We’ll be skipping fiction this month and publishing a new piece by Chris Nakashima-Brown in February. In the meantime, get your SF kick at Flurb, Rudy Rucker’s webzine. Good stuff going there. [boingboing]

Media marketers want better data about who’s watching what, and when, and for how long. A company called Integrated Media Measurement, Inc. has a novel if worrisome solution: cell phones that record 10 seconds of audio every 30 seconds, and upload the content to a server to be matched against the audio signatures of media broadcast in the area. [schneier]

A couple of weeks ago the Mars rovers (whose lifespan has far exceeded their design) got a software upgrade. Call me starry-eyed, but it’s just too cool that we live in a world where we’re running software installs on robots on Mars. [slashdot]

A court in Ontario has ordered allowed the listing of three parents on a child’s birth certificate. It’s a legal recognition of what is becoming a de facto reality for many people, not just gay couples with an involved biological parent, but also adoptive parents with birth mothers. [mefi]

This is what the relentless march of progress is all about: cheaper whole house music servers.