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"A Mosque Among The Stars was the first anthology that dealt with the subject of Muslim characters and/or Islamic themes and Science Fiction. It was edited by me (Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad) and the Canadian Muslim author Ahmad Khan. It came out in 2007. Now that it has been years since it was released in printed form, we have decided to release A Mosque Among The Stars to the public as a Creative Commons Licensed (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs) book. This means that you can download it for free and share with others as long as you dont make any changes to it and also do it for free. So without much further ado here is where you can download the book."

Android applications downloaded by as many as 185 million users can expose end users' online banking and social networking credentials, e-mail and instant-messaging contents because the programs use inadequate encryption protections, computer scientists have found. The researchers identified 41 applications in Google's Play Market that leaked sensitive data as it traveled between handsets running the Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android and webservers for banks and other online services. By connecting the devices to a local area network that used a variety of well-known exploits, some of them available online, the scientists were able to defeat the secure sockets layer and transport layer security protocols implemented by the apps. Their research paper didn't identify the programs, except to say they have been downloaded from 39.5 million and 185 million times, based on Google statistics.

Eureqa (pronounced "eureka") is a software tool for detecting equations and hidden mathematical relationships in your data. Its goal is to identify the simplest mathematical formulas which could describe the underlying mechanisms that produced the data. Eureqa is free to download and use. Below you will find the program download, video tutorial, user forum, and other and reference materials.

Science-themed e-books and mobile apps are beginning to account for a significant segment of the digital marketplace - and that segment is growing. But as the supply of ebooks/apps about science continues to swell, it is becoming increasingly difficult to not only keep tabs on new releases, but to determine which releases are worthy of your attention - let alone your hard-earned cash, or the space on your phone/tablet/reader's hard drive.

"Big Data is watching you. And it's big business. Credit card companies, for instance, are selling the data about what you're consuming. So why is it that you, as the person manufacturing the data, has no say over who's using it or what they're doing with it? "That's got to change," argues Rick Smolan who co-authored the book The Human Face of Big Data (available for download as a tab let app here) an ambitious project that aims to capture the "men, women, and children whose lives are being transformed by this data revolution.""

Last year Golan Levin's son decided to build a car. Aside from the minor inconvenience of being 4 years old, the younger Levin faced an engineering challenge. His Tinkertoys, which he wanted to use for the vehicle's frame, wouldn't attach to his K'Nex, the pieces he wanted to use for the wheels. It took his father, an artist, hacker and professor at Carnegie Mellon, a year to solve that problem. In the process he cracked open a much larger one: In an age when anyone can share, download and create not just digital files but also physical things, thanks to the proliferation of cheap 3-D printers, are companies at risk of losing control of the objects they sell?

For those of you who are addicted to merge new technologies to interface-archeology here is a new 'Tworsekey'.  A vintage looking tweeting device which takes input in the form of morse code and tweets the output. It features arduino and the ethernet shield.  The sketch can be downloaded from here.  Needless to say that the design is open sourced.

Inside NYU art professor David Darts' black metal lunchbox, painted with a white skull and crossbones, is the PirateBox - a tiny Linux server, a wireless router, and a battery. Turn the PirateBox on and you have a self-contained mobile communications and file-sharing device, whereby those in the vicinity can upload and download files securely and anonymously. (See this 2011 Ars Technica story for photos and details.) Built with free and open source software and openly licensed itself, the PirateBox has inspired a number of other projects, including Alan Levine's Storybox and now Jason Griffey's LibraryBox.

Malware researchers investigating a Trojan linked in a gaming forum as a how-to video for Diablo III got a surprise when the hacker started chatting with them-through a feature in the malware. Franklin Zhao & Jason Zhou of antivirus company AVG were looking for keylogging code in the malware with a debugger after downloading it to a virtual machine when a chat box popped up. The hacker asked, in Chinese, "What are you doing? Why are you researching my Trojan?"