Floating Gold (HC)

Author Margaret Muir is joining the ranks of Historic Naval Fiction authors with a new novel which is now available for pre-order in hardcover. Floating Gold is due for release on 31 May 2010.

In March 1802, the Treaty of Amiens brings an uneasy peace to Europe. While the fighting ships of the Royal Navy languish in ordinary and sailors litter the alleys and alehouses of Portsmouth, frustrated officers barrage the Admiralty for a commission.

From a beach on the Isle of Wight, Captain Oliver Quintrell observes a convoy of merchantmen preparing to set sail from St. Helen’s Road. He is unaware that within days he will have command of His Majesty’s frigate Elusive, which will be sailing with the fleet into the Atlantic.

With a sound ship and an able crew, the captain is confident of a safe voyage but when the ship reaches its destination there are unknown dangers and unspeakable horrors to be faced. Can Captain Quintrell retrieve the cargo he has been sent to find and return with it safely to England?

Read More Floating Gold (HC).

China breaks up Black Hawk hacking ring – ZDNet.co.uk

Chinese authorities have broken a hacking-tool dissemination ring, according to state media.

Police in the central Hubei province arrested three people suspected of running the Black Hawk Safety Net, state news agency Xinhua reported on Monday.

The Black Hawk Safety Net disseminated hacking tools and Trojans to its members, said Xinhua. The group had collected seven million yuan (£650,000) in membership fees from 12,000 subscribers by the time it was shut down. The group had an additional 170,000 members who had joined for free, said Xinhua.

As well as the arrests, the police also seized nine servers, five computers, a Honda Accord and 1.7 million yuan in assets.

via China breaks up Black Hawk hacking ring – ZDNet.co.uk.

Blue Whales Croon A New Tune : NPR

John Hildebrand of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography studies whale sounds and says he’s been hearing something new lately.

“They’ve been shifting the frequency. They’ve been shifting the pitch to be lower each year. And that shift in pitch has resulted in song that is now about 30 percent lower than it was in the 1960s,” he says. He says the change is happening in blue whale colonies all over the world.

Hildebrand believes the change is tied to the elimination of blue whale hunting. Before hunting was banned in 1966, the numbers of blue whales were dangerously low.

via Blue Whales Croon A New Tune : NPR.

Lithium-Ion Battery Life Could Reach 20 Years – PCWorld

Japanese research and development firm Eamex claims to have found a new way to increase the typical average life of a high-capacity lithium-ion battery. Eamex’s new technology will allow the demanding batteries to sustain over 10,000 recharges over the course of 20 years.

This rather dramatic increase in performance is made possible by new techniques such as a stabilization process of the battery’s electrodes, which in-turn puts less stress on the battery’s tin. This maintains the bonding of particles for a longer period of time and reduces the overall deterioration process. The result is a battery that lasts up to 10 times as long as most current batteries.

Lithium-ion batteries are broadly popular within various consumer electronics. They tend to hold their charge when not in use, and have a high energy-to-weight ratio. Current lithium-ion batteries can hold their charge for up to 1,000 charge cycles.

via Lithium-Ion Battery Life Could Reach 20 Years – PCWorld.

China threatens world health by unleashing waves of superbugs – Telegraph

China’s reckless use of antibiotics in the health system and agricultural production is unleashing an explosion of drug resistant superbugs that endanger global health, according to leading scientists.

Chinese doctors routinely hand out multiple doses of antibiotics for simple maladies like the sore throats and the country’s farmers excessive dependence on the drugs has tainted the food chain.

Studies in China show a “frightening” increase in antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as staphylococcus aureus bacteria, also know as MRSA . There are warnings that new strains of antibiotic-resistant bugs will spread quickly through international air travel and internation food sourcing.

via China threatens world health by unleashing waves of superbugs – Telegraph.

LHC to run for longest continuous period | Tech News on ZDNet

The Large Hadron Collider is about to enter its longest continuous operational period, in preparation for full-strength particle-smashing.

On Wednesday, Steve Myers, the LHC’s director for accelerators and technology, blogged that Cern had decided last week to run the giant particle collider for 18-24 months at a collision energy of seven tera-electron-volts (TeV) — or 3.5 TeV per beam — with the powering-up phase starting later this month.

After that, the LHC will “go into a long shutdown in which we’ll do all the necessary work to allow us to reach the LHC’s design collision energy of 14 TeV for the next run”, Myers wrote.

via LHC to run for longest continuous period | Tech News on ZDNet.

FBI wants records kept of Web sites visited | Tech News on ZDNet

The FBI is pressing Internet service providers to record which Web sites customers visit and retain those logs for two years, a requirement that law enforcement believes could help it in investigations of child pornography and other serious crimes.

FBI Director Robert Mueller supports storing Internet users’ “origin and destination information,” a bureau attorney said at a federal task force meeting on Thursday.

As far back as a 2006 speech, Mueller had called for data retention on the part of Internet providers, and emphasized the point two years later when explicitly asking Congress to enact a law making it mandatory. But it had not been clear before that the FBI was asking companies to begin to keep logs of what Web sites are visited, which few if any currently do.

via FBI wants records kept of Web sites visited | Tech News on ZDNet.

Google phasing out support for IE6 | Relevant Results – CNET News

Google has clearly had enough with Internet Explorer 6.

As of March 1, Google will no longer support IE6 on its Google Docs and Google Sites services, it announced Friday. IE users will have to upgrade to at least version 7 if they want to use those products, as “many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers,” the company said in a blog post.

A flaw in IE6 was exploited in the recent cyberattacks against Google and other U.S. companies, and Microsoft scrambled to patch the flaw in a rare out-of-cycle patch release earlier this month. Use of the browser–considered much weaker than more recent versions of IE within the security community–has been dropping with the release of Internet Explorer 8 but it is still being used by 13.5 percent of Web surfers, according to statistics from StatCounter.

via Google phasing out support for IE6 | Relevant Results – CNET News.

Mozilla weighs privacy warnings for Web pages | Politics and Law – CNET News

Unless you speak lawyerese as a second language, a Web site’s privacy policy can seem as incomprehensible as the loudspeakers on New York City subways.

The organization behind Firefox, the world’s second most popular Web browser, has embarked on an ambitious project to change this. Instead of forcing people concerned about privacy to scroll through pages of “notwithstanding anything to the contrary,” the Mozilla Foundation is designing a standard set of colored icons to reveal how data-protective–or how intrusive–Web sites are.

It does seem a bit odd that, in the era of the iPad and cars that nearly drive themselves, technologists have been unable to puzzle out a better way to display that privacy information. The Mozilla Foundation’s tentative solution is to employ the leverage it has through Firefox, used by something like 350 million people worldwide, to convince publishers to disclose their privacy practices in a standard way that would be displayed in a Web browser’s address bar.

via Mozilla weighs privacy warnings for Web pages | Politics and Law – CNET News.

Pipester Review: Peter Raven Under Fire by Michael Molloy

Michael Molloy is, apparently, an accomplished author of young adult fiction — his “witch” books are very popular. With Peter Raven Under Fire, he turns his hand to historic naval fiction for young adults. Peter, the well-educated son of a clergyman is determined to go to sea and has prevailed on his father to find him a midshipman’s berth. He is almost immediately swept into intrigue and espionage as he becomes the protégé of the mysterious Commodore Beaumont. Unfortunately, Molloy has not done his homework. Or rather, he has not done it well enough. The book is riddled with howlers and inaccuracies. He makes a muddle of naval vessels (100-gun frigates, indeed!), naval ranks and shipboard vocabulary.

read more Pipester Review: Peter Raven Under Fire by Michael Molloy.