Israeli ground troops have entered the Gaza Strip, Israeli military officials have confirmed, a week after the offensive against Hamas began.

An Israeli military spokeswoman confirmed ground operations had begun and said the objective was "to destroy the Hamas terror infrastructure in the area of operations".

The militant group's exiled political leader, Khaled Meshaal, earlier warned Israel against a ground offensive, saying that a "black destiny" awaited Israeli forces if the entered Gaza.

"We will not break, we will not surrender or give in to your conditions," he said in a speech from the Syrian capital, Damascus.

It was hoped the robots would work for at least three months; but their longevity in the freezing Martian conditions has surprised everyone.

"These rovers are incredibly resilient considering the extreme environment the hardware experiences every day," said John Callas, project manager for Spirit and Opportunity at Nasa's Jet Propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Spirit has to drive backwards everywhere it goes because of a jammed wheel; and Opportunity's robotic arm has a glitch in a shoulder joint because of a broken electrical wire.

Journalspace.com has fallen and can't get up. The post on their site describes how their entire database was overwritten through either some inconceivable OS or application bug, or more likely a malicious act. Regardless of how the data was lost, their undoing appears to have been that they treated drive mirroring as a backup and have now paid the ultimate price for not having point-in-time backups of the data that was their business.

Taking a page out of Apple's book, Google is now urging Gmail users to drop Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) in favor of Firefox or Chrome that, according to the company, run the popular web-based email service "twice as fast." Google also labels IE6 as an unsupported browser, meaning it fails to run some Gmail features.

Google recently dumped Firefox in the Google Pack application bundle and replaced it with Chrome. Last month, the company added a direct download link for Chrome on Google and YouTube.

Cities around the world have been greeting the start of 2009 with celebrations and fireworks.

New Zealand and Australia were among the first to reach midnight, and staged dramatic displays from Auckland's Sky Tower and the Sydney Opera House.

A security research team has used MD5 collision attacks to create a rogue Certificate Authority (CA) certificate. The certificate is trusted by all common web browsers and allows them to impersonate any website on the internet, including HTTPS secured banking and e-commerce sites.

The certificate can also be used to sign other certificates, which could allow attackers to carry out "practically undetectable phishing attacks".

The team found the following CAs still using MD5; RapidSSL, FreeSSL, TC TrustCenter AG, RSA Data Security, Thawte and verisign.co.jp. They collected 30,000 certificates and found 9,000 of them were signed with MD5 and of them, 97 per cent were issued by RapidSSL.

Bucking the open-source trend, the British Royal Navy has developed a modified version of Microsoft Windows XP and has begun installing it on its fleet of nuclear submarines.

Given that Windows runs on approximately 85 percent of the world's PCs, there is a good chance sailors are familiar with it. However, so are hackers -- both the amateur and the cyber warfare pro variety. Not a problem, according to BAE, since all hack-prone elements of Windows "were tended to during the modification."

Israeli air force jets have bombed the Islamic University in the Gaza Strip, a significant cultural symbol for Hamas.

The university is a centre of support for Hamas - the Islamist militant group which controls the Gaza Strip. Many of its top officials graduated from there.

The exiled leader of Hamas, Khaled Meshaal, has called for a new intifada, or uprising, against Israel, while the movement's Gaza leader, Ismail Haniya, called the attack an "ugly massacre".

In SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, the Boston case in which the defendant is represented by Prof. Charles Nesson and his CyberLaw class at Harvard Law School, the defendant has requested that audio-visual coverage of the court proceedings be made available to the public via the internet.

Surely education is the purpose of the Digital Deterrence Act of 1999, the constitutionality of which we are challenging. How can RIAA object? Yet they do, fear of sunlight shone upon them.

Vietnam has approved new regulations banning bloggers from discussing subjects the government deems sensitive or inappropriate and requiring them to limit their writings to personal issues.

The rules, which were approved Dec. 18, attempt to rein in Vietnam's booming blogosphere. It has become an alternative source of news for many in the communist country, where the media is state-controlled.