Cuba won’t let blogger travel to New York to accept award

A Cuban blogger who has criticized her government has been denied permission to travel to New York to pick up a prestigious journalism award Wednesday. Yoani Sanchez writes a blog that gets more than 1 million hits from around the globe every month, and Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world last year

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Iranian opposition leader’s office raided, shut down

Iranian authorities raided and shut down the offices of opposition leader Mehdi Karrubi, an Iranian news agency reported Tuesday, one day after another prominent reformer’s office was raided. Brandishing a court order, representatives of the prosecutor entered the building in the Tehran neighborhood of Jamshidieh at 3 p.m., a spokesman for Karrubi’s party said, according to the Iranian Labor News Agency

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Dangerous Internet search terms grow with cybercrime, financial crisis

Cyber criminals are setting snares that move at the speed of news. Panda Security, a Spain-based antivirus maker, has been monitoring an onslaught of links with malicious software, or “malware,” on Twitter by tagging hot current topics such as the Air France crash, the NBA finals, “American Idol” runner-up Adam Lambert and the new iPhone.

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Tetris turns 25: Is it the next Olympic sport?

It’s amazing how a huge global phenomenon can begin. In 1984, Russian mathematician Alexey Pajitnov was playing with one of his favorite puzzles when he had an inspiration: How about creating a computer version Pajitnov wrote the program in his spare time, simplifying the idea to make it easier for those of us who aren’t math geniuses. He used shapes made of four squares — hence “Tetris,” which comes from the Greek word for four, “Tetra.” In the game, players must position and stack blocky shapes to fill a grid without leaving spaces in between.

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The Sims 3: Getting Real

There’s a professor at Oxford University who makes a compelling argument that if humans survive long enough to create conscious computers, it’s likely that all of us, right now, are simply historical simulations the computers created for their amusement. After playing with The Sims 3 — the latest sequel in the mega-popular Sims franchise — I believe that prof. Ich bin ein Sim

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A Brief History of the White House Easter Egg Roll

While much of the country spends the day after Easter sweeping up plastic grass and nursing a Peeps overdose, the White House welcomes an invasion of children. Thousands of young people will stream onto the South Lawn this Easter Monday for the White House Easter Egg Roll, one of the oldest presidential traditions and the largest annual event held at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

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Conficker wakes up, updates via P2P, drops payload

The Conficker worm is finally doing something–updating via peer-to-peer between infected computers and dropping a mystery payload on infected computers, Trend Micro said on Wednesday. Researchers were analyzing the code of the software that is being dropped onto infected computers but suspect that it is a keystroke logger or some other program designed to steal sensitive data off the machine, said David Perry, global director of security education at Trend Micro. The software appeared to be a .sys component hiding behind a rootkit, which is software that is designed to hide the fact that a computer has been compromised, according to Trend Micro.

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