Yikes. I’m with the Japanese who think that this situation is far more dire than officials have been letting on.

Tokyo Electric Power said Tuesday that after the explosion at the No. 2 reactor pressure had dropped in the “suppression pool” — a section at the bottom of the reactor that converts steam to water and is part of the critical function of keeping the nuclear fuel protected. After that occurred radiation levels outside No. 2 were reported to have risen sharply.

“We are on the brink,” said Hiroaki Koide, a senior reactor engineering specialist at the Research Reactor Institute of Kyoto University. “We are now facing the worst-case scenario. We can assume that the containment vessel at Reactor No. 2 is already breached. If there is heavy melting inside the reactor, large amounts of radiation will most definitely be released.”

via Workers Strain to Retake Control After Blast and Fire at Japan Plant – NYTimes.com.

Facebook’s porous security model is one reason why I never “link” my Facebook account to other websites.

Facebook finally provided a way to keep any random jerk in the café from hijacking your account. But you have to go out of your way to enable this protection, and you might have to wait. Still: Jump on this.

Facebook has at long last offered an option to use the encrypted HTTPS protocol, a feature it will begin rolling out today but won’t finish for a “few weeks.” You should check now if it’s available, and sign up as soon as it is enabled for your account. The performance overhead is minor—zippy Gmail, for example, uses HTTPS for everything—and it’s an important step to keep your Facebook account safe from being hijacked on an open or poorly secured wireless network.

via The Facebook Setting You Should Change as Quickly as Possible.

I guess I’m fascinated with China, like it or not. I was reading this WaPo article about Chinese President Hu Jintao’s upcoming state visit to America when I noticed this interesting tidbit:

After U.S. officials, including Clinton and Jeffrey Bader, senior Asia director at the National Security Council, tussled with Chinese security guards at the Copenhagen Climate Conference at the end of 2009, and China reacted strongly to a U.S. decision to sell $6.4 billion of weapons to Taiwan, the Obama administration’s tone changed.

I was unaware that there has been a “tussle” with Chinese security guards at this conference. My Google-Fu fails me here, too, as I can’t seem to find any mention of a physical confrontation at the Climate Conference. Was this somehow hushed up? And if so, how could it have been hushed up at such a public conference?

Could this lack of search results on this event be somehow related to China’s alleged hacking attacks against Google?

via Hu Jintao arriving for state visit focused on economics, security, human rights.