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Enlarge / The Clintons used one of these to run a mail server for Hillary Clinton's Blackberry. (credit: baku13)

As she was being confirmed as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton contacted Colin Powell to ask him about his use of a Blackberry while in the same role. According to a Federal Bureau of Investigations memorandum published today (PDF), Powell warned Clinton that if it became public that she was using a Blackberry to "do business," her e-mails would be treated as "official" record and be subject to the law.

"Be very careful," Powell said according to the FBI. "I got around it all by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data."

Clinton told the FBI that she didn't take factor Powell's advice into her decision to use a personal mail server—a statement that seems obvious based on the tens of thousands of e-mails now being published as the result of lawsuits, congressional and FBI investigations, and Freedom of Information Act requests. Just how far she deviated from that advice is evident in the detailed history gathered by the FBI. Their information on the Clintons' e-mail infrastructure dates back to Hillary Clinton's tenure in the US Senate, and this new release shows how that infrastructure was intertwined with the information technology used by former president Bill Clinton's staff.

Enlarge (credit: Google Fiber)

As Google Fiber fights AT&T and Comcast over access to utility poles in Nashville, the new ISP says it hasn't been able to get access to 44,000 poles in the city.

Google Fiber launched in Nashville in April, but expansion throughout the city has been slow in part because of pole access problems. Under the current process, Google Fiber has to wait for other carriers to perform "make ready" work that gets poles ready for Google to attach its own wires. Google Fiber is pushing a "one touch make ready" ordinance that would authorize the ISP to make all of the necessary wire adjustments itself without having to wait for incumbent providers to send their own construction crews. AT&T and Comcast have fought against the proposal.

With a Nashville Metro Council vote scheduled for September 6, Google Fiber published statistics yesterday detailing the scope of its problem.

(credit: OpenOffice)

OpenOffice, once the premier open source alternative to Microsoft Office, could be shut down because there aren't enough developers to update the office suite. Project leaders are particularly worried about their ability to fix security problems.

An e-mail thread titled, "What would OpenOffice retirement involve?" was started yesterday by Dennis Hamilton, vice president of Apache OpenOffice, a volunteer position that reports to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) board.

"It is my considered opinion that there is no ready supply of developers who have the capacity, capability, and will to supplement the roughly half-dozen volunteers holding the project together," Hamilton wrote.

For the past several years, a group of researchers have been observing a seemingly impossible wood ant colony living in an abandoned nuclear weapons bunker in Templewo, Poland, near the German border. Completely isolated from the outside world, these members of the species Formica polyctena have created an ant society unlike anything we've seen before.

The Soviets built the bunker during the Cold War to store nuclear weapons, sinking it below ground and planting trees on top as camouflage. Eventually a massive colony of wood ants took up residence in the soil over the bunker. There was just one problem: they built their nest directly over a vertical ventilation pipe that leads into the bunker. When the metal covering on the pipe finally rusted away, it left a dangerous, open hole. Every year when the nest expands, thousands of worker ants fall down the pipe and cannot climb back out. The survivors have nevertheless carried on for years underground, building a nest from soil and maintaining it in typical wood ant fashion. Except, of course, that this situation is far from normal.

Polish Academy of Sciences zoologist Wojciech Czechowski and his colleagues discovered the nest after a group of other zoologists found that bats were living in the bunker. Though it was technically not legal to go inside, the bat researchers figured out a way to squeeze into the small, confined space and observe the animals inside. Czechowski's team followed suit when they heard that the place was swarming with ants. What they found, over two seasons of observation, was a group of almost a million worker ants whose lives are so strange that they hesitate to call them a "colony" in the observations they just published in The Journal of Hymenoptera. Because conditions in the bunker are so harsh, constantly cold and mostly barren, the ants seem to live in a state of near-starvation. They produce no queens, no males, and no offspring. The massive group tending the nest is entirely composed of non-reproductive female workers, supplemented every year by a new rain of unfortunate ants falling down the ventilation shaft.