NASA is offering its Twitter followers a chance to personally get an up close look of a space shuttle mission at the agency’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston.

NASA is hosting a Tweetup on Wednesday, May 19 during Atlantis’ STS-132 mission to the International Space Station. Atlantis will launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday, May 14 at 1:20 p.m. CST.

Sprint has introduced a new pay-as-you-go service which it will begin offering at Walmart stores on Saturday May 15.

The new offering called "Common Cents Mobile," one of Sprint’s prepaid brands, includes 7- cent per minute phone calls and 7-cent text messages.

Common Cents Mobile includes a round down feature, so if a user talks for 1 minute and 46 seconds they will be charged for 1 minute and not 2.

The group of entities that have a problem with Facebook’s privacy policies has grown again.  Late yesterday, the Article 29 Working Party (which has quite a bit of pull in Europe) expressed its concerns over recent changes.

Here’s a story – or more properly, a rumor – for the folks who are never more than five feet from their iPhones and don’t let a day go by without signing into Facebook: the next iPhone operating system will supposedly feature a certain level of integration with the social network.

Broadband penetration in rural markets in U.S. has experienced double-digit growth in the past year, driven largely by regional providers continuing to increase their market share in these areas, according to a new report by comScore.

About four weeks ago, Gmail gained a drag-and-drop feature that made attaching files to emails considerably more convenient.  Now, as a sort of complement to that text-focused upgrade, another new feature is set to make inserting pictures into emails easier, as well.

A noteworthy point here is that Google’s skipped past the beta/lab stage, offering the new option to lots of ordinary Gmail users.  Another important fact is that it’s user-friendly – the sort of thing even people who don’t read WebProNews and official Google blogs might discover for themselves.

MerchantCircle is going international. The local business social network, which gets nearly six million unique monthly visitors (according to Compete data), should be increasing that number greatly as it expands into Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

HTC announced today that it is suing Apple. The company says it took legal action against Apple, filing a complaint with the United States International Trade Commission (ITC) to halt the importation and sale of the iPhone, iPad and iPod in the United States. HTC’s complaint outlines five patents it claims are infringed upon by Apple products.

YouTube has just introduced a new option that privacy enthusiasts should find appealing. Users can now upload videos and mark them as unlisted. What this means is that only people with the link to the video page will be able to view any video marked as such.

A single cybercrime gang using advanced malware was responsible for two thirds of all phishing attacks detected in the second half of 2009, according to a new report by the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG).

The report authors found the Avalanche phishing gang was responsible for 66 percent of all phishing attacks launched in the second half of 2009. Avalanche successfully targeted some 40 banks and online service providers, and domain name registrars and registries.

A single cybercrime gang using advanced malware was responsible for two thirds of all phishing attacks detected in the second half of 2009, according to a new report by the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG).

The report authors found the Avalanche phishing gang was responsible for 66 percent of all phishing attacks launched in the second half of 2009. Avalanche successfully targeted some 40 banks and online service providers, and domain name registrars and registries.

A single cybercrime gang using advanced malware was responsible for two thirds of all phishing attacks detected in the second half of 2009, according to a new report by the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG).

The report authors found the Avalanche phishing gang was responsible for 66 percent of all phishing attacks launched in the second half of 2009. Avalanche successfully targeted some 40 banks and online service providers, and domain name registrars and registries.

A single cybercrime gang using advanced malware was responsible for two thirds of all phishing attacks detected in the second half of 2009, according to a new report by the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG).

The report authors found the Avalanche phishing gang was responsible for 66 percent of all phishing attacks launched in the second half of 2009. Avalanche successfully targeted some 40 banks and online service providers, and domain name registrars and registries.

If moral support determined the outcome of lawsuits, YouTube might be in a whole lot of trouble.  Fourteen organizations – including very important companies like Disney, NBC, and Warner Bros. – have officially declared themselves friends of Viacom by filing a legal brief.

Six Apart has launched an interesting new feature for blogs (not just TypePad blogs, but all platforms), which injects sponsored comments into conversations on the blogs. TypePad works with "leading voices" in a given category to come up with questions that are syndicated to "influential" bloggers, who post their answers on their blogs.

PeopleStyleWatch.com, a magazine website focused on celebrity style news and trends, has partnered with fashion and shopping website HauteLook.

Beginning today, PeopleStyleWatch.com editors will feature selected products from sales on HauteLook in a new "Daily Hot Picks" section on its website. Exclusive weekly incentives and discounts will be offered to PeopleStyleWatch shoppers. The site will also highlight a calendar of upcoming HauteLook sample sale events featuring popular brands such as BCBG, Mike & Chris, and Kiehl’s.

Mozilla CEO John Lilly dropped a bomb late yesterday in announcing that he would be stepping down from his position. The news came just after Mozilla revealed its early product plan for Firefox 4, in which it placed great emphasis on speed and HTML5 support – two of the big selling points for competing browser Google Chrome.

Back in 2008, Google launched Google Moderator, a tool to help presenters prioritize questions for Q&A sessions. Since then, we’ve seen it in action a number of times, often from the company itself, but also in political settings, and other democratic-style events.

The rate of global software piracy rose to 43 percent in 2009, a two percent increase from 2008 driven primarily by expanding PC sales in emerging markets, according to the seventh annual Business Software Alliance/IDC Global Software Piracy Study.

"Software theft exceeded $51 billion in commercial value in 2009. The public and private sectors need to join forces to more effectively combat an epidemic that stifles innovation and impairs economies on a global scale," said BSA President and CEO Robert Holleyman.

Amazon announced the launch of its official iPad app today. It’s now available in Apple’s App Store.

"Following the launch of the Amazon App for iPhone and iPod touch, we’ve used our customers’ feedback to help us build a fun and intuitive shopping destination on the iPad," says Director of Amazon Mobile Sam Hall. "This application offers customers a unique, interactive experience that takes full advantage of the visual and tactile nature of the iPad."

The bad news for Google is that the FTC still hasn’t approved its acquisition of AdMob, and according to a fresh report, has in fact decided to take even more time to think things over.  The good news is that the FTC was supposedly motivated to review the situation by a development that makes a Google monopoly look less probable.

Google has been very clear about how big of a part mobile plays in the company’s strategy moving forward, and a number of recent acquisitions and strategic moves have made it equally clear that Google is gunning for Apple. These are a couple reasons why it has come as no surprise to find out that Google is working with Verizon on a Tablet computer that would compete with the iPad.

In September Google introduced a new site where users can find Internet statistics from various sources. It’s called Google Internet Stats. It appears that either Google forgot or is pretending it didn’t happen, because today they have a new post up introducing it again.

The next time there’s a big election or important issue up for debate, think about thanking Twitter’s founders if your phone doesn’t ring.  Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have determined that, at least in some instances, combing Twitter for data can be as good a way of researching opinions as conducting an actual poll.