Two years ago, almost to the day, a Spanish airliner belonging to Spanair crashed just after takeoff. Of the 172 people on board, 154 were killed. New information now reveals that one of the airplane’s central computer systems was infected with malware, and that the crash was likely directly attributable to this malware infection.

While you may be familiar with the term “blood diamonds”, diamonds are not the only thing which are mined in the violent, war-torn mining regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo (“DRC”). Many minerals used in the manufacturing of electronics such as cell phones and computers are also mined in the DRC. These minerals, which include gold, columbite-tantalite, cassiterite, and wolframite (from which tungsten is derived), when mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, have come to be known as “conflict minerals” or “blood minerals”, and their use in manufacturing electronics by companies based in the United States is now the subject of Federal regulation by the U.S. government. Part of the recently enacted “Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act”, which, through enforcement by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), is primarily aimed at controlling financial institutions following the 2009 financial meltdown in the U.S., the “Conflict Minerals” clause, which is Section 1502 of the Dodd Frank act, requires U.S. companies to declare whether they have used any minerals from the DRC and, if they can prove that they have not, allows them to label their products as “Conflict Free”.

Professor Aydogan Ozcan, currently of the UCLA Electrical Engineering Department, has invented an attachment that, with just $10.00 worth of parts, can turn your cell phone into a microscope. Dr. Ozcan, who did both his PhD and post-doc work in Electrical Engineering at Stanford, has, along with his team, won 3 awards for his design, but the real prize is that with the award monies he can (and is going to) take the cell phone microscope, dubbed the LUCAS microscope, out into the field, in Africa, to put it to practical use. (‘LUCAS’ microscope stands for “Lensless Ultrawide field Cell monitoring Array platform based on Shadow Imaging microscope” – yeah, it’s a stretch, but we didn’t name it!)

The whistle-blowing, secret-revealing, classified document-exposing website, WikiLeaks.org, has posted tens of thousands of classified documents – many of them field reports, all of them related to the war in Afghanistan – which taken together paint a picture of exactly how the U.S. war in Afghanistan and Pakistan is going, and has been going. The WikiLeak documents, spanning the period from 2004 up through last year, and estimated at between 75,000 and 90,000 in number, and labeled by WikiLeaks “The Afghan War Diary”, represent one of the single biggest leaks in United States history. These Afghan War Diaries have the White House and the rest of the U.S. administration in a tizzy, revealing, as they do, unreported civilian casualties, an allegation that Pakistan is backing the Taliban in Afghanistan, and information about the elusive “Task Force 373” (being misreported in some coverage as “Task Force 273”), which is purported to be the unit used to target and take out high ranking enemy persons of interest.

According to reports on the BBC and in the Register and other international news sources, a complainant in Pakistan has initiated a process against Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg which could invoke the death penalty or, at least, life in prison, over the “Draw Muhammad” contest that was being hosted on Facebook.

This past week fourteen people staged an escape from the Huai’an Internet Addiction Treatment Centre in China. Last August a Chinese teen who was sent to the Nanning Qihang treatment center for his Internet addiction died under the hands of his “instructors”. So, just what is going on in these Chinese “treatment centers” – or so called ‘Internet boot camps’ – that are designed to “cure” people of their web addiction?

There is a series of SMS text message spams going around right now, from TM-GODSGIFT, that has people wondering. The messages from TM GodsGift say that you have won money – usually in the Coca Cola lottery or the Exxon Mobile draw. It’s all spam – it’s all a scam. You can ignore it – or you can report it. But whatever you do, don’t respond to a message from TM GodsGift.

Toshio Yamamoto is a man who knows his ramen, and we’re not just talking that cheap American Oodles of Noodles stuff.  And everyone else’s ramen too.  The 49 year old engineer eats ramen 5 days a week, and records his reviews of each one for ramen posterity’s sake on his website

Ever wonder just how identity theft and financial fraud happens? CallService.biz was a site that served as a front for thousands of bad guys to take advantage of identity theft, and use stolen financial information such as bank account and credit card numbers. Run by Dmitry Naskovets, from the Czech Republic, and Sergey Semashko, from Belarus, CallService.biz was open about what it did – providing identity theft and financial information theft criminals with service representatives who would call the financial institutions at which the compromised financial accounts were based, and pretend to be the account holders – in your choice of English or German – and would confirm the financial transactions being made by the crooks.

A group of U.S.-based Internet service providers (ISPs) have announced that they are going to start charging their email users for processing the spam that is addressed to them. As the deluge of spam continues unabated, ISPs are seeking new ways to help offset the cost of processing the trillions of pieces of junk email that they are keeping out of their customers’ inboxes (or, in some cases, still delivering to their customers’ inbox or junk folder).

Now, there’s something you might think you’d never hear: that the President of the United States has a Twitter account, let alone that it got hacked. But it’s true. Well, it’s nearly true, as in reality Barack Obama does not, himself, man a Twitter account (so far as anyone knows). But there is a “BarackObama” Twitter account that is manned on behalf of the President of the United States by the organization known as Organizing for America, that calls itself “the grassroots organization for President Obama’s agenda for change”, and that account was hacked.

You’ve probably already heard of the .xxx domain that has been proposed, rejected, re-rejected, and reconsidered, but did you know that there are also a .god domain and a .gay domain being considered? The .xxx domain was first proposed – and provisionally approved – back in 2005, and then was rejected in 2006 and 2007, primarily as a result of lobbying by conservative and religious groups; now it’s being reconsidered. Interestingly, the .god domain, which has had considerably less press, was first proposed as far back as 1995, and has been in the public awareness since at least 2000. The .gay domain is among the newest of proposed TLD (Top Level Domain) offerings (actually “gTLD”, which stands for generic Top Level Domain), although not the only new one (consider New York City’s request for a .nyc domain) – all of which are being considered this week as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) meets in Nairobi.

Last month we told you about how Wintek, a main supplier for Apple and Nokia, among others, was poisoning its workers with n-hexane – a toxic chemical used in the screen manufacturing process that is actually banned (meaning that Wintek was using it in violation of the ban – they have since claimed to have ceased all use of n-hexane). Now in an annual report from Apple entitled “Supplier Responsibility: 2010 Progress Report”, Apple admits that not only have workers been poisoned by banned substances in the plants they use, but they have been using child labor, as well.

In an Internet law ruling that is not only the first of its kind, but that may have wide implications – indeed worldwide implications – for Internet law, privacy law, and Google and any other sites that host images, three Google executives have been sentenced to 6 months in prison by an Italian court, over the public posting of a video of a disabled boy with Downs syndrome being subjected to bullying by four bullies, in Turin, Italy. The three convicted Google executives are Google Privacy Director Peter Fleischer, Senior VP David Carl Drummond (formerly director of Google Italy), and George De Los Reyes, a retired Google financial executive.

As Google threatens to pull completely out of China, following allegations that the hack attacks against Google, code named “Operation Aurora” and first disclosed by Google last month, originated at two Chinese universities with strong governmental ties, the Chinese government is trying their own brand of shaping the Internet – by encouraging its citizens to send “red text messages”, also being referred to as “red snippets” and even “red jokes” (although they are not jokes). The Chinese term actually translates as “Red Duan” – ‘duan’ relating to measurement, such as a piece or stretch of time – in other words, a red era. According to authorities in China, the red text message – or red snippet – is intended to facilitate “the spirit of Chinese culture for an Internet age” and to combat the invasion of American culture. In the meantime, Google contemplates pulling out of China altogether after their discoveries in the wake of the Operation Aurora hacks, unless China agrees to allowing uncensored search.