Anonymous vs The Vatican?

Anatomy of an Anonymous Attack on the Vatican

In the middle of last year, the hacking group Anonymous tried but failed to attack various Vatican Internet servers. A report that was just released by Imperva shows the extent of their prowess, and is a blueprint for other corporate security managers who want to try to protect their own networks in the future from miscreants. While the report itself doesn't divulge the destination of the attack, it has been widely reported by the New York Times and other news outlets that it was the Vatican.

Evernote stays with MySql (for now)

Evernote: NoSQL? Not Now, Thanks! We're Good

Big services demand NoSQL, right? With nearly a billion notes and almost 2 billion resource files, Evernote should be ready to jump on the NoSQL and Big Data bandwagon, right? Not so fast, says Evernote's CTO Dave Engberg. According to Engberg, some applications may benefit from modern key-value storage engines, but Evernote has good reasons for sticking with its MySQL setup for account metadata.

In a post yesterday on the Evernote Tech Blog, Engberg says that the ACID-compliance of MySQL's default storage engine (InnoDB) is key to their synchronization model (PDF).

Space Junk: 12000 pieces of debris orbit us

More than half a century of sending objects into space has left the Earth surrounded by junk. Bits of long-dead satellites, spent rocket stages and other debris orbit the planet at almost 18,000 mph, each chunk a potential hazard to working satellites or astronauts.

The Swiss have a plan, however. Scientists at the Swiss space centre at EPFL, the federal institute for technology in Lausanne, want to send a “janitor satellite” into orbit, to sweep up debris and permanently remove it from orbit.

The SFr10m (£7m) satellite, called CleanSpace One, could launch within five years, according to EPFL.

eBooks2: Wow

Books Continue to Evolve - Check Out E.O. Wilson's 'Life on Earth' iBook

Life on Earth is a digital biology textbook for high school students. It's currently "under development" (it isn't being written, it's being developed) by the E. O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation. The free download offers a preview of the book and a sample chapter about ecology. New chapters will be "released" (not published) over the next 2 years to the Apple iBookstore.

DIY Hovercraft

Make a very lovely hovercraft! This super awesome DIY project requires a bit of parent or teacher supervision (sharp needle needed to make a hole), but overall, it answers all of my wishes: Not only does it teach about physics and get kids making things that are fun, but it gives us a great use for the old CDs that we have in boxes around the house! (And there are quite a few.) That alone makes this project a gem in my book.

Millenium Falcon 10179 Animation Construction on CAD/3DS

Lego Millennium Falcon Stop Motion Assembly 3d from Francisco Prieto on Vimeo.

Facebook faces more Class-Action

Facebook Faces Nationwide Class-Action Lawsuit

A Baltimore law firm filed a nationwide class action lawsuit against Facebook Friday, claiming the social network illegally tracked user activity on the Internet.

In its claim, the law firm Murphy P.A. said the company "repeatedly ignored" warnings from a user who noticed Facebook continued to track users' activities on the Internet even after they had logged off. Facebook finally confirmed the practice in September and promised to make corrections within 24 hours.