Apple's iPhone software update going well so far

Remember the pandemonium the last time iPhone owners updated software?

It was a Friday. Apple's iPhone 3G, the latest version of its hot gadget, began going on sale around the world and the company made available its free iPhone software update. Then a collective howl started on the East Coast and spread west, going on for six hours or so as people who dutifully downloaded the software found they couldn't make phone calls, access their contacts or check their calendars.

That problem was fixed, but over the last 60 or so days, iPhone owners have complained about a series of issues such as dropped calls. Applications would stop working, music and video would disappear and many iPhone owners became experts at restoring data.

Today at 6 a.m. EST, Apple made available its latest iPhone software update, which is supposed to, among other things, fix eight security vulnerabilities and improve battery life for most users, ComputerWorld says.

Early signs show that the update process itself is smooth and phones are operating.

Scott Kleinberg is live blogging his iPhone updating process on the Chicago Tribune's Redeye site as if the update were the birth of a child.

"Updated and all I can say is Wow," he wrote at 11:08 Central time.

Luck Was Key to Dinosaurs’ Survival, Study Suggests

You might say that the dinosaurs were extremely unlucky 65 million years ago. Things were going along swimmingly and then, poof! that nasty asteroid came along and wiped them out.

But before that, apparently, the dinosaurs led a charmed life. A study published in Science suggests the dinosaurs ruled the roost for some 135 million years not so much because they were superior to the competition, but because they were lucky.

Mike Benton of the University of Bristol in England, Stephen L. Brusatte, now at Columbia University, and colleagues studied dinosaurs in relation to a major competing group of reptiles, the crurotarsans, the ancestors of the crocodiles. Both groups survived an extinction about 225 million years ago, but few of the crurotarsans made it through another mass extinction at the end of the Triassic, 200 million years ago.

Scientists had long thought that the reason for this was that the dinosaurs were somehow superior — they were able to outcompete the crurotarsans when the going got tough. But the new study indicates this was not the case.

The researchers developed a database of hundreds of skeletal features of more than 60 dinosaurs and crurotarsans, as well as a new family tree of both groups, and used them to determine evolutionary patterns. They found much more disparity among crurotarsans’ morphological features — a much broader array of shapes and forms.

“The assumption is that the diversity or range of body forms is more or less proportional to the number of modes of life that they’d occupy,” Dr. Benton said. So the finding shows that the crurotarsans were more diverse in terms of their lifestyle, diet and habitat — they filled more ecological niches and were, if anything, the more successful of the two groups in the late Triassic. “The dinosaurs didn’t find a way to squeeze into the crurotarsans’ role,” he said.

But then at the end of the Triassic, for some unknown reason the dinosaurs survived while almost all the crurotarsans did not. “There was a certain amount of luck involved,” Dr. Benton said. “One group got pretty much wiped out and another group soldiered on and took off. The dinosaurs finally got their chance.”

YouTube bans terrorism training videos

WASHINGTON (AP) — The popular video-sharing site YouTube has moved to purge terrorists training films and other videos that extremist groups might use to attract new members, an imperfect process that will rely on users to report objectionable videos.

It's sort of like the post Sept. 11 advice — if you see something, say something. It's nearly impossible to vet every video when 13 hours of new video are uploaded every few minutes.

A quick search on Google-owned YouTube on Friday, one day after the new policies were posted, turned up several videos on how to make bombs using, for instance, such household items as toilet bowl cleaner and tin foil.

In addition to barring terror training videos, the new YouTube community guidelines include bans on videos that incite others to commit violent acts, videos on activities such as how to make bombs and footage of sniper attacks. Previously, it had policies in place against showing people "getting hurt, attacked or humiliated," banning even clips OK for TV news shows.

YouTube has not identified specific videos on its site that led to the change, nor said exactly how it will choose those that are purged. YouTube does not deny that extremist groups could have used the site.

The Internet has become a powerful tool for terrorism recruitment. What was once conducted at secret training camps in Afghanistan is now available to anyone, anywhere because of the Web. Chat rooms are potent recruitment tools, but counterterrorism officials have found terrorist-sponsored videos are also key parts of al-Qaida's propaganda machine.

YouTube, large as it is, represents a fraction of the video content available on the Web. Videos can also be transmitted by e-mail or other means without ever appearing in a public forum like YouTube.

Google did not include its popular e-mail service, gmail, under the new YouTube guidelines, nor address whether it would ever try to limit Google searches for the same kind of material on other sites.

Even so, backers of the latest change hope it will blunt al-Qaida's strong media online campaign.

"It's good news if there are less of these on the Web," FBI spokesman Richard Kolko said. "But many of these jihadist videos appear on different Web sites around the world, and any time there is investigative or intelligence value we actively pursue it."

Researchers have found terror-training videos posted online in both English and Arabic. Videos of varying sophistication appear to show how to slit someone's throat or make suicide vests, said Bruce Hoffman, a counterterrorism expert and professor at Georgetown University. Others are violent anti-American speeches or montages of militants appearing to attack U.S. forces.

Hoffman said he does not know which of the worst videos appeared on YouTube.

"It's going to do nothing to take these videos off the Internet," said John Morris, an Internet free speech expert at the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Morris noted the availability of other terror-tinged videos on other sites. "This change isn't going to make this any different."

A year ago, a Homeland Security Department intelligence assessment said "the availability of easily accessible messages with targeted language may speed the radicalization process ... for those already susceptible to violent extremism."

But experts in the field debate whether shutting down extremist sites is effective. Keeping them online allows analysts and investigators to monitor what is being said and in some cases who is saying it.

"The reality is by shutting it down, it is more or less a game of whack-a-mole — it pops up somewhere else," said Frank Cilluffo, homeland security director at George Washington University. However, he said, forcing extremists to find other ways to post videos could give officials a better opportunity to monitor them.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, asked Google to ban videos from al-Qaida and other Islamist terrorist groups. Lieberman said the private sector has a role in protecting the United States from terrorism.

By banning these videos on YouTube, "Google will make a singularly important contribution to this important national effort," Lieberman wrote to Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt in May.

Lieberman spokeswoman Leslie Phillips said Lieberman hopes other host sites will institute similar policies. "This is an ongoing debate," she said.

YouTube spokesman Chris Dale would not respond to questions about Lieberman's appeal but instead said YouTube regularly updates its policies regarding content. Without announcement, YouTube included a link to the new restrictions at the bottom of administrative notices on its home page.