If you spend any time on the Internet, you’ve likely run across some form of protest against SOPA and/or PROTECT IP, bills before Congress that supporters claim are necessary to protect copyrights and opponents say will destroy the Internet as we know it.     [FULL  STORY]

The Washington Post
Sunday, November 22, 2009
By Juliet Eilperin

Electronic files that were stolen from a prominent climate research center and made public last week provide a rare glimpse into the behind-the-scenes battle to shape the public perception of global warming.

While few U.S. politicians bother to question whether humans are changing the world’s climate — nearly three years ago the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded the evidence was unequivocal — public debate persists. And the newly disclosed private exchanges among climate scientists at Britain’s Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia reveal an intellectual circle that appears to feel very much under attack, and eager to punish its enemies.    more …

“Indeed, yes, we found water,” said Anthony Colaprete, project scientist for NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, known as LCROSS. “And we didn’t find just a little bit; we found a significant amount.”  In October, the LCROSS mission sent an empty rocket hull crashing into a dark, cold crater near the moon’s south pole. The idea was to kick up the lunar dust to see what might be hiding at the bottom of the moon’s permanently shadowed craters, places that haven’t seen sunlight for billions of years.

The impact created a hole about 60 to 100 feet wide, and sent dust and debris soaring up. The plume was analyzed by instruments on an observing spacecraft. That spacecraft sent the data back to Earth, and Colaprete says scientists have been studying it around the clock.  At a press conference, Colaprete holding up a white plastic bucket, said, in all the debris blasted out of the moon, they found enough water to be the equivalent of “maybe about a dozen of these two-gallon buckets.”   more …

Apple has made a wireless mouse and keyboard the default options, and both have received redesigns.   more …

New Jersey-based PayChoice sent a message to customers Thursday indicating that thieves appeared to have stolen customer login IDs and passwords by exploiting a vulnerability in the website feature for changing a password, WashingtonPost.com reports. PayChoice said it disabled the change-password feature until it could fix the vulnerability.

The company discovered the problem after some of its payroll customers noticed bogus employee names being added to their payroll lists, in an attempt to get the companies to pay those “employees” through bank accounts controlled by the fraudsters.   more …