The building blocks of life could have their beginnings in the tiny icy grains that make up the gas and dust found between the stars, and those icy grains could be the key to understanding how life can arise on planets. With help from students, researchers have discovered an important pair of prebiotic molecules in the icy particles in interstellar space. The chemicals, found in a giant cloud of gas about 25,000 light-years from Earth may be a precursor to a key component of DNA and another may have a role in the formation of an important amino acid. More »
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The “ultimate” building blocks of life have been found in interstellar space
mask.of.sanity writes “The passwords of thousands of Australian businesses are being stored in clear readable text by the country’s tax office. Storing passwords in readable text is a bad idea for a lot of reasons: they could be read by staff with ill intent, or, in the event of a data breach, could be tested against other web service accounts to further compromise users. In the case of the tax office, the clear text passwords accessed a subsection of the site. But many users would have reused them to access the main tax submission services. If attackers gained access to those areas, they would have access to the personal, financial and taxpayer information of almost every working Australian. Admins should use a strong hash like bcrypt to minimize or prevent password exposure. Users should never reuse passwords for important accounts.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
More than 60 percent of app downloads from iTunes U come from outside the United States, and the educational content can be accessed in 155 countries. [Read more] 
Online and offline sharing of copyrighted music took a nosedive last year, according to NPD. [Read more]