A new Canadian study adds to the evidence that punishing troubled teens within the juvenile-justice system exacerbates their bad behavior.

The NHL has asked a bankruptcy judge to throw out Canadian billionaire Jim Balsillie’s bid to buy the Phoenix Coyotes based on the league’s overwhelming rejection of him as a potential owner.

When General Motors emerged from bankruptcy, it was freed of obligations for polluted properties that will require millions of dollars to clean up. GM’s unusual, government-engineered bankruptcy allowed the Detroit automaker to emerge as a new company — and shed billions in liabilities, including claims that governments had against GM for polluting

Yes, the rumours are true.

Theoren Fleury really does want to make a comeback in the National Hockey League.

The Flames legend confirmed to the Herald's George Johnson Friday night that he wants to give it one more shot.

“I honestly don’t give a s–t what people think of me. I don’t. People say I should get a life? Hey, worry about your own lives. This is mine. When you’ve gone through the 12 stages of Alcoholics Anoymous, you realize that you’ve got to be okay with yourself. I am.

“I’ve come to the realization that 50 per cent of the people like me, and 50 per cent don’t. Guess what, I’m hanging out with the 50 per cent who do.

“I’m a busy guy. I’m not doing this because I have nothing else in my life. I do public speaking. I work with native people. With the Dream Centre. I’m doing this partly because I didn’t go out the way I wanted to. And partly because I’ve watched this for five years and believe in my heart that there’s still a place for me.’’

 

To read the full story, check out Saturday's Herald.

Theoren Fleury will attempt a comeback to the NHL, TSN reported on its website Friday.

Cocaine played a role in the death of television pitchman Billy Mays, a Florida autopsy report says.

Sometimes we get so set in our ways that we don’t open ourselves to the potential of the new. When Jimmy Fallon took the stage of Late Night earlier this year, all that was visible was years of ruined SNL skits and a couple of movie bombs. But no one could have ever imagined that Jimmy would be able to outdo Conan O’Brien.

The Saskatchewan Roughriders will look to make an early claim for top spot in the CFL West on Friday night, while B.C. just wants to establish some momentum after a disappointing start to the season.

Unintended duplicate files can chew up a lot of disk space. Auslogics Duplicate File Finder will help you find dupes even when the file names don’t match.

By scanning and compiling the MD5 hash of of each file it scans, Auslogics Duplicate File Finder can dig through your disks and find duplicates with mismatched names. Multiple copies of music and other media, even when oddly named, will be matched up. You can filter by file size and file type. Matching can be contingent on file name, date and size, and the file hash.

If you have a favorite tool for finding duplicate files, let’s hear about it in the comments. Auslogics Duplicate File Finder is freeware, Windows only.

Jeremy Roenick officially ended a 20-year NHL playing career Thursday, announcing his retirement in San Jose.

Push. It’s not just a verb that sends people careening down a flight of stairs. It’s also not just for guys in suits diddling on BlackBerrys. You hear it featured on new iPhone apps every week. So, what is it?

Well, push describes a lot of things. Push is simply an action. Versus, say, pulling. Maybe that's horribly abstract, so try this: If information shows up on your phone or neural implant or messaging program without you (or your wares) asking for it—that's push. The info is pushed to you, versus you pulling it from the source. There are tons of ways push can be (and is) used.

Email’s a pretty good starting point for grasping the difference between push and the other stuff. You probably know good ol’ POP3—you log into your mail server and pull down new messages. Maybe it's on a frequent schedule, so it feels automatic, even instant, but you're still reaching out to the mail server every time to check and see if there's new mail to download.

IMAP is a little fancier than POP, where all of your folders and email are the same on all of your computers, phones and other gadgets, and any change you make on one shows up on the other, since it's all happening on a remote server somewhere. But with the standard setup, it's still the same deal—your mail program has to log in, see what's new, and pull it down. IMAP does have a pretty neat trick though, an optional feature called IMAP IDLE, that does push pretty well—it's what the Palm Pre uses for Gmail, for instance. Essentially, with IMAP IDLE, the mail server can tell whatever mail app that you’ve got new messages waiting, without you (or your app) hammering the refresh button over and over. When the app knows there’s new messages, it connects and pulls them down, so it gives you just about the speed of push, without matching the precise mechanism.

While different systems do things differently (obvs), what true push services have in common is that they generally insert a middleman between you and the information source.

RIM’s setup for the BlackBerry is probably the most sophisticated. When your BlackBerry registers with the carrier (which has to support BlackBerry), the details are handed to RIM’s network operating center, so the NOC knows where to send your mail. The NOC watches your mail server, keeps tabs on the phone’s location, and pushes email through to your phone whenever you get new stuff.

What makes it push is that your phone's not actually polling a server for new messages to pull—it only receives them when they hit your inbox, and are then pushed to your phone by RIM's servers. This means you save a lot of battery life that'd be wasted by making the phone constantly hit the servers for updates. The flipside is that when RIM’s servers blow up, you don’t get email, since it's all routed through their system—hence the other panic that grips dudes in suits once every few months lately.

The other biggie is Microsoft, who has Direct Push, part of Exchange’s ActiveSync. It’s architected a little bit differently, so it doesn't need the precise kind of data about where your phone is that RIM's NOCs do: The phone or whatever you've got sends an HTTPS with a long lifespan to the Exchange server—if new mail arrives before it dies, the Exchange tells your device there's new stuff, so it should start a sync. After it syncs, the device sends out another long HTTPS request, starting it all over again.

Apple’s weak-sauce substitute for multitasking works pretty similarly: The developer has something its wants to send an iPhone, when its application isn’t actually running, like an IM. It sends the notification to Apple’s push servers, which send the notification to the phone through a “persistent IP connection” the phone maintains with the servers. This connection, which is only maintained when push notifications are turned on, is needed to locate the phone, but still doesn’t draw as much power as constantly pinging the mail server.

Of course, those aren’t the only push systems around, and it’s only getting more and more important as stuff gets shifted to the cloud. We haven’t mentioned Android and Google Chrome, but both utilize push (or will) in different ways. Suffice it to say, Google Sync will soon be a major player in this game. But basically, all kinds of different data can be pushed—calendars, contacts, browser data, hell, even IM is a kind of push—and they all work more or less the same broad way. Just don't ask us why there isn't push Gmail on the iPhone yet.

Still something you wanna know? Send questions about pushing, shoving and pancake massacres to tips@gizmodo.com, with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.

Twitter, Facebook, and LiveJournal have all been experiencing outages (Twitter) and slow-downs (Facebook and LiveJournal) all morning according to the New York Times (and, well, our own experience along with countless other sites and users around the internet). From the sound of things, it appears to have been a DDoS attack (those seem to be going around lately), but it only serves to highlight the risks of keeping your data in the cloud we’ve mentioned in the past. Photo by edwheeler. [NYT]

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Twitter, the popular and ubiquitous (as long as you’re over 25) microblogging service was down for several hours on Thursday.

“Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote in the site’s official blog today.

The outage began at around 8:00 am EDT, and continued until around 11:00 am, when the Twitter Status Blog was updated to say, “Update: the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack.”

The site is still difficult to reach, but has returned to a more stable state. Expectedly, the top trending topics on the freshly-restored site include “DDoS,” “Denial-of-Service,” “Twitter Status,” and the names of several Twitter clients such as TweetDeck, and UberTwitter which were also unresponsive this morning.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009

(Windows/Mac/Linux): Encrypting a message is an excellent way to protect it from prying eyes. What if you want to protect it against prying eyes and make it disappear? Expiring-message service Vanish can help.

Alarmed by trends in US case law where individuals were forced to give up their encryption keys and by the brutality of regimes abroad that did the same in less tactful ways, the creators of Vanish wanted to create a method of encryption where your encrypted data expired and could in no way be retrieved.

We created “self-destructing data” to try to address this problem. Our prototype system, called Vanish, shares some properties with existing encryption systems like PGP, but there are also some major differences.

First, someone using Vanish to “encrypt/encapsulate” information, like an email, never learns the encryption key. Second, there is a pre-specified timeout associated with each encrypted/encapsulated messages.

Prior to the timeout, anyone can read the encrypted/encapsulated message. After the timeout, no one can read that message, because the encryption key is lost due to a set of both natural and programmed processes. It is therefore impossible for anyone to decrypt/decapsulate that email after the timer expires.

How do they achieve this guaranteed destruction? The key that is generated each time you create a unique Vanish message is shared across Bittorrent networks—unlinked in anyway to your identity—and temporarily stored in a distributed hash table. By the nature of the Bittorrent network your key can exist in increments of 8 hours depending on how long you want the Vanish servers to keep your message alive.

Once your message reaches the expiration date the number of users in the Bittorrent network carrying the necessary parts of your key begins to degrade and your message essentially disintegrates. You can never decrypt the message or be compelled to share the key because no key even exists. Check out the following video for an overview.

Vanish is available as a web-based demo, but they recommend you download the Java-based Vanish System for a more powerful and customizable experience—you can increase the size of your key and tweak other settings with the download. The Firefox plug-in makes it easy to quickly create Vanish-encrypted messages for web-based email and other online services. Vanish is an open-source and free project available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Scientology founder L Ron Hubbard made up his qualifications along with his religion, as shown by secret documents released to the Times.