Hackers aligned with Anonymous have exposed hundreds of e-mail messages from the webmail server of Syria's Ministry of Presidential Affairs, the support ministry for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Among the exposed e-mail messages was a set of talking points for Assad's interview with Barbara Walters in December 2011.

A translation of the e-mail sent by Sheherazad Jaafari, a press attaché at the Syrian mission to the United Nations, to Assad aide and former Al Jazeera journalist Luna Chebel, provided helpful hints for Assad to manipulate American opinion about what was going on in Syria. The message suggested that "it is hugely important and worth mentioning that 'mistakes' have been done in the begining of the crises because we did not have a well-organized 'police force.' American psyche can be easily manipulated when they hear there are 'mistakes' done and now we are 'fixing it.'" 

Jaafari suggested comparing what was happening in Syria to US law enforcement's response to the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Along with the release of these e-mails, Anonymous also exposed the passwords of 78 accounts on the Ministry's servers. Of the passwords revealed, 31 were "12345" and a number were minor variations on that. Some of the other passwords in the set included:

• iloveyou
• 123vivasyria
• system
• honda2011
• testing

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Google issued a beta release of Chrome for Android earlier today. The browser provides support for modern Web standards and includes a number of compelling features that aren't available in the Android's default browser. One noteworthy Chrome desktop feature that isn't included in the mobile port, however, is the integrated Flash runtime.

Adobe has issued a statement confirming that Chrome for Android does not support Flash content. The company also indicated that it does not plan to work with Google to add Flash support to the new mobile browser. Adobe will, however, continue supporting Flash in the current default Android browser.

"Today Google introduced Chrome for Android Beta. As we announced last November, Adobe is no longer developing Flash Player for mobile browsers, and thus Chrome for Android Beta does not support Flash content," wrote Adobe's Flash Platform product manager Bill Howard.

Adobe struggled for years to make the Flash player plugin viable on mobile devices. Though it was able to make Flash work reasonably well on Android phones, results were mixed on other systems. Due to Apple's unwillingness to allow the Flash plugin on iOS and the difficulty that Adobe faced bringing the Flash player to new devices, the plugin never achieved the same ubiquity on phones that it has historically enjoyed on the desktop.

These setbacks caused Adobe to abandon its mobile Flash player strategy last year. The company announced that it would phase out development of its mobile Flash player plugin and not support it on new platforms. Adobe instead focused its mobile Flash efforts on developing tools for deploying Flash content as native mobile applications. It also strengthened its commitment to native Web standards and acknowledged HTML5 as the way forward for building rich mobile Web experiences.

When Google eventually moves to replace the default Android browser with Chrome in future versions of the Android platform, devices that run the operating system will likely no longer be able to play Flash content in the browser.

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When Microsoft first revealed that the Explorer file manager would be outfitted with a ribbon-style toolbar in Windows 8, responses were loud, passionate, and frequently negative.

The company recently described changes that it has made to Windows 8's Explorer in response to the feedback. These include some small modifications to the ribbon experience along with some other refinements of Explorer's new features. Though the changes themselves have been welcomed, the continued hostility toward Explorer's redesign remains.

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Much like flying cars and jet packs, wearable computing is one of those aspirational fields of technology where the current state of the art doesn't deliver the sort of experience that people have imagined for decades. An experimental project that is reportedly under development in Google's labs could raise the bar, however.

According to a report that was published today in the blog 9to5Google, the search giant is developing a product called Google Glasses that will have a built-in heads-up display. The device, which supposedly resembles a pair of Oakley shades, is said to have an integrated transparent display for one eye and a built-in front-facing camera. The latter could be used for augmented reality applications. The device would use speech and head tilting for text input and control.

9to5Google suggests that the Google Glasses product could soft-launch with a pilot program later this year, making the product available to a select number of testers. This would follow the model of the Chromebook launch, which was preceded by the Cr-48 test unit.

Although the reports are still highly speculative, the concept of smart glasses is intriguing. There are some existing products in this space, but they aren't easy to purchase and are definitely not priced for a mainstream audience.

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Ever since I first heard about the idea, I have loved inertial confinement fusion. The basic concept involves blowing stuff up with lasers to get some energy, then doing it again and again as fast as possible. What more could a 38-going-on-5-year-old want? Well, what I might also want is a fusion reaction that generates more energy than you put in to it.

One thing that lets me down about inertial confinement fusion is that the implosion that gets the fusion reaction going also acts to stop the fusion. One idea for improving the fusion reaction that has been floating around for a while is to use magnetic fields in place of lasers to increase the efficiency of the fusion burn. But until recently, no one could figure out how to make it work properly.

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Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a technique to take advantage of the "fused architecture" emerging on multicore CPUs that puts central processing units and graphics processing units on the same chip. The technology, called CPU-assisted general purpose computation on graphics processor units (CPU-assisted GPGPU) uses software compiled to leverage the architecture to allow the CPU and GPU to collaborate on computing tasks, boosting processor performance on average by more than 20 percent in simulations.

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Microsoft's complaint against Barnes & Noble's Android-based Nook devices has been narrowed down to just three patents, with the US International Trade Commission having to decide whether Nook devices infringe on several patented methods of interacting with and downloading electronic documents. Barnes & Noble is also asking the ITC to declare the patents invalid because they cover obvious and trivial functionality.

Microsoft's ITC complaint, which was filed in March 2011 and targets Foxconn and Inventec in addition to Barnes & Noble, cited five patents. One 1994 patent related to "new varieties of child window controls [that] are provided as system resources that application programs may exploit," and a 1997 patent related to how browsers load and display content in portable computers with limited display areas have since been dropped from the case.

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Online dating has only become more ubiquitous and socially acceptable since the first sites launched in the mid-'90s: in a 2007-2009 study, 22 percent of couples surveyed formed as a result of dating websites, and it's now the second-most common way for people to meet. But a meta-analysis of online dating and psychological studies shows that while some people are successful using those services, the sites themselves oversell their benefit. There are also a number of downsides, from wrong impressions gotten from too much Internet interaction to unnecessary pickiness from an abundance of potential dates to choose from.

The front-facing parts of dating websites often namecheck science, math, and other quantitative disciplines when describing their methods, throwing around high percentages of people matched and married, large numbers of dimensions of compatibility, and surprisingly even numbers of male and female users. Based on their iffy science, the services claim their methods are superior to offline dating. Despite the fact that "news agencies frequently parrot these claims uncritically… in awed tones," the meta-analysis says, its investigation suggests that "dating sites have failed to produce compelling evidence" for them.

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A recent trademark application from Apple for the term "Macroscalar" may give a clue about upcoming improvements for its next-generation mobile processors. The term refers to technology Apple has been working on as far back as 2004, according to Patently Apple, and appears to refer to code optimization techniques that keep processors filled with instructions to run during otherwise repetitive loops.

Apple applied for the trademark for "Macroscalar" in both the US and Hong Kong last week. The trademark application links the term to use with microprocessors as well as mobile devices and software. It turns out that Apple has at least four patents related to what it calls "macroscalar processor architecture," suggesting the trademark is likely connected to an improved processor for its iOS devices.

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Next month's launch of Mass Effect 3 is extending past the usual PS3, Xbox 360 and PC platforms with Mass Effect Infiltrator, an iOS game that will tie in with the console and PC title to provide bonuses and unlock content.

A number of reports from an EA promotional event in New York describe Infiltrator as a third-person shooter in which players work to free prisoners from a Cerberus base. Completed rescues in the iOS title will unlock "exclusive weaponry" and increase players' "Galactic Readiness" rating in Mass Effect 3 according to the reports, helping players to unlock the best ending in the main game. Actions in infiltrator will also affect the larger story in Mass Effect 3.

This isn't the first time the Mass Effect series has appeared on iOS. 2009's Mass Effect Galaxy was a short, top-down shooter that offered an extremely limited tie-in reward with Mass Effect 2 when the game was completed.

EA says Infiltrator will be hitting the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch "soon," presumably ahead of Mass Effect 3's planned March 6 launch.

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A one-of-a-kind website enabling the online sale of preowned digital-music files got a major legal boost late Monday when a federal judge refused to shutter it at the request of Capitol Records.

ReDigi, which opened in October, says it’s a modern-day, used-record store that provides account holders with a platform to buy and sell used MP3s that were purchased lawfully through iTunes. The platform’s technology does not support other digital files such as those purchased from Amazon or ripped from a CD.

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Google is finally bringing Chrome to the Android platform. A beta release of the increasingly popular Web browser was published this morning in the Android Market and is available to users who are running Android 4. The port includes Chrome's advanced HTML rendering engine and many of the browser's popular features.

The Chrome beta is designed to run on both phones and tablets. The tablet version of the user interface is nearly a perfect match of Chrome on the desktop, including the distinctive slanted tab design. The phone version has a more compressed interface, suitable for smaller screens, and includes the standard Chrome features such as the Omnibar and application shortcut pane.

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In the annals of video gaming, 2005's mind-bending platformer Psychonauts is right up there with Earthbound and Beyond Good and Evil in the ranks of games that have a devoted cadre of fans eagerly demanding sequels. Now, those Psychonauts fans might have a decent chance of getting their wish, thanks to an odd, indirect Internet back-and-forth involving Psychonauts creator Tim Shafer and Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson.

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It has been nearly 200 years since we became aware of the Neanderthals, an extinct form of humans that once shared Europe and Asia with the modern humans. But it has been less than two years since we discovered that the Neanderthals were not the only archaic modern human around at the time. In short order, researchers in Germany produced a draft of the Denisova genome, which showed that the ancestors of some modern human populations had interbred with the Denisovans at some point in the past.

However, the genome sequence that was published in 2010 was only a draft, which is expected to contain errors and areas of very poor coverage. The folks at the Max Planck Institute have continued sequencing away, though, and have greatly expanded their coverage of the Denisova genome; they're apparently preparing a paper to describe the expanded sequence right now. But to keep the research community from waiting for the paper to clear peer review, they've decided to release the sequence, both on the Max Planck website and through Amazon's web services. The release includes both the raw sequence itself, as well as alignments to the human and chimp genomes.

To protect their ability to publish a paper, the Max Planck team is releasing the sequence under a license that prohibits anyone else from doing an analysis of the complete genome. But anyone interested in looking at specific genes is able to do their analysis without waiting. People interested in doing something in between these two extremes are invited to get in touch with Svante Pääbo, who is directing the work, to sort out an agreement.

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After a key ruling last week, US gamblers hoping to retrieve $150 million stored with online gaming site Full Tilt Poker will have the opportunity to go after the company in court.

In April 2011, the US Department of Justice shut down the websites of the three largest online poker companies then operating in the United States. These included Full Tilt Poker, which the Justice Department described as a "global Ponzi scheme" that assured players that their money was safe but that did not actually have enough funds to repay them. It was alleged that Full Tilt Poker credited "approximately $130 million in phantom money to US players' online accounts."

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The ubiquity of the action RPG, as an idea, is a little weird when you think about it. It's hard to think of two more disparate genres to try to combine, and usually the attempt ends up leaning too heavily toward one side of the coin or the other. Action RPGs often feel like roleplaying games that replace turn-based combat with overly simple button mashing, or like action games with some cursory, stat-building “RPG elements” thrown in toward the end of development.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning manages a surprising trick, then, in creating an action RPG that feels like a full-fledged action game and a full-fledged RPG. Unfortunately, only one of those two component parts manages to stand on its own in a satisfying way.

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Microscopically, glasses are solids that look more like liquids—they lack a regular crystalline structure. The liquid character is no accident, since a typical glass is made by cooling a fluid rapidly. If done in the right way, this skips the usual crystallization that occurs at the freezing point of the material, leaving a disordered state. If we want to create a glass with specific properties, we need precise control over the fluid-to-glass transition, but that has proven very difficult to achieve in practice.

To this end, Yunlong Guo et al. have developed a way to produce stable glasses made of polymers. As described in a Nature Materials paper published February 5, the resulting glasses are extremely lightweight, have a higher transitional temperature, and maintain their properties up to a higher temperatures than normal glasses. The researchers made the glasses by deposition rather than cooling, using a technique known as matrix-assisted pulsed laser evaporation, or MAPLE. The result is a glass built up of nanoscale globules, a material with interesting theoretical properties as well as potential applications.

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The Motorola Droid 4 will be available on Verizon's network for $199.99 with a two-year contract, Motorola announced in a press release today. The smartphone carries on the keyboard tradition of its predecessor, the Droid 3, but with a much-improved design.

The Droid 4 has a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, and a 4-inch qHD display. An 8-megapixel camera that can record 1080p video is on the back of the phone, and an "HD" camera is on the front. The phone has a 1785mAh battery and will launch with Android 2.3 Gingerbread, "to be upgraded to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich," according to Motorola.

We handled the phone a bit at CES, and while it's still on the thick and heavy side, the sliding action was smoother and easier than the Droid 3, which had a stiff mechanism. The keyboard keys also had more travel and were easier to press, which should make for a better typing experience.

The Droid 4 will be available in stores and online starting February 10.

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Nikon on Monday announced the D800 digital SLR camera, the newest addition to its professional DSLR line up. Boasting a 36.3 megapixel full-frame CMOS sensor, high ISO shooting capabilities, and a variety of high definition video modes, the D800 leapfrogs well beyond its predecessor, the D700, as well as anything else in the 35mm format, to offer resolution approaching that of $10,000+ medium format cameras.

Like the flagship D4 announced in January, the D800 uses a 51-point autofocus system that is sensitive down to -2EV. It also has the new 91,000 pixel 3D color matrix metering and Advanced Scene Recognition System that compares the image in the viewfinder with a database of previously captured images and their exposure settings. The D800 retains the standard DSLR size of the D700, wrapped in magnesium alloy, but its corners and curves have been rounded in line with the design of the D4.

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Hackers claiming to have the source code for Symantec's PCAnywhere and Norton Antivirus software attempted to extort $50,000 from the company, according to e-mail transcripts posted on February 7.

But the point of contact for the hacker group involved in the code exposure claimed in an e-mail conversation with Reuters that they never intended to take money from Symantec, and that the negotiations were a scam in themselves to embarrass the company. And according to the transcript, it was Symantec that set the price of the hackers' destruction of the code, along with a demand that the hackers publish a statement saying that they had lied about obtaining the code.

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