Logging The Cyber World

Apple’s share of the global operating system market is climbing steadily, and could top 8% this month, statistics from a Web metrics firm showed Wednesday.

The latest monthly numbers from Net Applications show that Mac OS X had 7.94% of the market in June. Considering that its share has been climbing an average of 0.18% a month over the last 10 months, Mac OS X could top 8% this month. In August 2007, the Apple OS had 6.18% of the market.

During the same period, Linux has also increased market share, rising to 0.8% of the market in June from 0.47% last August, according to Net Applications. Meanwhile, the global market share of Microsoft Windows has declined over the last 10 months. In June, Windows accounted for 90.89% of the market, down from 93.06%.

Complete article from Yahoo! News

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon will buy and operate one or two commercial imagery satellites and plans to design and build another with more sophisticated spying capabilities, according to government and private industry officials.

The satellites could spy on enemy troop movements, spot construction at suspected nuclear sites and alert commanders to militant training camps.

The Broad Area Space-Based Imagery Collector satellite system, or BASIC, will cost between $2 billion and $4 billion. It would add to the secret constellation of satellites that now circle the Earth, producing still images that are pieced together into one large mosaic.

A single satellite can visit one spot on Earth once or twice every day. BASIC’s additional satellites will allow multiple passes over the same sites, alerting U.S. government users to potential trouble, humanitarian crises or natural disasters like floods.

From Yahoo! News.

DailyTech has previously covered the frantic pace of melt in Greenland, which is accelerating, dumping vast amounts of water into the sea. Meanwhile, the North Pole has been steadily melting away as well. Fortunately, the North Pole ice is floating, and thus will not affect sea levels, but its dissolution is an important indicator of warming.

While some remain critical that global warming is occurring at all, the melting of the North Pole represents a sharp indicator against voices of doubt. Now scientists are predicting that a major milestone will be reached this summer or next — the disappearance of the North Pole’s ice cover during the Arctic Summer.

Full article here.

The Mars Lander’s mission on the fourth planet from the Sun is a dream come true for many scientists who have been trying for decades to prove that there is indeed water on Mars, and that where there’s water, there could be life.

NASA’s Phoenix lander recently discovered chunks of bright materials near the surface of the planet, which at a first glance appeared to be ice. Mission investigators were convinced: could it be anything else?

At the time, the answer would have been yes, as some feared those could have been in fact salt deposits. However, their complete disappearance in just days after they had been uncovered made it clear: it was water ice, as scientists confirmed last week.

Read the full article here.

From Sunday, June 22 for one week, Usher’s life is up for sale on eBay with the package including his $420,000 (US$397,000) three-bedroom house in Perth, Western Australia, a trial for his job at a rug store, his car, motorbike, clothes and even friends.

Usher, 44, told Reuters he had been inundated with emails from all over the world since he put his life up for grabs in March, largely from people supporting him but also from those who were asking for advice on how to change their own lives.

“I was taken aback by how much interest there has been and by the amount of people it has inspired and had an impact on,” said Usher who is hoping to raise up to $500,000 to fund a new life.

Complete story from Yahoo! News

They’re in our computers, reading our files. The Chinese government, that is, according to two U.S. Congressmen who recently accused Beijing of sending hackers to ferret out secret documents stored on Congressional computers. The Chinese deny any involvement, but if they were lying, would we be able to prove it?

The answer, according to computer and security experts, is probably not.

At least, not conclusively enough for a court of law.

“It’s very difficult to track hacker attacks and, even if you can track it, you don’t always know with 100 percent certainty if you’re right,” said James Lewis, director and senior fellow of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

That was the problem faced by the investigators who attempted to figure out who broke into computers used by the staff of Rep. Christopher H. Smith, R-N.J., and Rep. Frank R. Wolf, R-Va. The Congressmen announced on June 11 that they’d been the targets of several attacks, beginning in 2006.

Both Smith and Wolf are high-profile critics of the Chinese government. They told reporters that, among other things, the hackers stole lists of identities of Chinese dissidents and records from Congressional human-rights hearings.

Read complete article here

The Windows XP era ends June 30 and soon hardware vendors will be shipping you all Vista all the time (in most cases). The save XP effort failed. The whining should cease. And now it’s time for Vista to sink or swim.

Ina Fried has a good overview of where Windows XP will stand with PC manufacturers. And Matt Asay highlights a report from Evans Data noting that 92 percent of developers are ignoring Vista. Coupling these two items together and you come to one conclusion: Folks are skeptical about Vista, but a lot of that skepticism is because XP is still lingering.

“Only eight percent of North American software developers are currently writing applications to run on Microsoft’s Vista operating system, while half are still writing programs for XP, according to Evans Data’s Spring 2008, North American Development Survey. These same developers forecast a fragmented Windows market in 2009 with only 24 percent expecting to target Vista and 29% expecting to continue with XP.”

Complete article here…

Humans can see into the future, says a cognitive scientist. It’s nothing like the alleged predictive powers of Nostradamus, but we do get a glimpse of events one-tenth of a second before they occur.

And the mechanism behind that can also explain why we are tricked by optical illusions.

Researcher Mark Changizi of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York says it starts with a neural lag that most everyone experiences while awake. When light hits your retina, about one-tenth of a second goes by before the brain translates the signal into a visual perception of the world.

Read the complete article from msn.com

For those of you who want to know more about choosing the right web hosting company, here’s a great article that talks about “Finding a New Web Site Host“.

An anonymous hacker has posted personal data about 6 million Chilean residents on the Internet, highlighting wider privacy problems in the country.

The data was posted early Saturday morning on Fayerwayer.com, a popular Chilean technology blog.

The hacker, who calls himself “Anonymous Coward,” posted three compressed files of data that included names, addresses, telephone numbers and taxpayer identification numbers for Chilean residents, said Leo Prieto, Fayerwayer.com’s director.

Complete Article Here (PCWorld.com).