Trevor Floyd

The European Commission has ordered all makers of portable music players to add a default volume setting of around 80 decibels (dB) and a health warning to all new devices within the next two years. The current maximum volume level permitted for portable devices of 100 dB in the European Union remains unchanged, the Commission said in a statement. It is also calling on standards bodies to change industrywide technical safety standards for mobile devices to include the 80 dB default setting.

An estimated 10 percent of music player owners in Europe (up to 25 million people) risk going deaf by listening to music at volumes of up to 120 dB - - roughly the volume of a jet airliner taking off - for an hour or more each day on a regular basis, consumer rights commissioner Meglana Kuneva said in a press conference Monday. Eighty dB is roughly the volume of road traffic."It's easy to push up the volume on your MP3 player to damagingly loud levels, especially on busy streets or public transport," Kuneva said, adding that young people especially "have no idea they can be putting their hearing at risk."The new standard default setting on devices won't prevent users from overriding the default settings and pumping up the volume, but there will be clear warnings so they know the risks they are taking, Kuneva said. You can safely listen to music at 80 dB for up to 40 hours a week without harming your ears, a study conducted for the Commission concluded. The industry said it supported the move but it warned the Commission not to try to prescribe universal volume levels for all users. Bridget Cosgrave, director general of the trade group Digital Europe, added that music players are only one part of the problem of hearing loss, but the industry would cooperate in the European initiative, "to best serve consumer interests" she said. It urged the Commission and standardization bodies to match the wishes of users with safety considerations when they set the default level.

Digital Europe called for global harmonization of the standards to be applied in Europe. "Unharmonised requirements would undermine credibility and confuse users, potentially exposing themselves to inappropriate volume of noise," the trade group said in a statement. Kuneva warned firms that she won't tolerate their failure to observe the new standards. "Regardless how big the company, no matter how reputable, I will take action," the commissioner said. And it warned the Commission against setting "overly stringent regulations", pointing out that this would drive sales of products to countries with more relaxed regulation.

Criminals have poisoned major search engines for terms related to the new MMS capability of Apple's iPhone, and are using the results to steer users to fake Windows security software downloads, a researcher said today. "Up to the top six results for search phrases about iPhone and SMS are poisoned," said Stephan Chenette, the manager of security research at Websense. "This obviously has to do with the iPhone's new MMS feature," he added, referring to the launch last Friday by AT&T of its Multimedia Message Service for the popular iPhone. "The hosts involved were registered just three or four days ago," Chenette said. When users click on one of the poisoned search results, they're redirected to a malicious site promoting "scareware," the term used to describe phony security software that claims a PC is heavily infected. Late Friday morning, Pacific time, AT&T fired up its MMS service , one of the most long-awaited features for the iPhone. The software duns users with bogus pop-up warnings until they fork over up to $50 for the useless program.

Attackers poison search results by creating massive numbers of useless Web sites on the bots they control, or by using previously-hijacked sites. It's all too easy for cyber criminals to poison search results with links to malware or other malicious content, said Chenette. "They have millions of bots at their fingertips," he said, "and with that control, they can sway the results of any search engine at any time." This campaign, however, was clearly aimed to coincide with AT&T's launch of MMS for the iPhone. "People want to know how to use [MMS], how to send multiple pictures at the same time, things like that," said Chenette. Those sites are all packed with credible content, news and headlines in many cases, that has been copied from legitimate sites. When the search engines' spiders crawl the Internet, and index the fake and real sites that have the landing page URL, their algorithms are essentially tricked into pushing it to the top of any search result for the key phrases in the stolen content. "The botnets give them much more power this way than if, say, they were just using them for spam," he added. All such sites point to a single "landing page" URL, which in turn sends users to a number of different, and often shifting, servers hosting malware, in this case Windows scareware.

The only defense is to be wary of what's clicked in a search result. "This isn't going away, it's too successful of a tactic," said Chenette. "[Attackers] are taking the way that engines are populating their results and using it to their advantage. In February, for example, they used Google's own Trends, a tool that highlights the most popular searches of the past hour, to dupe users into clicking on rogue security software downloads. There's nothing search engines can really do about it unless they redesigned how they create results from the ground up." As Chenette hinted, this is far from the first time that scareware makers have poisoned search results to shill their worthless software.

Security vendor PandaLabs has discovered an online service offering to help those so inclined to hack into any Facebook account they choose for a price: $100. However, those who sign up for the service could find themselves becoming the victims instead, PandaLabs warned today. Users of the service are required to first register with the site and then provide an ID of the Facebook account they want hacked, said Luis Corrons, technical director of PandaLabs. The Facebook hacking service, which is delivered via a professional looking Web site, was discovered by PandaLabs earlier this week. Users who enter the ID and click on a "Hack it" button are then presented with the username of the owner of the Facebook account.

But to actually get the password, the user is then required to send $100 via Western Union to an individual in Kirovohrad, Ukraine. They then have the option to "Start Facebook hacking." Those who follow the instructions are eventually told that the hack was successful and a password for the account was retrieved. It's not clear whether sending the money will yield any login and passwords, Corrons said. The site contains an FAQ section, which claims the site has been in business for more than four years. But the way the site has been designed and the ease with which a potential client can interact with it lends it a certain degree of credibility, he said. The site even provides a link to a Webmoney account that in fact does appear to be four years old, Corrons said.

At least as of the last time PandaLabs inspected the site, it was not downloading or distributing any malware and seems to have been set up purely to scam those seeking to gain illegal access to Facebook accounts, Corrons said. However the domain itself appears to have been registered by someone in Moscow only a couple of days ago, he said. "We've been looking at it and we are 99.9% sure it is a ruse," to get people to pay up money in exchange for what they think will be legitimate Facebook credentials, he said. Those who do fall for the scam are unlikely to go to law enforcement to report it, he noted.

Development of HTML 5, the highly touted upgrade to the language of the Web, is progressing but still faces obstacles, including lack of a standard video codec, said an official of the World Wide Web Consortium at a gathering on Tuesday. W3C officials also provided updates on efforts in the mobile widget and IPv6 adoption spaces. [ HTML 5 could be a killer of both Flash and Silverlight. ] "[HTML 5 presents] the next generation of being able to interact or do more with your Web applications," Le Hegaret said.  HTML 5 would be supported within browsers and by application developers. Featuring video capabilities and support for offline applications and the SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) specification, HTML 5 is set to move to a candidate recommendation phase in by the end of 2010. That phase would last two years before a final adoption could occur, said Philippe Le Hegaret, W3C interaction domain leader, during a press briefing at the W3C Technical Plenary/Advisory Committee meeting in Santa Clara, Calif. Challenges, however, include the lack of a video codec in HTML 5. "The underlying issue is finding a video format which is royalty-free," said Le Hegaret. "So far, we haven't been able to provide one video format that can satisfy everyone." MPEG-4 and Ogg have not met the royalty-free criteria, Le Hegaret explained.

HTML 5's multimedia capabilities could give developers less reason to deploy proprietary technologies like Microsoft Silverlight or Adobe Flash, Le Hegaret acknowledged. Fallback options could include having a developer, for example, define a page to work in the Safari and Firefox browsers and then provide two video formats, he said. But Le Hegaret said those technologies would remain a step ahead of HTML 5 in technical development. Le Hegaret also touted SVG, which provides a language for describing two-dimensional graphics and graphical applications in XML. "What we're going to see is Web applications becoming much nicer with the arrival of SVG on the Web," he said. Work also is being done in the accessibility space, with HTML 5 to link to the WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative Accessible Rich Internet Applications) suite, to make Web content accessible to people with disabilities.

But Microsoft's lack of support for SVG in the Internet Explorer browser remains "the elephant in the room," Le Hegaret said. Although noting Microsoft has not released its plans for the Internet Explorer 9  browser, Le Hegaret said to expect good news from the company on the SVG front. "They're not discussing publicly yet what are their plans," he said. Microsoft, however, has been a co-chair of the HTML working group and has several employees at the WC3 event, he said. W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee lauded HTML 5 efforts. "I think [the specification] is great," he said. With its mobile widgets initiative, efforts are afoot to address fragmentation in developing applications for the mobile space, said David Rogers, director of external relations for OMTP (Open Mobile Terminal Platform). Widgets are small Web applications considered ideal for mobile device-independence. "We have a problem in the mobile industry. But he added there is to work to do on the specification and that it must be made to work on the Web in a secure way.

We have an issue with fragmentation," Rogers said. Rogers's presentation featured a Vodaphone mobile phone built by Samsung and featuring a development framework based on the W3C widget standard. Technologies are being developed to address fragmentation, such as the W3C Widgets 1.0 specification and OMTP Bondi, Rogers noted.  By coming to the W3C, interested parties can define what a widget is and find areas of agreement, said Rogers. The device ran the Limo OS. In the IPv6 arena, Leslie Daigle, chief Internet technology officer for the Internet Society, said the last allocation of IPv4 addresses to an ISP is predicted to occur in February 2013. "The cupboard is definitely running bare.  On the other hand, there are lots of IPv6 addresses," she said. Major ISPs and content providers, however, are including IPv6 in current deployments . "It's also becoming clear that wireless broadband is going to be a major component  of IPv6 deployment," Daigle said.

IPv6 was defined a decade ago but there have not been enough deployments, she said. IPv6 deployments have been lacking, however, because of a belief that there is no business case for it, she said. Follow the latest developments in application development at InfoWorld.com. This story, "HTML 5 progresses despite challenges," was originally published at InfoWorld.com.

Like the Internet? If so, please take a moment to thank today's three Nobel prizewinners for their discoveries. Own a digital camera? The three American scientists, honored today with the 2009 Physics prize, helped give us modern telecommunications-including the Internet-and digital photography.

Sad it took 40 years to honor these great men-their work was done during the 1960's-but good health has smiled upon all three, now in their 70's and 80's. (Nobels are not awarded posthumously). Charles Kao, who also holds British citizenship, is being honored for his work helping to develop fiber optics, the oh-so-slender glass pipelines than carry digital data-converted into pulses of colored light-around the world. Fiber optic cable makes the high-speed communications possible, while charge-coupled devices (CCDs) are the cornerstone of digital photography. Born in 1933, Kao was in England when he invented a method to dramatically improve the purity of the glass used to construct the fibers. Dr. Boyle also holds Canadian citizenship. The other half of the $1.4 million prize was won by Willard Boyle, 85, and George Smith, 79, for their invention of the CCD, made at AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1969. CCDs are based on the photoelectric effect, which itself won a Nobel for Albert Einstein. Read about the science being honored in this New York Times story.

In honoring these three today, perhaps we can also honor all those who make our technology-based lives possible. Many other people played a part in making these Nobel-winning discoveries a part of daily life. Better, we can recommit ourselves to supporting basic science and research-hard thinking-that is so out-of-fashion in much of society today. You and I are direct beneficiaries of the work the Nobel committee has chosen to honor today. (The ceremony will be held Dec. 10 in Stockholm). Let's honor these scientists by supporting math and science education and, perhaps, in another 40 years we'll be honoring a new generation of American scientists for their life-changing achievements. At a time when we need more answers than ever before, we should be concerned about how many people are capable of asking the questions and putting what they discover to use for the good of everyone. David Coursey tweets as @techinciter and can be contacted via his Web page.

Just hours after Yahoo announced a planned implementation of Facebook Connect on its network of sites, Google announced that you can now use your Twitter credentials to register on Google Friend Connect sites. This could end up being a hard fought battle, because there's one major reason one-stop online identity is becoming important as we enter 2010, and that reason is paywalls. 2010: Year of the micropayment 2009 may have been the height of Google's power as the champion of the open and free Web, but the mantra "information wants to be free" may start to change in 2010 to "information wants a small fee." The signs are everywhere. Friend Connect and Facebook Connect are both a means to quickly register for a site or service that requires a login, and it's likely no coincidence they announced competing deals on the same day. Forget Rupert Murdoch's ludicrous comments about pulling News Corp's news sites from Google's Index.

Murdoch isn't the only one either. What's more likely, and what the News Corp Chairman has stated on several occasions, is that all of his company's news sites-including The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Times in London-will erect paywalls by next summer. The New York Times Company CEO Janet Robinson has said there is a "high probability" the Times will put up a paywall again. There are even rumors that Hulu may be considering some kind of pay service. Magazine publishers like Conde Nast and Time Inc. are also busy creating online formats for touchscreen devices that will entice people to pay for digital versions of their magazines. So in all likelihood, paywalls are coming back.

During the Web's early days in the 1990's numerous sites wanted you to sign up for an account with a unique login and password. Nickel-and-dimed to death But this idea of having you pay for every single site and service they use online has been tried before. Many of these sites were also asking you to pay small amounts for access to their content-typically anywhere from two to ten dollars a month. It was such a pain to have to constantly remember logins and fork over your credit card information all the time, so most people didn't. Over time paywalls fell, the Web became more open and business models started crumbling. But all those little payments could add up if you bought too many of them, and very few were offering one-time payment schemes. But things may change with resurrected paywall schemes, and that's where these unified logins like Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect could come in handy.

In May, TechCrunch's MG Siegler came across an option to pay with his Facebook account on a Facebook application from GroupCard. Your Digital Wallet is already here Paying with Facebook is already underway according to several reports. Then in June, Inside Facebook reported that Facebook had lured a Google Checkout executive to help Facebook develop the social network's growing payment platform. If paywalls, micropayments, and subscriptions are coming back to the Web in force, then a digital wallet that you can take with you to any site and pay for items using one-click access will be a critical component for success. Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect could easily be linked to Google Checkout and Facebook's payment platform making it easier to pay for things online.

These identities would become even more useful if they could be used across most online retailers as well. Google and Facebook aren't alone; other major contenders looking to be your wallet include PayPal and Amazon. That's why a war over how you choose your online identity could become increasingly important moving into next year. None of these services are universal methods of payment yet (although PayPal is probably the closest), which means the market is wide open for some of these companies to dominate the digital wallet. Connect with Ian on Twitter (@ianpaul). So the question is: who will you trust with your money?

In the days leading up to NASA's crashing of two halves of a space probe into the moon, doubters turned to the Internet to express fears that the lunar bombing would have negative effects on the Earth. In a quest to find out if there's water on the moon , NASA sent two separated halves of a spacecraft crashing into a permanently dark crater on the south pole of the moon this morning. Scientists and astronomers were quick to step forward to refute any rumors and quell concerns, but rumors are still circulating online. The crashes were meant to send up a huge debris plume that could be measured and analyzed for evidence of water ice hiding in the cold, dark crater.

But detractors were quick to post online warnings about possible negative effects of the experiment. With NASA still hopeful to one day create a viable human outpost on the moon , it would be helpful for anyone there to find water rather than haul it up from Earth. Amy Ephron, an author and screenwriter, wrote an article for the Huffington Post earlier this week, questioning NASA for taking the risks associated with sending two spacecraft crashing into the surface of the moon. "Who did the risk assessment? Ephron was far from alone in her concerns. I mean, what if something goes wrong?" asked Ephron. "I could say something scientifically lame and ask, 'What if it gets thrown off its axis?' or something funny and suggest something (that I actually sort of believe), like, 'What if it somehow throws off the astrology?' Or that we're not risking - as we have the earth with continued experiments of this kind - sending the solar system out of balance. The Chicago Surrealist Movement posted an online petition , which was signed by 560 people, calling for NASA to halt the bombing of the moon.

Faith Vilas, director of the MMT Observatory , said she's been amazed by such negative reactions to the mission. And people against the LCROSS mission started their own Twitter presence with @helpsavethemoon . While some people said they felt NASA's plan was simply too aggressive an attack on the Earth's orbiter, some claimed that the impacts would change the Earth's tides, throw the moon off its axis or even affect women's menstrual cycles. There's simply no danger, she added. "The moon is impacted by nature and meteors all the time," said Vilas. "Nature has done much more damage to the moon than we just did. What we did was nothing. We were not likely to have any effect on the moon at all.

We didn't have much of an impact at all." Bruce Betts, director of projects at The Planetary Society , said in an email to Computerworld that this morning's crashes will have no negative impact on the moon or the Earth. "The spacecraft are far too tiny compared to the moon, in fact, to have any significant effect on the moon's orbit or dynamics," he added. "The impact might be likened to a gnat hitting the windshield of a truck."

Microsoft Corp.marketed i4i Inc.'s XML software to potential customers at the same time it planned to drive the small company out of business by infringing on its patent for the technology, according to court documents filed last week. Federal Judge Leonard Davis issued the injunction in August, barring Microsoft from selling Word 2003 and Word 2007 after Oct. 10. The decision came about three months after a Texas jury found that Microsoft had illegally used patented i4i technology to build XML features into its word processing software. In a brief submitted to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal District in Washington, Toronto-based i4i argued that an injunction blocking Microsoft from selling current versions of Word should stand. The jury had awarded i4i $200 million, but Davis increased the amount to just under $300 million when he issued the injunction.

Earlier this month, the three-judge appeals panel decided to stay the injunction while it weighs Microsoft's appeal . I4i filed the patent infringement lawsuit in 2007. The new i4i brief charges that in 1991, "at the same time Microsoft was praising the improved functionality that i4i's product brought to Word, and touting i4i as a 'Microsoft Partner,' Microsoft was working behind i4i's back to make i4i's product obsolete." According to the brief, just days after a 1991 meeting in which Microsoft had sought to find ways to work with i4i, Microsoft executives discussed XML plans for Word that would eventually "make obsolete any competitive attempts by third parties to conquer that market." Microsoft must file its rebuttal to i4i's brief by Sept. 14; the appeals court is slated to hear oral arguments from the two sides on Sept. 23. Asked to comment on i4i's briefs, a Microsoft spokesman said, "We're looking forward to the hearing on the merits of our appeal." This version of the story originally appeared in Computerworld 's print edition.

The University of Florida, Cornell University and a handful of other schools have been awarded $12.2 million to build a social/collaborative network for scientists and researchers. The project, funded via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, will initially take of the form of networks within each of the 7 founding schools but within two years could expand across the country. The idea is to make it easier to find research and like-minded researchers in an effort to speed new discoveries. Eventually, the network will go worldwide, grant recipients hope. "The goal of the program is national networking of all scientists," said Michael Conlon, interim director of biomedical informatics for the University of Florida, in a statement. "Scientists have problems finding each other.

But they don't always know people even at their own institutions." 12 cool ways to donate your PC's spare processing power Technologies used to support the effort will include VIVO, an open source discovery tool out of Cornell used to search for research information. We often find that researchers have pretty good networks with students or with scientists at institutions where they received their degree or worked before. It will also exploit concepts of the Semantic Web, Tim-Berners Lee's vision for an even more useful Web that enables better sharing of data. Of course this effort is by far not the only one looking to make it easier for scientists to find one another. In addition to the University of Florida and Cornell, also involved in the project are Indiana University, Weill Cornell Medical College, Washington University in St. Louis, the Scripps Research Institute and the Ponce School of Medicine in Puerto Rico.

One commercial venture, Epernicus, recently took the stage at the Web Innovators Group in Boston to talk about its effort to link life sciences researchers within companies with one another, and eventually across organizations. For more on network research news, follow our Alpha Doggs blog  Track Bob Brown on Twitter    

All right, Microsoft, 'fess up: How many takes did you need for your video of Samsung Intrepid's TellMe feature, which sends text messages and searches the Web by voice, to go smoothly? One that, given some of the things we've heard about Windows Mobile 6.5 in general, is particularly worthy of praise. Because honestly, it's a pretty impressive feature.

See, voice dialing has never really excited me. Using voice to replace typing, however, can be more convenient in more scenarios. It's useful for those occasions when your hands are busy, but anyone comfortable with their phone can generally get to a number easily with buttons. Here's how it works: The Sprint Intrepid has a dedicated button for the TellMe feature. Then, you can just dictate your message, and the phone will transcribe it.

Press it, and you can start a text message by saying "text" and the contact's name. You are, of course, able to check it before sending the message. I'm aware that the Google Mobile app for Blackberry, Android, and the iPhone also lets you search the Web by voice (and it's fairly accurate, too), but the difference with the Intrepid is hardware. The search function is even easier, as you can just say what you're looking for, and in one step the phone initiates a Bing search. Even on the iPhone, you've still got to slide out of the phone's lock system or get out of whatever app you're using, find the Google Mobile app, and then lift the phone to your ear to start a voice search. Indeed, I'd like to see other phone-makers (ahem, Apple) extend their phones' voice dialers to include these functions.

By fusing TellMe's voice features to a dedicated button on the hardware, Microsoft and Samsung make texting and searching much easier. Wait, did I just say other tech companies should copy Microsoft? I must be in the Bizarro world.

Startup Cloudera is introducing a set of applications on Friday for working with Hadoop, the open-source framework for large-scale data processing and analysis. It allows an application workload to be spread over clusters of commodity hardware, and also includes a distributed file system. Cloudera, which provides Hadoop support to enterprises, developed the new browser-based application suite to simplify the process of using Hadoop, according to CEO Mike Olson. "It's an easy-to-use GUI suitable for people who don't have a lot of Hadoop expertise," Olson said. "The big Web properties with sophisticated and talented PhDs have been successful [with it], but ordinary IT shops ... have had a harder time." Hadoop is known for its behind-the-scenes role crunching oceans of information for Web operations like Facebook and Yahoo. But although the technology is "at its best" when data volumes get into multiple terabytes, Hadoop has relevance for a wide variety of companies, according to Olson. "It's increasingly easy to get your hands on that much data these days," especially from machine-generated information like Web logs, he said.

Cloudera and its partners are fine-tuning the suite, which is now in beta, before issuing a general release. The browser-based application set is supported on Windows, Mac and Linux, and includes four modules: a file browser; a tool for creating, executing and archiving jobs; a tool for monitoring the status of jobs; and a "cluster health dashboard" for keeping tabs on a cluster's performance. Hadoop needs many more tools like it, according to analyst Curt Monash of Monash Research. "If Hadoop is to consistently handle workloads as diverse and demanding as those of [massively parallel processing] relational DBMSes, it needs a lot of tools and infrastructure," Monash said via e-mail. "The three leaders in developing those are Yahoo, Cloudera, and Facebook. There's a long way to go."

As 2009 winds down, are you having trouble remembering exactly what you spent the past year doing? Anyway, if you'd like a bit of a jumpstart to the old memory, Apple's posted a feature called iTunes Rewind 2009 on the iTunes Store, recapping the best music, movies, TV shows, podcasts, audiobooks, and apps of 2009. Music As you might expect, Michael Jackson gets prominent billing-the iTunes staff has picked him as the artist of the year. That happens to me sometimes: for example, it only started snowing on the east coast this week, and already I can't remember ever being warm.

Kings of Leon's Only By the Night took top album of the year, and best new artist went to the seemingly omni-present Lady GaGa. iTunes also doled out the same awards to each genre of music it sells in the store, so if you're itching for the best in hip-hop, jazz, or western, take a look. The list of top sales and rentals in the store was topped by-duh-Twilight, surprise second-placer Pineapple Express, and Quantum of Solace (Star Trek placed fifth, though it's only been out for a few weeks). TV shows Television, now, that's my bailiwick. There's also a list of the top-selling songs of 2009-and strangely enough, I own not a single one of them: "Boom Boom Pow" by the Black Eyed Peas took the number one spot, followed by Flo Rida's "Right Round," and Lady GaGa's "Poker Face". Movies The movies section features twelve top titles, including Pixar's Up, J.J. Abrams's Star Trek and indie titles like (500) Days of Summer and Sunshine Cleaning. iTunes pimped Fox's freshman comedy Glee for the best season in that category, with the top episode going to an installment of 30 Rock. The store also breaks out a number of other categories-I was pleased to see Dollhouse's unaired "Epitaph One" taking the top episode for sci-fi.

Drama saw an AMC sweep with sophomore series Breaking Bad taking best season and Mad Men's pivotal "The Gypsy and the Hobo" nabbing best episode. The top-selling season list was headed by Mad Men's third season, and followed by Lost's season five, and 24 season seven. Apps Meanwhile, in apps, iTunes made a distinction between the year's best and best-selling apps and games. Top-selling episodes were headlined by Family Guy, Gossip Girl, and Lost. Best game awards went to Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor, Real Racing, and Zenonia, among others, while top sellers included The Sims 3, The Oregon Trail, and the apparently Teflon Tiger Woods PGA Tour.

Free apps were apparently not recognized, however. Best apps, on the other hand, were headlined by titles like CBS Sports: Live College Games, Convertbot, and Leaf Trombone: World Stage, while the top-selling apps included MLB.com At Bat, QuickOffice Mobile Office Suite, and SlingPlayer Mobile. Audiobooks In the audiobooks category, the best of the year included fiction titles like The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley, Under the Dome by Stephen King, and Nick Hornby's Juliet, Naked (which, incidentally, I just finished in dead-tree format and can't recommend enough). The non-fiction list was topped by Dave Cullen's Columbine, Thomas E. Ricks's The Gamble, and Tracy Morgan's I Am the New Black. Philosophy. On the best-seller side, William P. Young's The Shack amazingly edged out all four Twilight books slavering at its heels to take the fiction side, while Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture topped the non-fiction section, followed by Sun Tzu's unabridged The Art of War and The Ricky Gervais Guide to... Podcasts Finally, the best in podcasts was topped by The Adam Carolla Podcast for this year in audio, CNBC's The Suze Orman Show for this year in video, This American Life for "classic" audio, and The Onion News Network for "classic" video.

Except, of course, the actually important things. And that's it for Apple's 2009 year in review: everything you need to remember about this year compiled in a series of helpful lists of media. For that, we recommend shutting down your copy of iTunes, firing up your copy of iPhoto and browsing through the last year of photos for some real memories.

Among Microsoft's trials and tribulations in the mergers and acquisitions space, a Microsoft official on Tuesday evening cited fear of dealing with the company as an obstacle Microsoft has had to overcome. Brown made the comments at a Churchill Club event in Mountain View, Calif., during a panel discussion on mergers and acquisitions that also featured representatives from Cisco, Google, and Accel Partners. [ Microsoft and Yahoo recently agreed to partner in an effort to better compete with Google. | Stay ahead of the key tech business news with InfoWorld's Today's Headlines: First Look newsletter. ] After the event, Brown said he was referring to a time when he started at the company years ago.  In general, people were just scared of Microsoft, he said. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 "[For a while] there was a fear of dealing with Microsoft and we've worked really hard to try to overcome that," said Marc Brown, managing director of corporate development at Microsoft. This fear existed with both the entrepreneurial and venture capital communities, said Brown. The three technology companies represented on the panel have made waves over the years with their acquisitions.  Cisco is known for numerous purchases, ranging from Scientific Atlanta to Grand Junction Networks; Microsoft has acquired companies such as Great Plains Software and attempted to buy Yahoo, while Google bought YouTube and others.

Panelists discussed their companies' mergers and acquisitions strategies. "The M&A and acquisitions strategy's pretty straightforward," Brown said. "We are a technology buyer. Panel moderator Steve Smith, senior managing partner with Arma Partners, noted Microsoft actually began with an acquisition. "[Founder Bill] Gates bought PC DOS for something under $100,000 and turned it into a thing called Windows and a company called Microsoft," Smith said. Most of our acquisitions are of earlier-stage companies."  Microsoft then leverages sales and distribution channels and processes to bring acquired technologies to the widest audience possible, he said. "What I would say is M&A  is not really the strategy. We start with the idea of what should be our growth strategy," said Carmel. M&A is the tool," said Charles Carmel, vice president of corporate development for Cisco. "The strategy is really about capturing innovation." Cisco realizes it does not have a monopoly on good ideas, he said. "We don't start with the idea of what company we should buy. When pondering an acquisition, Google looks at the caliber of leadership being brought over to the company from the acquired venture, along with factors including time to market and opening of new markets, said David Lawee, Google vice president of corporate development.

Panelists also cited increasing interest in potential overseas acquisitions in places such as China. "There's nothing to prevent us from being as aggressive internationally," Lawee said. The company's acquisition of Urchin resulted in the Google Analytics platform while Keyhole, also bought by Google, became Google Earth, Lawee said. But panelists declined to make any predictions when asked whether the European Union should approve the planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. Tuesday's event was held at Microsoft's Silicon Valley offices. They also would not discuss what impact this acquisition would have on their own businesses. "Everybody's got their own twists and turns to their M&A activities," Carmel said. "No comment," Brown added. This story, "Fear of Microsoft subsides in mergers and acquisitions arena," was originally published at InfoWorld.com.

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Virtualization and cloud computing has taken off, despite strong concerns lingering over how companies can secure and manage those apps and data. Over the next year, Novell plans to release eight new products or upgrades to aid in what it calls "intelligent workload management." The upcoming Novell Identity Manager 4 will add the new ability for IT managers embed identity management and other security features into both Web-hosted and virtualized apps, Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian said in an interview last week. Novell Inc. says it can help companies with both sides of the equation, accelerating the creation of virtualized and cloud apps with built-in security.

Novell Identity Manager 4 will arrive by the middle of next year. These will work closely with a Novell's Suse Appliance Toolkit, which is due in the first quarter next year. That will work closely with Novell Cloud Security Service, also due in 2010, in order to extend identity and security policies onto apps and data hosted in the cloud. The Toolkit helps ISVs and large enterprises quickly build and deploy virtualized appliances, i.e. self-contained apps prepackaged with a thin operating system layer that can be moved from server to cloud-based server without crash or conflict. The most popular is a DIY version of the Chrome OS built with Google 's browser running on Novell's OpenSUSE Linux.

Hovsepian said customers are already starting to use Novell's existing generation of virtual appliance building tools in a major way. "In the last three months, we've had 40,000 registered users come into our system and build 100,000 different virtualized appliances and workloads," Hovsepian said. Hovsepian said that virtual appliance has been downloaded 750,000 times. Gerry Gebel, an analyst with the Burton Group, agreed, saying that other leading players in the identity management and security space, including CA Inc., IBM Corp. and Oracle Inc., haven't laid out a comprehensive roadmap for virtualized and hosted management. "This is pretty significant," he said. "It's the kind of capability that more advanced organizations with large virtual environments are going to need, as they continually stop, start, reactivate and archive workloads." Companies who push forward on virtualization or cloud computing, or let their employees and departments do so, without setting up an identity management and security framework, are putting themselves in "real danger," Gebel said. "You can't dismiss security and identity management just because the computing model is changing. Novell is also upgrading its Platespin virtual management product so that users can use it as their single console for managing all of these workloads, whether they are run virtually or hosted in the cloud, Hovsepian said. "We are way ahead of everyone else," he said. It's no excuse," he said. Gordon Haff, an analyst with Illuminata Inc., said it will be a challenge for Novell to make all of its tools work together elegantly. "A lot of moving parts and the trick is to get everything glued together in a coherent way," Haff said. "I also don't see it as fundamentally different from what other vendors are doing, whether it is VMware, IBM, Citrix, or Microsoft ."

Gebel said Novell has the technical goods to back up its marketing push, citing a demonstration of the beta for Novell Identity Manager 4, which he said was "pretty impressive." "The integration with the virtualization and cloud workloads looked like it was working well," he said.

Ethernet switch vendor Extreme Networks is replacing its CEO and laying off 70 employees in an effort to quickly improve the company's bottom line and set it up to run profitably with lower revenues. Canepa receives $639,354 severance. CEO Mark Canepa, who took the position in 2006, has resigned, but will remain for a short period to help recently hired CFO Bob Corey transition to Acting CEO. The company is seeking a permanent replacement.

As part of the restructuring, the company also eliminated the job of chief counsel, getting rid of Robert Schlossman, and replacing him with Vice Presideint Diane Honda, according to a filing this week with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company didn't say where the 70 layoffs would come, but it represents about 9% of Extreme's workforce. Judging from the company Web site, the head of human resources and head software developer are also gone. Most Notable IT Layoffs of 2009  The moves will lower the company's expenses by $2.5 million per quarter, with the larger goal being to have the company break even if it makes $70 million per quarter. The company hasn't reported its financial statement for the quarter ended Sept. 27, but it said earlier this month that it expected to come up $14.4 million shy of what Wall Street analysts forecasted. The measures will cost the company a one-time $4.2 million hit.

The analysts projected Extreme would take in $66 million but the actual revenues will be more like $80.4 million, the company said. The company's stock prices hit a low of close to a dollar in March, struggled back to just over $3 last month then dipped to about $2.25 over the past weeks. "They're in a tough spot," says Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with Yankee group. "This is a company that's truly having a hard time finding its way." He says the company is smaller than its main competitors, HP, IBM, Cisco, Juniper and Brocade (which has reportedly put itself up for sale).  Extreme makes a range of switches from edge, to aggregation to core, as well as wireless switches and security gear. A the time Canepa blamed the company's North American business as being particularly soft because some deals it had hoped for fell through and others were delayed beyond the end of the quarter. The company burst onto the networking scene in the mid-1990s as one in a pack of Gigabit Ethernet and Layer 3 switching pioneers and differentiated itself, among other ways, by uniquely packaging its technology in purple boxes.  "When you look at all the network vendors out there, what problem is it that Extreme is trying to solve that isn't being solved by somebody else?" Kerravala says. "If you look at data centers, all the emphasis is on converged fabric, and they just don't have a roadmap to get there. They'll get smaller and smaller and continue to exist off their installed base until their assets get acquired by somebody else." Insiders and channel partners said the firm seemed to be too focused on long range strategic planning instead of trying to figure out how to survive the dire economy.

I think they'll go the route of Enterasys. Extreme's Chairman of the Board Gordon Stitt said in a written statement: "Management and the Board decided to take this action to streamline our operations, reduce our breakeven and create an operating model that will position Extreme Networks for sustained profitability as quickly as possible. We remain committed to the products, markets, channels and customers and to continuing to introduce new and innovative products." These reductions have been taken across the entire organization.

This won't be a long post so I'm going to make you wait until the end before revealing the sum of money this plaintiff wants to extract from Gartner because Gartner had the audacity to relegate its software to "niche player" status in the firm's legendary "Magic Quadrant." (Opinion) On Friday, a judge in San Jose will hear arguments regarding Gartner's motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed in May by ZL Technologies that seeks to not only eviscerate the Magic Quadrant but also punish Gartner severely for ever having foisted it upon the IT world. (That some of you are cheering grants ZL's case not a scintilla of validity, but point taken.) Having spent too much of my day reading four separate documents filed in the case, allow me to simplify the arguments: San Jose-based ZL Technologies accuses Gartner of "defamation, trade libel, false advertising, unfair competition, and negligent interference with prospective economic advantage." All of these purported wrongs allegedly arose from the decision of Gartner analyst Carolyn DiCenzo to place ZL's e-mail archiving software in the "niche" corner of the Magic Quadrant - along with other niche players (in this market) such as IBM, HP and EMC - instead of in the "market leaders" quadrant with the likes of market leader Symantec. You can read the original complaint here. ZL takes wounded exception to the fact that Gartner considers such squishy criteria as vision and marketing ability when determining quadrant placement.

Gartner responds that it is known far and wide among IT professionals as a purveyor of expert opinion - "views" is the word it emphasizes to the court - that are designed to facilitate technology purchasing decisions. In a follow-up filing, ZL sputters and spews that Gartner cannot be allowed to claim First Amendment protections because … well, well … I'm sorry, but it doesn't even warrant a summarization. Gartner's reports - including the Magic Quadrants - amount to nothing more or less than protected free speech, the company argues here. You can read it here. And, whatever one may think of Gartner's judgment - in this case, or any other - it isn't actionable as long as First Amendment law rules.

Gartner's response to that response demonstrates why lawyers get paid more than trade-press pundits, in that the company's attorneys manage to maintain their composure and point out yet one more time that ZL isn't really complaining about anything more than Gartner's judgment. You can read that reply here. Try $132 million, "and" - emphasis mine - "that such damages be trebled." They want $396 million? … That's not a judgment request, it's an exit strategy. OK, so how much does ZL want for having been so maligned and mistreated? But, wait, there's more.

They want attorneys' fees, too, naturally. ZL wants the judge to order Gartner to fund an advertising campaign to "correct any misperceptions resulting from Gartner's unlawful acts," and "disgorge all profits" derived from said acts. Done? Oh, not by a long-shot: ZL wants the court to impose "punitive damages … in the amount of $1,300,000,000." Sell it to the judge.

She was one of the first women to shatter IT's glass ceiling and become a top technology executive at Xerox Corp. back in the 1980s. She has been a senior vice president at Citibank, CIO for the city of Phoenix and a director at American Express. So what is the one question that Laraine Rodgers, now president of her own consulting company, Phoenix-based Navigating Transitions, has been asked more than any other? " 'Will you fix my PC?' I get asked that all the time. In the late 1990s, U.S. Vice President Al Gore requested her help with his "reinventing government" program. It's a situation I'm very familiar with," she laughs.

One network administrator tells how she has come home to find PCs sitting on her front porch - new "patients" from friends and relatives who heard through the grapevine that she had a special talent for ridding computers of viruses, pop-ups and spam. There's no doubt that family - and friends of family, and friends of friends of family - gravitate toward their relatives in IT for help with any and all things digital: cell phones, cameras, GPS gadgets, big-screen TVs, electronic pinball games, you name it. Every IT person seems to have a few friends-and-family fix-it stories. We asked IT folks to tell us about their most unusual support requests; here are some of our favorites. Even CIOs can't say no to their loved ones' pleas for tech help. Google guru saves day, basks in adulation Google CIO Ben Fried says that many of the phone calls he receives from his 74-year-old father, an author with 23 history and political science books to his credit, involve questions about either hardware or software. "This is a man whose main tool prior to getting a Mac not that long ago was a 1938 Smith-Corona typewriter," Fried says.

Upon closer examination, Fried discovered that his father had written the first 275 pages of the book he was working on as a footnote - rather than as a document - in Microsoft Word. Fried doesn't mind fielding unusual support calls, like the one he received from his dad complaining that his computer was running very slow. Fried simply copied and pasted the manuscript into a text document - a feat that his father responded to by saying, "Son, you're a genius." After that, Fried says, the volume of calls from his dad's friends stepped up for a while. CIO Jeff Steinhorn describes himself as "the default help desk for my wife, my kids, my friends and my parents." So it wasn't at all unusual for him when his 11-year-old son called him at work with "an emergency situation at home." Steinhorn recalls, "He had just ordered four tickets online to an exciting amusement park we typically treat the kids to once a year, and he needed to get them printed." But the printer wasn't working, and Steinhorn couldn't troubleshoot and fix it over the phone. "I know my son's e-mail ID and password - as every parent of an 11-year-old should - so I went into his account and found the e-mail confirmation number, so that he could take that to the entrance gate and have the tickets reprinted there," he recalls. Hess honcho is family hero Hess Corp. But Steinhorn got more than he bargained for.

The Steinhorn family did make it to the amusement park - several times, in fact, since they had a dozen tickets and never managed to get a refund for the extras. "And looking on the bright side, in the end it was just a printer jam, so the actual equipment failure did not end up costing me anything." Accenture expert makes multiple connections Chris Crawford, a global applications architect for internal functions at Accenture in Chicago, recalls the panicked call he received from a good friend who had just purchased and set up a very expensive sound system for his home. He found a confirmation for 12 tickets at a cost of about $500 charged to his credit card. "I can only assume that he hit Enter a couple times too many," Steinhorn says. "I was much less concerned about the printer than I was about the season's [worth of] passes to the park I had just funded." The story does have a happy ending. His friend couldn't discern any significant difference in sound quality - despite the great amount of money he had paid for the system. Crawford adjusted the wire and was an instant hero. As it turned out, a woofer on one of the speakers wasn't hooked up properly. Crawford says he's especially busy with requests around the holidays when friends and family want to know which electronic gadgets he recommends for gift-giving.

Once, for instance, he was summoned to a former CEO's home to fix a phone. (He plugged it back in.) But he's also gone above and beyond answering calls for high-tech help. He even started an internal blog at Accenture where colleagues post their favorite tips and recommendations. "I like computers so much that it's fun to be an expert," Crawford says. "It can also come in handy as an ice breaker at cocktail parties." Amerisource Bergen ace gives new meaning to "software support" Tom Murphy, senior vice president and CIO at Amerisource Bergen, a $70 billion pharmaceutical services company based in Valley Forge, Pa., says he has certainly received his fair share of tech fix-it requests throughout his career. He has been asked to fix colleagues' personal work-life balance issues, and once, he recalls, he even had a request to see if he could help fix a marriage. "For whatever reason, people have always approached me to discuss personal issues," Murphy says. "To me, the best part of my job is helping to fix the real 'software' - i.e., human - challenges."

Google today rolled out Social Search within the Google Labs site. The Google Labs page explains that with Social Search, you "sign in to Google and do a search. Google announced the new experimental search tool at last week's Web 2.0 Summit.

If there's relevant web content written by people in your social circle, it will automatically show up at the bottom of your search results under a section called 'Results from people in your social circle'." Limited by Your Social Circle Ok. I'm game. It only took one search for me to figure out that my 'social circle' needed some work. I clicked the button on the Google Labs page to 'Join this experiment'. Now, when I visit the main Google search page I get a special Google Experimental Labs logo to let me know I am using the cutting edge Social Search capabilities. As far as Google Social Search is concerned, your 'social circle' is defined by the contacts you have built up in Gmail and the sites that you have linked to in your Google profile. I have a Gmail account and a Google profile, but I don't rely on either regularly so the network of contacts I have established there is scarce at best.

Social Search can incorporate people you're connected with in Twitter, FriendFeed, or LinkedIn, but only if you have established those connections within your Google profile. My search results demonstrated to me that I will have to invest some time expanding my social circle within Google in order for Social Search to provide any value to me. Social Search is a sort of hybrid approach to real-time search indexing and social networking which provides posts and content from contacts in your social network within your search results. Where's Facebook? It isn't hard to see then that the proverbial elephant in the room is the conspicuous absence of content from Facebook, the biggest social networking site there is. Aside from pulling publicly available content from your social circle to include in your search results, Social Search borrows from the six degrees of separation concept leveraged in LinkedIn to provide content from the social circle of your social circle as well.

Interestingly, when Microsoft and Facebook announced that Bing would begin providing real-time indexing of Facebook status updates, Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg stated that no money changed hands in the arrangement and that Facebook is "not trying to make money on data." Sandberg's statement begs the question 'if Facebook isn't trying to make money on data, what is the hold up with coming to a similar deal with Google?' A follow up question also comes to mind: 'if Google Social Search doesn't include posts and content from the biggest social networking site, how much value can it really provide?' Innovative Approach Google Social Search brings some unique elements to the concept of web search and real-time indexing. I spoke with Robert Scoble, technology evangelist and social networking guru. He explained that with Twitter searches you get results from everybody, with FriendFeed you get results only from your friends, but with Social Search you get results from two levels- your own social circle and the contacts of your friends in your social circle, expanding the sphere and providing greater value. He likes what he sees so far from Google's experimental service. Scoble pointed out that this approach "could eliminate spam." Restricting your search to only your direct social circle limits the potential results, but the Twitter-style search of indexing every public post provides too much opportunity for spam. He said "If I am following you I know you won't spam me, and you won't have spammers in your network.

According to Scoble, the Google Social Search approach will weed out spam. If I start getting spam from you, I can just drop you from my social circle." Users will be more discriminating about who they connect with, and more diligent about protecting their own reputation. In a video overview of Google Social Search, Google stresses the ability to customize the social circle and opt out of any service. As with all things social networking, Social Search has to walk the tightrope between sharing information with the social network, and protecting privacy. Tony Bradley is an information security and unified communications expert with more than a decade of enterprise IT experience.

He tweets as @PCSecurityNews and provides tips, advice and reviews on information security and unified communications technologies on his site at tonybradley.com.

In the days leading up to NASA's crashing of two halves of a space probe into the moon, doubters turned to the Internet to express fears that the lunar bombing would have negative effects on the Earth. In a quest to find out if there's water on the moon , NASA sent two separated halves of a spacecraft crashing into a permanently dark crater on the south pole of the moon this morning. Scientists and astronomers were quick to step forward to refute any rumors and quell concerns, but rumors are still circulating online. The crashes were meant to send up a huge debris plume that could be measured and analyzed for evidence of water ice hiding in the cold, dark crater.

But detractors were quick to post online warnings about possible negative effects of the experiment. With NASA still hopeful to one day create a viable human outpost on the moon , it would be helpful for anyone there to find water rather than haul it up from Earth. Amy Ephron, an author and screenwriter, wrote an article for the Huffington Post earlier this week, questioning NASA for taking the risks associated with sending two spacecraft crashing into the surface of the moon. "Who did the risk assessment? Ephron was far from alone in her concerns. I mean, what if something goes wrong?" asked Ephron. "I could say something scientifically lame and ask, 'What if it gets thrown off its axis?' or something funny and suggest something (that I actually sort of believe), like, 'What if it somehow throws off the astrology?' Or that we're not risking - as we have the earth with continued experiments of this kind - sending the solar system out of balance.

The Chicago Surrealist Movement posted an online petition , which was signed by 560 people, calling for NASA to halt the bombing of the moon. Faith Vilas, director of the MMT Observatory , said she's been amazed by such negative reactions to the mission. And people against the LCROSS mission started their own Twitter presence with @helpsavethemoon . While some people said they felt NASA's plan was simply too aggressive an attack on the Earth's orbiter, some claimed that the impacts would change the Earth's tides, throw the moon off its axis or even affect women's menstrual cycles. There's simply no danger, she added. "The moon is impacted by nature and meteors all the time," said Vilas. "Nature has done much more damage to the moon than we just did. What we did was nothing. We were not likely to have any effect on the moon at all.

We didn't have much of an impact at all." Bruce Betts, director of projects at The Planetary Society , said in an email to Computerworld that this morning's crashes will have no negative impact on the moon or the Earth. "The spacecraft are far too tiny compared to the moon, in fact, to have any significant effect on the moon's orbit or dynamics," he added. "The impact might be likened to a gnat hitting the windshield of a truck."

It's hard to imagine NASA could face more challenges than the ones it stared at in October. On the cloudier side, the Review of United States Human Space Flight Plan Committee said NASA faces significant challenges in continuing the manned space flight program. On the good side, the space agency had a couple major successes first with the NASA LCROSS satellites successfully crashing into the moon looking for water and then the Ares X rocket launch that went off without a hitch at the end of the month. Then the GAO said NASA network faces myriad security problems.

That was the conclusion of the Augustine Review of United States Human Space Flight Plan Committee report delivered to the White House today. Here's a look at those NASA stories and more from October: NASA's future: Now the space battle beginsWhen it comes down to it, NASA is the most accomplished space organization in the world but its human spaceflight activities are at a tipping point, primarily due to a mismatch of goals and money. The report's 157-pages worth of findings will now be debated and in the end, dictate the future of NASA and space flight operations. The short test flight - about 2 minutes - will provide NASA an early opportunity to look at hardware, models, facilities and ground operations associated with the mostly new Ares I launch vehicle. NetworkWorld Extra:12 mad science projects that could shake the world10 NASA space technologies that may never see the cosmos "Frickin fantastic" launch of NASA Ares X rocket NASA saysWith a hiss and roar NASA's Ares X rocket blasted into the atmosphere this at about 11:33 am EST taking with it a variety of test equipment and sensors but also high hopes for the future of the US space agency. NASA network security torchedWhile NASA may be focused on keeping its manned space flight plans intact, apparently it has seriously neglected the security of its networks.

NASA teams with Air Force to step up commercial space paceAs it looks to significantly reshape its future, NASA today said it would partner with the US Air Force Research Laboratory to develop a technology roadmap for use of reusable commercial spaceships. Watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office issued a 53-page report pretty much ripping the space agency's network security strategy stating that NASA has significant problems protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the information and variety of networks supporting its mission centers. The study of reusable launch vehicle, or RLVs will focus on identifying technologies and assessing their potential use to accelerate the development of commercial reusable launch vehicles that have improved reliability, availability, launch turn-time, robustness and significantly lower costs than current launch systems, NASA stated. NASA spacecraft crash into the moonNASA' Lunar CRater Observing and Sensing Satellites (LCROSS) took dead aim and crashed into the moon around 7:31 am ESD. Watching the results on NASA TV, scientists were pleased with the impact of the two satellites. The study results will provide roadmaps with recommended government technology tasks and milestones for different vehicle categories. The impact of the $80 million LCROSS satellites into the moon was to create what the space agency hopes is an ice-filled a debris plume that can be analyzed for water content.

The space agency said on Oct. 15 it will start a series of 17 flights to study changes to Antarctica's sea ice, glaciers and ice sheets. NASA takes ice hunt Earth-boundWhile NASA is crashing into the moon to look for ice, it's also looking for the frozen stuff here on Earth, only in a much more conventional way. The flights are part of what NASA calls Operation Ice Bridge, a six-year project that is the largest airborne survey ever made of ice at Earth's polar regions. The Apophis asteroid is approximately the size of two-and-a-half football fields and updated computational techniques and newly available data indicate the probability of an Earth encounter on April 13, 2036, for Apophis has dropped from one-in-45,000 to about four-in-a million, NASA stated. NASA says 200-yard long asteroid will miss EarthNASA scientists have recalculated the path of a large asteroid known as Apophis and now say it has only a very slim chance of banging into Earth. NASA Ares rocket battles lightning strikesNASA's Ares I-X test rocket has been delayed today in part because of the number of lightning strikes in the area - 154 since last evening, NASA said.

That's because NASA built an enormous lightning protection system at the Kennedy Space Center that will not only protect people and equipment but collects strike information for analysis by launch managers. While NASA can't control the weather, the Ares launch pad and surrounding area as well protected from lighting strikes as can be.