mattnyc99 writes "Over at Popular Mechanics, Glenn Derene has a great new column investigating the lawless lands of broadcast television, where the quality of the picture that ends up on your expensive hi-def set is determined by a bunch of fuzzy math. Quoting: 'In fact, there's no real regulation over high-definition picture quality at all — "none whatsoever," one industry consultant told me. And that's part of the reason why different HD stations often have wildly varying levels of picture quality that change from one moment to the next. Behind the scenes, content producers, broadcasters and cable and satellite providers are engaged in a constant tug-of-war over bandwidth and video quality, with no hard metrics to even define what looks acceptable. Even officials at HBO, where Generation Kill looks pretty fantastic on my TV, bemoaned the lack of a silver bullet ... for now.'"

dpreformer sends word that President Bush signed a classified directive Jan. 8 (it only came to light this week) putting all cyber-defense and counter-offensive activity for government networks under the aegis of the National Security Agency. Previously, federal agencies had disparate intrusion and attack monitoring programs. The directive does not address private-sector networks and systems. While some lawmakers and civil-rights advocates are unhappy with expanding the NSA's role domestically, one alternative that was considered and rejected — putting Homeland Security in charge — might have been worse. "A proposal last year by the White House Homeland Security Council to put the Department of Homeland Security in charge of the initiative was resisted by national security agencies on the grounds that the department, established in 2003, lacked the necessary expertise and authority. The tug-of-war lasted weeks and was resolved only recently, several sources said."

sciencehabit writes with a link to the ScienceNow site, noting an article saying the Higgs boson may already have been found in previous observations of the known universe. A theorist at Michigan state is arguing that scientists may have already found evidence for the elusive particle. The key appears to be that the particles that make up the Higgs field are of various 'strengths', and some of those particles may tug on others very weakly. "The lightest Higgs can be very light indeed, but it would not have been seen at [CERN's Large Electron-Positron (LEP)], because LEP experimenters were looking for an energetic collision that made a Z that then spit out a Higgs. That wouldn't happen very often if the lightest Higgs and the Z hardly interact. 'Just within the simplest supersymmetric model, there's still room for Higgs that is missed,' Yuan says. However, this lightweight Higgs is not exactly the Higgs everyone is looking for, says Marcela Carena, a theorist at Fermilab. 'The Higgs they are talking about is not the one responsible for giving mass to the W and Z,' she says. It can't be because it hardly interacts with those particles, Carena says. Indeed, in Yuan's model, the role of mass-giver falls to one of the heavier Higgses, which is still heavier than the LEP limit, she notes."

Anonymous writes "Security researchers Greg Hoglund and Gary McGraw poked around in World of Warcraft and other online games, finding vulnerabilities and exploiting the system using online bots and rootkit-like techniques to evade detection. Their adventures in online game security became fodder for the book, Exploiting Online Games. McGraw discussed with securityfocus the state of security in modern video games, cheating and anti-cheating systems, how the market for cheats, exploits, and digital objects is growing, what we could learn from the design of these huge systems, and how game developers react to submissions of security vulnerabilities."

Vexorian writes "Is there direct or indirect censorship in the media towards delicate but important topics? Project censored lists 25 stories that did not seem to get the attention they deserved. Whether intentionally or not, for the most part the media skipped over these important topics. From the article: 'Throughout 2005 and 2006, a large underground debate raged regarding the future of the Internet. More recently referred to as network neutrality, the issue has become a tug of war with cable companies on the one hand and consumers and Internet service providers on the other. Yet despite important legislative proposals and Supreme Court decisions throughout 2005, the issue was almost completely ignored in the headlines until 2006.1 And, except for occasional coverage on CNBC's Kudlow & Kramer, mainstream television remains hands-off to this day'."

An anonymous reader writes "Scientists at a small startup called Walker Reading Technologies in Minnesota have determined that the human brain is not wired properly to read block text. They have found that our eyes view text as if they're peering through a straw. Not only does your brain see the text on the line you're reading, but it's also uploading superfluous information from the two lines above and the two lines below. This causes your brain to engage in a tug of war as it fights to filter and ignore the noise. The result is slower reading speeds and decreased comprehension. The company has developed a product that automatically re-formats text in a way that your brain can more easily comprehend."

In the IT trench writes "How's this for a new twist on the old responsible disclosure debate? Hackers are using clues from Microsoft's pre-patch security advisories to create and publish proof-of-concept exploits. The latest zero-day flaw in the Windows DNS Server RPC interface implementation is a perfect example of the tug-o-war within the Microsoft Security Response Center about how much information should be included in the pre-patch advisory."

anthemaniac writes "Thirty years ago, Luke Skywalker beheld something that scientists are just now realizing is likely quite common in the universe: double sunsets. Astronomers have long known that binary star systems are common. And models suggested that planets could form in these systems, even though there's a double-tug of gravity on the material that would have to form a planet. Observations from NASA's Spitzer telescope, show that binary systems are just as likely to be surrounded by planet-forming debris disks are are lone stars."

eldavojohn writes "Mercury News is running a story reporting that Google has filed subpoenas with Microsoft and Yahoo, in relation to their legal battles with publishers and authors. Google faces charges of massive copyright infringement surrounding its online book project. The company claims that Microsoft and Yahoo have taken the exact same steps in acquiring print-related rights. Google therefore wants to show that 'everyone is doing it.'" From the article: "McGraw-Hill Cos. and the Authors Guild, along with other publishers and authors, contend that a Google project to digitize the libraries of four major U.S. universities, as well as portions of the New York Public Library and Oxford University's libraries, ignores the rights of copyright holders in favor of Google's economic self-interest ... Is the library of the future going to be open? Or will it be controlled by a couple of big corporate players?"

An anonymous reader writes "The Washington Post has an interesting article on what they label 'The Coming Tug of War Over the Internet. From the article: 'Do you prefer to search for information online with Google or Yahoo? What about bargain shopping -- do you go to Amazon or eBay? Many of us make these kinds of decisions several times a day, based on who knows what -- maybe you don't like bidding, or maybe Google's clean white search page suits you better than Yahoo's colorful clutter. But the nation's largest telephone companies have a new business plan, and if it comes to pass you may one day discover that Yahoo suddenly responds much faster to your inquiries, overriding your affinity for Google. Or that Amazon's Web site seems sluggish compared with eBay's.'" Seems like the idea of the 2-tier internet is really catching on with the market-droids.