Politics, rather than good old-fashioned theft, is increasingly the motivation of malicious hackers who attack websites using DDoS techniques. Arbor Networks has found that ideological hacktivism was the motivation behind most distributed denial of service attacks in 2011. Attacks for profit or competitive reasons still happen, but the rise of the political hacker is changing the threat landscape. “Businesses should definitely be cognizant of the potential impact that policy changes and outbound corporate statements might have in the public forum,” said Arbor’s Carlos Morales.

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Google has brought its Chrome Web browser to the Android Market. A beta edition of the browser is available from the app shop now for free, but since its operation is restricted to the latest version of the mobile operating system, Ice Cream Sandwich, only about 1 percent of Android’s millions of users will be able to take the software for a test drive. Making the browser a downloadable app means users don’t have to wait for phone makers to install the browser on their hardware. On the other hand, they still have to wait for those phone makers to upgrade their handsets.

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When the bright folks at Zeebox, a killer social TV site, decided to build their website, they naturally turned to cloud services because they are a startup and had to use their money wisely. They also turned to the Scala language and open source community because they had very specific scalability and performance needs, like processing 60+ TV channels — knowing it will grow to thousands in the future — in real time, and juggling the social streams of users from sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

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If you spend a lot of time at your keyboard, no doubt you dabble a lot in listening to Internet radio. Radio Tray is a relatively new Linux app that can make tuning in to your favorite radio stations a new experience. Radio Tray is a streaming player for online radio that sits on the Linux desktop panel. Think of this app as a shortcut that hides the browser interface. It is not intended to replace a full-featured music player. Rather, its was created as a fast and simple way to play streaming radio with a barely-there interface.

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How much does a civil engineer in New Orleans make? What is the average temperature there? What are the differences in the trigonometric functions of sin, cos and tan? What is the exchange rate between the U.S. and the UK right now? Throw one of these questions at Siri, the voice assistant in iPhone 4S, and she will speedily reply. Fueling Siri is Wolfram Alpha, a computational knowledge search engine launched in 2009. Now the engine’s developers are taking its data-driven approach one step further with the launch of Wolfram Alpha Pro.

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They’re building people out of 3D printers now — parts, anyway. LayerWise announced Sunday that it has applied a process called “additive manufacturing” to produce a titanium total lower jaw implant for facial reconstruction. The project was developed in collaboration with partners from medical industries and academia. This is the first complete patient-specific implant for the lower jaw. The complex implant design incorporates articulated joints and dedicated features. The implant restored a patient’s facial aesthetics and allowed her to regain her speech within hours.

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A hacker who was negotiating a ransom for stolen source code to a Symantec product released the data via peer-to-peer networks on Tuesday after negotiations fell through. The code is for security vendor Symantec’s pcAnywhere remote access software. Symantec had last month warned pcAnywhere users to observe best security practices and told them they might have to disable the application. The company launched its own investigation and called in law enforcement.

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Google has launched a new program devoted to fostering discussions and ideas among leaders in the science and technology industries. The project, dubbed “Solve for X,” aims to be a seeding ground for solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems. The site is meant to inspire “moonshot” thinking, out-of-the-box technologies and projects that might seem closer to science fiction than real-life solutions to global problems. The program hopes to sponsor thinkers and doers that can highlight a widespread problem and present concrete and radical solutions.

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Google’s apparently taking a cue from movies like “Iron Man” and “The Terminator” in designing one of its upcoming products: Eyewear that displays data and information to the wearer. The Internet giant’s glasses are in the late prototype stage, 9to5Google claims. They are likely going to run a version of Android, connect to the Internet, include a global positioning system and double as a phone, 9to5Google stated. The devices could be released to the market soon.

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One day, Hemi Weingarten’s wife brought home some glow-in-the-dark yogurt for their three young children. He read the ingredient list to find out how the strawberries could be so red, and finding “Red #40,” looked it up online. He was surprised to discover that it was a controversial chemical banned in parts of Europe. That incident made him realize there was a market for easily accessible nutritional information for consumers. “I decided to help consumers like me by creating a simple tool that people can use while at the supermarket,” Weingarten said.

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The rivalry between Google and Apple in the cut-throat mobile device world took a new turn recently when mobile app support platform company Crittercism published a study that found iOS apps crash more often than their Android counterparts. Crittercism analyzed more than 214 million apps launched in November and December that use its service. The worst offender was iOS 5.01, with nearly 29 percent of overall crashes. iOS 4.2.10 accounted for another nearly 13 percent and iOS 4.4.4 a further nearly 11 percent.

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Back when Apple promised editing features built into the iPhone 3GS (the first iPhone to have a video camera), I wondered how a video-editing program could possibly fit into a phone. It wasn’t just a question of available processing power, though that was part of it. It was also a question of screen size. Video editing needs a lot of space. If you’re going to be throwing around a few dozen clips and managing multiple tracks for sound, you’re going to need some elbow room.

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