Who here thinks YOU aren't being spied on ?

 Taken from WIRED
Which Telecoms Store Your Data the Longest? Secret Memo Tells All By David Kravets Email Author September 28, 2011 | 6:30 am |

________________________________________________________________

The nation’s major mobile-phone providers are keeping a treasure trove of sensitive data on their customers, according to newly-released Justice Department internal memo that for the first time reveals the data retention policies of America’s largest telecoms.

The single-page Department of Justice document, “Retention Periods of Major Cellular Service Providers,” is a guide for law enforcement agencies looking to get information — like customer IP addresses, call logs, text messages and web surfing habits – out of U.S. telecom companies, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon.

The document, marked “Law Enforcement Use Only” and dated August 2010, illustrates there are some significant differences in how long carriers retain your data.

Verizon, for example, keeps a list of everyone you’ve exchanged text messages with for the past year, according to the document. But T-Mobile stores the same data up to five years. It’s 18 months for Sprint, and seven years for AT&T.

That makes Verizon appear to have the most privacy-friendly policy. Except that Verizon is alone in retaining the actual contents of text messages. It allegedly stores the messages for five days, while T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint don’t store them at all.

The document was unearthed by the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina via a Freedom of Information Act claim. (After the group gave a copy to Wired.com, we also discovered it in two other places on the internet by searching its title.)

“People who are upset that Facebook is storing all their information should be really concerned that their cell phone is tracking them everywhere they’ve been,” said Catherine Crump, an ACLU staff attorney. “The government has this information because it wants to engage in surveillance.”

The biggest difference in retention surrounds so-called cell-site data.

That is information detailing a phone’s movement history via its connections to mobile phone towers while its traveling. Verizon keeps that data on a one-year rolling basis; T-Mobile for “a year or more;” Sprint up to two years, and AT&T indefinitely, from July 2008.

The document also includes retention policies for Nextel and Virgin Mobile. They have folded into the Sprint network.

The document release comes two months before the Supreme Court hears a case testing the government’s argument that it may use GPS devices to monitor a suspect’s every movement without a warrant. And the disclosure comes a month ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Electronic Privacy Communications Act, an outdated law that the government often invokes against targets to obtain, without a warrant, the data the Justice Department document describes.

“I don’t think there there is anything on this list the government would concede requires a warrant,” said Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “This brings cellular retention practices out of the shadows, so we can have a rational discussion about how the law needs to be changed when it comes to the privacy of our records.”

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) has proposed legislation to alter the Electronic Privacy Communications Act to protect Americans from warrantless intrusions. Debate on the issue is expected to heat up as the anniversary nears, and the Justice Department document likely will take center stage.

History of Life on Earth - Awesome !!

For a full size version, click here & trust me, it's AWESOME !!

Majestic shuttle in unique station image

Click to enlarge

By Jonathan Amos
Science correspondent, BBC News

The picture was taken by Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli as he left the International Space Station in May in a Soyuz capsule to return to Earth.

Safety procedures mean the Russian vehicle would never normally be in transit when a shuttle is present.

It makes this the first-ever image of an American orbiter docked to the ISS.

Endeavour sits firmly on the bow of the station, which is moving across the surface of the Earth at a speed of 27,000km/h (17,000mph) and at an altitude of approximately 355km (220 miles).

Nespoli's camera is looking along the ISS's truss, or backbone, which carries the four sets of giant solar wings. The stern is occupied by Europe's robotic freighter - the Johannes Kepler ship.

The pictures were acquired on 23 May but were only released by the US space agency (Nasa) on Tuesday. They had been eagerly awaited by space fans.

Click to enlarge

Nespoli had spent a lot of time during his 159-day stay at the station taking pictures of Earth and life aboard the international outpost. Many of these images were posted on his mission Flickr account. It was widely expected therefore that the European Space Agency astronaut would get some excellent shots during the unique departure.




Enthusiasts on the ground with telescopes routinely try to snap a shuttle attached to the ISS, and some of the results have been very impressive. But none of these pictures compares to the majestic portrait acquired by Nespoli so close to the orbiting complex.

The timing and subject are also perfect. Endeavour is seen here making her final sortie into orbit, making the last big US assembly item delivery - a $2bn particle physics experiment known as the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. The seven-tonne machine now sits on top of the platform.

Endeavour was also the orbiter chosen to take up the first American segment of the platform when the project had just got started in the late 1990s.

The youngest of Nasa's shuttles returned to Earth on 1 June and will now be prepared for public display at a science museum in California. Sister ship Atlantis stands ready on the launch pad in Florida for a swansong of her own in July. Once her mission is done, no orbiter will ever fly again.

Click to enlarge

Nespoli's crewmates in the Soyuz were Russian cosmonaut and Expedition 27 commander Dmitry Kondratyev; and Nasa astronaut Cady Coleman. Apart from the photo opportunity, their departure was a standard ISS crew rotation flight.

Their replacements blasted off from Kazakhstan on Tuesday in another Soyuz vehicle. Nasa astronaut Mike Fossum, Russian cosmonaut Sergei Volkov and Japanese astronaut Satoshi Furukawa are scheduled to arrive at the ISS on Thursday, raising its complement once again to six individuals.

The venerable Soyuz will be the only way for astronauts and cosmonauts to reach the platform in the years following the retirement of the shuttle fleet.

Nasa hopes some US commercial carriers will become available in the middle of the decade.

CERN Scientists Trap Antimatter for Almost 17 Minutes

Awesome stuff, if you're a fan of Star Trek, interested in Science or just a closet GEEK !!

What happened to antimatter? That's the grand riddle that scientists are attempting to piece together, but it takes quite a bit of work to conduct experiments on the illusive mirror image of matter–anything that has a volume and occupies mass, to define matter in layman's terms.
But CERN scientists have now been able to isolate unstable antimatter for a grand total of nearly 17 minutes. That's a far cry from experiments performed last fall, when scientists were only able to record the presence of antimatter for fractions of seconds. The increased longevity should now give researchers the time they need to perform studies on antiatoms related to change-parity-time reversal (CPT) symmetry.
So just how difficult is it to trap antimatter for study? Just like in Star Trek, the combination of matter and antimatter particles leads to the annihilation of both and the production of a small flash of energy. Thus, to successfully trap antimatter, researchers use magnetic fields to contain antiatoms. When they turn off the field, the resulting annihilation events–recorded by a special detector–clue the scientists into just how many antiatoms are left after a set period of containment time.
"In the beginning we were turning off our trap as soon as possible after each attempt to make anti-atoms, so as not to miss any," said the University of California, Berkeley's Joel Fajans.
In the case of CERN's research, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research has been experimenting with the creation of antihydrogen atoms. The longer lifespan of these antihydrogen atoms will now allow researchers to perform more precise spectroscopy and comparisons of these antimatter elements against their hydrogen counterparts.
In doing so, scientists hope to start working their way toward an answer to the ultimate question: Why nature favored matter over antimatter at the creation of the universe, even though the two should have been fashioned in equal amounts (and subsequently annihilated each other, we suppose). They didn't, which violated CPT symmetry, or the position that particle charges, parities, and time flows should not be predisposed in one direction or another. In our universe, for example, positive charges favor heavy particles, matter is favored over antimatter, and forward time is favored over reverse.
"Any hint of CPT symmetry breaking would require a serious rethink of our understanding of nature," said Jeffrey Hangst, a professor at Aarhus University in Denmark. "But half of the universe has gone missing, so some kind of rethink is apparently on the agenda."
CERN's full study was published in the journal Nature Physics: "Confinement of antihydrogen for 1,000 seconds."
For more from David, follow him on Twitter @TheDavidMurphy.