Matthew Dorn

While NASA is crashing into the moon to look for ice, it's also looking for the frozen stuff here on Earth, only in a much more conventional way. The flights are part of what NASA calls Operation Ice Bridge, a six-year project that is the largest airborne survey ever made of ice at Earth's polar regions. The space agency said on Oct. 15 it will start a series of 17 flights to study changes to Antarctica's sea ice, glaciers and ice sheets. Network World Extra:10 NASA space technologies that may never see the cosmosTop 10 cool satellite projects Researchers will work from NASA's DC-8, an airborne laboratory equipped with laser mapping instruments, ice-penetrating radar and gravity instruments.

NASA said data collected from the flights will fill in data gaps between the agency's Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite, known as ICESat, which has been in orbit since 2003, and NASA's ICESat-II, scheduled to launch no earlier than 2014. ICESat is nearing the end of its operational lifetime, making the Ice Bridge flights critical for ensuring a continuous record of observations, NASA stated. Data collected from the mission will help scientists better predict how changes to the massive Antarctic ice sheet will contribute to future sea level rise around the world, NASA stated. The payload on the DC-8 includes the Airborne Topographic Mapper, a laser altimeter that can produce elevation maps of the ice surface. The Laser Vegetation Imaging Sensor maps large areas of sea ice and glacier zones. Other instruments flying include the Multichannel Coherent Radar Depth Sounder which measures ice sheet thickness and the varied terrain below the ice.

A gravimeter will give scientists their first opportunity to measure the shape of the ocean cavity beneath floating ice shelves in critical spots of Antarctica. Because airborne observations lack the continent-wide coverage a satellite provides, mission planners have selected key targets to study that are most prone to change. A snow radar will measure the thickness of snow on top of sea ice and glaciers, NASA stated. Sea ice measurements will be collected from the Amundsen Sea, where local warming suggests the ice may be thinning. According to NASA, the Antarctic continent may be remote, but it plays a significant role in Earth's climate system. Ice sheet and glacier studies will be flown over the Antarctic Peninsula and West Antarctica, including Pine Island Glacier, an area scientists believe could undergo rapid changes.

The expanse is home to glaciers and ice sheets that hold frozen about 90 percent of Earth's freshwater - a large potential contribution to sea level rise should all the ice melt. Compared to the Arctic, where sea ice has long been on the decline, sea ice in Antarctica is growing in some coastal areas. How and where are Antarctica's ice sheets, glaciers, and sea ice changing? Snow and ice have been accumulating in some land regions in the east. West Antarctica and the Peninsula, however, have seen more dramatic warming and rapid ice loss, NASA stated.

The U.S. Department of Education is rolling out desktop encryption software in a way that links the cryptographic process to employees' government-issued Personal Identity Verification (PIV) smart cards. The system, which is based on PGP's disk encryption technology, is intended to meet government rules for safeguarding sensitive financial and personal information, says Phillip Loranger, chief information security officer at the Department of Education. "There is a large amount of financial resources we're responsible for; we are in the student-loan business and we interface with universities and colleges," Loranger says. Tying encryption to the PIV card is a novel approach that will offer stronger authentication than a simple password. The Department of Education is actually "one of the largest banks in the country, with grants, student loans and school financial requests," he says.

The agency picked PGP in part because the encryption software company is willing to do some custom development to make sure that its Whole Disk Encryption software works with the government-issued PIV smart card and Microsoft Active Directory, Loranger says. Biometrics: The human body as proof of identity The Department of Education intends to first deploy PGP's Whole Disk Encryption on all mobile computers to protect data at rest. Loranger says he's in favor of the more stringent security tied to the PIV smart cards, but he acknowledges there will be situations when end users forget their PIV cards or lose them. In such circumstances, employees won't be locked out of their computers but will be granted a temporary password they can use for 24 hours, he says.

A bank that inadvertently sent confidential account information on 1,325 of its customers to the wrong Gmail address is suing Google for the identity of the Gmail account holder. According to court documents, the bank in August received a request from one of its customers asking for certain loan statements to be sent to a third-party. The case, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, involves Rocky Mountain Bank of Wyoming.

An employee of the bank, responding to the request, sent the documents to the wrong Gmail address. When it discovered the error, the bank immediately sent an e-mail to the Gmail address asking the recipient to delete the previous email and the attachment. In addition to the requested loan information, the bank employee also inadvertently attached a file containing names, addresses, tax identification numbers and other details on 1,325 account holders to the same address. The bank also asked the recipient to contact the bank to discuss what actions had been taken to comply with the bank's request. When Google refused to provide any information on the account without a formal subpoena or court order, the bank filed a complaint asking the court to force Google to identify the account holder. When it received no reply, the bank sent an e-mail to Google asking whether the Gmail account was active or dormant and also what it could do to prevent unauthorized disclosure of the inadvertently leaked information.

Rocky Mountain Bank also requested that its complaint and all of the pleadings and filings in the case be sealed. U.S. District Court Judge Ronald Whyte dismissed that request, saying there was no need for the proceedings to be sealed. "An attempt by a bank to shield information about an unauthorized disclosure of confidential customer information until it can determine whether or not that information has been further disclosed and/or misused does not constitute a compelling reason," Whyte wrote last week. The bank said it hopd to prevent unnecessary panic among its customers and a "surge of inquiry from its customers." The bank argued that if the complaint and motion papers are not sealed, all of its customers would learn of the inadvertent disclosure. This is the third time in recent weeks that Google has faced a similar issue. The man alleged that the contributors to the paper had unfairly linked him to government corruption.

Earlier this month, the Associated Press reported that a resort developer in Miami had obtained a court order requiring Google to disclose the identities of anonymous contributors to an online newspaper in the Turks and Caicos Islands. In that case, Google indicated that it would disclose the data only after first informing the paper about the request and giving it a chance to appeal for the court order to be quashed. In the other incident, a court in New York compelled Google to disclose the identity of a blogger who had made disparaging comments about a Vogue model in her blog "Skanks in NYC."

The ITU Telecom World exhibition has returned to Geneva after a visit to Hong Kong in 2006 - and has brought many Asian exhibitors back with it. The booths of China Mobile, ZTE and Datang Telecom Group loom over the entrance to the main hall, alongside those of NTT DoCoMo and Fujitsu, while upstairs Huawei Technologies and Samsung Electronics booths dwarf that of Cisco Systems, which has more meeting rooms than products on display. "Ten months ago, people were urging us to cancel the event," said Hamadoun Touré, secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union, which organizes the exhibition and the policy forum that runs alongside it. There are also signs that the way some companies are using the show is shifting. The pessimists feared that the show would attract neither exhibitors nor visitors, as companies slashed marketing budgets and cut back on business travel in the midst of the economic downturn.

The ITU still expects 40,000 visitors at this year's show; 82,000 turned up at the last Geneva event, in 2003. This year, around half the show is occupied by national pavilions: Saudi Arabia has the biggest, followed by those of Spain and Russia. While the show is noticeably smaller than previous editions - it only occupies Halls 2, 4 and 5 of the sprawling seven-hall Palexpo exhibition center, with some yawning gaps between stands, Touré is satisfied. "It's a good show, despite the crisis," he said. Other European nations, including Belgium, France and the U.K., also have pavilions, but by far the most numerous are those of the African nations: Burundi, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda. The biggest company stands are those of the Asian network operators and equipment manufacturers, with the U.S. and Western European countries keeping a low profile. Microsoft and IBM have booths, but you'd barely notice. This domination of the show floor is not down to size alone: It's also about tactics.

There were actually only three of them, but their effect was magnified by loud music and the multiple video walls on the booth. Russia deployed what looked like an army of violinists dressed mostly in sequins on its stand on Monday. China Mobile has taken a similar route, with the logo of its 3G mobile brand, Wo, swirling and pulsing hypnotically across the walls and even the ceiling of its booth. Similar exhibits fill the stands at NTT DoCoMo and Samsung. ZTE has taken a more traditional route, with glass cases full of mobile phones, modems and cellular base stations. On the Cisco booth, there are almost no products to be seen - unless you count the looming bulk of one of its TelePresence systems, linking the booth in high resolution to similar systems around the world.

This shows images of the products that can be rotated on screen to examine them from different angles - and even measured or dismantled so that prospective buyers can figure out whether they would fit in their data center. Other elements of the Cisco product range are present virtually thanks to another screen, supplied by Massachusetts-based Kaon Interactive. Like Secretary-General Touré, Cisco faced a crucial decision last year about whether to maintain a show presence in Geneva. "One year ago, it wasn't clear how many customers were going to make this trip," said Suraj Shetty, the company's vice president of worldwide service provider marketing. That's why the rest of the stand is given over to meeting rooms. "Our focus is on customer intimacy," Shetty said. However, the company realized that "this could be used as an opportunity to shift how we get contact with customers," he said. Carrier Ethernet specialist Ciena has taken a similar approach.

Like Cisco, it prefers to show products virtually, rather than physically. "Computer graphics and touch screens are more effective in these cases. Its stand, close to Cisco's and even more discreet, consists entirely of meeting rooms. That's the trend," said Ciena CTO Stephen Alexander. If you're buying bulky network or data center infrastructure, then don't expect to kick the tires at a trade show next year - although you might be able to click on them, on the booth's screen or your own.

A network of Russian malware writers and spammers paid hackers 43 cents for each Mac machine they infected with bogus video software, a sign that Macs have become attack targets, a security researcher said yesterday. Another Sophos researcher argued that Samosseiko's evidence shows Mac users, who often dismiss security as a problem only for people running Microsoft's Windows, are increasingly at risk on the Web. "The growing evidence of financially-motivated criminals looking at Apple Macs as well as Windows as a market for their activities, is not good news - especially as so many Mac users currently have no anti-malware protection in place at all," said Graham Cluley , a senior technology consultant at U.K-based Sophos, in a blog entry Thursday. In a presentation Thursday at the Virus Bulletin 2009 security conference in Geneva, Switzerland, Sophos researcher Dmitry Samosseiko discussed his investigation of the Russian "Partnerka," a tangled collection of Web affiliates who rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars from spam and malware, most of the former related to phony drug sites, and much of the latter targeting Windows users with fake security software, or "scareware." But Samosseiko also said he had uncovered affiliates, which he dubbed "codec-partnerka," that aim for Macs. "Mac users are not immune to the scareware threat," said Samosseiko in the research paper he released at the conference to accompany his presentation. "In fact, there are 'codec-partnerka' dedicated to the sale and promotion of fake Mac software." One example, which has since gone offline, was Mac-codec.com , said Samosseiko. "Just a few months ago it was offering [43 cents] for each install and offered various promo materials in the form of Mac OS 'video players,'" he said. Mac threats may be rare, but they do pop up from time to time.

Mac OS X's security has been roundly criticized by vulnerability researchers , but even the most critical have acknowledged that the Mac's low market share - it accounted for just 5% of all operating systems running machines that connected to the Internet last month - is probably enough protection from cyber criminals for the moment. In June 2008, for example, Mac security vendor Intego warned of an active Trojan horse that exploited a vulnerability in Apple's Mac OS X. Last January, a different Trojan was found piggybacking on pirated copies of Apple's iWork '09 application suite circulating on file-sharing sites. Samosseiko's paper on Partnerka can be downloaded from Sophos' site ( download PDF ).