ESA Launches GOCE To Map Earth’s Gravity
DSG2 sends in an ESA press release which reads in part: “This afternoon, the Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) satellite developed by the European Space Agency was lofted into a near-Sun-synchronous, low Earth orbit by a Rockot launcher lifting off from the Plesetsk cosmodrome in northern Russia. GOCE is the first of a new family of ESA satellites designed to study our planet and its environment in order to enhance our knowledge and understanding of Earth-system processes and their evolution, to enable us to address the challenges of global climate change. In particular, GOCE will measure the minute differences in the Earth’s gravity field around the globe.” One consequence of mapping the planet’s geoid in finer detail is that ocean currents can be limned more accurately. This BBC article from 2007 goes into some detail about this application.
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Wikileaks Pages Added To Australian Internet Blacklist
cpudney writes “The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has added several Wikileaks pages to its controversial blacklist. The blacklisted pages contain Denmark’s list of banned websites. Simply linking to addresses in ACMA’s blacklist attracts an ,000 per-day fine as the hosts of the popular Australian broadband forum, Whirlpool, discovered last week when they published a forum post that linked to an anti-abortion web-site recently added to ACMA’s blacklist. The blacklist is secret, immune to FOI requests and forms the basis of the Australian government’s proposed mandatory ISP-level Internet censorship legislation. Wikileaks’ response to notification of the blacklisting states: ‘The first rule of censorship is that you cannot talk about censorship.'” So Australians aren’t allowed to see what it is that the Danes aren’t allowed to see?
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Passwords of 8000 Comcast Customers Exposed
IBM Develops Technology To Talk To Web
ProgramErgoSum writes to tell us that IBM’s Indian-based research arm is trying to bring a new dimension to web interaction through voice interaction on your mobile phone. Developing a new protocol, Hyperspeech Transfer Protocol (HSTP), the hope is to allow users to talk to the web and get a response. Without more explanation I’m hoping this goes about as far as the gopher web. “The spoken web is a network of voice sites or interconnected voice and the response the company got in some pilot projects in Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat and the kind of innovations that people came up with were just mind-boggling, Gupta said. “
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Web 2.0 tools can foster growth in hard times
Apple holding back on web-based 3D graphics for the desktop
Apple has added 3D position and transform capabilities to WebKit, along with the 2D CSS-based transform abilities added some time ago. However, Apple allows access to these advanced 3D abilities only via Mobile Safari. If Apple enables the features on the desktop, they could kickstart the development of a whole new class of visually rich web applic
Assemble the Social Web with Zembly
stoolpigeon writes “Web applications are all the rage. Web applications that function within the context of social networking sites doubly so. I think it is safe to say that pretty much anyone looking to garner a large audience on the web, for financial or any other reasons, has to be considering how they can reach people on sites like Facebook, or all those users out there accessing the web via their iPhones. Sun Microsystems has entered this arena by providing a set of web based development tools and a platform on which to host the resulting products that is now in beta and named Zembly. And while Zembly has not been open to the public for all that long, two of Zemblys architects with the help of two writers have published a new cookbook for the aspiring Zembly developer, Assemble the Social Web with Zembly.” Read below for the rest of JR’s review.
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