• Worries in the U.K. over Chinese-made phone equipment

    BT is engaged in a massive upgrade of its 21CN network backbone; trouble is, at the core of this upgrade is equipment acquired from Chinese networking giant Huawei, a company Western intelligence services have long suspected of being a front for Chinese intelligence; fear of an undetectable “kill switch” that could disable critical communications

  • Motorola: Cellphones could offer a unified disaster alerts broadcasts

    Motorola envisages using cellphones for emergency alerts even if most of a cellphone network is down; a new generation of cellphones that can rapidly form a peer-to-peer network when an emergency alert is broadcast

  • Palestinians in Gaza try to build new foundations from the ruins of old ones

    Tight Israeli and Egyptian economic blockade of the Gaza Strip prevents building materials from entering the Hamas-controlled area; Gazans have come up with ingenious ways of rebuilding their city

  • Obama creates cyberczar post

    Czar will be in charge of coordinating efforts to secure government networks and U.S. critical infrastructure; president says the new White House cybersecurity office would include an official whose job is to ensure that the government’s cyber policies do not violate privacy and civil liberties

  • Nuclear power may be considered for carbon credits

    Te 2001 Kyoto protocol excluded nuclear power from clean energy technology schemes; now, more and more countries appear to support the idea that developing countries should be given carbon credits if they build nuclear power stations; carbon credits could cut the capital cost of building new nuclear stations by up to 40 percent

  • GPO reveals confidential U.S. nuclear information by mistake

    A 2004 agreement between the United States and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) requires the United States to submit to the agency a detailed list of the addresses and specifications of hundreds of U.S. nuclear-weapons-related facilities, laboratories, reactors, and research activities, including the location of fuel for bombs; the Department of Energy (DOE) prepared the report, and Government Printing Office (GPO) printed it so it could be submitted to the IAEA — but the GPO went ahead and, mistakenly, posted 268-page dossier on its Web site

  • Sweden selects location for central nuclear waste repository

    The Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository project now appears doomed, but in Sweden a location has been selected for that country’s central nuclear waste disposal site

  • New flood warning system developed

    Researchers from the United Kingdom and China develop a software-based flood warning system which takes into account both climate change and corresponding hydrological effects

  • Internet's root zone to be secured

    NTIA announced it would sign the Internet’s root zone digitally by the end of the year; VeriSign and ICANN to share DNSSEC duties

  • Obama's emphasis on IT security a boon to Michigan companies

    Focus on cybersecurity technology offers Michigan IT companies chance to grow; the state has been quietly building a respectable range of network security companies

  • Flood-proofing New York City with storm barriers

    New York City faces two problems with water: rising ocean level and surges created by hurricanes and Nor’easters; engineers propose a system of barriers to prevent New Orleans-like flooding

  • Melting Greenland ice threatens northeast U.S., Canada

    The melting of Greenland’s ice sheets is driving more and more water toward the already threatened coastlines of New York, Boston, Halifax, and other cities in the northeastern United States

  • Anti-U.S. hackers break into U.S. Army servers

    InformationWeek reports that Defense Department investigators subpoena records from Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo in connection with ongoing probe of Turkish hackers who broke into U.S. Army servers

  • A fish called WANDA

    Aussie researchers develop a robotic fish that can swim toward objects of interest to investigate; the Wireless Aquatic Navigator for Detection and Analysis (WANDA) is propelled by a flexible joint tail fin that is activated through artificial muscles made from a conducting polymer

  • U.S. unprepared for severe solar storms

    Mankind’s vulnerability to disruptions caused by severe solar storms has increased as a result of the increasing dependence of human societies on technology and electricity; a storm on the scale of the 1859 Carrington Event could damage the U.S. electrical grid to such an extent that vast regions of the country could be without power for weeks, perhaps months.