WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange would face a secret, closed-door trial if he were extradited from Britain for sex-crime allegations in Sweden, his defense attorney argued in court on Monday.

In the first of what’s expected to be a two-day extradition hearing, defense attorney Geoffrey Robertson argued that Assange’s right to “open justice” would be denied if he were to be tried in Sweden where rape trials are often closed to the press and public at the court’s discretion.

“You cannot have a fair trial when the press and public are excluded from the court, and the Swedish custom is to exclude t...

A mixture of cornstarch and water best known for entertaining kindergartners could have plugged the spewing Macondo oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, say physicists.

Where regular drilling mud failed to stop the flow, oobleck — a complex fluid that seems to switch between liquid and solid — succeeded in simulations published Jan. 31 in Physical Review Letters.

“We couldn’t do a full scale experiment on a real well that was blowing out 50,000 barrels a day, but to the extent that you can do a smaller experiment in the laboratory it’s basically the same physics,” said physicist Jonathan Katz of...

After three years of planning, a missile on wheels designed to top 1,000 mph is finally under construction.

The team behind Bloodhound SSC hope to shatter the current land-speed record of 763.035 mph when it sends Royal Air Force pilot Andy Green streaking across a dry lake bed in South Africa within two years. The team is one of three hoping to exceed 800 mph.

Of the vehicles, the Bloodhound SSC is perhaps the most radical — which is saying something. The car, if it can be called that, features a jet engine and a rocket that produce 47,000 pounds of thrust. To put that in perspective, each of...

The $315 million that AOL is paying for The Huffington Post is roughly three times the valuation seen at its last capital raise two years ago, and is 10 times its 2010 revenues and roughly five times estimated-forward 2011 revenues. Those are all big numbers, but not insanely so, for what is clearly a big strategic move on the part of AOL. After all, AOL has a market cap of $2.3 billion: right now it still dwarfs HuffPo. That might not be true in a few years’ time, if HuffPo continues growing at its current rate and AOL continues to lose subscribers and revenues.

My feeling, then, is that...

The launch of the iPhone on Verizon adds to the mountain of evidence that you just can’t trust wireless carriers.

On the day that iPhone preorders began last week, Verizon quietly revised its policy on data management: Any smartphone customer who uses an “extraordinary amount of data” will see a slowdown in their data-transfer speeds for the remainder of the month and the next billing cycle.

It’s a bit of a bait-and-switch. One of Verizon’s selling points for its version of the iPhone is that it would come with an unlimited data plan — a marked contrast to AT&T, which eliminated its unlim...

George Hotz

Sony is threatening to sue anybody posting or “distributing” the first full-fledged jailbreak code for the 4-year-old PlayStation 3 gaming console.

What’s more, the company is demanding that a federal judge order Google to surrender the IP addresses and other identifying information (.pdf) of those who have viewed or commented about the jailbreak video on a private YouTube page. The game maker is also demanding that Twitter provide the identities of a host of hackers who first unveiled a limited version of the hack in December.

Sony’s aggressive pretrial discovery demands come in its ...

A U.S. security firm that claimed to have uncovered the real identity of Anonymous members responsible for a recent spate of web site attacks became a victim of Anonymous itself, when members of the online vigilante group breached the company’s network and stole more than 60,000 internal e-mails.

The group posted the e-mail spool Sunday on the Pirate Bay torrent site for anyone to download and sift through.

HBGary Federal, which does classified work for the U.S. federal government among other security work, claimed it had been working with the FBI to unmask hackers behind recent...

How does gaming culture affect the world? What’s the future of interactive storytelling? Can indie developers really thrive in an industry dominated by powerhouse publishers?

In a series of episodic videos called Game Theory, analyst Scott Steinberg wrestles with these questions and more, talking to major industry figures like Peter Molyneux (Fable) and Lorne Lanning (Oddworld) in order to get unfiltered perspectives that Steinberg says are hard to find elsewhere.

“Game Theory started as a result of frank discussions with both many of today’s top CEOs and the field’s most renowned designers, wh...

Angry Birds, the insanely popular multiplatform game, is introducing a new payment system to some Android customers for purchasing in-game content.

Angry Birds players will be able to use their real cash money to pay for virtual goods existing only within the game’s ecosystem. It’s like buying a shovel for your plot on Farmville with your MasterCard.

The title? “Bad Piggy Bank.”

Yes, it has a stupid name. And yes, it’s only for Android/Angry Birds customers on the Elisa mobile carrier network in Finland. But it’s more significant than you might think.

Now, users won’t have to whip out the plastic ...