. The really eagle-eyed ones, however, would notice many subtle changes and even some new features. Since we launched the new design a little over two months ago, our team has been tackling many issues, technical and otherwise. We surveyed everyone about the new redesign and we’ve been collecting data on how people have adjusted their use of the website in response.

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If you’re in West Virginia, you may want to watch what you say in the comments thread to this article. A bill introduced last week would expand the definition of harassment under the state’s Computer Crime and Abuse Act, making it a misdemeanor punishable by a $500 fine or up to six months in jail to post false statements about another person in an online forum.

The legislation was originally sponsored by state senator Mike Green (D-Raleigh) last Monday, though without the “false statements” provision, which was added when the bill was reported out of the Judiciary Committee on Friday. As currently written, the bill would make it a crime to create a “webpage or posting on a newsgroup” containing “untrue statements about another person which are false and designed to entice or encourage other people to ridicule or perpetuate the untruth about that person.”

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Navigation device-maker TomTom has settled its patent dispute with Microsoft, putting an end to the current round of litigation between the two companies. The terms of the settlement, which were announced by Microsoft on Monday, are said to be fully compliant with GNU’s General Public License (GPL).

The conflict between Microsoft and TomTom, which publicly emerged in February, raised serious concerns within the open source software community. Microsoft alleged that TomTom’s navigation products, which use the open source Linux kernel, infringe on a handful of Microsoft’s patents. Two of the patents cited by Microsoft cover legacy compatibility features in Microsoft’s FAT filesystem, support for which is implemented in Linux. Some feared that the lawsuit was the beginning of a patent litigation campaign by Microsoft against embedded Linux adopters.

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You win some, you lose some. That’s the message that the scientific community got from the Texas State Board of Education last week, as it voted on new state standards for science education. When it comes to the big picture, there was good news, as the problematic “strengths and weaknesses” language was deleted, and an effort to challenge common descent was turned back. But things were not so rosy in the fine print, where amendments to the standards raised questions about the age of the universe and adopted language favored by the intelligent design movement.

As we mentioned last week, things were bound to be complicated. The existing standards had indicated that teachers instruct students on the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories, even if the strengths significantly outweigh the weaknesses, or when the weaknesses required an understanding of the topic that is far too sophisticated for public school students. As such, replacement standards proposed by a committee of scientists and educators dropped this language. Those replacements, however, had to get past a state board chaired by someone who, based on his belief that the universe is less than 10,000 years old, thinks most of modern science suffers from serious weaknesses.

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Google and the Big Four music labels have launched an ad-supported music service in China in an attempt to make online music profitable there. The venture, launched along with 14 independent labels, will have to compete with search engines that point users to thousands of copyrighted music files for free, but Google hopes that this will make it even easier for users to find what they want online while ensuring artists get paid for their work.

This appears to be the same venture that Google discussed in August of 2008, now located at http://www.google.cn/music. The service is actually run through the partially-Google-owned Top100.cn, which is responsible for selling advertising space and divvying up revenues between the music labels. The site will be limited by IP address to those in mainland China, however, so if you’re in Taiwan or any other surrounding area and want to get a taste, you’ll be out of luck.

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Supermassive
black
holes are often accompanied by two things: an accretion
disk
of matter in its death throws and a pair of relativistic
jets that eject some of this matter in a last-minute pardon prior to its removal
from the universe. While black holes are known for capturing every bit
of matter or energy that gets too close, it has also been theorized that they will eventually stop growing. It is believed that these two
phenomena—matter being devoured at the edge of the disk while being
pushed away by the jets—form a sort of self-regulating system
that
keeps these monsters in check.

While this self-regulatory behavior is believed to be common in
supermassive black holes, the extreme mass scales involved mean that the dynamics of the system
occur on extremely long time scales, on the order of tens of thousands of years. However, if
the
black hole is smaller—on the order of a few solar
masses—then
the dynamics of these phenomena should operate on more earthly
timescales, such as a few hours. It’s worth checking, because if these phenomena are not detected in
smaller black holes, then physics has a big problem on its hands, since
the same equations describe both sizes of black holes.

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The existence and operation of massive, coordinated, government-affiliated online espionage networks is typically the province of television or the silver screen, rather than the subject of  research. In the real world, even a direct link between online and offline action (Russia’s invasion of Georgia and the simultaneous online attacks against that country

are a good example) is not enough to automatically prove that the government behind the one is automatically behind the other. We’ve covered the rise of hacktivism previously on Ars; as more citizens

come online, we’ll undoubtedly see more of this type of crowdsourced aggression in the future.

Researchers in Toronto, however, may have actually discovered and tracked a hacking effort that can be traced back to a foreign intelligence network—China’s, in this case—over the past ten months. The team, which is affiliated with

the Munk Centre for International Studies, has published an extensive report on the activities of what they dub GhostNet. Their investigation took place from June 2008 through March

of 2009, and focused on allegations that the Chinese had engaged in systemic online espionage activities against the Tibetan community. GhostNet was spread through the use of a wide variety of Trojans, many of which were controlled through a program nicknamed gh0st RAT (Remote Access Tool).

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Ubuntu 9.04, codenamed Jaunty Jackalope, has reached the beta testing stage. The beta release, which was made available for download last week, provides users with an opportunity to get an early look at the features that will be included in the new version of the popular Linux distribution.

Ubuntu 9.04 includes GNOME 2.26, the latest version of the open source GNOME desktop environment. We did some hands-on testing with the new GNOME release when it arrived earlier this month. GNOME typically represents a large chunk of the user-visible improvements in new Ubuntu releases, but there isn’t really anything particularly exciting for Ubuntu users in GNOME 2.26.

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Here at Ars, we all use Twitter and not just because it’s a kind of virtual pub, but because as a communication tool it sits in between immediate and long-term: it’s far more in-the-moment than e-mail or blogs, yet it’s more enduring than instant messaging or IRC. You can talk now with whomever is listening, and your tweets provide a breadcrumb trail of your life that anyone can catch up with at any time.

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Back in September, Google launched its Chrome browser. With advanced features like website task managers, visual histories, individual browser memory management, and even the ability to re-open tabs that you accidentally closed, Chrome promised to reshape the browser, offering new abilities and capabilities that went beyond the status quo. Windows users got immediate access to those capabilities, but Google has yet to release Chrome for OS X and Linux.

That’s not to say Google been hiding its development progress behind closed doors. Chromium is the open source project that, like its metallic namesake, is used to make Chrome. The Chromium source code repository has remained available and updated since the September 2008 Chrome introduction. Since there hasn’t been any really big news or progress updates, Chromium for OS X and Linux has basically dropped off the radar for the past few months. But that doesn’t mean that progress isn’t being made. We recently checked out the latest iteration of the Chromium source, and we talked to some of the Googlers behind the project to get a sense of where the Chrome OS X port is, and of when Mac users might have something functional in our hands.

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It seems somewhat unbelievable that it took this long for Nintendo to revisit Punch-Out, one of the best-loved games for the NES, and then the Super Nintendo. This is a game that people talk about fondly, and even non-gamers remember from their youth. At this year’s GDC we spoke with Ken Yeeloy, the producer of the upcoming Punch-Out remake for Next Level games, and we asked him if that level of hype was intimidating. What are the downsides of tackling a property with this many expectations?

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It seems somewhat unbelievable that it took this long for Nintendo to revisit Punch-Out, one of the best-loved games for the NES, and then the Super Nintendo. This is a game that people talk about fondly, and even non-gamers remember from their youth. At this year’s GDC we spoke with Ken Yeeloy, the producer of the upcoming Punch-Out remake for Next Level games, and we asked him if that level of hype was intimidating. What are the downsides of tackling a property with this many expectations?

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The Microsoft corporation has weighed in on how the government should spend its billions in broadband stimulus money. The software giant says that the stimulus cash should be used to extend fiber networks to critical public institutions.

“With less than $7 billion in recovery funds available, we believe it is impossible to blanket the nation with the broadband capacity that our local governments, anchor institutions, businesses and residents ultimately require,” Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer wrote to the Federal Communications Commission on March 25. “The question therefore becomes one of how to maximize the near- and long-term return on taxpayers’ investment in broadband.”

The answer: “Connecting schools, libraries and hospitals will generate the quickest, most impactful and most equitable distribution of social benefits.”

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Fans of action video games have now been given a new excuse for spending hours in front of a screen. According to research published in today’s issue of Nature Neuroscience, action video games may train our eyesight so we have a better contrast sensitivity function (CSF), which is our ability to detect shades and colors that differ from the background. Daphne Bavelier, from the University of Rochester, and her colleagues compared the eyesights of expert action and non-action gamers and found that only action games enhanced CSF.

Poor CSF makes it difficult for people to drive, read, and perform a variety of other functions. CSF isn’t a matter of how clearly you see things; instead, it’s related to the brightness perception of your vision, and is based on both the capabilities of our eyes and the neural components that interpret what they perceive. Thus, it’s possible to improve CSF without changing basic aspects of vision by training the brain in a way that heightens awareness of contrast.

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In the almost never ending saga of the embattled US auto makers, there have been a few odd twist and turns. This is probably the oddest one so far. According to the Associated Press, the Whitehouse has requested that GM CEO Rick Wagoner step down immediately, likely as a condition of an aid package that President Obama is set to reveal in the next few days. The sources is attributed as an Administration official, but is not named because not everything is public at this point.

This brings the month of March to an end for GM, which started the month suggesting that GM may not be viable anymore. This move to toss Wagoner out the door may be a move for the Obama administration to get a much firmer hand on the wheel at GM. The story says “A person familiar with Obama’s plans said last week they would go deeper than what the Bush administration demanded when it approved the initial loans last year.”.

It brings the questions: What happens next? Is this going to accelerate the shutting down of brands like Saturn and Hummer? Will Obama install a more friendly face to run the company? Read the story here, and see what you think.

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One of the more interesting questions about the history of science is whether certain theories are inevitable. Given a set of data and the prevalent intellectual environment, does it become difficult to avoid formulating, say, a theory of evolution by natural selection? Biology would seem to argue yes. After all, Darwin and Wallace, having been influenced by Malthus and Lyell, both spent time as naturalists in the Pacific and developed matching theories within about a decade of each other. Similarly, several people recognized the significance of Mendel’s work within a few years of each other shortly after 1900, and they helped develop modern genetics at the same moment.

In a commentary in Nature Physics, MIT’s Seth Lloyd considers whether this sort of fertile intellectual environment might extend across fields of study. He considers the fact that, at the same time Mendel’s work on genes as discrete units of inheritance was being elaborated, quantum mechanics, with its emphasis on discrete energy states and behaviors, was also being developed. Is it possible that the intellectual environment was simply ready to see things in the form of quantized entities?

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Saving money in a recession is job number one for many families (though not this one), but can you really save hundreds of dollars of year by downgrading from broadband to dialup?

That’s the premise of a ridiculous article that appeared today in the Chicago Tribune (the editors apparently liked it so much when they ran it last month that they decided to do it again). The writer found a single Florida senior who had switched back to dialup as a way to save money. Even though the one analyst the author spoke with said that this wasn’t a trend, and even though the dial-up companies themselves said that dial-up was “not a robust, growing segment of the Internet-service business,” the premise was apparently too good to pass up.

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An interesting report on the March viewership numbers from Nielsen Media Research. shows the CNN is slipping to third amoungst cable news viewship in prime time. “Through Wednesday, Fox was averaging 2.73 million prime-time viewers in March. MSNBC had 1.16 million and CNN had 1.14 million. The March ratings period ends Friday, and it’s doubtful CNN will be able to overcome MSNBC.”

But there are a few little asterisks to throw out there with this one. First off, MSNBC and Fox “news” both stradle the line between news and opinion, with a very heavy lean towards the opinion side. MSNBC runs Keith Olbermann’s countdown show in prime time, which is effectively talk radio with video. the Fox No News Channel is even worse, will a full night lineup that is heavy on entertainment and pretty much devoid of news (except for quickly breaks at the top of the hour). Sheppard, O’Reilly, and Hannity aren’t reading news from a teleprompter, they are doing conservative talk radio on TV. It’s fully about opinion.

Now, there is nothing wrong with opinion, but in the end, is it really news?

So with Fox and MSNBC running 3 hours of opinion programming in prime time, which is often more popular than straighter news, CNN seems to have headed off that was a bit as well. Lou Dobbs in particular has gone from solid reporter to more of an angry attack dog, not being afraid to show some serious bias. The “no bias no bull” show featuring Campbell Brown is a particularly ugly show. If you have to say you have “no bias”, it’s probably because you are going to have tons of bias. Larry King is the “king” of the dullest interviews ever (I can’t picture anyone under 50 having the patience to listen to him slowly wander up to a question). Only Anderson Cooper is left doing fairly serious news and in depth coverage, everyone else seems to have headed out to give an opinion instead. Even CNN Headline news blatherer Nancy Grace is pulling bigger numbers. What’s up with that?

I have a feeling that CNN is caught in a horrible place right now: There is no good news, and the bad news isn’t the type of bad news Americans like to hear about. With the stock market down and all that, people are looking to lay blame and call names. They are in a fighting mood, not in a mood to hear fair and balanced reporting. The US isn’t involved in a spectacular bomb dropping media event of a war, they are in an ugly, drawn out, deadly conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. There isn’t a major hurricane or anything of that nature that is truly media worth, the floods in North Dakota are as close as they will get. So without compelling news to get people to watch, CNN is in a tough place.

My suggestion? Move Larry King later, maybe 10PM or even 11PM. Tell Lou Dobbs to report the news and keep his ghastly opinions to himself. Run an bring Nancy Grace over from Headline news. Let headline news run actual news again in prime time. Continue to give Anderson Cooper the space to operate. Make some space for actual news again!

Certainly CNN is ahead of MSNBC when it comes to news and full day programming. But when there is no news, it’s easy for the opinion fluffers to get ahead.

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Our first story this weekend isn’t science; it’s math. There’s a new, open access math journal in the works, and it’s looking for submissions for its inaugural issue. Nothing surprising there, but its twist on the publishing process is hinted at by its title: Rejecta Mathematica. I’d be tempted to view this as a joke, but there appear to be real academics behind it, and there’s a certain (mildly crazed) logic to its concept.

The idea is that some papers that have been rejected may still contain valuable information, like useful approaches and techniques; the rejection occurs because they’re applied to a flawed premise or used in conjunction with some methodological error. The new journal doesn’t promise to fix these problems; instead, authors are expected to fully disclose the flaws in a letter that accompanies the paper and explains why it was originally rejected. The big problem I see is that crackpots probably don’t recognize the issues with their ideas, and can’t be counted on to accurately portray them in a letter. Still, I really hope it’s not a joke, because I’m dying to see the first round of letters. I also note that the journal is at math.rejecta.org, opening the prospect of a biology.rejecta.org, and so on.

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Let’s look back at the week that was in Microsoft news:

Windows 7 RC download page goes up early, coming in May. Details on the Windows 7 Release Candidate public download leaked, straight from Microsoft. Although the page has been pulled now, we managed to grab a screenshot and save all the text on the page.

WHS Power Pack 2 begins to arrive, WHS added to MSDN. The English version of Windows Home Server Power Pack 2 has been released, with more languages coming next month. At the same time, Microsoft has finally put WHS on MSDN.

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Chances are high that you’re reading this article with a browser that was recently hacked.

Chrome came out smelling like a rose at the Pwn2Own Conference. Security researchers were able to easily exploit vulnerabilities in Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer, but were unable to crack Chrome. Security researchers attribute the strength of Google’s browser to its sandbox design.

A report released by Free Press claims that DPI could bring about the “end of the Internet as we know it” and could result in an “encryption arms race.” But DPI gear is already widely deployed around the world and the Internet apocalypse has yet to occur. But countries where DPI is widely used and traffic caps are in place aren’t hotbeds of Internet innovation, either.

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As we come out of our winter hibernation and look forward to the summer, news about upcoming updates to Mac OS X and the iPhone continues to ramp up. Read on to catch up on the top Apple news from this week.

iPod shuffle review: where we’re going, we don’t need clicks: The third-generation iPod shuffle has caused quite a stir thanks to its lack of buttons and the inclusion of a proprietary headphone controller chip. At the same time, Apple fans are loving the even-sleeker music player. Ars takes a look in its latest review to see whether the pros are worth the cons.

Michigan iPod scammer gets hit with criminal charges: Apple has already filed a civil suit against Michigan iPod repairman Nicholas Woodhams, alleging that he obtained 9,000 free iPods by manipulating Apple repair and warranty programs. Now, prosecutors in Michigan have also filed criminal charges over the matter.

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As might be expected, GDC dominated the gaming news this week. Here’s a rundown of the most important gaming stories from the past week.

Microsoft is introducing a new antipiracy technology to its Games for Windows platform. You can call it whatever you’d like, just don’t call it DRM, says Microsoft. You’ll be able to play a game on as many systems as you want, as long as you have a license attached to your account—provided it’s a game with an online component.

Given its position at the top of the gaming industry, it’s no surprise that Nintendo’s GDC keynote was one of the most highly-anticipated events of the conference. Nintendo President Satoru Iwata didn’t disappoint, announcing a new Zelda, more storage for the Wii, and a new Arcade channel. Oh, Nintendo also now has the fast-selling hardware in gaming history, having shipped 50 million pieces of Wii hardware worldwide.

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Ars’ science staff loves the Digital Object Identifier system that’s used for scientific publications. Each paper gets its own unique ID, and plugging that into the doi.org site will resolve it to the paper, even if the original journal changes its name, moves the paper to a new URL, or what have you. Aside from helping find an original research paper, the DOI is powerful as a tool for finding related information. A simple search for a DOI can identify a whole host of articles that comment on the paper.

If it’s useful for papers, imagine what a DOI for authors could do. Authors have a far more complex history that papers. I’ve published while affiliated with three different institutions, my name appears with and without the middle initial, and there is at least one other Timmer, J.R. doing biology research out there—and I have a relatively rare last name and short publication history. Having a functional author ID system could help with everything from datamining the scientific literature to identifying the role of social networks in science. Unfortunately, it’s such an obvious thing to do, that multiple, competing initiatives are forming.

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The global economic downturn has compelled a growing number of companies to search for ways to reduce IT costs. Uptake of open source software is climbing in this environment, which means more opportunities for the companies that have built their businesses around the open source Linux platform.

Red Hat, one of the most prominent commercial Linux vendors, reported its quarterly earnings Thursday and revealed that its total annual revenue was $652 million, an increase of 25 percent over the previous year. Subscriptions to Red Hat’s commercial support service, which accounts for $541 million of that revenue, were up 20 percent. Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, a former Delta Airlines COO who joined Red Hat in 2007, cites the recession as a factor that has contributed to the company’s success.

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The Australian government agency charged with classifying movies and video games has reportedly been hacked in protest of the nation’s controversial ISP-level Internet filtering scheme. The culprits replaced the website’s introductory text with a comical message which characterizes the government’s censorship program as an attempt to “control and sheepify the nation.”

In the all-important war against pictures of boobies on the Internet, the government of Australia has spared no expense. In 2006, after conducting a study which determined that ISP-level filtering was not feasible, the nation spent $116 million to develop Internet filtering software that parents could install on computers. When this software was easily circumvented by children, the government decided to try again with an $89 million ISP-level filtering scheme based on a blacklist devised by the Australian Communication and Media Authority (ACMA).

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Despite the growing popularity of online video options, average TV watchers still get most of their TV exposure from switching on the ol’ boob tube and watching whatever’s available at the moment. DVRs, web video, and even mobile devices are gaining in prominence, according to a new report by the Nielsen-funded Council for Research Excellence (CRE). Still, when it comes to sitting back, turning your brain off, and watching objects move on a screen, traditional TV viewing remains king.

The average TV viewer over the age of 18 watches 309.1 minutes, or about 5.15 hours, of live broadcast shows per day. (Does that horrify you as much as it horrifies us?) This compares to an average of just 14.6 minutes of playback via DVR or TiVo, 22.9 minutes of playback through a DVD player or VCR, and 2.4 minutes on the computer/Internet.

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