1968: Karen Schroeder, a second-generation resident of the Love Canal neighborhood of Buffalo, New York, gives birth to an infant girl with multiple birth defects. The enormity of the neighborhood's affliction will take a few more years to come to light.

Love Canal was a never-used, late 19th-century hydroelectric channel that was sold to the Hooker Chemical company in 1942. Between then and 1953, Hooker used the site to bury 22,000 tons of chemical wastes in barrels.

Hooker sold the site to the Niagara Falls School Board for $1, and the board built an elementary school there in 1955. A blue-collar suburban neighborhood flourished around the disused industrial site.

Flourished is probably the wrong word. Schroeder's parents found black sludge seeping through the walls of their basement starting in the late 1950s. A woman who ran a beauty parlor in her basement developed a debilitating weakness and had to give up working. Trees and shrubs died. Noxious chemical smells hung over the neighborhood.

Schoolchildren developed strange rashes and vague, unexplained allergies. Sometimes, they played with phosphorus-laden dirt that exploded with a crackle when lumps of it were thrown to the ground.

Baby Sheri Schroeder was born with an irregular heart beat and a hole in the heart wall, nasal bone blockages, partial deafness, deformed ears and a cleft palate. As she grew, her family realized she was mentally retarded. Her teeth arrived in a double row on her lower jaw, and she suffered from an enlarged liver.

Heavy rains in the mid-1970s caused groundwater levels to rise. Swimming pools lifted up out of the ground. The buried waste rose closer to the surface.

The Niagara Gazette began reporting in October 1976 about chemicals seeping into basements in the Love Canal neighborhood, with stories of harm to humans, pets and plant life. Chemical analyses showed 15 organic chemicals, including three toxic chlorinated hydrocarbons.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the state and county health departments began to take notice, testing the neighborhood's soil, water and air, as well as blood samples from residents. Still, it was August 1978 before the state health commissioner declared a state of emergency, closed the school and ordered an evacuation ... but only of pregnant women and children under age 2.

Soon it was learned that Hooker had buried 200 tons of dioxin at Love Canal, that residents suffered a high rate of miscarriages, birth defects and chromosomal damage, and that 10 percent could develop cancer.

U.S. Rep. Al Gore (D-Tennessee) charged in 1979 that the tragedy had been avoidable. He publicized a 1958 internal Hooker Chemical memo, describing three or four kids burned by materials at the Love Canal waste site. The first lawsuits were filed in 1979.

Early amelioration work released noxious smells in the neighborhood, and the evacuation area was widened. More schools were shut down. Government programs bought condemned homes and tore them down. Hundreds of families evacuated, but 60 families remained behind. Cleanup costs have been estimated at $250 million.

A federal judge eventually found Hooker Chemical negligent but not reckless, and parent company Occidental Petroleum settled with the EPA for $129 million.

An EPA regional administrator called Love Canal "one of the most appalling environmental tragedies in American history."

The core area around the dump is still off-limits, but new buildings have been built nearby. The neighborhood is now called Black Creek Village.

Source: Various

Oh sure, we're all for alt-fuel green cars. Hybrids? Love 'em. EVs? We'll take two. Hydrogen? Show us where to get the stuff, and we're there. But there's something to be said for being pushed back into butter-soft, hand-stitched leather as you hurtle toward the horizon at absurd velocity. Here then are our picks for the 10 cars at the Los Angeles Auto Show that will do just that.

Left: Gumpert ApolloIf "limited edition" isn't limited enough, Gumpert has the car for you. The boutique supercar maker is sending just 10 of the race-ready rides to America next year. They start at $485,000, but we'll take the top-of-the-line $850,000 model, because why wouldn't you want every one of the 850 horsepower you get with it?

If you have to ask, you'll never understand.

It's not the flashiest car around. The doors don't flip upward. It isn't covered in carbon fiber. And most people won't have any idea what it is. But the DBS is just so quintessentially British that way. It's got a 6.0-liter V12, it'll hit 60 mph in 4.3 seconds, and it tops out at 191 mph. When you're that good, you can afford to be understated.

It's got more scoops than Baskin-Robbins and more bling than Flavor Flav, so you'd be forgiven for thinking it's something of a joke. But this Dutch rocket with a racing pedigree produces 400 horsepower, does 0 to 60 in 4.5 seconds and has a top speed of 187 mph. So the joke's on you.

Lotus is one of the most-storied names in sports cars, and those who have driven them love them. If you haven't driven one, now's the time to start.

Eeenie, meenie, miney, mo … oh, just pick one. You can't go wrong.

From the gleaming chrome hood ornament and 500-horsepower twin-turbo V8 to the diamond-quilted leather interior (choose from one of 25 different kinds) and jeweled fuel cap, everything about the Azure T is decadently, sensuously luxurious. And for $350,000, it damn well better be.

Yes, there are faster Porsches. Yes, there are more-expensive Porsches. And yes, there are Porsches that will run circles around the Boxster. But we just love this scene.

The R8 is stereotypically German — beautifully engineered, ruthlessly efficient and exceptionally quick. It isn't as good as you've heard; it's better. Everyone should have one.

For burning rubber, doing donuts and blowing the doors off anything short of a Gumpert Apollo, nothing beats the 638-horsepower Corvette ZR1. It's a muscle car on steroids and the best 'Vette ever. Dollar for dollar, pound for pound, nothing beats it.

You will never catch us yawning at an airport gate. You won't find us desperately rereading the in-flight magazine, and we never ... ever ... cross the thresholds of hotel business centers. We are the quartermasters in the battle to stay connected, productive, and entertained — and we do not travel unprepared. As wired gadget editors, we make it our mission to see every new product. As avid gadget-fiends, we make damn sure that the best of them end up in our personal arsenals. This is our current must-have list, the gear we reach for whenever an eticket pops into our remotely accessible inbox.

Left: Tod's Cartella computer bag $1,600

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When a giant sperm whale rammed a whaling vessel in 1820, the deadly encounter inspired Herman Melville's classic novel, Moby Dick.

Melville's story, inspired by real-life man-versus-beast mayhem from the 1800s, made it to movie screens in the 1950s. Director John Huston's Moby Dick was evidence of Hollywood's growing fascination with giant, thrashing creatures.

Here are some of the best beasties ever captured on celluloid.

Left:

Captain Ahab (played by Gregory Peck) battles the great white whale in Moby Dick.

A giant squid battles Captain Nemo (played by James Mason) in Walt Disney's 1954 production, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Another great white terror of the deep surfaced in 1975's Jaws, directed by Steven Spielberg. The blockbuster scared beachgoers and spawned three sequels.

Not nearly as big as a whale, a giant squid or a great white shark, the Gill Man nevertheless emerged from murky waters to menace humans in 1954's Creature From the Black Lagoon, by director Jack Arnold.

In a battle of the box office titans, Godzilla battles King Kong in the 1962 Japanese film, Kingu Kongu tai Gojira. Only unlucky structures get between the behemoths in director Ishirô Honda's movie.

Bigger isn't always better. Suspense master Alfred Hitchcock turned seemingly innocuous seagulls into a giant, crowdsourced flying nightmare in 1963's The Birds.

A dinosaur foolishly liberated from the Forbidden Valley goes on a rampage in The Valley of Gwangi. Stop-motion animation great Ray Harryhausen created the creature for director Jim O'Connolly's 1969 flick.

Fussy intergalactic fat-ass Jabba the Hutt smokes out, Star Wars-style, in Return of the Jedi. The beast is known for his bad temper — and for keeping Princess Leia, dressed in her sexy slave girl outfit, on a chain.

Cuddly creatures turn into nightmarish beasts in 1984's Gremlins and again in 1990's sequel, Gremlins 2: The New Batch.

Creature-feature fans saw two classic extraterrestrials face off in 2004's AVP: Alien vs. Predator, by director Paul W.S. Anderson, and in Colin Strause's 2007 follow-up, AVPR: Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem.

A hideous beast from god knows where thrashes Manhattan in 2008's Cloverfield. Director Matt Reeves did a masterful job of unveiling the monster, one blurry bit at a time.

1820: The whaling ship Essex is rammed and sunk by a sperm whale 2,000 miles off the west coast of South America. The ordeal of the crew inspires Herman Melville's classic, Moby Dick.

The Essex was an aging vessel from Nantucket, which at the time possessed the largest whaling fleet in the world. The three-masted ship was 87 feet long and weighed 238 tons. She was captained by George Pollard Jr., at 28 already an experienced whaler.

By November 1820 the Essex had been at sea for over a year (three years out was not uncommon), surviving an early knockdown in an Atlantic squall and a rough passage around Cape Horn. Once the ship reached the fertile Pacific whaling grounds, however, things began looking up.

If the risks of whaling were many, the rewards could be great. Whale oil was prized as a lighting fuel. A successful voyage could make a captain wealthy, and meant a good payday for the crew as well. The Essex had taken its share of whales and on Nov. 20 appeared ready to take a few more when a pod was sighted off the starboard beam.

The ship's three remaining whaleboats — one had been destroyed by a whale's flukes during an earlier hunt — were dispatched for the kill. As the harpooning began, First Mate Owen Chase, commanding one of the whaleboats, looked back and saw a large sperm whale, which he estimated at 85 feet, approaching the Essex.

As he watched helplessly, the whale propelled itself into the ship with great force. Some crewmen on board were knocked off their feet by the collision, and Chase watched in disbelief as the whale drew back and rammed the ship again. This time the Essex was holed below the waterline, and doomed.

The crew organized what provisions they could and two days later abandoned ship aboard the three whaleboats. Twenty men left the Essex. Eight would ultimately survive the harrowing ordeal that played out over the next three months.

Fearing the "cannibalistic savages" of the South Seas islands (the irony of that reasoning will become apparent momentarily), Pollard decided to head for the more distant coastlines of Chile or Peru, first heading south to catch the expected favorable winds.

The winds, it turned out, weren't favorable at all, but Pollard was determined to reach South America. Eventually the three boats became separated from one another. One vanished and was never heard from again. The other two, one commanded by Pollard and the other by Chase, thrashed against the elements, and as the provisions dwindled and ran out, men began to die.

The first to go were given proper burials at sea, but as food ran out and the survivors on both boats became delirious from hunger, they turned to cannibalism. In Pollard's boat, straws were drawn to see who of the remaining four would be sacrificed so that the other three might survive. Pollard's young cousin, Owen Coffin, drew short straw. He was shot and eaten.

Only two men on that boat, Pollard and Charles Ramsdell, were alive when they were rescued by the whaling ship Dauphin after 95 days in an open boat. Chase and the survivors of his boat were picked up after 90 days. Three other men, who had chosen to remain on a small island shortly after the ordeal began, were also rescued.

What is known of the details of the ship's ill-fated voyage rests largely on Chase's memoir. He could offer no reason why the whale should attack the ship. But another young Nantucket whaleman, Herman Melville, drew his own conclusions. Moby Dick was a very, very smart whale.

Source: BBC

You might not have realized it, but the next great battle of cryptography began this month. It's not a political battle over export laws or key escrow or NSA eavesdropping, but an academic battle over who gets to be the creator of the next hash standard.

Hash functions are the most commonly used cryptographic primitive, and the most poorly understood. You can think of them as fingerprint functions: They take an arbitrary long data stream and return a fixed length, and effectively unique, string. The security comes from the fact that while it's easy to generate the fingerprint from a file, it's infeasible to go the other way and generate a file given a fingerprint.

Originally created to make digital signatures more efficient, hashes are now used to secure the very fundamentals of our information infrastructure: in password logins, secure web connections, encryption key management, virus and malware scanning, and almost every cryptographic protocol in current use. Without cryptographic hash functions, the internet would simply not work. At the same time, there isn't a good theory of hash functions. Unlike encryption algorithms, there are no secret keys involved; this makes it harder to mathematically define exactly what hash functions are.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, is holding a competition to replace the SHA family of hash functions. "SHA" stands for "Secure Hash Algorithm." It was developed by the NSA in 1993 to replace the commercial MD4 and MD5 algorithms, and has been updated several times since then. All the SHA algorithms are very similar, and have been increasingly under attack, so NIST wants to replace them.

The competition is important because, unlike other technological standards, committee design — balancing the interests of diverse constituents — isn't conducive to good security. Security is best when it's designed by expert teams and then subjected to public review. And cryptography is best when it's chosen by competition.

In 1997, NIST held a competition for a block cipher to replace DES. Fifteen candidates and three-and-a-half years later, Rijndael became the new Advanced Encryption Standard — AES. NIST is doing the same thing for what it's calling SHA-3 (not, for some unexplained reason, the Advanced Hash Standard or AHS).

The deadline was October 31, and NIST received 64 submissions. This isn't surprising — I predicted 80 — as most of the 15 AES submitters were professors, whose students at the time have become professors themselves, with their own students. (If NIST does a stream cipher competition in another ten years, they should expect about 256 submissions.) These submissions came from academia, from industry, and from hobbyists. CIO magazine recently interviewed one of the submitters, who is 15. Twenty-eight submissions have been made public by the submitters, and six of those have been broken.

NIST is going through all the submissions right now, making sure they are complete and proper. Their goal is to publish all accepted submissions by the end of November, in advance of the First Hash Function Candidate Conference, to be held in Belgium right after the Fast Software Encryption workshop in February.

The group expects to quickly make a first cut of algorithms — hopefully to about a dozen — and give the community a year of cryptanalysis before making a second cut in 2010. After another year of cryptanalysis, NIST will choose a winner in 2011. Expect a final standard by 2012.

My advice for software developers is to let the process run its course. While it's tempting to use the new cool algorithms in your designs, it's far too soon to trust any of them. This process is likely to result in all sorts of new research results in hash function security, and some real cryptanalytic surprises. Give the community a few years to figure out which ones are good and which aren't.

I've previously called this sort of thing a cryptographic demolition derby: The last one left standing wins. But that's only partially true. Certainly all the groups will spend the next few years trying to cryptanalyze each other, but in the end there will be a bunch of unbroken algorithms. NIST will select one based on performance and features.

NIST has stated that the goal of this process is not to choose the best standard but to choose a good standard. I think that's smart; in this process, the best is the enemy of the good. While there's no rush to choose a new standard — the SHA-2 algorithms will remain secure for the foreseeable future — we don't want to analyze the candidates forever.

Personally, I was part of a group of eight cryptographers that submitted Skein to the competition. A decade ago, writing Twofish and participating in the AES process was the most fun I had ever had in cryptography. These next few years promise to be even more fun.

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Bruce Schneier is chief security technology officer of BT. His new book is Schneier on Security.