Techcordance

Privacy


Let us be perfectly clear: While Facebook has received a lot of criticism lately about its new privacy policies and Open Graph concept, which allows them to partner with other sites which will also have access to some Facebook user data, Facebook isn’t explicitly keeping secrets from you. But some security professionals and users continually knock the site for what they say are less-than-clear explanations about where your data is going, and how secure the site really is.
Joey Tyson, a social media security expert who maintains the site Social Hacking, says there are important data security and privacy issues happening under the radar of the Facebook experience. This is what Facebook isn’t saying outright to members.
Facebook’s privacy policies have evolved dramatically in the last few years since the site launched–see the Electronic Freedom Foundation’s timeline of Facebook’s privacy policies. At Facebook’s inception, privacy was tightly controlled by the users. Today, there are some parts of the profile that the user cannot make private. Other parts can be made private, but not without a lot of work figuring it out. Changing your privacy settings on Facebook has recently been called “today’s version of programming the VCR,” by some security professionals.

Privacy

When a piece of software is automatically installed on your computer without your knowledge, it’s called malware. But what do you call it when Facebook apps are added to your profile without your knowledge? We discovered Wednesday that this is actually happening, and stopping it isn’t as easy as checking a box in your privacy settings. If you visit certain sites while logged in to Facebook, an app for those sites will be quietly added to your Facebook profile. You don’t have to have a Facebook window open, you don’t need to be signed in to these sites for the apps to appear, there’s no notification, and there doesn’t appear to be an option to opt-out anywhere in Facebook’s byzantine privacy settings.The apps appear to be related to Facebook’s latest sharing features and tools. The sites currently leaving this trail all have Facebook integration, and the list includes heavyweights such as the Gawker network of blogs, the Washington Post, TechCrunch, CNET, New York Magazine, and formspring.me.

Google TV

Google Inc. is planning to introduce Android-based television software to developers at an event in May, according to people familiar with the matter.The technology—designed to open set-top boxes, TVs and other devices to more content from the Internet—is attracting interest from partners that include SonyIntel Corp. and Logitech International SA, which are expected to offer products that support the software, these people said. None have so far discussed the efforts publicly.The decision to address developers suggests that the Internet giant may be hoping to kick-start a race to build applications for its TV platform, much in the same way that Google, Apple Inc. and others have courted developers for smartphones. Corp.,

HaHa
Is laughter the new exercise? Quite possibly. While toning thighs and building muscle mass still require a trip to the gym, other benefits associated with exercise – improved cholesterol and blood pressure, decreased stress hormones, a strengthened immune system and a healthy appetite – can be attained with regular guffaws, studies now suggest.
The latest mirth study, which focuses on the appetite effects of a good laugh, is being presented this week at the 2010 Experimental Biology conference in Anaheim, Calif.
A joyful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones. Proverbs 17:22

Study

Network neutrality rules adopted by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission could lead to the loss of more than 340,000 jobs in the broadband industry over the next 10 years, with few offsetting Web content jobs, according to a new study funded by a group opposed to the proposed rules.
If the FCC adopts the net neutrality rules it is now considering, close to 1.5 million jobs across the U.S. economy could be put in jeopardy by 2020, and revenue growth in the broadband industry would slow by about one-sixth during that time frame, said the study, by Coleman Bazelon, a telecom economist with The Brattle Group.
Bazelon predicted that spending in the broadband industry would decrease by US$5 billion in 2011 if the FCC passes formal net neutrality rules, with the number growing in subsequent years.
“The FCC should be careful in developing any net neutrality rules, to not undermine its own goals of promoting broadband and employment,” Bazelon said during a press conference Friday.
Broadband deployment in the U.S. is a “success story,” the study said. About 95 percent of U.S. residents have fixed broadband available, and 98 percent have 3G mobile broadband available, the study said.

MacAfee

McAfee’s popular antivirus software failed spectacularly on Wednesday, causing tens of thousands of Windows XP computers to crash or repeatedly reboot.A buggy update that the company released early in the day turned the software’s formidable defenses against malicious software inward, prompting it to attack a vital component of Microsoft Windows. The update was available for business customers for about four hours before distribution was halted, McAfee said.The damage was widespread: the University of Michigan’s medical school reported that 8,000 of its 25,000 computers crashed. Police in Lexington, Ky., resorted to hand-writing reports and turned off their patrol car terminals as a precaution. Some jails canceled visitation, and Rhode Island hospitals turned away non-trauma patients at emergency rooms and postponed some elective surgeries.Intel was also hit by McAfee’s bungled update, a source inside the company confirmed to CNET. The source said that all Intel’s computers inside the United States ran McAfee and many were affected but didn’t know how many or whether it impacted the company’s factories.

Demotion

A NASA employee in Pasadena, California, has filed suit over action taken against him for discussing intelligent design with other employees.David Coppedge, an information technology specialist and system administrator on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s mission to Saturn, claims he was harassed and demoted from a high-level job because he distributed DVDs that explain intelligent design.
Casey Luskin, an attorney with the Discovery Institute, tells OneNewsNow that NASA officials claimed intelligent design is religious material when it is really scientific.
“The evolution lobby has long claimed that intelligent design is religion and cannot be advocated in public schools,” Luskin reports. “But now they are claiming that intelligent design is religion and cannot even be talked about at scientific research organizations, whose primary goal is to study the origin of life.” The only employees who received the DVDs were willing recipients, and the Discovery Institute attorney explains that Coppedge “would offer these pro-intelligent design DVDs to his coworkers, and if they said that they were not interested, he would drop the matter. He was not pushy in trying to share these DVDs with his coworkers,” Luskin assures.Nonetheless, the NASA employee was accused of promoting ideas in a fashion that was unwelcome and disruptive, and he was charged with creating a hostile work environment. Action was taken without Coppedge being allowed to even see evidence against him, so now he is suing for religious discrimination, harassment and retaliation, violation of his free-speech rights, and wrongful demotion.

Tweets

Every 140-character snippet of info you’ve ever shared publicly on Twitter will soon have a home next to the Declaration of Independence.Twitter and the Library of Congress announced Wednesday that every public tweet posted since Twitter started in 2006 will be archived digitally by the federal library.The purpose, according to a blog post by Library of Congress communications director Matt Raymond, is to document “important tweets” as well as gather information about the way we live through the sheer masses of tweets on the site.”I’m no Ph.D., but it boggles my mind to think what we might be able to learn about ourselves and the world around us from this wealth of data,” Raymond said in the post. And I’m certain we’ll learn things that none of us now can even possibly conceive.”Twitter says it receives about 55 million tweets every day — amounting to billions of them since its inception.Only tweets from public Twitter feeds will be included, not those that have been set as private.

Behe
Eight years ago, biochemist Michael Behe wrote this open letter to the prestigious scientific journal, Nature:

Sir-
As a public skeptic of the ability of Darwinian processes to account for complex cellular systems and a proponent of the hypothesis of intelligent design, (1) I often encounter a rebuttal that can be paraphrased as “no designer would have done it that way.” …
If at least some pseudogenes have unsuspected functions, however, might not other biological features that strike us as odd also have functions we have not yet discovered? Might even the backwards wiring of the vertebrate eye serve some useful purpose?
…. Hirotsune et al’s (3) work has forcefully shown that our intuitions about what is functionless in biology are not to be trusted.
Sincerely, Michael J. Behe
An Open Letter to Nature

Contrast that with Ken Miller’s now falsified claim in 1994:
the designer made serious errors, wasting millions of bases of DNA on a blueprint full of junk and scribbles.
Although Miller won in Judge Jones’ Kangaroo Court, Behe has won where it counts, in the court of empirical facts. Behe has won the argument over the backward wiring of the eye (see the essay by medical researcher Michael Denton: Inverted Retina).

And Behe has scored a second victory in the debate over junk DNA. Although Nature may not have had Behe in mind when they wrote the following, it seems, the net effect is as if they have “written back” eight years later to Behe and affirmed his views while essentially trashing their poster boy Ken Miller the honest Darwinist.
In Human genome at ten: Life is complicated, we read:
Just one decade of post-genome biology has exploded that view. Biology’s new glimpse at a universe of non-coding DNA — what used to be called ‘junk’ DNA — has been fascinating and befuddling. Researchers from an international collaborative project called the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) showed that in a selected portion of the genome containing just a few per cent of protein-coding sequence, between 74% and 93% of DNA was transcribed into RNA2. Much non-coding DNA has a regulatory role; small RNAs of different varieties seem to control gene expression at the level of both DNA and RNA transcripts in ways that are still only beginning to become clear. “Just the sheer existence of these exotic regulators suggests that our understanding about the most basic things — such as how a cell turns on and off — is incredibly naive,” says Joshua Plotkin, a mathematical biologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia

Promtional Video:

Alternatives

Apple’s iPad will be available on April 3 and reports suggest that the product is off to a good start, with hundreds and thousands being ordered from Apple’s Web site. But the device has faced some criticism for lacking features such as a video camera, USB ports and support for technology called Flash that enables Web video.
But those technologies could be available in iPad alternatives reaching the market soon, including Neofonie’s WePad, Hewlett-Packard’s Slate, Notion Ink’s Adam and Innovative Converged Devices’ Ultra. These handheld devices have diagonal screen sizes from 7 inches to 11.6 inches and will be based on Google’s Android Linux OS or Windows 7.