RIO DE JANEIRO — The search for the black boxes from an Air France airliner crash off Brazil six months ago will resume in early February, the head of the French office investigating the accident said here Saturday.

The new underwater sweeps, approximately 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) off Brazil’s northeast coast, will last a maximum three months and involve sonar and robot submarines, said Jean-Paul Troadec, director of the Investigation and Analysis Bureau. Read the full story

A blog post from a Google executive on Saturday morning dropped hints that the company would release a Google Android phone of its own.

In the post, Mario Queiroz, a Google vice president of product management, said the company had developed a “mobile lab” device that “combines innovative hardware from a partner with software that runs on Android.” According to Queiroz, Google has distributed the device to Google employees worldwide so that they could test the new technology and help improve it. Read the full story

Malaysian firm buys social network pioneer Friendster

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Since May of this year, Google Wave has been highly anticipated by the Internet community. It’s Google’s newest project that they are slowly releasing to the public. On September 30th, the beta version of Google Wave was launched and access was given to a select few 100,000 people for testing.

It has been referred to as a game-changer for communication and even the death of e-mail. So how is Google Wave going to back these statements up? With key features that make Google Wave much cleaner, more efficient and just more fun than e-mail. Let’s take a look below. Read the full story

By ALEXANDER G. HIGGINS

GENEVA

The world’s largest atom smasher has recorded its first high-energy collisions of protons, a spokeswoman said Wednesday.

Physicists hope those collisions will help them understand suspected phenomena such as dark matter, antimatter and ultimately the creation of the universe billions of years ago, which many theorize occurred as a massive explosion known as the Big Bang. Read the full story

In a spectacular snafu, the Transportation Security Administration stupidly posted an entire airport screening procedures manual on a government website. The 93-page document included details on special screening rules for diplomats, CIA and law enforcement officers; a list of items for which screening is not required (like wheelchairs, casts, orthopedic shoes); and the fun fact that during peak travel times, TSA screeners who check IDs only use black lights to authenticate 25% of documents. Some of these secrets were revealed because, apparently, somebody erroneously believed they were redacted. But The Wandering Aramean blog, which discovered the oopsy, explains why that didn’t work:

They apparently don’t understand how redaction works in the electronic document world. See, rather than actually removing the offending text from the document they just drew a black box on top of it. Turns out that PDF documents don’t really care about the black box like that and the actual content of the document is still in the file. Read the full story

Just as the Manhattan Project was conceived in 1942 to beat the Germans to the atomic bomb during World War II, the “Manhattan Beach Project” was founded as an “all-out assault on the world’s biggest killer – aging,” according to project organizer David A. Kekich.

An end to aging may be just as explosive as the atomic blast that occurred at Alamogordo, New Mexico during the predawn hours of July 16, 1945. It’s serious enough that members of the Obama Administration consider it to be one of the major global destabilizing forces of the next 25 years. It will require the political mastery of a scientific and societal transition built around the Nano-Info-Bio-Cogno (NBIC) roadmap.

After nine years of research and collaboration, a group of entrepreneurs and scientists – many known to h+ readers –- are disclosing their plan “to start saving up to 100,000 lives lost to aging every day, by 2029.” A Longevity Summit in November 2009 — organized by Kekich — brought together a number of researchers on human aging and longevity for a discussion on the state-of-the-art research, the implications of their discoveries, and round table, cross-disciplinary discussions that may lead to new and accelerated results. Here’s a video of Kekich explaining the project: Read the full story

Google search is getting eyes and ears, moving beyond typed key words to let people scour the Internet with mobile telephone cameras or spoken words in multiple languages.

Google on Monday unveiled “Goggles” software that lets people search online using pictures taken with cameras in mobile phones based on its Android operating system. Read the full story

Google hopes to turn the river into a canal

Before too long, expect to find anything that anyone puts on the Internet on Google within seconds: with luck, it might even be useful.

Real-time search has come to Google. The company has been hinting at this day for several months, most recently when it announced a deal to access Twitter’s “firehose” of data. But it presented its vision for real-time search before the media Monday at the Computer History Museum, claiming to have made a little history on its own.

Over the next few days, Google users will start to notice a box called “Latest results” on the main search results page for a topic that’s guaranteed to produce results. Google used “Obama” as its example, and searches for that query place a new box that automatically scrolls through recent “real-time” results associated with that topic from sources like Twitter, FriendFeed, and Google News, as well as new Web pages–such as this story–as they are created.

The concept is hot in the search world: Microsoft’s Bing also displays updates from Twitter and various blogs, although those results are not integrated with the main page. And Yahoo has also signed up with a company called OneRiot to throw its hat into the real-time search wars.

What’s less clear, however, is how useful this technology will be unless Google and others working on the problem can bring the same degree of relevance and trust to real-time results that it brings to regular search results. Google News can already confuse the casual user who wonders how and why those particular headlines were singled out, so how will relevancy work when a stream of news can knock a particularly authoritative result off your screen in seconds?

“It’s a very hard problem. Language understanding is still an unsolved problem,” said Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow and one of the key players in developing this product. “Not only do we have to understand what someone is saying, but we have to get to the deeper semantics of what is indeed true. We have to work through many issues. Truth ends up being a rather vague notion.”

In a way, this challenge is right up Google’s alley. The company is obsessed with speed when it comes to presenting results, agonizing over whether design changes that add tenths of seconds to page-loading times are worth the effort.

And now that seemingly everyone has a blog, a microblog, a social-networking profile, and commenting identity (or 29), new content on the Internet is being generated at an astounding pace. Google used to think it would be able to index all the world’s information in about 300 years, but CEO Eric Schmidt told CNET in November that one of Google’s greatest challenges in the decades ahead will be staying abreast of the explosion in content enabled by social media.

That’s why it’s a bit surprising that Google, the world’s leading search engine by a wide margin, hasn’t necessarily been a leader in this area. Marissa Mayer, vice president of search and user experience at Google, admitted Monday the company could have moved more quickly to organize the vast amount of data produced by services such as Twitter. Anyone who has tried to use Twitter Search knows that real-time search at the moment is like the regular Internet was 10 years ago: a blast of information that’s impressive in its scope but overwhelming in its usefulness.

But what Google is trying to do is leapfrog the notion of Twitter as the vanguard of the real-time content explosion. Twitter is undeniably hot at the moment, but new Web pages are generated constantly, especially as traditional media companies move online. One need only to think back to this summer when news reports of Michael Jackson’s death sent millions online looking for confirmation, staggering services such as Google and Twitter under that load.

Google said it plans to display all kinds of Internet content in its “Latest news” box. Google didn’t pay Twitter an undisclosed amount of money for access to its feed for no reason, however; the speed at which real-time content is generated can be harnessed much easier if search providers such as Google have that information pushed to them, rather than having to pull it out of the Web itself.

That raises the question of just how Google will index and rank real-time results. The company needs to develop the real-time equivalent of PageRank, which evaluates Web pages by the number of other pages that are linking to that page. That’s something Google “is beginning to experiment with,” Mayer said in a question-and-answer session following Google’s presentation.

There’s definitely some way to do that, but it certainly is not a simple problem. Someone with 15,000 Twitter followers is not necessarily as authoritative in one area as they are in another, and Google will have to figure out some way to evaluate this information to make it truly useful.

Until then, however, news junkies can entertain themselves watching the Latest results section spin with updates on Tiger Woods’ latest paramour or the glacial progress of Congress’ attempt to pass health-care reform legislation.

In a roughly 10-second period Monday afternoon on Google’s Trends page, where it is testing out the real-time service, the feed for “Pearl Harbor Day”–the second most popular trend on the Internet Monday behind the aforementioned Tiger Woods–produced a tweet about a Pearl Harbor Day poem, a news story on people who were in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and a gentleman celebrating Ruby Diner’s 27th anniversary with a $2.70 Rubyburger. (He also happened to note in his tweet that it was Pearl Harbor Day.)

(SEE MORE AT THE ORIGINAL SOURCE BY CLICKING HERE)

TEHRAN, Iran — Government opponents shouted “Allahu Akbar” and “Death to the Dictator” from Tehran’s rooftops in the pouring rain on the eve of student demonstrations planned for Monday. Authorities choked off Internet access and warned journalists working for foreign media to stick to their offices for the next three days.

The measures were aimed at depriving the opposition of its key means of mobilizing the masses as Iran’s clerical rulers keep a tight lid on dissent. Government opponents are seeking, nonetheless, to get large numbers of demonstrators to turn out Monday and show their movement still has momentum. Read the full story

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is quickly making up for lost time: The first scientific results from the recently restarted particle accelerator have been announced—about two weeks ahead of schedule.

During the first collisions of the LHC’s twin beams of protons, a machine called A Large Ion Collider Experiment, or ALICE, collected the results from a proton-proton smashup. Read the full story

Want to know how much phone companies and internet service providers charge to funnel your private communications or records to U.S. law enforcement and spy agencies?

That’s the question muckraker and Indiana University graduate student Christopher Soghoian asked all agencies within the Department of Justice, under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed a few months ago. But before the agencies could provide the data, Verizon and Yahoo intervened and filed an objection on grounds that, among other things, they would be ridiculed and publicly shamed were their surveillance price sheets made public. Read the full story

The mechanics of slowing light down, as well as speeding it up, is governed by methods and equations that are pretty well understood. Now scientists just have to figure out what to do with it.

Most people learn in physics class that light goes one speed: faster than anything else. Because of its long, rich history, this 300 million meters per second is generally treated as an established fact. In the last few decades, though, scientists have been playing around with light’s speed. But, as that history noted, researchers have started playing around with exceptions, based on the premise that “nothing in normal space can go faster than light, but if you can do funny things to space, you can go faster than light.” Read the full story

It is a disappearance almost worthy of Mulder and Scully. After almost 60 years investigating the UFO threat over Britain – the MoD ‘X Files’ bureau has been axed.

Earlier this week the UK Ministry of Defence quietly cut their hotline for members of the public to report UFO sightings.

And it wasn’t because no-one was calling – the line has received more than 12,000 UFO and alien reports since it was launched in 1950, including 135 last year. Read the full story

Last month, the Swedish ISP Portlane was sued by several Hollywood movie studios for hosting OpenBitTorrent, claiming that the tracker is a re-branded copy of one previously operated by The Pirate Bay. Now the Stockholm District Court has rejected calls to order the shutdown of the tracker.

Earlier this year a new BitTorrent tracker was launched. Due to its public nature, OpenBitTorrent (OBT) was seen by some as a possible replacement for The Pirate Bay tracker, which has recently closed down for good. Read the full story

Malware authors are impersonating the CDC in a new scheme to propagate a trojan horse. Fraudulent e-mails sent by a botnet claim that the recipient must register for a fake state vaccination program but really link to a malware-infested phishing website.

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) issued a statement this week to warn citizens about a recent wave of phishing e-mails that deceptively claim to be from the government organization. The e-mails refer to a state vaccination program and tell recipients that they have to create a personal H1N1 vaccination profile. Read the full story

Hey, Tiger Woods: Why so dumb about tech?

When it comes to digital embarrassment, celebs are apparently just stupid

updated 7:59 a.m. CT, Thurs., Dec . 3, 2009

Not since Prince Charles of Wales told then-mistress Camilla Parker-Bowles of his desire to be her feminine hygiene product has an adulterous celebrity been so humiliated by a telephone communiqué. We’re talking about Tiger Woods here, and the voice mail message he left to an alleged mistress, released earlier this week by Us Weekly. In review:

“Hey, it’s, uh, it’s Tiger. I need you to do me a huge favor. Um, can you please, uh, take your name off your phone. My wife went through my phone. And, uh, may be calling you. If you can, please take your name off that and, um, and what do you call it just have it as a number on the voice mail, just have it as your telephone number. That’s it, OK. You gotta do this for me. Huge. Quickly. All right. Bye.”

Read the full story

On Monday night, French media giant Vivendi and NBC parent company General Electric agreed to terms that clear the way for US cable giant Comcast to take a controlling stake in NBC Universal. An announcement from Comcast is expected within days. The proposed merger would create a media behemoth, and clear the way for an unprecedented era of media consolidation across cable, the Internet and broadcast television.

Be afraid. Comcast is both the largest cable company and the largest residential broadband provider in the United States: a $34-billion business with 24 million subscribers, reaching nearly one out of every four homes in the country. NBCU owns NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, Universal Studios, 27 television stations, and a host of other properties. Read the full story