Mapping the Blogosphere

Matthew Hurst, a scientist at Microsoft Livelabs, has collected data on how Blogs interconnect. He used that data to generate maps showing the different ways that news and people travel from blog to blog. The map above represents data collected over six weeks.
The maps are pretty cool looking. The white dots on the map above, are the most active blogs. As you can see, most of the other blogs connect to the active ones in some way.

Check out the Discover article: http://discovermagazine.com/2007/may/map-welcome-to-the-blogosphere
See Matthew's Blog for more maps and more info: Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media

Terrorists take over satellite broadcast

A Sri Lankan terrorist group, the Tamil Tigers, has been illegally using an Intelsat satellite to broadcast propaganda messages. It seems that they discovered how to get the satellite to rebroadcast TV and radio transmissions on an unused frequency of the satellite. It's not the first time that a terrorist group has used satellites to broadcast their message to the world, but it is the first time that it was done with out the authorization of the satellite owners.
While details on exactly how the satellite was hijacked are not available, it seems that many satellites are vulnerable to having their broadcasts hijacked.

Via Slashdot: Sri Lankan Terrorists Hack Satellite