'Anonymous' hackers target US security think tank (AP) : Technet

'Anonymous' hackers target US security think tank (AP)
Decades later, a Cold War secret is revealed (AP)
3 New Ways to Connect With Content That Interests You (Mashable)
Web gambling gets boost from Obama administration (Reuters)
Wives in ads, kids on the bus as GOP voting nears (AP)
In China, a daring few challenge one-child limit (AP)
NORAD Santa trackers having record holiday (AP)
Kindle Fire updates boost performance and navigation (Appolicious)
Global Hotels, Broken Down By Social Media Rewards [INFOGRAPHIC] (Mashable)
iPad 3 launch rumored for Steve Jobs' Feb 24 birthday (Digital Trends)
Top 10 Space Stories of 2011 (Mashable)

'Anonymous' hackers target US security think tank (AP)

Posted: 25 Dec 2011 04:29 PM PST

By CASSANDRA VINOGRAD and RAMIT PLUSHNICK-MASTI, Associated Press Cassandra Vinograd And Ramit Plushnick-masti, Associated Press – Sun Dec 25, 7:29 pm ET

LONDON – The loose-knit hacking movement "Anonymous" claimed Sunday to have stolen thousands of credit card numbers and other personal information belonging to clients of U.S.-based security think tank Stratfor. One hacker said the goal was to pilfer funds from individuals' accounts to give away as Christmas donations, and some victims confirmed unauthorized transactions linked to their credit cards.

Anonymous boasted of stealing Stratfor's confidential client list, which includes entities ranging from Apple Inc. to the U.S. Air Force to the Miami Police Department, and mining it for more than 4,000 credit card numbers, passwords and home addresses.

Austin, Texas-based Stratfor provides political, economic and military analysis to help clients reduce risk, according to a description on its YouTube page. It charges subscribers for its reports and analysis, delivered through the web, emails and videos. The company's main website was down, with a banner saying the "site is currently undergoing maintenance."

Proprietary information about the companies and government agencies that subscribe to Stratfor's newsletters did not appear to be at any significant risk, however, with the main threat posed to individual employees who had subscribed.

"Not so private and secret anymore?" Anonymous taunted in a message on Twitter, promising that the attack on Stratfor was just the beginning of a Christmas-inspired assault on a long list of targets.

Anonymous said the client list it had already posted was a small slice of the 200 gigabytes worth of plunder it stole from Stratfor and promised more leaks. It said it was able to get the credit card details in part because Stratfor didn't bother encrypting them — an easy-to-avoid blunder which, if true, would be a major embarrassment for any security-related company.

Fred Burton, Stratfor's vice president of intelligence, said the company had reported the intrusion to law enforcement and was working with them on the investigation.

Stratfor has protections in place meant to prevent such attacks, he said.

"But I think the hackers live in this kind of world where once they fixate on you or try to attack you it's extraordinarily difficult to defend against," Burton said.

Hours after publishing what it claimed was Stratfor's client list, Anonymous tweeted a link to encrypted files online with names, phone numbers, emails, addresses and credit card account details.

"Not as many as you expected? Worry not, fellow pirates and robin hoods. These are just the `A's," read a message posted online that encouraged readers to download a file of the hacked information.

The attack is "just another in a massive string of breaches we've seen this year and in years past," said Josh Shaul, chief technology officer of Application Security Inc., a New York-based provider of database security software.

Still, companies that shared secret information with Stratfor in order to obtain threat assessments might worry that the information is among the 200 gigabytes of data that Anonymous claims to have stolen, he said.

"If an attacker is walking away with that much email, there might be some very juicy bits of information that they have," Shaul said.

Lt. Col. John Dorrian, public affairs officer for the Air Force, said that "for obvious reasons" the Air Force doesn't discuss specific vulnerabilities, threats or responses to them.

"The Air Force will continue to monitor the situation and, as always, take appropriate action as necessary to protect Air Force networks and information," he said in an email.

Miami Police Department spokesman Sgt. Freddie Cruz Jr. said that he could not confirm that the agency was a client of Stratfor, and he said he had not received any information about a security breach involving the police department.

Anonymous also linked to images online that it suggested were receipts for charitable donations made by the group manipulating the credit card data it stole.

"Thank you! Defense Intelligence Agency," read the text above one image that appeared to show a transaction summary indicating that an agency employee's information was used to donate $250 to a non-profit.

One receipt — to the American Red Cross — had Allen Barr's name on it.

Barr, of Austin, Texas, recently retired from the Texas Department of Banking and said he discovered last Friday that a total of $700 had been spent from his account. Barr, who has spent more than a decade dealing with cybercrime at banks, said five transactions were made in total.

"It was all charities, the Red Cross, CARE, Save the Children. So when the credit card company called my wife she wasn't sure whether I was just donating," said Barr, who wasn't aware until a reporter with the AP called that his information had been compromised when Stratfor's computers were hacked.

"It made me feel terrible. It made my wife feel terrible. We had to close the account."

Wishing everyone a "Merry LulzXMas" — a nod to its spinoff hacking group Lulz Security — Anonymous also posted a link on Twitter to a site containing the email, phone number and credit number of a U.S. Homeland Security employee.

The employee, Cody Sultenfuss, said he had no warning before his details were posted.

"They took money I did not have," he told The Associated Press in a series of emails, which did not specify the amount taken. "I think `Why me?' I am not rich."

But the breach doesn't necessarily pose a risk to owners of the credit cards. A card user who suspects fraudulent activity on his or her card can contact the credit card company to dispute the charge.

Stratfor said in an email to members, signed by Stratfor Chief Executive George Friedman and passed on to AP by subscribers, that it had hired a "leading identity theft protection and monitoring service" on behalf of the Stratfor members affected by the attack. The company said it will send another email on services for affected members by Wednesday.

Stratfor acknowledged that an "unauthorized party" had revealed personal information and credit card data of some of its members.

The company had sent another email to subscribers earlier in the day saying it had suspended its servers and email after learning that its website had been hacked.

One member of the hacking group, who uses the handle AnonymousAbu on Twitter, claimed that more than 90,000 credit cards from law enforcement, the intelligence community and journalists — "corporate/exec accounts of people like Fox" News — had been hacked and used to "steal a million dollars" and make donations.

It was impossible to verify where credit card details were used. Fox News was not on the excerpted list of Stratfor members posted online, but other media organizations including MSNBC and Al-Jazeera English appeared in the file.

Anonymous warned it has "enough targets lined up to extend the fun fun fun of LulzXmas through the entire next week."

The group has previously claimed responsibility for attacks on credit card companies Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc., eBay Inc.'s PayPal, as well as other groups in the music industry and the Church of Scientology.

____________

Plushnick-Masti reported from Houston. Associated Press writers Jennifer Kay in Miami and Daniel Wagner in Washington, D.C. also contributed to this report.

_____________

Cassandra Vinograd can be reached at http://twitter.com/CassVinograd

Decades later, a Cold War secret is revealed (AP)

Posted: 25 Dec 2011 07:26 AM PST

By HELEN O'NEILL, AP Special Correspondent Helen O'neill, Ap Special Correspondent – Sun Dec 25, 10:26 am ET

DANBURY, Conn. – For more than a decade they toiled in the strange, boxy-looking building on the hill above the municipal airport, the building with no windows (except in the cafeteria), the building filled with secrets.

They wore protective white jumpsuits, and had to walk through air-shower chambers before entering the sanitized "cleanroom" where the equipment was stored.

They spoke in code.

Few knew the true identity of "the customer" they met in a smoke-filled, wood-paneled conference room where the phone lines were scrambled. When they traveled, they sometimes used false names.

At one point in the 1970s there were more than 1,000 people in the Danbury area working on The Secret. And though they worked long hours under intense deadlines, sometimes missing family holidays and anniversaries, they could tell no one — not even their wives and children — what they did.

They were engineers, scientists, draftsmen and inventors — "real cloak-and-dagger guys," says Fred Marra, 78, with a hearty laugh.

He is sitting in the food court at the Danbury Fair mall, where a group of retired co-workers from the former Perkin-Elmer Corp. gather for a weekly coffee. Gray-haired now and hard of hearing, they have been meeting here for 18 years. They while away a few hours nattering about golf and politics, ailments and grandchildren. But until recently, they were forbidden to speak about the greatest achievement of their professional lives.

"Ah, Hexagon," Ed Newton says, gleefully exhaling the word that stills feels almost treasonous to utter in public.

It was dubbed "Big Bird" and it was considered the most successful space spy satellite program of the Cold War era. From 1971 to 1986 a total of 20 satellites were launched, each containing 60 miles of film and sophisticated cameras that orbited the earth snapping vast, panoramic photographs of the Soviet Union, China and other potential foes. The film was shot back through the earth's atmosphere in buckets that parachuted over the Pacific Ocean, where C-130 Air Force planes snagged them with grappling hooks.

The scale, ambition and sheer ingenuity of Hexagon KH-9 was breathtaking. The fact that 19 out of 20 launches were successful (the final mission blew up because the booster rockets failed) is astonishing.

So too is the human tale of the 45-year-old secret that many took to their graves.

Hexagon was declassified in September. Finally Marra, Newton and others can tell the world what they worked on all those years at "the office."

"My name is Al Gayhart and I built spy satellites for a living," announced the 64-year-old retired engineer to the stunned bartender in his local tavern as soon as he learned of the declassification. He proudly repeats the line any chance he gets.

"It was intensely demanding, thrilling and the greatest experience of my life," says Gayhart, who was hired straight from college and was one of the youngest members of the Hexagon "brotherhood".

He describes the white-hot excitement as teams pored over hand-drawings and worked on endless technical problems, using "slide-rules and advanced degrees" (there were no computers), knowing they were part of such a complicated space project. The intensity would increase as launch deadlines loomed and on the days when "the customer" — the CIA and later the Air Force — came for briefings. On at least one occasion, former President George H.W. Bush, who was then CIA director, flew into Danbury for a tour of the plant.

Though other companies were part of the project — Eastman Kodak made the film and Lockheed Corp. built the satellite — the cameras and optics systems were all made at Perkin-Elmer, then the biggest employer in Danbury.

"There were many days we arrived in the dark and left in the dark," says retired engineer Paul Brickmeier, 70.

He recalls the very first briefing on Hexagon after Perkin-Elmer was awarded the top secret contract in 1966. Looking around the room at his 30 or so colleagues, Brickmeier thought, "How on Earth is this going to be possible?"

One thing that made it possible was a hiring frenzy that attracted the attention of top engineers from around the Northeast. Perkin-Elmer also commissioned a new 270,000-square-foot building for Hexagon — the boxy one on the hill.

Waiting for clearance was a surreal experience as family members, neighbors and former employers were grilled by the FBI, and potential hires were questioned about everything from their gambling habits to their sexuality.

"They wanted to make sure we couldn't be bribed," Marra says.

Clearance could take up to a year. During that time, employees worked on relatively minor tasks in a building dubbed "the mushroom tank" — so named because everyone was in the dark about what they had actually been hired for.

Joseph Prusak, 76, spent six months in the tank. When he was finally briefed on Hexagon, Prusak, who had worked as an engineer on earlier civil space projects, wondered if he had made the biggest mistake of his life.

"I thought they were crazy," he says. "They envisaged a satellite that was 60-foot long and 30,000 pounds and supplying film at speeds of 200 inches per second. The precision and complexity blew my mind."

Several years later, after numerous successful launches, he was shown what Hexagon was capable of — an image of his own house in suburban Fairfield.

"This was light years before Google Earth," Prusak said. "And we could clearly see the pool in my backyard."

There had been earlier space spy satellites — Corona and Gambit. But neither had the resolution or sophistication of Hexagon, which took close-range pictures of Soviet missiles, submarine pens and air bases, even entire battalions on war exercises.

According to the National Reconnaissance Office, a single Hexagon frame covered a ground distance of 370 nautical miles, about the distance from Washington to Cincinnati. Early Hexagons averaged 124 days in space, but as the satellites became more sophisticated, later missions lasted twice as long.

"At the height of the Cold War, our ability to receive this kind of technical intelligence was incredible," says space historian Dwayne Day. "We needed to know what they were doing and where they were doing it, and in particular if they were preparing to invade Western Europe. Hexagon created a tremendous amount of stability because it meant American decision makers were not operating in the dark."

Among other successes, Hexagon is credited with providing crucial information for the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1970s.

From the outset, secrecy was a huge concern, especially in Danbury, where the intense activity of a relatively small company that had just been awarded a massive contract (the amount was not declassified) made it obvious that something big was going on. Inside the plant, it was impossible to disguise the gigantic vacuum thermal chamber where cameras were tested in extreme conditions that simulated space. There was also a "shake, rattle and roll room" to simulate conditions during launch.

"The question became, how do you hide an elephant?" a National Reconnaissance Office report stated at the time. It decided on a simple response: "What elephant?" Employees were told to ignore any questions from the media, and never confirm the slightest detail about what they worked on.

But it was impossible to conceal the launches at Vandenberg Air Force base in California, and aviation magazines made several references to "Big Bird." In 1975, a "60 Minutes" television piece on space reconnaissance described an "Alice in Wonderland" world, where American and Soviet intelligence officials knew of each other's "eyes in the sky" — and other nations did, too — but no one confirmed the programs or spoke about them publicly.

For employees at Perkin-Elmer, the vow of secrecy was considered a mark of honor.

"We were like the guys who worked on the first atom bomb," said Oscar Berendsohn, 87, who helped design the optics system. "It was more than a sworn oath. We had been entrusted with the security of the country. What greater trust is there?"

Even wives — who couldn't contact their husbands or know of their whereabouts when they were traveling — for the most part accepted the secrecy. They knew the jobs were highly classified. They knew not to ask questions.

"We were born into the World War II generation," says Linda Bronico, whose husband, Al, told her only that he was building test consoles and cables. "We all knew the slogan `loose lips sink ships.'"

And Perkin-Elmer was considered a prized place to work, with good salaries and benefits, golf and softball leagues, lavish summer picnics (the company would hire an entire amusement park for employees and their families) and dazzling children's Christmas parties.

"We loved it," Marra says. "It was our life."

For Marra and his former co-workers, sharing that life and their long-held secret has unleashed a jumble of emotions, from pride to nostalgia to relief — and in some cases, grief.

The city's mayor, Mark Boughton, only discovered that his father had worked on Hexagon when he was invited to speak at an October reunion ceremony on the grounds of the former plant. His father, Donald Boughton, also a former mayor, was too ill to attend and died a few days later.

Boughton said for years he and his siblings would pester his father — a draftsman — about what he did. Eventually they realized that the topic was off limits.

"Learning about Hexagon makes me view him completely differently," Boughton says. "He was more than just my Dad with the hair-trigger temper and passionate opinions about everything. He was a Cold War warrior doing something incredibly important for our nation."

For Betty Osterweis the ceremony was bittersweet, too. Not only did she learn about the mystery of her late husband's professional life. She also learned about his final moments.

"All these years," she said, "I had wondered what exactly had happened" on that terrible day in 1987 when she received a phone call saying her 53-year-old husband, Henry Osterweis, a contract negotiator, had suffered a heart attack on the job. At the reunion she met former co-workers who could offer some comfort that the end had been quick.

Standing in the grounds of her late husband's workplace, listening to the tributes, her son and daughter and grandchildren by her side, Osterweis was overwhelmed by the enormity of it all — the sacrifice, the secrecy, the pride.

"To know that this was more than just a company selling widgets ... that he was negotiating contracts for our country's freedom and security," she said.

"What a secret. And what a legacy."

___

Helen O'Neill is a New York-based national writer for The Associated Press. She can be reached at features(at)ap.org.

3 New Ways to Connect With Content That Interests You (Mashable)

Posted: 24 Dec 2011 09:56 AM PST

Zoe Fox Zoe Fox – Sat Dec 24, 12:56 pm ET

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Each weekend, Mashable selects startups we think are building interesting, unique or niche products.

This week, we chose three startups that are helping to tailor content in a digital environment that has become over-saturated with information.

BetaBait connects startups with early adopters who love trying new products and apps. Subjot is a social network in which you follow topics rather than people. Movable Ink is adding dynamic graphic elements to emails, helping your message stand out in a flat inbox.

BetaBait: Connecting Startups With Early Adopters

Quick Pitch: BetaBait connects startups with their target group of beta users, who love to test new apps and products.

Genius Idea: Connecting eager users with exciting new products.

Mashable's Take: BetaBait's daily email service makes it easy for startups to find consumers and professional early adopters. Both the consumers and the startups get what they want, so the service is mutually beneficial.

In each daily email blast, BetaBait profiles new apps, businesses, social networking tools and educational resources that early adopters can get their hands on.

Since BetaBait's recent launch, it has amassed more than 500 beta users and 100 startup partners. The startups featured have reported dozens of new users after they've entered a partnership with BetaBait.

The startup's main source of revenue is currently startup sponsorships for its daily emails. Each email blast offers one startup sponsor the top section of the email body, ensuring their content is the first thing the community reads.

Subjot: Follow the Topics You Care About

Quick Pitch: Subjot is a social network that lets you follow people's topics, rather than everything they say.

Genius Idea: Fine tuning just the content you want to see.

Mashable's Take: You know when you only care about half of the tweets sent by someone you follow on Twitter? Say they have great taste in music, but you couldn't care less about their thoughts on sports. Subjot can help. On this new social network you only follow the subjects that interest you from the people you follow.

You use it just like Twitter -- post about whatever you'd like -- but your followers will only see posts about the subjects they've chosen to follow. You also don't need to follow everyone who follows you. You get a bit more space to "jot your thoughts" than you do on Twitter: 250 characters to be exact.

You can share links, photos, videos and engage in conversations on the nascent social network.

Movable Ink: Brings Your Emails to Life

Quick Pitch: iStockphoto, izusek

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

Web gambling gets boost from Obama administration (Reuters)

Posted: 25 Dec 2011 02:36 PM PST

By Jim Wolf and Nicola Leske Jim Wolf And Nicola Leske – Sun Dec 25, 5:36 pm ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Obama administration cleared the way for states to legalize Internet poker and certain other online betting in a switch that may help them reap billions in tax revenue and spur web-based gambling.

A Justice Department opinion dated September and made public on Friday reversed decades of previous policy that included civil and criminal charges against operators of some of the most popular online poker sites.

Until now, the department held that online gambling in all forms was illegal under the Wire Act of 1961, which bars wagers via telecommunications that cross state lines or international borders.

The new interpretation, by the department's Office of Legal Counsel, said the Wire Act applies only to bets on a "sporting event or contest," not to a state's use of the Internet to sell lottery tickets to adults within its borders or abroad.

"The United States Department of Justice has given the online gaming community a big, big present," said I. Nelson Rose, a gaming law expert at Whittier Law School who consults for governments and the industry.

The question at issue was whether proposals by Illinois and New York to use the Internet and out-of-state transaction processors to sell lottery tickets to in-state adults violated the Wire Act.

But the department's conclusion would eliminate "almost every federal anti-gambling law that could apply to gaming that is legal under state laws," Rose wrote on his blog at www.gamblingandthelaw.com.

If a state legalized intra-state games such as poker, as Nevada and the District of Columbia have done, "there is simply no federal law that could apply" against their operators, he said.

The department's opinion, written by Assistant Attorney General Virginia Seitz, said the law's legislative history showed that Congress's overriding goal had been to halt wire communications for sports gambling, notably off-track betting on horse races.

Congress also had been concerned about rapid transmission of betting information on baseball, basketball, football and boxing among other sports-related events or contests, she summarized the legislative history as showing.

"The ordinary meaning of the phrase 'sporting event or contest' does not encompass lotteries," Seitz wrote. "Accordingly, we conclude that the proposed lotteries are not within the prohibitions of the Wire Act."

The department expressed no opinion about a provision in the law that lets prosecutors shut down phone lines where interstate or foreign gambling is taking place.

Many of the 50 U.S. states may be interested in creating online lotteries to boost tax revenues and help offset the ripple effect of a federal deficit-reduction push.

The global online gambling industry grew 12 percent last year to as much as $30 billion, according to a survey in March by Global Betting and Gaming Consultancy, based on the Isle of Man, where online gambling is legal.

Federal prosecutors in April charged three of the biggest Internet poker companies with fraud and money-laundering along with violations of another federal law, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Act of 1986.

The government outlined an alleged scheme by owners of the three largest online poker companies - Full Tilt Poker, Absolute Poker and PokerStars - to funnel gambling profits to online shell companies that would appear legitimate to banks processing payments.

(Editing by Derek Caney)

Wives in ads, kids on the bus as GOP voting nears (AP)

Posted: 25 Dec 2011 06:53 AM PST

By HOLLY RAMER, Associated Press Holly Ramer, Associated Press – Sun Dec 25, 9:53 am ET

CONCORD, N.H. – Mitt Romney's wife gushes about his silly side and devotion to their five sons and 16 grandchildren. Rick Santorum's college-age daughter opines online about missing the campus coffee shop and chats with friends about their Friday night plans. Jon Huntsman's daughters generate much-needed buzz for him with a joint Twitter account and online videos, including at least one that went viral.

Days away from voting in the Republican presidential race, the path to the nomination is quickly becoming a crowded family affair with spouses and offspring pitching in and doing far more than just smiling from the sidelines.

Ann Romney, Anita Perry and Callista Gingrich are starring in new TV ads for the husbands they've loyally campaigned for. Romney extols her husband's character and says "to me that makes a huge difference" in a candidate. Perry tells the "old-fashioned American story" of how she and her husband were high school sweethearts who had to wait until he was done flying airplanes around the world for the Air Force before they could marry. Callista Gingrich wishes the nation a Merry Christmas "from our family to yours" in husband Newt Gingrich's new holiday-themed TV ad.

Candidate kids, including those born to Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul, are helping, too, acting as surrogates, strategists and, in some cases, sounding boards for parents competing for the right to challenge President Barack Obama next fall.

"There are times when I wonder why I'm not sitting in the coffee shop on campus with my friends, lightheartedly discussing ('Saturday Night Live') videos, how bad the cafeteria is, what our plans are for Friday night or how absolutely swamped we are with school work," Santorum's daughter Elizabeth lamented in a recent blog post. "But this is where God wanted me."

She has taken time off from her junior year at the University of Dallas to serve as a self-described "field staffer/phone banker/chauffeur/surrogate speaker," for her father, primarily in the leadoff caucus state of Iowa.

Her father, who hopes Iowa's socially conservative voters turn out for him on caucus night Jan. 3, rolled out an ad late last week featuring the entire Santorum clan, including the family German shepherd, Schotzy. The spot highlights his 21-year marriage to his wife, Karen, notes that he has coached Little League and introduces viewers to the youngest of the couple's seven children, Isabella, born in 2008 with a genetic disorder.

Sometimes the family members campaign with the candidates and other times they go it alone.

Such family involvement carries risks and benefits. The stories they tell often humanize the candidates and help voters relate to them. But the things they say, and do, can sometimes cause headaches for the campaign advisers who are left to try to figure out a way out.

While Rick Perry spent several days campaigning in Iowa recently, his wife was hundreds of miles away in New Hampshire emphasizing his small-town upbringing and conservative values at a retirement community chapel. Audience members then peppered her with detailed questions about such subjects as taxes, immigration and the death penalty.

"She handled them quite well," said Sid Schoeffler, an independent voter from Concord. "When she knew the answer or knew the campaign's story line, she recited it. And when she didn't know, she said so. I thought that was refreshing."

"Compared to what I expected, she made a favorable impression," he said. "But whether it's enough to swing my vote, I don't know yet."

Earlier in the year, as Bachmann rose in public opinion, her husband, Marcus, was forced to defend his Christian counseling business from claims that its therapies included "curing" people of being gay. With Bachmann now near the back of the GOP pack in polls, Marcus Bachmann joined her at the start of her bus tour of Iowa's 99 counties but was quickly replaced by four of their five children.

"My husband had to go home. We're small-business owners and someone had to go home and mind the store," Bachmann told one crowd. And at one point, Bachmann, who began losing her voice in the middle of the jam-packed tour, turned over the microphone to son Harrison, a teacher who talks up his family's ties to the state, and teased: "Harrison, say some nice things about me and you'll get extra cookies."

In Paul's case, he's probably hoping validation from his son, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a favorite of the tea party, will give him a boost with that pivotal constituency in Iowa. Rand Paul is also appearing in a television ad for his father.

Romney's five-son family and wife of more than four decades have long been a part of his presidential campaigns. But the spotlight has been shining more brightly on his wife and their brood in recent weeks as the campaign seeks to cast the former Massachusetts governor as a person of "steadiness and constancy" while drawing a contrast with the thrice-married Gingrich.

Ann Romney also has spoken openly about how her husband supported her through her struggle with multiple sclerosis.

Huntsman's wife and the couple's three oldest daughters are near-constant companions in New Hampshire, the only state where the former Utah governor is earnestly campaigning. His daughters recently generated a huge amount of buzz with a video spoof of an ad by former rival Herman Cain. They donned oversized glasses and fake mustaches to look like Cain's campaign manager.

"We are shamelessly promoting our dad like no other candidate's family has," one daughter said in the ad. "But then again, no one's ever seen a trio like the Jon2012 girls."

___

Associated Press writers Philip Elliott and Steve Peoples contributed to this report.

In China, a daring few challenge one-child limit (AP)

Posted: 24 Dec 2011 09:00 PM PST

By ALEXA OLESEN, Associated Press Alexa Olesen, Associated Press – Sun Dec 25, 12:00 am ET

ZHUJI, China – Seven months pregnant, Wu Weiping sneaked out early in the morning carrying a shoulder bag with some clothes, her laptop and a knife.

"It's good for me I wasn't caught, but it's lucky for them too," said Wu, 35, who feared that family planning officials were going to drag her to the hospital for a forced abortion. "I was going to fight to the death if they found me."

With her escape, Wu joined an increasingly defiant community of parents in China who have risked their jobs, savings and physical safety to have a forbidden second child.

Though their numbers are small, they represent changing ideas about individual rights. While violators in the past tended to be rural families who skirted the birth limits in relative obscurity, many today are urbanites like Wu who frame their defiance in overtly political terms, arguing that the government has no right to dictate how many children they have.

Using Internet chat rooms and blogs, a few have begun airing their demands for a more liberal family planning policy and are hoping others will follow their lead. Several have gotten their stories into the tightly controlled media, an indication that their perspectives have resonance with the public.

After finding out his wife was expecting a second child, Liu Lianwen set up an online discussion group called "Free Birth" to swap information about the one-child policy and how to get around it. In less than six months, it has attracted nearly 200 members.

"We are idealists," said the 37-year-old engineer from central China, whose daughter was born Oct. 18. "We want to change the attitudes of people around us by changing ourselves."

Freed of the social controls imposed during the doctrinaire era of communist rule, Chinese today are free to choose where they live and work and whom they marry. But when it comes to having kids, the state says the majority must stop at one. Hefty fines for violators and rising economic pressures have helped compel most to abide by the limit. Many provinces claim near perfect compliance.

It's impossible to know how many children have been born in violation of the one-child policy, but Zhai Zhenwu, director of Renmin University's School of Sociology and Population in Beijing, estimates that less than one percent of the 16 million babies born each year are "out of plan."

Liu thinks his fellow citizens have been brainwashed. "They all feel it's glorious to have a small family," he said. "Thirty years of family planning propaganda have changed the way the majority of Chinese think about having children."

The reluctance to procreate is also an issue of growing concern for demographers, who worry that the policy combined with a rising cost of living has brought the fertility rate down too sharply and too fast. Though still the world's largest nation with 1.3 billion people, China's population growth has slowed considerably.

"The worry for China is not population growth — it's rapid population aging and young people not wanting to have children," said Wang Feng, director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy, a joint U.S.-China academic research center in Beijing.

Wang sees a looming disaster as the baby boom generation of the 1960s heads into retirement and old age. China's labor force, sharply reduced by the one-child policy, will struggle to support them.

He argues that the government should allow everyone at least two children. He thinks many Chinese would still stop at one because of concerns about being able to afford to raise more than that.

Penalties for violators are harsh. Those caught must pay a "social compensation fee," which can be four to nine times a family's annual income, depending on the province and the whim of the local family planning bureau. Parents with government jobs can also lose their posts or get demoted, and their "out of plan" children are denied education and health benefits.

Those without government posts have less to worry about. If they can afford the steep fee and don't mind losing benefits, there's little to stop them from having another child. There's popular anger over this favoring of the wealthy but not much that ordinary people can do about it, since the policy is set behind closed doors by the communist leadership in Beijing.

In 2007, officials in coastal Zhejiang province threatened to start naming and shaming well-off families who had extra kids, but the campaign never got off the ground, possibly because it threatened to tarnish the reputations of too many well-connected people.

Hardest hit by the rules are urban middle class parents with Communist Party posts, teaching positions or jobs at state-run industries.

Li Yongan was ordered to pay 240,000 yuan ($37,500) after his son was born in 2007 as he already had a 13-year-old daughter. After refusing to pay the fee, Li was denied a household registration permit for his son, forcing him to pay three times more for kindergarten.

He was also barred from his job teaching physics at a state-run university in Beijing. "I never regret my second child, but I have been living with depression and anger for years," said Li, who struggles to make ends meet as a freelance chess teacher.

Of course, there are surreptitious, though not foolproof, ways to evade punishment: paying a bribe or falsifying documents so that, for instance, a second child is registered as the twin of an older sibling. Or, sometimes second babies are registered to childless relatives or rural families that are allowed to have a second child but haven't done so.

Wu, the woman who made the early morning escape, said she never intended to flout the one-child rule. She had resorted to fertility treatments to conceive her first child — a daughter nicknamed Le Le, or Happy — so she was stunned when a doctor told her she was expecting again in August, 2008.

The news triggered a monthlong "cold war" with her husband, Wu said. Silent dinners, cold shoulders. She wanted to keep the baby. He didn't. After a few weeks, he came around, she explained with a satisfied smile.

But family planning officials insisted on an abortion. The principal at her school also pressured her to end the pregnancy.

Desperate, she went online for answers — and was led astray.

At her home on the outskirts of Zhuji, a textile hub a few hours south of Shanghai, the energetic former high school teacher recounted how she divorced her husband, then married her cousin the next day, all in an attempt to evade the rules.

The soap-opera-like subterfuge was meant to take advantage of a loophole that allows divorced parents to have a second child if their new spouse is a first-time parent.

Wu had helped raise her cousin, who is 25 and 10 years younger than her, and when she asked if he would marry her to help save the baby, he agreed.

The divorce, on Sept. 27, 2008 involved signing a document and posing for a photo. It was over in just a few minutes. The next day's marriage was similarly swift.

"I remember I was very happy that day," Wu said holding the marriage certificate with a glued-on snapshot of the cousins. "Because I thought I'd figured out a way to save my baby."

But her problem wasn't over. When the newlyweds applied for a birth permit, officials informed them conception had to take place after marriage. They were told to abort the baby, then try again. Wu was back to square one.

A popular option that was out of reach for Wu economically is to have the baby elsewhere, where the limits don't apply. Some better-off Chinese go to Hong Kong, where private agencies charge mainland mothers hundreds of thousands of yuan (tens of thousands of dollars) for transport, lodging, and medical costs.

The number giving birth in Hong Kong reached 40,000 last year, prompting the territory to cap the number of beds in public hospitals they are allowed from 2012. However, parents of kids born abroad face the bureaucratic hurdles of foreigners, having to pay premiums for school and other services.

In the end, Wu also fled, but not as far as Hong Kong. Three months from her due date, she kissed her baby daughter goodbye, telling her she was going on vacation, and hopped an early morning train to nearby Hangzhou. There she switched to another train bound for Shanghai, hoping the roundabout route would throw off anyone trying to tail her.

In Shanghai, Wu used a friend's ID to rent a one-room apartment with shared bathroom and kitchen. It was tiny and not cheap for her, 700 yuan a month (US$107), but it was across from a hospital that allowed her to register without a government-issued birth permission slip and it had an Internet connection.

Wu had never used email, so her husband — the real one — set up a password-protected online journal that he titled "yixiaobb," or 'one tiny baby.' She posted to the journal up to nine times a day, describing where she was living without ever revealing her exact location. She prefaced every entry with a capital M for mother, and added a number to mark how many messages she wrote in a day. Using the same journal, her husband wrote to her, coding his messages with an F.

It felt like an invisible tether linking Wu to her husband. He didn't know where she was, but knew she was OK. Shortly before her due date, she asked him to come to Shanghai, and he was present for the birth of their son.

More than two years later, she and her former husband, the father to both her children, have yet to remarry — hoping it will legally shield him from any future punishment.

The marriage with her cousin was easily dissolved after they discovered it was never valid, because marriages between first cousins is illegal in China.

Wu was fired from her job as a public school teacher because of the baby and her ex-husband, who is also a teacher, was demoted to a freelance position at his school. Though told she has been assessed a 120,740 yuan ($18,575) social compensation fee, Wu has refused to pay.

Enforcers of the family planning limits showed up at their house in July, and again in November, threatening legal action. Wu is afraid their property might be confiscated or that she or husband might end up in detention, but she doesn't want to pay the fine because she doesn't believe she's done anything wrong.

"I don't think I've committed any crime," she said. "A crime is something that hurts other people or society or that infringes on other people's rights. I don't think having a baby is any kind of crime."

NORAD Santa trackers having record holiday (AP)

Posted: 24 Dec 2011 03:36 PM PST

By KRISTEN WYATT, Associated Press Kristen Wyatt, Associated Press – Sat Dec 24, 6:36 pm ET

DENVER – Santa's piling up more than presents this year. The big man's trackers at NORAD say Santa Claus also broke records this Christmas Eve.

Volunteers at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado were fielding 8,000 calls an hour Saturday afternoon, on pace to break a record. Also, Santa's NORAD Facebook page approached 920,000 "likes" by midafternoon. Last year, Santa had 716,000 "likes."

Volunteers at NORAD Tracks Santa said kids started calling at 4 a.m. Saturday to find out where Santa was.

"The phones are ringing like crazy," Lt. Cmdr. Bill Lewis said Saturday.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command has been telling anxious children about Santa's whereabouts every year since 1955. That was the year a Colorado Springs newspaper ad invited kids to call Santa on a hotline, but the number had a typo, and dozens of kids wound up talking to the Continental Aerospace Defense Command, NORAD's predecessor.

The officers on duty played along and began sharing reports on Santa's progress. It's now a deep-rooted tradition at NORAD, a joint U.S.-Canada command that monitors the North American skies and seas from a control center at Peterson.

NORAD's Santa updates are blowing up on social media, too. In addition to the website and Facebook and Twitter pages, Santa this year has a new tracking app for smart phones. The app includes the Elf Toss, a game similar to Angry Birds.

First lady Michelle Obama was among the volunteers for a second year in a row. She took about 10 calls from her family's holiday vacation in Hawaii. Lewis said Obama's voice didn't throw any of the phoning children.

"They all just asked run-of-the-mill stuff. They wanted to know about Santa," Lewis said.

___

Online:

http://www.noradsanta.org

Kindle Fire updates boost performance and navigation (Appolicious)

Posted: 24 Dec 2011 10:00 AM PST

Global Hotels, Broken Down By Social Media Rewards [INFOGRAPHIC] (Mashable)

Posted: 24 Dec 2011 03:09 AM PST

Lauren Drell Lauren Drell – Sat Dec 24, 6:09 am ET

A new year is just around the corner, which means one thing -- a new batch of vacation days! But where will you go? And, more importantly, where will you stay? Lucky for you, savvy traveler, the infographic below can help you figure that out. There are deals to be had, upgrades to be enjoyed and virtual tours to be taken, should you capitalize on the resources available on social media sites. See what the biggest names in hospitality are doing on Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and YouTube -- and who's dominating on each platform. Based on their activity on social channels, it looks like Wyndham, Marriott, Hyatt and Starwood have come out on top, but they have some competition, which we expect to increase as social travel really takes off. Have a gander, take your pick and then hop on over to our list of top travel tools to help plan your entire vacation.

[More from Mashable: Google Doodles: 12 Years of Holiday Magic [PICS]]

Where do you stay when you travel? Do you follow your favorite hotel brands on social media, and have you saved money by doing so? Let us know in the comments below.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

iPad 3 launch rumored for Steve Jobs' Feb 24 birthday (Digital Trends)

Posted: 25 Dec 2011 12:21 PM PST

Adam Rosenberg Adam Rosenberg – Sun Dec 25, 3:21 pm ET

With Christmas today comes the gift of another iPad 3 rumor, this one relating to the unannounced tablet's release date. It's February 24, the same day as Steve Jobs' birthday. At least according to unnamed sources "close to Taiwanese makers in the iPad 3 supply chain" speaking to Chinese-language newspaper Economic Daily News (via Focus Taiwan). It's not clear if the date refers to a product launch or an announcement, though 9to5mac notes that Apple traditionally launches new products on Fridays, as February 24 is.

The sources say that employees at a number of companies known or believed to be working on the iPad 3 have been told to expect a heavy workload around the Lunar New Year. Apple manufacturer Foxconn reportedly isn't allowing employees to take any more than five days off during the holiday. The word is that the iPad 3′s initial shipment "could exceed 4 million units."

Remember that this is all rumor for now, and will likely stay that way until early next year. Even if there weren't hard evidence to support it, there would be little doubt that a third iPad is coming soon. Apple is a company that likes sticking to a script, and the script clearly pegs another tablet announcement/launch for the start of the year. Yes, the iPhone 4S launch was shuffled just this year from the usual summer release to the fall. My money's still on early '12 for the next iPad though.

This article was originally posted on Digital Trends

Technet

Sunday, December 25, 2011