dawn

Google lets you remove your Wi-Fi info from its location database, iTunes Match goes live, and the Department of Justice pushes Congress to make it a felony to use a fake name on a social network or lie on a dating-site profile.

Links from Tuesday's episode of Loaded:

Four years after launch from Cape Canaveral, NASA's ion-drive Dawn spacecraft is finally in orbit around the asteroid Vesta, studying the second largest body in the rubble-strewn belt between Mars and Jupiter in unprecedented detail. Pictures released today show a strangely tortured world with huge parallel grooves separating the heavily cratered northern hemisphere from smoother terrain in the south dominated by the chaotic remnants of a catastrophic impact.

"These photos have been already a great revelation to the team about what the surface is like," Christopher Russell, the mission's principal investigator, told reporters today. "We … Read more

China will install CPUs developed by government-backed research institutions into a test supercomputer by the end of 2011.

The Loongson microchips will underpin the Dawning 6000 high-performance computing system, which is scheduled to be available for tasks as early as summer, China's state-owned People's Daily Online publication reported.

The Dawning 6000 will use up to 10,000 Loongson microchips and will eventually have a computing speed of more than 1,000 trillion operations a second, according to the article. (1,000 trillion operations are equal to a petaflop.)

For perspective, the Chinese Tianhe-1A leads the Top500 list of … Read more