John Mahoney

To the unconverted, Twitter is just a way to deliver mundane details of your life to many friends at once. The free service(
Twitter.com) is a social-networking site in which you post updates, or “tweets,” to a page where friends who “follow” you can view them. But since it lets users post and receive tweets via text messages, it’s actually a powerful platform for getting things done on the go.

It's official. The iPhone has gotten a birthday facelift, and the juicy details are all in line with the rumors we've been hearing all month—3G, GPS, an integrated app store, and a glossy new plastic back in black or old-school Apple white. Perhaps most surprising is a substantial price drop—down to $199 for the 8GB version and $299 for the 16GB (price drops were hinted at, but no amounts). Here's what else Apple campers will be dreaming about when they pitch their tents prior to the July 11 launch date.

At this very moment, Steve Jobs is on stage in San Francisco where he is expected to unveil the next version of the iPhone. High-speed 3G data connectivity, on-board GPS and a fully developed application store are all likely to be in the cards.

For the past two weeks, NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has been broadcasting a wealth of incredible images from its landing site in the Martian arctic. I've been refreshing the mission's raw photo stream obsessively—no little green men yet, just gorgeous panoramas and detailed closeups of the most foreign of all foreign lands. Being a bit of a camera geek, I was quite curious as to what kind of hardware was behind the action, and naturally, Phoenix has some pretty sweet gear on board to make it all possible.

Over the long weekend, the servers of the Internet TV site Revision3.com were brought down by what is called a "denial-of-service" attack (DoS)—one of the most common methods used to disrupt the operations of a Web site or server by flooding it with an overload of simultaneous connections. These attacks are not uncommon, but in a fascinating blog post written by Revision3's CEO Jim Louderback today, he reveals that the source of this particular attack was not a pimply basement hacker with a grudge, but a major anti-piracy organization called MediaDefender whose clients include all the major entertainment companies and the RIAA. The hitch? Revision3 is a perfectly legitimate business that does not deal in pirated content.

In the first ever instance of a spacecraft photographing the landing of another craft on Mars, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured this incredible image of NASA's Phoenix Lander making its descent on Sunday. Phoenix landed successfully and has already begun transmitting images from its landing zone in Mars's northern polar region, where it will be conducting meteorological and geological surveys over the course of its three-month mission.

When you're vacationing on a beach, nothing beats an underwater camera; but watertight cases are pricey and disposables have lousy quality. Lucky for you, the editors of PopSci have come up with an easy workaround using something there's probably already plenty of in your suitcase (hint: not socks). That's right, thanks to the magic of unlubricated condoms, you too can transform your point-and-shoot into an waterproof wonder. The set-up is easy enough, but as John and Doug demonstrate, it really does help to have a partner lend a hand.

The Soviet Union has been history for going on 17 years now, but there is one place where the former superpower continues to live on, even with the semi-endorsement of a major international standards agency. That place is of course the Internet, where for 500 rubles (around $25) per year, it is still possible to own a little chunk of Soviet real estate by parking your website at an official ".su" domain name.

Woe is the Internet on April 1. For it is on this day where sites large and small rack their brains for the perfect Fools' Day prank, briefly vindicating those that continue to hold the belief that the Web serves as nothing more than a sloppy ocean of untruths and nonsense.

In today's gadget blogosphere, there are few if any new products that aren't upon release subjected to an immediate "unboxing"--a thorough and, some may say, pathologically obsessive series of photographs documenting exactly what is implied by the name: taking a shiny new object out of its multiple layers of packaging, step by exhaustive step.

For those leaning more toward the "pathologically obsessive" reasoning here (there are in fact entire blogs dedicated to the practice), the question is: Why does this happen?

When Asus unveiled their ultraportable, ultra-cute EeePC in October of last year, they may not have anticipated launching a whole new product category, but judging by the overwhelmingly favorable reaction of users online and strong sales numbers, that's exactly what they've done. The slimmed-down, no-nonsense, Linux-powered ultraportable category that the Eee currently presides over, and that Everex's recently released Cloudbook hopes to capitalize on, is just one instance of a greater tech trend we're seeing across the board: an emphasis on shrinking form-factors and streamlined usage. In an industry that has always been about more power, more size, more capability—more everything—this is notable.

Last night at approximately 10:26 EST, after a long buildup of preparations, the Navy took the controversial step of shooting down a dead U.S. reconnaissance satellite from its low-Earth orbit. The satellite, which is about the size of a school bus, was destroyed to prevent a potentially hazardous impact with Earth, the military has said. It was moving faster than 17,000 mph at an altitude of 133 nautical miles above the Pacific when a modified SM-3 anti-ballistic missile launched from the USS Lake Erie, a Ticonderoga-class AEGIS missile cruiser, reportedly made impact.

We first saw the Livescribe Pulse "smartpen" in action at the DEMO conference last month, but today CEO Jim Marggraff stopped by to give us a closer look.

When you use the Pulse to write on paper printed with a special microdot pattern, it recognizes its exact relative location on the page and captures a digital file of your pen strokes (complete with full character and word recognition) along with audio. The pen can also then interact with written words on the page in many interesting ways, including live audio translations into multiple languages of any word you tap.

As we reported from CES, HD-DVD's death knell as a viable high-definition disc format began to ring loudly when Warner Bros., one of the format's largest major supporters, announced that they would move exclusively to Blu-ray in early 2008. Today, Netflix and Best Buy also declared HD-DVD dead to them—the former will completely phase them out of its rental business, and the latter will now exclusively recommend Blu-ray players to its customers.

If you've tinkered with bikes in the last decade or so, chances are that sheldonbrown.com has proven incredibly useful to you—it's practically the Bible of bicycle mechanics, repair, maintenance and appreciation on the Web. I was saddened to read today that its keeper and one of the online cycling world's most charismatic presences passed away on Sunday of a heart attack.