Today's top news

creativecommons.org — Yesterday RDFa reached Proposed Recommendation status at the World Wide Web Consortium, the final stage before becoming a W3C Recommendation. RDFa makes data in web pages rendered for humans readable in a meaningful way by computers. It's always been difficult to bring the Semantic Web to the World Wide Web, RDFa is crucial bridging them together.

alleyinsider.com — The GeoEye satellite that Google will use to provide mapping imagery at 50-centimeter resolution successfully blasted into space today. So don't leave your underwear lying all over your lawn.

economist.com — Military technology: Advances in camouflage, concealment and deception are revolutionising an age-old art of warfare. Even the most common form of camouflage —the coloured patterns printed onto combat fatigues—is being given a high-tech twist, as designers work with new software that incorporates neuroscientists’ understanding of human vision.

valleywag.com — Of the companies surveyed, 35% own the domain name for their brand followed by the word "sucks." They include Wal-Mart Stores, Coca-Cola, Toys"R"Us, Target and Whole Foods Market. Some 45% of these domains have yet to be registered by anyone. The study found that the majority of companies that do own these domain names publish no content on them.

torrentfreak.com — Following Demonoid and QuebecTorrent, the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) has threatened isoHunt with legal action. However, isoHunt has decided to launch a preemptive strike, as it turns the tables and sues the CRIA instead.

torrentfreak.com — A new trend is surfacing, as spammers have sent out millions of emails targeting BitTorrent users. The emails that claim to come from MediaDefender, warn the receiver that he or she has been logged using BitTorrent and points them to an attachment supposedly containing evidence, but which is in fact infected with a virus.

mashable.com — If a post on Facebook ’s developer blog is accurate, you have less than a week to make your call for no change. A group of members have coalesced behind a petition, massing together “Against the ‘New Facebook’†to send Zuckerberg a message: Don't get rid of the new layout, just give current users the choice to keep the old one.

eweek.com — Thanks to Chrome and its subsequent pairing with Android, Google will extend beyond being the No. 1 search engine to being the premier Web applications provider in the world by 2018.

washingtonpost.com — I wish Google didn't make me think of tentacles. It never did before I tried avoiding it for 24 hours -- a doomed exercise that began as a challenge and morphed into a horror show.

bits.blogs.nytimes.com — A blog that caught my attention in recent weeks is AndroidGuys, which has chronicled Google ’s year-long effort to bring to consumers a mobile phone powered by the company’s new Android software.