The death of Google Research Datasets and the rise of the Amazon Web Services for public scientific data is important because it yet another signal that Amazon, not Google, may be the major player in experimentation with cloud computing services and data storage for scientific research.

Researchers with Microsoft recently released the results of one of the first systematic studies of the nature of health care information on line, user behavior during queries for web site information, and cyberchondria. The results are interesting and serve as an important resource for those that want to understand why this occurs.

The last two years have seen increases in a startlingly new trend, the use of the Internet to coordinate or televise suicides (cybercides). Even more disturbing has been the use of live video and chat rooms to broadcasting "real time" suicides.While these events are few in number, the deeply disturbing behavior of live televised suicide with a sickening encouragement from individuals who devalue human life is likely to result in calls for increased regulation of streamed Internet video. 

Google announced today that they have tested with the Centers for Disease Control a system which aggregates the searches done by users of their search engine for keywords related to flu and flu-like symptoms and then used these to predict the outbreak of flu in a given region

Jack Louis and Robert Lee, from Outpost24 (http://www.outpost24.com/), are scheduled to give a talk at the T2'08 Information Security Conference in Finland later this month giving details on a new, and dangerous, denial of service attack that uses TCP state table manipulation. The attack is unique in that it is cross platform and requires very little bandwidth to be executed.[1] This attack also has a prolonged impact on the hardware that lasts beyond the denial of service. As a blogger from a recent talk from Louis and Lee wrote, "After this introduction it was time for them to show their application Sockstress. Unfortunately they couldn’t disclose any technical details about it but they ran two demos and it was quite amazing.Exploiting a vulnerability they showed us how they brought down port 80 on a web server (or actually the presentation laptop) in a matter of seconds. A typical Denial of Service attack. The next demo was even better. The started playing music on the very same laptop and then started Sockstress. After about two minutes the music wouldn’t play the way it was supposed to. It was slowed down, the CPU was at 100% etc. They then stopped sockstress but the machine never came back. It kept misbehaving even though the attack was over. What was really interesting was that both these attacks only sent 4 packages each second to the server machine. That’s nothing and could be done on a 56k modem. Scary but cool." Louis and Lee have contacted vendors regarding the various bugs they have found which allow for this exploit but aren't releasing technical details at this time due to the fact that there are currently no short-term fixes.[3] Concern has been expressed in the security community that just the simple talks given thus far may be enough of a recipe for a low-level hacker to easily replicate the attack.

The X2 project conducted an expert workshop at National University of Singapore on July 24, 2008, with academics from NUS and Nanyan Technological University, and members of the Singaporean government. The workshop generated a map of the future of science, with particular attention to science in Singapore.

The New York Times reports on a new Pentagon program to make more systematic use of social scientists.

Robin Mejia, writing for Nature Magazine, reports on some of the practical and ethical issues surrounding accepting corporate funds to conduct academic research in the life sciences. (1)

Joseph Biederman and Timothy E. Wilens, both Harvard professors of psychiatry, are under investigation for failing to report millions of dollars in "consultant fees" received from pharmaceutical companies over the past decade. Both professors received government research grants requiring disclosure of any additional research monies received. In addition, Harvard limits the amount of corporate funding for conducting clinical trials to $10K, so the researchers appear to be in violation of multiple regulations designed to limit potential conflicts of interest between publicly funded basic research and corporation-backed translational research.