The Air Force has had it with soldiers getting their information from the unsavory world of blogs. The service’s Network Operations Center has instituted widespread filtering of the Web, blocking all sites with the letters b-l-o-g in their URLs and filtering out most other sites that qualify as blogs, Wired relates, via an Air Force Times story. The idea isn’t to keep airmen in the dark — they can still access news sources that are “primary, official-use sources,” said Maj. Henry Schott, A5 for Air Force Network Operations. “Basically … if it’s a place like The New York Times, an established, reputable media outlet, then it’s fairly cut and dry that that’s a good source, an authorized source,” he said….

A report out Friday, a week before Apple officially reveals details of its iPhone software development kit, suggests the company is planning to keep a tight grip on iPhone development.

Janus particles, which take their name from a Roman god with two faces, are microscopic ‘two-faced’ spheres whose halves are physically or chemically different. Now, U.S. researchers have shown that some of these Janus microparticles can move like stealthy submarines when an alternating electrical field is applied to liquid surrounding them. This could lead to new kinds of self-propelling microsensors or means of targeted drug delivery. But read more… You can see above how these particles “move perpendicular to the applied electric field direction with their polystyrene hemisphere (lighter side) forward. The liquid flow around the metal-coated hemisphere (darker side) is much stronger then around the polystyrene hemisphere, driving the particle to move by induced-charge electrophoresis (ICEP) in the direction…

The mobile version of the dramatically popular console game comes to AT&T phones, with a few upgrades.

This weekend I’ll be putting together a gallery and comparison of NeoOffice, OpenOffice for the Mac, Microsoft Office 2008, and iWork. These products have been compared and debated before for their relative merits, but my concern, as with all things on my new Mac, is how easy are these applications to use from a teacher’s perspective. In the same way, I’m hoping to evaluate their power and flexibility for those teachers who are more savvy. Ultimately, I’d like to factor in the cost (or lack thereof) of each piece of software and make some recommendations for educators. Pages, in particular, is an interesting program and will serve as a preface for my full evaluation of the competing suites. Pages is…

Andy Plesser was a busy guy at our Adobe Engage event this week. He talked to a lot of customers and attendees about what’s coming up and has been posting them over on his blog. I chatted with him about AIR and how it could fit into the entire video space from desktop to devices. For live coverage, Scoble provided the best angle, but Andy did a great job on getting a wide-range of subjects to talk about AIR, technology, and the web. I also know he’s going to have some more information that’s VERY relevant to anyone thinking about online video delivery. Nick Bilton from ShifD/New York Times Claude Courbois - NASDAQ Market Replay Robert Blatt - AOL’s XDrive…

Sighs of relief can be heard coming from Brazil this week as police arrested four men (port security guards) responsible for heisting some computers that had lots of data from the newly discovered mega-oil-patch off the coast of Brazil. Way back when I was an industry analyst I remember fighting the battle against universitites about so called academic freedom and firewalls. The argument ran that places of higher learning should not erect barriers that would limit access to information. That laughable theory applied to IT security has long since been discredited but the horrifying aspect was that the idea of no-firewalls was also present in major US government agencies such as the US Geological Survey, which is part of the…

As everyone already knows, the HD disc format war is over, resolved in true domino fashion by Warner Brothers’ decision to back Blu-ray exclusively. Most of the studios in the HD DVD camp have now agreed to back Blu-ray, particularly now that Toshiba has announced it will cease pushing the HD DVD format (though Dreamworks is an odd holdout). HD discs have had microscopic sales compared to standard definition DVD, however, which may partly explain why Dreamworks feels no driving need to switch its allegiance in the near future. I also don’t think the studios are expecting a huge surge in Blu-ray sales, mostly because Blu-ray players always were, and continue to be, MUCH more expensive than HD DVD…

Today we have another one of those reports that tend to drive me crazy. It’s from the Bluewolf Group of New York, located just off Madison Square Park, which calls itself “the world’s leading provider of professional services for on-demand software applications.” But it’s not about Software as a Service. Instead it’s a statement pulled from a survey of IT salaries that open source developers make more money. This has Matt Asay happier than Tom Cruise on a couch (above), but it’s his bosses at Alfresco who are going to have to spread this extra green, and it begs the question, why? Is developing on an open source platform really different from developing on a closed source platform? Are the skills needed…

Microsoft has quietly released an update to its Office Live Workspace service, which the company first rolled out in beta form in December 2007. The just-released Office Live Workspace update, according to a posting on LiveSide.Net,includes a new activity pane for keeping track of what’s happening in your wokspace; e-mail notifications so you know when those with whom you are sharing documents make an update; support for adding multiploe documents to workspaces; and a new interface to make it easier to invite new people to participate in a shared workspace. A quick refresher on what Office Live Workspace is (and isn’t). Office Live Workspace is Microsoft’s alternative to Google Docs. It is not a Web-based version of Microsoft Office. It…