Cody Taylor

Wired is reporting that ecologists think the internet could act as an early ecological warning system based on data mining human interactions. While much of this work has been based on systems like Google Flu Trends, the system will remain largely theoretical for the near future. “The six billion people on Earth are changing the biosphere so quickly that traditional ecological methods can’t keep up. Humans, though, are acute observers of their environments and bodies, so scientists are combing through the text and numbers on the Internet in hopes of extracting otherwise unavailable or expensive information. It’s more crowd mining than crowd sourcing.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

meatheadmike writes to tell us that a recent Canadian court case brought against the Canadian Recording Industry Association by isoHunt Web Technologies, Inc, could drastically change the web landscape in Canada. “The question before the British Columbia Supreme Court is if a site such as isoHunt allows people to find a pirated copy of movies such as Watchmen or The Dark Knight, is it breaching Canadian copyright law? ‘It’s a huge can of worms,” said David Fewer, acting director of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic at the University of Ottawa. ‘I am surprised that this litigation has gone under the radar as much as it has. I do think this is the most important copyright litigation going on right now.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

alevy writes to mention that scientists at Fermilab have detected a new, completely untheorized particle. Seems like Fermi has been a hotbed of activity lately with the discovery of a new single top quark and narrowing the gap twice on the Higgs Boson particle. “The Y(4140) particle is the newest member of a family of particles of similar unusual characteristics observed in the last several years by experimenters at Fermilab’s Tevatron as well as at KEK and the SLAC lab, which operates at Stanford through a partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy. ‘We congratulate CDF on the first evidence for a new unexpected Y state that decays to J/psi and phi,’ said Japanese physicist Masanori Yamauchi, a KEK spokesperson. ‘This state may be related to the Y(3940) state discovered by Belle and might be another example of an exotic hadron containing charm quarks. We will try to confirm this state in our own Belle data.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tom’s Hardware has an interesting look at portable storage devices that fall a little outside of the normal bell curve. The reviewed items include Buffalo’s all-flash portable storage drive, Chaintech’s flash SSD w/ an additional USB port, and LaCie’s state-of-the-art RAID drive based on two 2.5″ drives. LaCie’s drive seemed to come out on top for usability and performance with the main downside being the 0 pricetag and lack of adequate backup software, but all had interesting advantages.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A software company could potentially lose more than half a million dollars because of an iPhone app that Apple has ignored for six months.

Earlier this week, we posed the question “Where has the old Facebook gone?” to address the frustrating experience that many users are having with the latest homepage design. The post attracted tons of feedback, most of which agreed with the sentiment that the new homepage is less personal, less informative, and less attractive…

You already know what you get in iPhone 2.0, you’ve heard about what you get in iPhone 3.0. Let’s see how those features stack up against Android’s current release and its upcoming update (called “Cupcake”) feature by feature.

by Larry Seltzer Day One of the CanSecWest Pwn2Own hacking contest finished Wednesday, with fully-patched copies of IE8, Safari, and Firefox all falling to hacker “Nils”.

The Wayback Machine, the digital time capsule that stores 85 billion archived versions of web pages online dating back to 1996, is getting a new 2 petabyte data center.

AIG, now infamous for their executive bonuses, has decided that the 0 billion they received from the government is not nearly enough and is suing the government for the return of 6 million in tax payments. “A.I.G. is effectively suing its majority owner, the government, which has an 80 percent stake and has poured nearly 0 billion into the insurer in a bid to avert its collapse and avoid troubling the global financial markets. The company is in effect asking for even more money, in the form of tax refunds. The suit also suggests that A.I.G. is spending taxpayer money to pursue its case, something it is legally entitled to do. Its initial claim was denied by the Internal Revenue Service last year.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.