The Large Hadron Collider will not destroy the universe

Update: March 1 2009: Penn State Researchers say it can't possibly happen: "The world is constantly bombarded by energetic cosmic rays from the depths of space, some of them inducing particle collisions thousands of times more powerful than those that will be produced by the LHC, If these collisions could create black holes, it would have happened by now."

The really smart people at CERN are building an enormous particle accelerator to try to find the Higgs Boson.

Some people think that the instruments that are capable of finding it will destroy the universe.

The concepts behind this are pretty difficult to understand, but here's a video that helped me understand. (I don't know why, but a synthesized voice doing rap about the LHC brings tears to my eyes)

Quiz for extra points - After you've watched the video - what kind of atoms are protons smashed against?

Update - Well, now they're not so sure. The scientists are almost certain that it won't destroy the earth, and the solar system, etc

DNS Problem

Yes, there is another DNS vulnerability and attack, and it's pretty scary.

DNS is the system on the internet that maps the name, like "www.whoever.com", to the numeric address. If it breaks, the internet breaks. If bad guys can successfully attack it, they can make you go to their servers instead of important places like your bank, Ebay, etc.

There's a long interesting story involved. Dan Kaminsky, the one who found it has a blog, which tells the story and has a program to test your ISP's DNS servers. If your ISP hasn't fixed it, please change your DNS to OpenDNS. Call me if you like to do it and need help, please call me.