Cooling towers needed to dissipate heat from supercomputers at the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico. (Energy Dept. photo)

by Frank James

This just in from the wow-that's-really-cool department. The Energy Department tells us that its newest supercomputer has broken an important speed barrier, making it the fastest such technology in the world.

(It's safe to say it's not running Microsoft's Vista operating system.)

In words that would thrill only computer scientists, the department says:

... the new Roadrunner supercomputer is the first to achieve a petaflop of sustained performance.

Uhh, OK. The press release's author saw that reaction coming. So he/she has provided the following useful thought experiment:

A "flop" is an acronym meaning floating-point operations per second. One petaflop is 1,000 trillion operations per second. To put this into perspective, if each of the 6 billion people on earth had a hand calculator and worked together on a calculation 24 hours per day, 365 days a year, it would take 46 years to do what Roadrunner would do in one day.

Now that's impressive. Given that kind of computing power, it makes the supercomputer's $133 million price tag definitely seem worth it. That's about two cents per each of the 6 billion people with their hand calculators.

The new computer's job will be to simulate nuclear explosions to ascertain the effectiveness of weapons in the nation's nuclear armament stockpile. That's needed because the U.S. hasn't conducted underground explosions of such weapons since the Cold War ended.

by Mark Silva

People who logged on to Sen. Barack Obama's campaign Web-site and went looking for an online community of the like-minded ended up at Sen. Hllary Clinton's Web-site instead.

The work of a hacker.

A flaw in the computer coding of Obama's site and a mischievous surfer who exploited it are blamed for the detour days before the Pennsylvania primary.

Some who tried to visit the community blogs section of Obama's site started noticing last week that they were being redirected to Clinton's campaign site. Security sleuths said a hacker had taken advantage of a "cross-site scripting" vulnerability in Obama's site. Netcraft Ltd. said the hacker injected code into certain pages, code then executed when visitors tried to go to Obama's community blogs section.

Needless to say, that cross-site Windows-dressing has been removed.

The hackng appears to have been a prank, but researchers suggest that this breach exposes the vulernable underbelly of the candidates' online operations. Try this: A similar mechanism could be employed to redirect visitors a site that steals personal information from visitors -- or maybe even make Obama contributions to Clinton.

"With people closely watching the heated contest to determine the next U.S. president, you can bet that this won't be the last time such attacks happen," Symantec Corp. researcher Zulfikar Ramzan wrote on the company's official blog.

The Associated Press relayed this story from San Jose, assuming hackers wion't know the way to make use of this intelligence..

Jammie Thomas leaves the courthouse with her attorney, Brian Toder of Minneapolis, after the jury returned a verdict against her in her civil trial for alleged music pirating through illegal sharing. Photo by Julia Cheng for Associated Press

by James Oliphant

The Minnesota file-sharing mom hit with a $222,000 penalty for illegal downloading last week said today she is going to appeal the judgment.

A Duluth, Minn. jury returned the verdict against Jammie Thomas Friday, siding with six recording companies that brought suit against her for copyright infringement. The amount represents damages for 24 songs that were downloaded without payment and then shared on the Kazaa network. Her attorney argued that Thomas wasn't the downloader. Thomas asserts her innocence on her MySpace blog.

The lawsuit was part of ongoing effort by the powerful Recording Industry Association of America to stem illegal downloads, which it says costs the industry billions a year. Thomas' suit was the first RIAA action to go to trial. Thomas, 30, is a single mother who says she earns $36,000 annually.

The basis of the appeal, Thomas says, will be jury instructions that said jurors could find her guilty simply by her participation in the Kazaa network on the night in question, regardless of whether the industry proved she actually downloaded the songs. The RIAA alleged two million Kazaa users, Thomas among them, were sharing 800 million songs between them on a night in February 2005.

For the record, here is a list of the 24 songs chosen by the RIAA:

Dan Rather has a new home at HDNet. AP photo by Damain Dovarganes

by Mark Silva

Dan Rather is back on television, of course, and he has a warning about the electronic voting machines that have taken hold since the presidential election debacle of 2000. He has "conclusive evidence'' about the failure of touch-screen voting, we're told.

The former CBS News anchor will offer an HD Net show tonight with a theory about what went wrong in Florida in 2000: Bad paper used in the manufcature of punch-card ballots, which ended in hanging chads.

"We talked to people at the company that made the ballots -- some workers, some management,'' Rather says. ''They say they were making quality punch cards for a long while and proud of it. But starting around 1999, the cards were made from what they felt was inferior paper,'' Rather reports. "They raised concerns about it, but the company's management had them under pressure to get the ballots out.''

This is part of a broader Dan Rather Reports investigation of voting machines focusing on paperless voting machines that many states have turned to since the 2000 election. Workers at the plants that made the machines call their manufacture shoddy, quality control a joke.

The show starts at 8 pm EDT.

Rather, once king of the CBS Evening News, spoke about it on another network today.

And the once and former heir to Walter Cronkite, with Rather warning that his "crystal ball is permanently in the hop shop'' when it comes to making any predictions about the next presidential election, also had some things to say on CNN today about the "dumbing.. down'' of network TV news.

by William Neikirk

Top members of the House Ways and Means Committee from both parties want to limit the use of your Social Security number by government and business in order to crack down on identity theft, a growing scourge in society.

A bill they introduced Monday falls short of an outright ban on using the number for governmental or business purposes, but its sponsors say it would help reduce the amount of identity theft. The question is whether the exceptions allowed under the bill would still give identity thieves enough room to operate. Time will tell, as they say.

But by permitting some exceptions, the sponsors do tacitly concede that your SSN is still a mighty handy universal identifier for many government and business purposes. It would still be possible to use it for credit purposes, for example. And I know a lot of people nervous about mentioning their SSN in public when applying for credit in a store.

Posted by Frank James at 12:23 pm CST

I had mixed feelings about writing this since we'd selfishly prefer readers of The Swamp to stay with us after President Bush's State of the Union speech tonight instead of going off to another blog. Anyway, Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.,) the Senate's Assistant Majority Leader, will be blogging on the liberal DailyKos tonight.

You can read the press release below. It seems to be written for people outside the blogosphere (do any such people still exist?) since it offers a quick definition and description of blogging and blogs.

I particularly like this line. "Recent studies show that nearly a quarter of the population in the U.S. reads blogs at least once a week (and of that group nearly one-third are moved to undertake some type of political action)."

Posted by David Lightman at 11:36 am CST

Media experts and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman today issued their annual video game report card, assessing how easily children can get access to violent games, and the news was generally upbeat.

Big retailers and game-makers are cooperating in limiting children's access to violent games, Lieberman, D-Conn. said.

But, he added, "there is a weak link"--parents.

"It's time to focus on parents and urge them to pay attention," he said. "Play what your kids play--if you can."

The 11th annual report card is based on surveys taken in September and October. The National Institute on Media and the Family surveyed 52 video game rental or retail stores in 12 states.