You know I love you. But these two stories are really, really embarrassing:

• Cyber Attacks in China Target Activists, Journalists
• Elvis, bin Laden and Hitler Join Mission to Mars

Story A: A number of people with interests that generally or specifically oppose those of the Chinese government have received emails carrying trojan malware payloads. Some of these emails appear to be from the recipients' trusted contacts.

Nobody involved with the story seems to realize that a lot of email trojans replicate by opening the victim's address book and sending themselves to everyone found within. Nor is it unusual for keyloggers to be installed. As far as I can tell there is nothing linking these attacks to China — although of course there are a lot of hackers in China, and hackers frequently employ nationalist (e.g. anti-Israeli, anti-American) rhetoric when defacing websites. Again, there's no reason to believe there's a government link here.

If the Chinese government wanted to go after these people, they would employ more sophisticated methods. This is not a story.

Story B: NASA is running a few different outreach programs whereby internet users can submit names or messages that will be burned to DVD and shot into space. The reporter repeatedly asks affiliated officials: "What if someone includes Osama Bin Laden's name? Or Adolf Hitler's!!?" Someone already has, apparently. The officials correctly respond to this by shrugging.

Really, NPR: what do you think is going to happen? An alien-assisted Caliphate spurred by the inclusion of our enemies' names? Who do you think is going to retrieve this DVD from the infinite emptiness, and know how to decode it, and then know what a bunch of proper nouns mean?

And if your critique has more to do with the inappropriate use of government resources, then let me ask you — what do you think the marginal cost of an extra dozen bytes on a DVD is? A hint: it's less than the cost of paying someone to vet every submission. And it's certainly less than the value of several minutes of broadcast time on public airwaves.