Pro-Iraq hackers hit NASA sites

0 Comments | Gazette, The (Colorado Springs), Feb 10, 2003 | by JIM BAINBRIDGE

Just hours after the Columbia space shuttle was lost last week, nine servers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory were broken into by a multinational group of hackers calling themselves the Trippin Smurfs.

Web pages hosted on those servers were replaced with pages displaying a political message critical of U.S. policy in Iraq, according to a report by British security company mi2g and confirmed by NASA representative Brian Dunbar.

NASA would not indicate whether other data stored on the servers were tampered with or stolen by the perpetrators. "We don't go into that level of detail on security breaches," Dunbar said. mi2g.com www.wbglinks.net/pages/interviews/trippinsmurfs.html

Public uses Internet to share shuttle data

The Internet is serving as a uniting force and a rich source of information on the Columbia shuttle disaster as the public shares digital photos and eyewitness accounts with NASA and news organizations.

NASA established an e-mail address at columbiaimages@ nasa.gov for people to submit images and text, plus a system to send video.

News sites also have been receiving contributions from readers. The jointly run Web sites for The Dallas Morning News, WFAA-TV and cable news station TXCN have created a searchable database of the material which went online at midweek. www.jsc.nasa.gov www.dallasnews.com

Internet acceptance continues to grow

Americans who use the Internet consider it at least as important as newspapers and books, even as they've become more skeptical of what they find online, a UCLA telephone survey of 2,000 households shows.

About 61 percent of Internet users find the Net "very" or "extremely" important as an information source, compared with 60 percent for books, 58 percent for newspapers, 50 percent for TV and 40 percent for radio. But only 53 percent of users believe most or all of what they read online, down from 58 percent a year ago, according to the survey from the Center for Communication Policy at the University of California-Los Angeles. ccp.ucla.edu

PCs enlisted in hunt for smallpox cure

In what the Associated Press calls the "ultimate needle-in-the- haystack search," a coalition of scientists and tech companies thinks it might make headway in a cure for smallpox by using idle personal computers.

The coalition's project would use the processing power of up to 2 million PCs to sift through millions of molecular combinations to find one that fights smallpox after infection.

Volunteers download a screen saver from www.grid.org that runs whenever their computers have resources to spare to perform computations. When the user connects to the Internet, the computer sends data back to a central hub.

www.grid.org/home.htm

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