Steve Jobs has finally done it with Apple's new Magic Mouse: the product is devoid of buttons. Instead of the usual left and right click with a scroll wheel, the Magic Mouse has a single shell that recognizes multitouch gestures across almost its entire surface, adding a new tactile dimension to the standard keyboard & mouse combo. Actually, the Magic Mouse's biggest problem may be that it's still just a mouse.

BOSTON - From personalized genomics to measurements of sea-level rise, from al Qaeda websites to citizen technology-assessment panels, from brain-based education to labor-saving inventions for use in developing countries, social and scientific changes are intertwined. "Science in a Changing World," a new graduate track at UMass Boston prepares students to participate in questioning and shaping the direction of scientific and social changes, as well as to teach and engage others to participate in this important endeavor.

With the release of iPhone OS 3.1, Apple has provided app developers with APIs to allow audio recording via connected bluetooth hardware devices, making it possible for developers to take advantage of bluetooth headsets for voice communication. Does this mean Skype's iPhone app will soon support bluetooth?

In two days, IBM will have finished preparations to transition all of its employees away from Microsoft's Office suite to their own version of the OpenOffice.org suite, Lotus Symphony. By Monday, every IBM computer will have Symphony installed, and the company will begin creating and sharing only open format documents. The move marks the most significant shift away from Microsoft's de facto standard office suite and proprietary document format by a single company, and—if well documented and supported—could help many other businesses do the same.

Firefox' session restore feature automatically restores a user's open tabs after an application crash, or from a previous browsing session when they start Firefox. This is great for conducting research as users can open a bunch of tabs and keep them open until they have the opportunity to read them, without needing to bookmark them or worry about losing them when Firefox quits. But what happens when you accidentally click start new session instead of restore session? Are all your tabs lost? Not if you follow these quick instructions.

Note: The following article was originally written for Communicate or Die - the labor and technology blog run by Prometheus Labor Communications.


The Communication Workers of America just released their 3rd annual Speed Matters report on broadband upload and download speeds by state across the U.S. Like their last report - that I wrote about in these pages a while back - this year's report makes the rather obvious case that America needs better and faster broadband internet coverage. They indicate that we're only number 28 in the world in average internet connection speed - still a shockingly low number considering that the internet was primarily created by the American military together with American research universities with public money.

Last August, Comcast officially announced it was capping bandwidth for its residential cable broadband Internet service subscribers at 250 GB per month. In the firestorm of coverage that followed, many criticized the nation's second largest ISP for capping their customer's previously unlimited service without providing them a tool to meter their usage. One year later, Comcast still hasn't provided its customers with a meter.

Hulu is a great, legal source for watching tons of network television and even movies. Too bad it's polluted with loud, offensive commercials just like the TV box. Fortunately for those who find the wailing jock rock guitar of Speed Stick commercials repugnant, the most recent version of popular Firefox plugin Adblock Plus successfully eliminates all Hulu commercials while leaving the video content intact. Follow our walkthrough to set it up yourself.

Having problems setting up your external hard drive with your Mac? A search for answers to "the underlying task reported failure on exit" leads one on a wild Google chase through useless Apple support documents, unnecessary Terminal command lines that return "bad super block: magic number wrong," and complicated Unix forum threads. It's enough to drive one mad, but the solution is surprisingly simple.

In two recent examples of conflict online—the Internet's response to Iran's rigged election, and 4chan's reaction to AT&T's perceived censorship—distributed denial of service attacks have been wielded (or threatened) as a powerful and disruptive, nonviolent tool for change. The relative ease with which one can coordinate and participate in such an attack means this tactic can be employed by individuals or small groups, not just militaries and large corporations. But what are the ramifications of empowering individuals to take down government sites? And what are the moral implications of adding DDoS attacks to a social movement's repertoire?