"browser screenshot"

(Credit: CNET)

If you're interested in protecting your online privacy, you've probably taken steps like deleting browser cookies or turning on the private browsing features of Safari and Google Chrome.

That's supposed to prevent Web sites from tracking you across repeat visits. But a forthcoming paper prepared by an Electronic Frontier Foundation technologist shows that they're not really effective at all.

The reason is simple, but counterintuitive: Modern browsers have been designed to send Web sites a torrent of information thought to be innocuous, including detailed version numbers, operating system information, screen size, what fonts are installed, and sometimes even in what order the fonts were installed. Firefox, for instance, sends every Web site a version number such as "Intel Mac OS X 10/Gecko/20100315 Firefox/3.5.9."

Once this collection of facts--which are individually anonymous--is combined together and compared against other users' browsers, the data can become personally identifiable. (It's like being able to find someone's name if you know their birth date, ZIP code, and gender, which is not that difficult a task.)

Peter Eckersley the Australian computer scientist working at EFF who wrote the report, calls the technique "browser fingerprinting." Eckersley's paper will be presented at a privacy symposium in Berlin in July.

Read the full article on CNET News.com.

(Credit: Apple)

The launch of Apple’s iPad brought concerns that the device might cannibalize sales of the Mac computer - but a look at the first month of the June quarter shows that it’s the iPod, not the Mac, that may be taking the iPad hit.

In the U.S., Mac sales for the month of April were up 39 percent, ahead of the 19 percent projection that Wall Street has estimated for the full quarter. At the same time, iPods were down 17 percent for the month, compared to April of last year. Wall Street is forecasting a 9 percent decline for the full quarter.Continue »

In a letter to users, MySpace's co-president Mike Jones on Monday outlined the company's stance on privacy and its place within social networking, as well as detailing what he calls a "simplified" version of the social network's privacy settings that will roll out to users in the next few weeks.

The announcement comes just three weeks after Facebook's F8 conference, where Facebook introduced, and immediately implemented new privacy settings that have drawn user and media ire for making profile information too public. Facebook's new system has also drawn criticism for being overly-complex. Continue »

(Credit: Lisa Parr, and Menno Hoogland, Museo del Hombre, Dominica.)

When it came to understanding the native peoples they encountered, 15th century era European explorers to the New World turned out to be mistaken about a lot of things - including the so-called "devil's grimace" they reported to encounter on these shores.. Actually, it was anything but.

Writing in the latest issue of Current Anthropology , co-authors Bridget Waller of the University of Portsmouth and Alice Samson, of Leiden University, found that research into facial expression in human and nonhuman primates shows that the bared teeth expression was used in social contexts "as an unambiguous signal of nonaggression, affiliation, and benign intent".

"This expression could likewise have functioned in the pre-Columbian Caribbean as a communicative signal in complex social interactions in both human and nonhuman (spirit, animal, natural) worlds and may have been essential for the maintenance of cohesive and stable inter??? and intracommunity relationships."

Disappearing glaciers at Glacier National Park

(Credit: PDPHoto.org)

Happy 100, Glacier National Park.

But will you still be worthy of the name when you reach the ripe old age of 200?

Increasingly, that worry is on the mind of conservationists and geologists A recent report by the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization and the Natural Resources Defense Council detailing the deterioration of the park's glaciers because of human disruptions. On Monday, the Associated Press moved a good writeup noting that the park draws about 2 million visitors a year, nearly all of them during the summer. That's up from about 4,000 visitors in 1911. But will they keep coming if the park loses its majesty? That's a question nobody can answer.

In the meantime, here are some data that can be measured:

• Glacier is on track to ose all or nearly all of its glaciers in the relatively near future. Of the 37 named glaciers in the park, only 25 remain large enough to still be considered glaciers. Of the 12 glaciers that have melted away, 11 have done so since 1966.
• Peak snowpack levels in the park may be reached 41 days earlier than in mid-20th century
• According to one weather station in the park, the average temperature for the last decade was 2.0°F hotter than the station's 1950-1979 average.

"You can start reshaping animal communities with fairly small changes," Dan Fagre, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist told the AP. "It's hard to make clear predictions, other than there will be change."

The piece went on to note that Glacier is the best place in the Lower 48 states to see the multiplicity of mammal predators which were present at the time of European settlement of America. With its five different life zones, the park supports a variety of species of animals and plants. Unfortunately, "ising temperatures are pushing the tree line higher up the epic peaks, altering the terrain that animals use for food and cover," according to AP.

The iPhone 4G prototype, as seen on Gizmodo last month.

(Credit: Gizmodo)

Apple's contract manufacturer building the next iPhone plans to ship 24 million units by the end of this year, according to a new report.

The report from Digitimes on Monday said Taiwan-based Foxconn will ship 4.5 million next-gen iPhones by the end of June, and 19.5 million by the end of 2010.

Apple sells a lot of phones, but 24 million is a big number even for them. For comparison, Apple has sold a little over 50 million total since the original iPhone's debut in 2007. So how to explain the supposed sudden surge in iPhone supply? Digitimes could be wrong of course, though it does have some good sources in the contract manufacturing world.

Other possible explanations could be that Apple is planning big price cuts on this model, which could move more units. Or, and this would jibe with reports that the company's building a CDMA phone, it could be planning to add more carrier partners. More outlets to sell the phone would mean more supply.

You can read the rest of this article at CNET News.com.

The Google I/O floor in 2009. Googlers and the Google-friendly will take over Moscone West again this week.

How much bigger can Google's world get?

As Google prepares for its third major developer conference, it's getting ready to pitch its vision for the future of computing to 5,000 developers and media at San Francisco's Moscone center. When I/O kicks off on Wednesday, don't expect Google CEO Eric Schmidt to break out into a passionate "Developers!" chant like his counterpart at Microsoft, CEO Steve Ballmer, did all those many years ago.

However, this is clearly one area in which Google and Microsoft--bitter rivals otherwise--can agree: developer support is crucial to the growth of technology platforms. Google has scheduled press briefings for its enterprise, Wave, Chrome, and Android technologies, giving us a pretty good idea of what topics it intends to highlight during the show.

One major thing has changed between last year's show and this year's, in that Android is now a mainstream operating system that is increasingly butting heads with Apple's iPhone for mindshare among consumers and developers.

Read the rest of this article on CNET News.com.

In a Hubble picture, a red circle indicates an object in a distant galaxy that could be an ejected black hole.

(Credit: Netherlands Institute for Space Research)

This doesn't qualify as your run-of-the-mill science project.

During the course of her final undergraduate research work, Utrecht University student Marianne Heida was comparing hundreds of thousands of x-rays with galaxy formations when she noticed something odd. What she found may possibly  turn out to be a super massive black hole being expelled from the galaxy at very high speed.

Super-massive black holes weigh more than 1 billion times the mass of the sun.

However, a final judgment on exactly what's out there awaits further study. it's possible that the finding may also be a supernova, or even a "midsize" black hole.

"All three of those [options] are exotic and have something peculiar to them," study co-author Peter Jonker, an astronomer with the Netherlands Institute for Space Research in Utrecht told National Geographic. If it turns out to be a supernova, then, Jonker added, it would be a very 'strange" one that scientists aren't very familiar with. Even odder, he said it would suggest that the supernova was bright enough for astronomers on Earth to detect--even though it never popped up on their radar.

Heida did her research at the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research in Utrecht. The results have been accepted for publication in The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

This must be the season for gallactic migrations. Last week, astronomers released photos of a massive star that they say was kicked out of its home about 180,000 miles from Earth.

Sometimes these things might actually work:An aggressive, meant-to-shock Facebook and YouTube campaign on behalf of environmental group Greenpeace has caused food conglomerate Nestle to modify its policies regarding the use of palm oil.

Nestle announced early on Monday that it has partnered with The Forest Trust, a non-profit group that helps businesses develop practices that harvest forests sustainably, to tackle the social and environmental impacts of its corporate supply chain by severing ties to companies that contribute to deforestation. The first issue addressed will be its use of palm oil--the harvesting of which has been connected to the loss of rainforests and the animal species that inhabit them, as well as greenhouse gas emissions.

Greenpeace considers this a major victory: Two months ago, the environmental group targeted Nestle's use of palm oil with a purposely unsettling video that compared eating Kit-Kat bars to snacking on the bloodied appendages of orangutans. When Nestle lobbied to have the video removed from YouTube, Greenpeace turned its force up a notch and encouraged supporters to start posting comments in protest on Nestle's Facebook fan page and to change their profile photos to modified versions of the Nestle logo (i.e. "Killer" instead of Kit-Kat"). The whole thing turned into a particularly ugly social-media mess for Nestle when the manager of the Facebook fan page started getting argumentative and rude. The commenters grew even more vocal, even after the page manager apologized.

Read the rest of this piece on CNET News.com.

(Credit: AP)

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded a $100,000 grant to a couple of researchers investigating the use of ultrasound as a reversible male contraceptive.

The technique already works on rats, according to James Tsuruta, of the University of North Carolina, who led the research.

"We think this could provide men with reliable, low-cost, non-hormonal contraception from a single round of treatment," he said.

The focus now is to come up with a therapeutic ultrasound that would safely deplete testicular sperm counts, which presumably would presage the development of a cheap (and reversible) method of contraception for men.

A hat tip to Discovery Magazine for noticing this item. While details about how the device would function still remain scarce, since sperm don't like excessive heat, Discovery suggests the process may involve "heating and shaking working in combination."