To celebrate the Internet’s 40th anniversary, DARPA, often referred to as the mad scientist wing of the Pentagon, will award a $40,000 prize to the first person or group to find all 10 of DARPA’s big red weather balloons.

But the contest is not all fun and games. DARPA is studying the participants to learn more about how large online groups share resources and compete using social networks. During the DARPA Network Challenge, each of the 10 red balloons will be placed in hidden but publicly accessible locations during the daylight hours of December 5. Would-be balloon hunters can start registering for the challenge on December 1, and have until December 14 to submit balloon locations to the contest website [Popular Science]. The agency has dropped a few vague clues, but they are mostly leaving it up to the balloon seekers to figure out how to conduct their search. DARPA will stand by and observe the contestants, collect data, and interview those involved about their search methods.

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The self-proclaimed spam king of the Internet, Sam “Spamford” Wallace, was ordered to pay Facebook $711 million in civil damages for slinging spam on the social networking site. Wallace allegedly accessed Facebook accounts without obtaining permission, and used them to make bogus wall posts and spam the account holders’ friends. Those actions run afoul of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, which sets guidelines for commercial e-mails, which are enforced by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) [PC World]. The judge also referred Wallace to the U.S. Attorney’s Office with a request that he be prosecuted for criminal contempt, which means he could actually face jail time if convicted.

If you’ve ever received an unsolicited email (and who hasn’t), chances are good that it came from Wallace’s company, Cyber Promotions, which was once the largest source of spam. So not surprisingly, this isn’t the first time Spamford has run afoul of the law. In May, 2008, MySpace won a $230 million judgment against Wallace for sending junk messages. Wallace was also fined $4 million by the Federal Trade Commission in 2006 for his excessive pop-up ads [CNN]. Officials at Facebook said they don’t expect to see much of the $711 million, seeing as how Wallace is bankrupt and may soon have to send out his spam as hand written letters from behind bars.

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Image: flickr / benstein

The cyber-attack that temporarily disabled Twitter and compromised Facebook and LiveJournal was politically motivated and was directed at a pro-Georgian blogger called Cyxymu, says a representative from Facebook.

The attack, which paralyzed Twitter for two hours and “degraded” service on Facebook, was one known as a distributed denial of service attack. This technique uses a network of tens of thousands of compromised computers, known as a “botnet”, to flood a website’s servers with page view requests, leaving legitimate traffic unable to get through. This huge amount of connection requests can quickly overwhelm a server and, in some cases, cause an entire website to crash [Telegraph]. It seems Twitter, a relatively new service with a U.S.-based infrastructure, couldn’t handle the surge in traffic, while Facebook and Google, which have many key services located internationally, were better-prepared for it.

It has not been confirmed who perpetrated the attack, but the blogger says he believes it could have been an attempt by the Russian government to squelch his criticism of over Russia’s conduct in the war over the disputed South Ossetia region, which began a year ago today. “Maybe it was carried out by ordinary hackers but I’m certain the order came from the Russian government” [Guardian], the blogger said. Such a widespread attack, some believe, would only be possible if the coordinator of the attack had access to significant resources.

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A French hacker broke into the email accounts of Twitter executives and employees, and now the cyber snoop is leaking business and personal info about company leaders to TechCrunch, an American blog, and Korben, a French blog. The hacker reportedly guessed passwords and gained access to several Gmail accounts, as well as accounts with Google Docs, PayPal, and other services.

TechCrunch received a compressed zip file of 310 confidential documents, including a complete Twitter employee list and salary information; food preferences of Twitter employees; confidential contracts with companies such as Nokia, Samsung, Dell, AOL, Microsoft, and others; a contact list of notable Web and entertainment personalities; meeting reports; [and] applicant resumes [PC World]. Now it’s up to the site to decide what information to publish. Thus far, TechCrunch has decided not to release anything that is personally embarrassing. Still, under the philosophy “News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising,” the site will release documents it considers relevant to the company. These include notes from executive meetings, the original pitch for a Twitter TV show, and certain company financial information.

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The first permanent node of the “interplanetary internet” has been installed and tested out aboard the International Space Station, in what NASA officials say is the first step to a communication system that could one day span the solar system. The interplanetary internet got its first deep space tryout last fall, when a spacecraft called EPOXI that’s on its way to a comet rendezvous used the system to send images back to its controllers on Earth. Now, researchers are ready to test it out in regular communications with the space station.

There’s a fringe benefit: In just a few months, astronauts will be able to tweet live from the international space station. “NASA is trying to leverage the popularity of Twitter to get its message out,” said [researcher] Kevin Gifford…. “To tweet from space will have a lot of glitz value” [Denver Post]. Currently, astronauts on the space station have to schedule times to send or receive data from mission control below; that’s why the first astronaut to make use of Twitter on a space shuttle flight, Mike Massimino, aka @Astro_Mike, had to send his tweets to Houston and have a NASA employee post them to his profile.

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The street protests in Iran will be not be televised–how passé. Instead, they are being tweeted.

The microblog service Twitter has become a critical way to get out information about the tumult in Iran‘s capital, Tehran, where people have poured into the street to protest the disputed results of last Friday’s presidential election. And the whole world is watching. The U.S. State Department has confirmed that over the weekend officials reached out to Twitter and asked them to delay a network upgrade that was scheduled for Monday night. The reason? To protect the interests of Iranians using the service [Time].

The vast majority of Twitter messages support the leading opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, and argue that he was the true winner of the presidential election. Twitter users are posting messages, known as tweets, with the term #IranElection, which allows users to search for all tweets on the subject. On Monday evening, Twitter was registering about 30 new posts a minute with that tag. One read, “We have no national press coverage in Iran, everyone should help spread Moussavi’s message. One Person = One Broadcaster. #IranElection” [The New York Times]. Since then, the Iranian government has restricted the movements of foreign journalists and has cracked down on blogs and Web sites within the country, but the flow of information on Twitter has only increased.

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When Adam Wilson wants to update his Twitter feed, he doesn’t have to tap out a single keystroke–brainwaves are all he needs. On April 1st, he used a brain-to-Twitter communication system to transmit this message: “USING EEG TO SEND TWEET.” That message may be a modern equivalent of Alexander Graham Bell’s “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.” Brain-computer interfaces are no longer just a gee-whiz technology, but a platform for researchers interested in immediate real-world applications for people who can think, but can’t move [Wired].

The system uses electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the electrical activity in the user’s brain. Explains University of Wisconsin professor Justin Williams: “All the letters come up, and each one of them flashes individually…. And what your brain does is, if you’re looking at the ‘R’ on the screen and all the other letters are flashing, nothing happens. But when the ‘R’ flashes, your brain says, ‘Hey, wait a minute. Something’s different about what I was just paying attention to.’ And you see a momentary change in brain activity” [MSNBC]. After the message has been painstakingly assembled, letter by letter, the user sends it by focusing on the “Twit” box on the screen. When that flashes and the EEG reader picks up the brain signal, the message is sent to Twitter.

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