The object also appeared out of nowhere. It just wasn’t there before. In fact, they don’t even know where it is exactly located because it didn’t behave like anything they know. Apparently, it can’t be closer than 130 light-years but it can be as far as 11 billion light-years away. It’s not in any known galaxy either. And they have ruled out a supernova too. It’s something that they have never encountered before. In other words: they don’t have a single clue about where or what the heck this thing is.

Napster Inc., the online music community that rose from a dorm room project to became the scourge of the global recording industry, is being purchased by Best Buy Inc. for nearly $127 million as the electronics retailer tries to boost its digital music business.

The $2.65 per share all-cash deal announced Monday is nearly double the music network’s Friday closing price but a small sum to pay for Best Buy, which gets access to Napster’s 700,000 subscribers who pay a monthly fee to access digital music catalogs.

“It’s not a huge investment, but it definitely has brand recognition,” said Morningstar analyst Brady Lemos, who said Best Buy also benefits from the acquisition of technical expertise about the digital music industry.

Syrian authorities have blocked access to 160 dissident websites since 2000 as part of a drive to censure the press and control Internet use, a free speech organisation said on Tuesday.

Security services have stopped access to “160 sites run by Kurdish political parties, opposition groups, newspapers — particularly from Lebanon — human rights, Islamic and civil society organisations,” said the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression.

The owner of an opposition Internet news site in Russia’s volatile Ingushetia region was shot and killed Sunday after being detained by police.

Magomed Yevloyev, owner of the www.Ingushetiya.ru Web site, was arrested at Nazran airport in southern Russia after disembarking a flight, according to a statement by media watchdog Reporters Without Borders. Yevloyev was later found dumped on the side of the road, suffering from a gunshot wound to the head, the news site’s deputy editor, Ruslan Khautiyev, told the Associated Press. Yevloyev later died at a hospital, Khautiyev said.

Yevloyev had angered the region’s Kremlin-backed administration with bold criticism of police treatment of civilians in the region, the AP reported. A court in June accused him of spreading “extremist” statements and ordered him to close his site, but it reappeared under a different name.

The Russian prosecutor general’s office said it would open an investigation into the “incident.”

“While police officers were attempting to transfer M. Yevloyev to an Interior Ministry office, an incident occurred,” said Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for the investigative committee of the prosecutor general’s office, according to the Interfax news agency. “M. Yevloyev received a gunshot wound to the temple area.”

A lawyer for Yevloyev ridiculed the explanation and said police dumped Yevloyev on a road after shooting him.

German customs police raided South Korea’s Hyundai IT Corp in Berlin on Saturday, seizing flat-screen televisions from its stand at IFA, the world’s largest consumer electronics fair.

A German court had ruled late on Thursday that Hyundai and other east Asian and European firms were marketing unlicensed patented technology at IFA and authorized 69 raids, a spokesman for Berlin’s customs investigation office said.

“Hyundai had the chance today to show us that it had paid for the licenses — then we would have gone. But that was not the case. They could not prove they had paid so we took the devices away,” said spokesman Norbert Scheidhauer.

A Reuters photographer witnessed uniformed customs police removing Hyundai’s flat-screen televisions in front of the public and trade visitors, leaving an empty stand with wires hanging from it.

Scheidhauer said he was not permitted to name other firms affected, but said that around 170 televisions, 140 MP3 music players, 21 mobile phones and 57 DVD recorders had been seized at IFA so far.

“This year is the biggest operation that customs investigators have had to carry out,” he said.

The theft of trade secrets by foreign companies is a sensitive topic in Germany, where the economy depends on a research-intensive export sector.

On September 29, 2008 Yahoo! will shut down it beta service Yahoo! Mash. Mash users (me included) already got an email announcement about the closing and being urged to copy al the important information of the web site and copy it to a different document.

Once the service is closed all of the content on your Mash profile with the EXCEPTION of your profile photo, nickname, age, sex and location (if you’ve provided this information) will be unavailable.

Here is the email message I got:

Dear Yahoo! Mash member,

Thank you for trying out our Mash Beta service. We hope you had fun with it.

Please note that we will shut down Mash on September 29, 2008. As a result, your current profile on Mash will no longer be available. We strongly recommend that you return to http://mash.yahoo.com and copy the content that you wish to save onto a separate document.

For a list of FAQs, please refer to the Mash Help Page.

Thanks for trying out Mash!

Matt Warburton

Major U.S. airports were operating normally on Tuesday evening after a glitch in the computer system for filing flight plans delayed hundreds of flights, the Federal Aviation Administration said.

The Department of Homeland Security said there was no link to terrorism and the FAA said the computer glitch did not affect its ability to safely track planes in the air.

FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said the problem was resolved around 6 p.m. EDT, about 4 1/2 hours after a communications link failed in the system that processes flight plans at a facility south of Atlanta.

The agency’s best guess is that “hundreds” of flights across a wide swath of the United States from Dallas and Chicago to the East Coast had been delayed by the computer breakdown, Brown said, adding that the FAA would not have an exact count until Wednesday.

“There were some airports that were affected more than others,” she said. Airports in Boston, Chicago, Baltimore and Atlanta experienced the most delays as a result of the problem, she said.

The cause of the failure was not known but it was not due to a computer hacking attack, said Hank Krakowski, chief operations officer for the FAA’s air traffic division.

“It appears to be an internal software processing problem. We’re going to have to do some forensics on it,” he told reporters in a conference call.

Flight plans include information like the type of aircraft, destination and number of passengers.

Online electronics retailer Newegg has stopped charging sales tax to its New York customers, according to a posting on the Consumerist.com.

The move by Newegg reverses action the online retailer took in June, in which it began to charge applicable sales tax for all shipments to New York, following passage of a new state law that required certain companies to charge sales tax on shipments to New York state.

Effective August 21, however, Newegg discontinued the practice and is leaving it up to New York residents to pay that sales tax themselves. That policy basically returns the responsibility of paying sales tax for online purchases back to the New York consumer, which was the case prior to the New York legislature passing its law earlier this year.

By choosing Joe Biden as their vice presidential candidate, the Democrats have selected a politician with a mixed record on technology who has spent most of his Senate career allied with the FBI and copyright holders, who ranks toward the bottom of CNET’s Technology Voters’ Guide, and whose anti-privacy legislation was actually responsible for the creation of PGP.

A Chinese medical team led by Shuzhong Guo of the Fourth Military Medical University in Xi’an has successfully completed the first transplant to include facial bone in a transplant on a man whose face was slashed by a bear. The Chinese graft included muscles, nerves, blood vessels, cartilage and skin and included an intact salivary gland, another first.

Two years after the procedure, the man can eat, drink and speak, thanks to the gradual fusing of transplanted nerves and muscles with what remained of the patient’s own. This transplant together with the another ground breaking transplant last year by French doctors that removed a huge tumor that had completely infiltrated and disfigured their patient’s face, now sets the stage for a full facial transplant

NASA destroyed an unmanned experimental rocket carrying a pair of research satellites Friday when it veered off course shortly after an early morning liftoff.

There were no injuries or confirmed reports of property damage, according to NASA, but the agency warned that debris from the explosion could be hazardous. NASA believes most of the wreckage fell into the Atlantic Ocean off the Virginia coast.

Officials said the rocket - a prototype made by Alliant Techsystems Inc., or ATK - was destroyed by remote control 27 seconds into the predawn flight. It was between 11,000 and 12,000 feet high when it exploded. Officials said they do not know why it veered off course. It was destroyed to avoid endangering the public.

Trying to view a video on CNN web site was impossible. Using Ubuntu and Firefox with Flash installed I got a message from the web server telling me that I need Flash player version 8 or above. The problem is that I have version 10 of Flash player installed (and working perfectly). I thought that a site like CNN has better QA team to check its scripts

this message from the CNN server.

This CNN.com feature is optimized for Adobe Flash Player version 8 or higher.

You are currently using Flash Player 10

Check out the screen shot on the right, WTF ?