12-Year-Old Sues School Over Facebook Privacy

By Melissa Daniels | Mon Mar 12, 2012 4:13 pm
A 12-year-old student is suing her school for demanding her Facebook password, escalating the growing debate over privacy and social media as profiles become public property.
The 12-year-old Minnesota student's school district demanded her passwords for Facebook and email in order to search her saved information. Her suit is backed by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The suit comes as agencies, schools, and employers demand increasing access to Facebook profiles of students and employees at a rapid rate. Organizations are safeguarding against inflammatory content on social media sites, but how they handle the situation can potentially violate constitutional rights, raising questions on whether Facebook posts can be treated as public, or subject to search.
The case stems from two incidents from the girl's Facebook. In one post, she called a hall monitor "mean" and said she hated her. A screenshot of the post made its way to the district, and someone showed the postings to the principal, resulting in a detention sentence and an apology to the hall monitor.
A subsequent post calling out whoever turned in the screenshot resulted in an in-school suspension. In the second incident, a male student's parent come forward, claiming the students were having inappropriate discussions on Facebook.
Administrators then called the girl to surrender her passwords in front of a school counselor and a county sheriff's deputy, in order to check her postings and chat records. The girl's mother says the district did not ask for her consent before its request.
Schools are examining Facebook activity, so the network is no longer the perceived safe haven students think it is. However, they still use the site as a place to express views about their school that, while maybe offensive, are not necessarily incendiary or criminal. In this case, the ACLU says the school district violated the student's First and Fourth Amendments.
"Students do not shed their First Amendment rights at the school house gate," an ACLU spokesperson said in a statement. "The Supreme Court ruled on that in the 1970s, yet schools like Minnewaska seem to have no regard for the standard."
But the district says as more facts about the case come out it will be clear its actions were "reasonable and appropriate." Meanwhile, it "disputes the one-sided version of events set forth in the complaint written by the ACLU," according to a statement.
Social media profiles are an informal communications that are, at an increasingly rapid rate, treated as an extension of that person's beliefs, reputation and associated organizations. Employers, and colleges, demand access to profiles through friending an employee or staff member, a growing trend that puts profiles under the microscope.
The findings can lead to disaster if someone's posts cast an unflattering light, like the much-discussed case of Apple firing an employee over rants about the company on their private page.
Schools demanding access to Facebook activity could have a chilling effect on the speech of students to rant about their school. But beyond the immediate school setting, the case could set a precedent for more users to fire back at organizations who probe pages for details.


Tue Mar 13, 2012 4:13 pm | By
Scottish scientists are developing an app converting sign language into text, showcasing mobile technology's capacity to evolve communication.



Tue Mar 13, 2012 4:04 pm | By
AT&T is expanding its LTE service, and Tim Cook sold off more of his stock in Apple. Meanwhile, Verizon had some sporadic outages, Apple denies Proview's claims on its iPad name and Twitter snapped up Posterous, a blogging platform.

Tue Mar 13, 2012 3:57 pm | By
Anonymous hackers struck the Vatican again, wreaking havoc despite ongoing arrests, defectors and rogue members that risk impairing future operations.

Tue Mar 13, 2012 3:42 pm | By
Yahoo is suing Facebook over alleged patent infringement, opening up untested legal territory as the social network goes public.

Tue Mar 13, 2012 2:46 pm | By
Apple's is reducing the price of the iPad 2 with the release of the new iPad, boosting the company's educational initiatives by making tablets more affordable for schools.


Editorials & Opinion By Kat Asharya
The Justice Department approved the $4.5 billion purchase of over 4,000 Nortel patents to major Android rivals like Apple and RIM, guaranteeing no end in sight to the legal battles entangling the mobile industry.

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Villains Become Victims in <cite>Clone Wars</cite>' 'Massacre'

Compelling female heroines and villains are comparatively few and far between in the Star Wars universe. But The Clone Wars’ complicated, vengeful Sith apprentice Asajj Ventress, as well as her supernaturally powerful Nightsisters of Dathomir, are some of its best.

Too bad they’re probably all getting killed in Friday’s night’s episode, “Massacre,” previewed in the clip above.

Well, perhaps: A scant few ever truly die in sci-fi franchises as expansive as Star Wars, which are always on the lookout for reboot opportunities. After all, Ventress herself was supposedly killed by Anakin in Genndy Tartakovksy’s stunning 2003 Clone Wars animated series, and the entire second Star Wars trilogy is based on the archetypal Darth Vader, whose sacrifice closed out Return of the Jedi.

What goes around eventually comes around.

That said, “Massacre” offers Count Dooku and General Grievous (below) chances to renew their deflated evils. The former uses the latter to claim his murderous payback against Ventress and her sisterhood of intergalactic witches, who attempted to assassinate Dooku after he threw her aside like another spent Star Wars pawn.

The knotted conflict of “Massacre” kicks off a four-episode arc that promises to darkly extinguish The Clone Wars‘ rewarding fourth season. Screen the clips above and below and let us know if you think The Clone Wars’ fifth season, due on Cartoon Network this fall, can cap the series before the inevitable syndication beckons.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars airs Friday at 8 p.m./7 p.m. Central on Cartoon Network.

Scott Thill covers pop, culture, tech, politics, econ, the environment and more for Wired, AlterNet, Filter, Huffington Post and others. You can sample his collected spiels at his site, Morphizm.
Follow @morphizm on Twitter.

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Syrian rebels reject Annan's call for dialogue

CAIRO/BEIRUT (Reuters) - Kofi Annan, the U.N.-Arab League envoy to Syria, said he would urge President Bashar al-Assad and his foes to stop fighting and seek a political solution, drawing angry rebukes from dissidents.

"The killing has to stop and we need to find a way of putting in the appropriate reforms and moving forward," Annan said on Thursday in Cairo ahead of his trip to Damascus on Saturday.

Syrian dissidents reacted with dismay and said government repression had destroyed prospects of a negotiated deal. More than 7,500 people have been killed in a year-long crackdown on an uprising against Assad, according to the United Nations.

"We reject any dialogue while tanks shell our towns, snipers shoot our women and children and many areas are cut off from the world by the regime without electricity, communications or water," said Hadi Abdullah, contacted in the city of Homs.

Another activist told Reuters Annan's call for dialogue sounded "like a wink at Bashar" that would only encourage Assad to "crush the revolution".

U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos, on a separate mission to Syria, said she was "devastated" by the destruction she had seen in the Baba Amr district of Homs city, and wanted to know what had happened to its residents, who endured a 26-day military siege before rebel fighters withdrew a week ago.

Amos is the first senior foreign official to visit Baba Amr since the government assault.

As world pressure on Syria mounted, the deputy oil minister announced his defection, the first by a senior civilian official since the start of the uprising. Abdo Hussameldin, 58, said he knew his change of sides would bring persecution on his family.

Two rebel groups later said four more high-ranking military officers had defected over the past three days to a camp for Syrian army deserters in southern Turkey.

Lieutenant Khaled al-Hamoud, a spokesman for the Free Syrian Army (FSA), told Reuters by telephone the desertions brought to seven the number of brigadier generals who had defected.

In Damascus, the authorities continued to crack down on Assad opponents, with government forces shooting and wounding three mourners at a funeral for an army defector that turned into a protest against the president, locals said.

Opposition sources and residents say protests in the capital are driven by inflation and the plunging value of the Syrian pound.

MILITARY ACTION

The world has failed to stop an unequal struggle pitting mostly Sunni Muslim demonstrators and lightly armed rebels against the armored might of Assad's 300,000-strong military, secret police and feared Alawite militiamen.

Western powers have shied away from Libya-style military intervention in Syria, which sits at the heart of a conflict-prone Middle East.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Wednesday defended U.S. caution about military involvement, especially without international consensus on Syria, but said the Pentagon had reviewed U.S. military options.

Tunisia and Turkey, a neighbor of Syria, have also declared their opposition to intervention by any force from outside the region, and Annan argued against further militarization of the conflict.

"We should not forget the possible impact of Syria on the region if there is any miscalculation," the former U.N. chief said.

But Syrian dissidents said diplomatic initiatives had proved fruitless in the past. "When they fail no action is taken against the regime and that's why the opposition has to arm itself against its executioner," said one rebel army officer.

Russia, a staunch defender of Syria, said Assad was battling al Qaeda-backed "terrorists" including at least 15,000 foreign fighters who it said would seize towns if Assad troops withdraw.

"The flow of all kind of terrorists from some neighboring countries is always increasing," Russia's deputy ambassador Mikhail Lebedev said in Geneva.

The Libyan government denied Russian accusations that it was running camps to train and arm Syrian rebels.

On the ground, the humanitarian situation appeared dire. The United Nations said it was preparing food supplies for 1.5 million Syrians as part of a 90-day emergency plan.

"More needs to be done," John Ging of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which is headed by Amos, told a Syria Humanitarian Forum in Geneva.

(Additional reporting by Khaled Yacoub Oweis and Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman, Erika Solomon in Beirut, Sui-Lee Wee in Beijing, Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva and Lin Noueihed in Tunis; Writing by Maria Golovnina; Editing by Jon Boyle)

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VYou brings video Q&A service to Android phones

Video Q&A startup VYou is massively extending its reach with the release Monday of an Android app. That app, which follows the release of an iPhone app (aapl) last September, could greatly increase the number of mobile users VYou can attract.

VYou is built around the idea of submitting and answering questions via video, putting a real voice and a face behind those people who provide their opinions through the service. It gives users a few short minutes to provide replies, which are viewable by all users. With recent updates, it also gave users the ability to create status updates and provide their own responses to questions that are posed to other users. All of these features have been aimed at building a community around sharing via video.

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Package at Limbaugh's home was not harmful: police

PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Authorities say a suspicious package sent to Rush Limbaugh's South Florida home was not dangerous or hazardous.

Instead, police say the item investigated Thursday turned out to be an electronic plaque sent by a listener of the radio talk show host's program as a "business opportunity" for him. It concerned the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth.

A Palm Beach police spokesman said during a news conference the package was delivered late Thursday afternoon. When it was screened by an X-ray device, staff members saw what appeared to be wires and called police. The Palm Beach Post (http://bit.ly/yUyogu ) reports that a sheriff's office bomb squad went to the home to investigate the package.

The sender apologized when investigators contacted him.

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Voting fraud allegations mar Putin's presidential win

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A few days before Russia's presidential election, Sergei Smirnov received a phone call from a man who called himself Mikhail and told him the terms of the deal: you will vote for Vladimir Putin four times and receive 2,000 roubles ($70) in return.

The sum was promised to dozens of other young men and women who met on Sunday outside a popular fast food joint on the southwest fringe of Moscow, waiting to be taken to various polling stations in the province that rings the capital.

Smirnov, a journalist, said he found the group a few weeks prior to the election through a friend. Mikhail, whom he met at Moscow's Yugo-Zapadnaya (Southwest) metro station on Sunday morning, gave him final instructions.

"He said we should vote for Vladimir Putin, photograph the ballot, and send him the photograph by phone," Smirnov said.

Smirnov is one of several activists who infiltrated and followed a group of what he said were "carousel" voters, as Russians call people who cast several ballots at different polling stations using documents reserved for absentee voters.

It is a practice critics say has been used to pad results for Kremlin candidates in elections since Putin came to power in 2000, including a December 4 parliamentary vote in which suspicions of fraud prompted the biggest protests of his 12-year rule.

Opposition politicians said Sunday's election, in which Putin won a six-year term with nearly 60 percent of the vote - enough to avoid a runoff he would have faced if he fell short of 50 percent - was no exception.

"Nobody expected these carousels ... it is complete impudence," said Alexei Navalny, a popular protest leader who is among those planning new demonstrations starting on Monday in Moscow and other cities.

Navalny, who sent observers to polling stations, said he had been receiving reports of potential violations all day.

Stung by allegations of fraud in the parliamentary vote, Putin ordered thousands of web cameras installed in polling places nationwide for Sunday's election, and in a victory speech he said he had won "in an open and honest struggle."

But critics said the group Smirnov joined was just one of many instances of suspected fraud.

Golos, an independent vote monitoring group, received more than 3,500 reports of potential violations nationwide.

A YouTube video posted by someone who identified themselves as Fremstiller showed men in Russia's southern province of Dagestan stuffing ballots into boxes one after another http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTbdeyfXeGE.

"THE CORRECT RESULT"

Lawmaker Ilya Ponomarev said that by Sunday afternoon he had heard of dozens of cases of alleged fraud, including carousels.

He said Russia's electoral system was permeated by a culture of fraud built less on orders from the top than on the initiative of regional and local officials who are eager to please those above them.

"Vladimir Putin has a system in place in which provincial authorities are obliged to hold up the result of the ruling party. They know that if they don't attain the right result they could lose their jobs," Ponomaryov said.

"They act out of instinct to cheat in the elections."

Grigory Melkonyants, deputy head of Golos, said voting violations took many forms.

The alleged "carousel" voting ring in Southwest Moscow had voters' names registered at several polling stations, he said, where local election officials most likely knew they were part of a vote rigging organization but failed to stop them.

"When people have absentee ballots that don't match their passport ... the election commission members usually understand that it is better to let them vote," he said.

Smirnov spoke outside a police station where officers were questioning Mikhail - Mikhail Nazarov, who told Smirnov he was a student at the elite Moscow State University.

In a series of video and sound recordings, Smirnov and others documented cars full of voters travelling to Vnukovo, a town outside Moscow, from there to the village of Tolstopaltsevo, and then back to Moscow.

Smirnov said he was put in a car with three others, one of whom was a friend who helped him gain access to the group.

"The other two were saying that it wasn't the first time they had done such a thing and that in the last elections they had voted at six polling stations and for that they paid them 5,000 roubles ($170)," he said.

Natalia Pelevine, who worked with Smirnov, said she and others caught another alleged member of the group handing out wads of 500-rouble notes in a nearby metro passageway to women they had followed in cars from polling stations outside Moscow.

The woman who received the money fled but Yulia Chelnokova, who was handing it out, was trapped after the activists called for the help of police, who detained her. Nazarov was also detained.

BLOGOSPHERE

Nazarov and Chelnokova were questioned in a police station in the metro and then transferred to another police station. When questioned by Reuters in the presence of police, Nazarov denied having set up or being part of a "carousel" voting group.

During voting the Russian blogosphere was rife with pictures of voters getting on and off buses at polling stations, a familiar scene that can indicate multiple voting.

Some of the thousands of mostly young people who took part in pro-Putin rallies after polls closed were brought to Moscow by bus. A woman at one rally who gave only her first name, Ira, said she had voted at two different polling stations.

Putin is likely to use his election result to show that he has support from the majority of Russians and dismiss opponents as a small group of dissenters.

Suspicions of fraud could help opposition leaders keep up the protest movement that erupted after the December election and brought tens of thousands of people into the streets.

"This shows major violations of the law and will play a large role in how we respond in protests," Pelevine said at Navalny's headquarters. "We're trying to make it as public as possible so that people know."

($1 = 29.2650 Russian roubles)

(Additional reporting by Alissa De Carbonnel, Writing by Thomas Grove, Editing by Steve Gutterman)

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Samsung Rugby Smart review: Tough INC.

The Samsung Rugby Smart for AT&T is bound to bring a massive dash of toughness to the Korean giant's Android ranks. Compliant with MIL-STD-810f military grade standard, the handset will also enable Samsung to compete in yet another smartphone segment of the already saturated U.S. market.

While it is no secret that Samsung's smartphone lineup in the United States is difficult to keep track of due to its sheer size, a rugged device had been a notable omission until the arrival of the subject of today's feature.

Samsung Rugby Smart official photos

Despite being a newcomer to the U.S. market, the Samsung Rugby Smart is hardly a revolution in terms of design or specifications. What Samsung have done essentially, is put the single-core, 1.4GHz Scorpion CPU and Snapdragon chipset of the Galaxy W into the casing of the Galaxy Xcover. Add a 3.7" Super AMOLED screen to the mix and there goes the Samsung Rugby Smart for AT&T. Here is the full list of key features for you.

Quad-band GSM and dual-band 3G support14.4 Mbps HSDPA; 5.76 Mbps HSUPAMIL-STD-810f ruggedness standard compliant1.4GHz Snapdragon CPU; Adreno 205 GPU; Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset; 512MB RAM4GB storage, microSD card support (up to 32GB)3.7" Super AMOLED display with WVGA (800 x 480) resolution; 252ppi pixel density5 megapixel auto-focus camera; HD (720p) video recording at 30fps, LED flashFront-facing VGA camera for video callsAndroid 2.3.6 Gingerbread with TouchWiz 4.0 launcherRich video format support out of the boxWi-Fi b/g/n; Hot-spot and DLNA connectivityBluetooth 3.0 with A2DPGPS with A-GPS; Digital compassStandard 3.5 mm audio jackAccelerometer and proximity sensorDivX/XviD/X264 video supportOffice document viewer/editorWeb browser with Adobe Flash 11 supportNot exactly a lookerHardware is not exactly at the cutting edgeNo dedicated camera button

As you can notice at its key features above, the Samsung Rugby Smart is not exactly at the cutting edge of the Android realm today. The smartphone surely is not a looker either. Instead, the handset is here to offer its potential users solid functionality, without compromising on toughness.

Samsung Rugby Smart live photos

Traditionally, we are now going to kick things off with an unboxing of the Samsung Rugby Smart, followed by design, build quality, and toughness inspection.

Editorial: You might notice that this review is shorter than usual and doesn't include all of our proprietary tests. The reason is it has been prepared and written far away from our office and test lab. The Samsung Rugby Smart for AT&T is a US-only phone, so it will probably never get to the shores of the Old Continent. Still, we think we've captured the essence of the phone in the same precise, informative and detailed way that's become our trademark. Enjoy the good read!

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U.S. physicists confirm 'God particle' finding is near

US-based physicists said Wednesday that their experiments confirm those from a major European atom-smasher's that have narrowed the range where the elusive Higgs boson particle could be hiding.

The results come from the now-defunct Tevatron collider, which closed down in September after nearly a quarter century, though physicists continue to analyze its data in the hunt for the so-called "God particle."

The Higgs boson is the missing link in the standard model of physics and is believed to be what gives objects mass, though scientists have never been able to pin it down and it exists only in theory.

"The end game is approaching in the hunt for the Higgs boson," said Jim Siegrist, Department of Energy associate director of science for high energy physics.

"This is an important milestone for the Tevatron experiments, and demonstrates the continuing importance of independent measurements in the quest to understand the building blocks of nature."

Physicists from the CDF and DZero collaborations at Fermi National Acceleratory Laboratory in Illinois said in a statement that their data "might be interpreted as coming from a Higgs boson with a mass in the region of 115 to 135 GeV (gigaelectronvolts)."

That result includes the slightly more narrow constraints announced in December 2011 by scientists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider -- the world's largest atom-smasher, located along the French-Swiss border.

The CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research) experiments, carried out by a consortium of 20 member nations, have shown a likely range for the Higgs boson between 115 to 127 GeV.

GeV is the standard measure for the mass of sub-atomic particles. One GeV is roughly equivalent to the mass of a proton.

However, none of the hints so far have been enough for physicists to announce that the particle has been "discovered," or to claim there is enough evidence to say for certain that it exists.

Fermilab director Pier Oddone said he was "thrilled with the pace of progress in the hunt for the Higgs boson," noting that scientists from around the world have combed through hundreds of trillions of proton-antiproton collisions.

"There is still much work ahead before the scientific community can say for sure whether the Higgs boson exists," added Dmitri Denisov, DZero co-spokesman and physicist at Fermilab.

"Based on these exciting hints, we are working as quickly as possible to further improve our analysis methods and squeeze the last ounce out of Tevatron data."

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Villains Become Victims in <cite>Clone Wars</cite>' 'Massacre'

Compelling female heroines and villains are comparatively few and far between in the Star Wars universe. But The Clone Wars’ complicated, vengeful Sith apprentice Asajj Ventress, as well as her supernaturally powerful Nightsisters of Dathomir, are some of its best.

Too bad they’re probably all getting killed in Friday’s night’s episode, “Massacre,” previewed in the clip above.

Well, perhaps: A scant few ever truly die in sci-fi franchises as expansive as Star Wars, which are always on the lookout for reboot opportunities. After all, Ventress herself was supposedly killed by Anakin in Genndy Tartakovksy’s stunning 2003 Clone Wars animated series, and the entire second Star Wars trilogy is based on the archetypal Darth Vader, whose sacrifice closed out Return of the Jedi.

What goes around eventually comes around.

That said, “Massacre” offers Count Dooku and General Grievous (below) chances to renew their deflated evils. The former uses the latter to claim his murderous payback against Ventress and her sisterhood of intergalactic witches, who attempted to assassinate Dooku after he threw her aside like another spent Star Wars pawn.

The knotted conflict of “Massacre” kicks off a four-episode arc that promises to darkly extinguish The Clone Wars‘ rewarding fourth season. Screen the clips above and below and let us know if you think The Clone Wars’ fifth season, due on Cartoon Network this fall, can cap the series before the inevitable syndication beckons.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars airs Friday at 8 p.m./7 p.m. Central on Cartoon Network.

Scott Thill covers pop, culture, tech, politics, econ, the environment and more for Wired, AlterNet, Filter, Huffington Post and others. You can sample his collected spiels at his site, Morphizm.
Follow @morphizm on Twitter.

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Infosys plans to create 14,000 jobs for engineers

IT major Infosys will set up a software development centre in Nagpur, its second in Maharashtra after Pune, with an initial investment of Rs 100 crore.

The Bangalore-based software services provider today signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) in this regard with Maharashtra Airport Development Company (MADC) in presence of Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan.

The MoU was signed by MADC Vice-Chairman and Managing Director U P S Madan and Shibulal, Managing Director of Infosys.

India's second-largest software firm will be allocated 142 acres of land for the centre at Mihan, a air cargo project being developed by MADC.

According to the MoU, the IT firm will start operations within three years at the centre which will come up at an investment of Rs 100 crore and provide jobs to about 2,000 software engineers over five years.

Infosys intends to invest a total of Rs 415 crore and create jobs for 14000 IT engineers when the centre, the firm's 12th in the country, is fully developed in about 10 years.

Infosys has 64 offices and 68 development centres in India and abroad and 1,45,088 employees as on December 31, 2011.

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Free theme for Symbian^3 Dark Blue by Hank

Free theme for S^3 and this theme is compatible with Nokia Belle.

You can download this theme from our Symbian^3 Themes section.

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iOS 5.1 could have Facebook integration

Rumors of iOS 5.1 including native Facebook integration first surfaced in January when iMore found a contact field for your Facebook ID within the contacts app in iOS 5.1 beta 3. Now, we have come across some more evidence that should confirm this rumor.

Thanks to some super sleuthing by the guys at Techie Buzz, they have noticed that updates being sent from the native iOS Facebook app once again show up as sent via 'Facebook for iPhone' or ''Facebook for iPad', depending upon your device. If you remember, Facebook stopped showing this message a while back and would only show sent via 'Mobile', which is also what you see when you post an update through the Android app. This happened around the same time when Apple dropped Facebook sharing option from Ping.

But now it seems in preparation for the Facebook integration within iOS, Facebook has changed the way updates sent from the iOS app are being reported. And this is happening just a few hours before the iPad 3 event, where Apple is likely to also announce iOS 5.1. Meanwhile, updates sent from the Android app continue to be shown as sent via 'Mobile'.

So it seems Apple and Facebook have finally put aside their differences and decided to work together. The Facebook integration should come as a welcome addition and will benefit everyone involved, the user, Apple as well as Facebook.

Source

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New Skype For Mac Update Finally Includes Full Screen Mode, Automatic Updates

I lean on Skype (and Macs) pretty heavily, so when a fairly substantial update for the VOIP/messaging service goes live, my ears tend to perk up. The new Skype 5.6 update has me especially tickled — it’s now available for folks of the Mac persuasion, and it thankfully packs a handful of bugfixes as well as a slew of new (and arguably overdue) features.

Perhaps most important is the ability to delete part or all of a conversation in one fell swoop. I don’t find myself needing to do this too often aside from when I’m locked in throes of a particularly nasty digital cleaning spree, but I’m sure there are more than a few of you out there sighing with relief right about now.

Textual indiscretions aside, Skype 5.6 also brings with it the ability to auto-update when new versions are released (which the Windows version has been able to do since last September), as well a new full-screen app mode that comes seven months after Apple’s Lion update added support for the feature. Better late than never, as they always say.

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5 Reasons Why Your Facebook Store Might Be Struggling

Beware, the sky is falling! Or at least that’s what we’re hearing from some experts on F-commerce following announcements from a few big name retailers in recent weeks that they are shuttering their stores on Facebook.

Going as far as to suggest that the “F” in “F-commerce” now stands for “failure,” these critics are boldly asserting that F-commerce’s days are numbered and that the entire concept is destined to soon be but a footnote in the pages of tech history.

Frankly, such claims are more than a little mind-boggling. Whenever a new medium like F-commerce emerges, companies are naturally uncertain on how to approach it and it always takes some time before strong and effective strategies emerge. Think back to when the internet first caught on – it was unchartered territory for everyone but now, just about every business has in-house employees that handle things like online reputation, SEO, SEM and more.

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Racial divide runs deep in U.S. schools, study finds

(Reuters) - Black and Latino students across the United States are far more likely to be suspended than white students - and far less likely to have access to rigorous college-prep courses, according to a sweeping study released on Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights.

The trove of data, collected from 72,000 schools serving 85 percent of the nation's students, revealed tremendous disparities in the public school experiences of minority and white students.

Some of the most striking findings involved discipline: one in five African-American boys - and one in 10 African-American girls - was suspended from school during the study period, the 2009-10 school year.

Overall, African-American students are 3-1/2 times more likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers. And 70 percent of students arrested or referred to law enforcement for disciplinary infractions are black or Latino, the study found. Other researchers have found that students who are repeatedly punished by being barred from campus are far more likely to drop out.

Academic opportunities also vary widely by race. Among high schools that serve predominately Latino and African-American students, just 29 percent offer a calculus class and only 40 percent offer physics. In some school districts, those numbers are even more glaring. In New York City, for instance, just 10 percent of the high schools with the highest black and Latino enrollment offer Algebra II.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan was careful to say that his department is "not alleging overt discrimination in some or all of these cases."

But he said he hoped the data would prompt soul-searching as educators across the nation confront inequities.

"In the big picture, this is really about self-analysis," Duncan said. He urged teachers and administrators to "look in the mirror, at the good, the bad and the ugly, and figure out what's going on."

That may be easier said than done, said Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The data hint uncomfortably at crude assumptions and enduring stereotypes about "who should be in school, who should be preparing to go to college, who can learn" - and "many of those beliefs stem back from before you or I were born," Welner said. "That's hard to change."

Other studies over the decades have found similar racial disparities in student discipline and academic opportunity. But the new report, which Duncan is scheduled to release today in an event at Howard University, is more detailed and comprehensive than most.

It breaks down the national data district by district and school by school. And it looks at racial disparities in realms as varied as access to pre-kindergarten programs; success in Advanced Placement courses; and the use of physical restraints on students with disabilities.

The release of such wide-ranging data "is very important for is if we're to gain the national will to overcome our aversion to looking at race," said Russell Skiba, who directs the Equity Project at Indiana University's School of Education. "It's tough to talk about race. It's awkward. But this data gives us a bit of a road map."

The report, known as the Civil Rights Data Collection, seeks to prod change by calling attention to districts that have used what Duncan called "best practices" to reduce inequities.

It points, for instance, to a high school in Montgomery County, Maryland, that serves a largely black and Hispanic population - and enrolls those students in physics at an impressive rate. The report also highlights an elementary school in an impoverished neighborhood of Dade County, Florida that enrolls nearly 17 percent of its black and Hispanic students in a program for gifted students, more than triple the national rate.

Duncan said he hoped administrators in other districts would ask how those schools had achieved their success, then follow suit. "There are some encouraging things in this data," he said. "Frankly, there are some very troubling things as well. But the only way forward is to know the truth."

(Reporting by Stephanie Simon in Denver; Editing by Eric Walsh)

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Texas boy kidnapped 8 years ago to be reunited with his mother

An 8-year-old boy who disappeared in Texas in 2004 has been found after police arrested his former babysitter on charges of kidnapping him.

Miguel Morin will be reunited with his mother, Auboni Champion-Morin, possibly later this week, pending a DNA test, a Houston television station reported on Wednesday.

Champion-Morin, of Houston, says she never gave up hope that she would find her child.

"I prayed every night that he was safe, loved and he would come home one day," Champion-Morin told the Texas station.

The sitter, Krystle Rochelle Tanner, 26, was arrested on felony kidnapping charges Monday, according to MSNBC, and remained jailed without bond in San Augustine, about 200 miles southeast of Fort Worth.

Tanner, who was friends with Champion-Morin and served as the child's godmother, had taken the baby for what was supposed to be one night before both vanished. Police investigated the case for two years before it was closed in 2006, Chief Deputy Gary Cunningham of the San Augustine Sheriff's Department told the Associated Press.

Late last summer, authorities got a break in the case after child welfare investigators in San Augustine County received a complaint that Tanner and her boyfriend were neglecting their two children, Cunningham said.

Officials tried to find the older boy, who turned out to be Morin, though Tanner told authorities conflicting stories about him—he used different names, and Tanner claimed she had been keeping him for a woman she had met in a park, Cunningham said.

Despite the fact that law enforcement had no record that Morin had gone missing because his name had been removed from the national missing children's database, they began investigating it as a missing child's cased in January.

"It was very difficult because we were essentially searching for a ghost," Cunningham told AP.

Child Protective Services recently learned about the kidnapping, which led to Monday's arrest of Tanner, whose relative led authorities to the boy. Tanner's relative claimed no knowledge of the kidnapping, Cunningham said.

Cunningham did not know if anyone else will be arrested.

"I want to hold him in my arms and let him know who I am," Champion-Morin told the Houston television station. "I hope he can feel the same thing I feel for him."

Cunningham told AP that the boy has seemingly never gone to school, and one of the names Tanner called him was "Dirty." He also said that the family will likely go through some counseling.

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9/11 victims’ remains were mixed with medical waste, put in landfill

Undated file photo released by Defense Department in 2004 of the flag-draped coffins of U.S. war casualties aboard …The remains of some of the victims of the 9/11 hijacking of flight No. 93 that went down over Shanksville, Pennsylvania, were incinerated, mixed with medical waste, and placed in a landfill, according to a gruesome new Pentagon report.

Issued by an independent commission chaired by retired Gen. John Abizaid, the report looks into allegations of improper handling at the Dover Air Force base's mortuary of the remains of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On Tuesday, the Pentagon released the 9-member panel's findings in an 86-page report  (.pdf). On page 11, the panel notes that it was only after the committee's work began that it was alerted to allegations that some 9/11 victims' unidentified remains were handled improperly at the facility:

Prior to 2008, portions of remains that could neither be tested nor identified ...were cremated under contract at a civilian crematory and returned to DPM [Dover Port Mortuary]. This policy began shortly after September 11, 2001, when several portions of remains from the Pentagon attack and the Shanksville, Pennsylvania, crash site could not be tested or identified.

These cremated portions were then placed in sealed containers that were provided to a biomedical waste disposal contractor. Per the biomedical waste contract at that time, the contractor then transported these containers and incinerated them. The assumption on the part of DPM was that after final incineration nothing remained. A DPM management query found that there was some residual material following incineration and that the contractor was disposing of it in a landfill. The landfill disposition was not disclosed in the contractual disposal agreement.

The practice ceased in 2008. "Remains are now cremated and retired at sea," the report said, referring to the new policy put in place.

Rep. Rush Holt (D-New Jersey) first brought the distressing allegations to the Pentagon chiefs' attention.

A spokesman for Holt told Yahoo News Tuesday that the congressman had originally learned of the issue last summer from a constituent whose husband had been killed in action in Iraq years before.

"She was getting evasive answers from the Pentagon about what happened to his remains," Holt's spokesman told Yahoo News in a phone interview Tuesday. "After digging into it, she was told his remains had been incinerated, mixed with medical waste, and put in a landfill. She was quite distressed and asked the congressman to dig in further."

Holt originally wrote Defense Secretary Leon Panetta about the concern in a letter last September. He sent a second letter on February 6th: "Can the Air Force confirm that no 9/11 victim's remains were ... sent to a landfill?" he wrote.

Holt pieced together a possible scenario. "Given this had been the Dover policy, and given that various 9/11 remains had been handled at Dover, he was concerned this might have happened," his spokesman said.

The White House expressed deep concern about the panel's findings on Tuesday, and said the President had been briefed on the review.

The President "strongly supports the Pentagon's efforts to make needed systemic structural changes so that these types of incidents never happen again," White House spokesman Jay Carney said in a press statement Tuesday evening. "The United States has a solemn obligation to compassionately and professionally care for fallen service members and their families, and those we tragically lost on 9/11."

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Infosys plans to create 14,000 jobs for engineers

IT major Infosys will set up a software development centre in Nagpur, its second in Maharashtra after Pune, with an initial investment of Rs 100 crore.

The Bangalore-based software services provider today signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) in this regard with Maharashtra Airport Development Company (MADC) in presence of Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan.

The MoU was signed by MADC Vice-Chairman and Managing Director U P S Madan and Shibulal, Managing Director of Infosys.

India's second-largest software firm will be allocated 142 acres of land for the centre at Mihan, a air cargo project being developed by MADC.

According to the MoU, the IT firm will start operations within three years at the centre which will come up at an investment of Rs 100 crore and provide jobs to about 2,000 software engineers over five years.

Infosys intends to invest a total of Rs 415 crore and create jobs for 14000 IT engineers when the centre, the firm's 12th in the country, is fully developed in about 10 years.

Infosys has 64 offices and 68 development centres in India and abroad and 1,45,088 employees as on December 31, 2011.

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Pintile claims to be India's Pinterest

Gurgaon-based Fizzy Softwares has launched Pintile.com as an online bulletin board exclusively for India, inspired by Pinterest.com. According to the company, Pintile aims to depict India in the form of images where people "PIN" their cultures, styles, ideas and much more.

Pinterest is a pinboard-styled social photo sharing website. The service allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections. The site's mission statement is to "connect everyone in the world through the 'things' they find interesting." Pinterest is managed by Cold Brew Labs, a team based in Palo Alto, California.

Pintile offers people a way to connect with others to share their experiences by pinning them onto their boards that can be personalized for each person. People can also like pins, and even re-pin them on their bulletin board. While the website has a few guidelines, people are free to pin whatever they like.

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Villains Become Victims in <cite>Clone Wars</cite>' 'Massacre'

Compelling female heroines and villains are comparatively few and far between in the Star Wars universe. But The Clone Wars’ complicated, vengeful Sith apprentice Asajj Ventress, as well as her supernaturally powerful Nightsisters of Dathomir, are some of its best.

Too bad they’re probably all getting killed in Friday’s night’s episode, “Massacre,” previewed in the clip above.

Well, perhaps: A scant few ever truly die in sci-fi franchises as expansive as Star Wars, which are always on the lookout for reboot opportunities. After all, Ventress herself was supposedly killed by Anakin in Genndy Tartakovksy’s stunning 2003 Clone Wars animated series, and the entire second Star Wars trilogy is based on the archetypal Darth Vader, whose sacrifice closed out Return of the Jedi.

What goes around eventually comes around.

That said, “Massacre” offers Count Dooku and General Grievous (below) chances to renew their deflated evils. The former uses the latter to claim his murderous payback against Ventress and her sisterhood of intergalactic witches, who attempted to assassinate Dooku after he threw her aside like another spent Star Wars pawn.

The knotted conflict of “Massacre” kicks off a four-episode arc that promises to darkly extinguish The Clone Wars‘ rewarding fourth season. Screen the clips above and below and let us know if you think The Clone Wars’ fifth season, due on Cartoon Network this fall, can cap the series before the inevitable syndication beckons.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars airs Friday at 8 p.m./7 p.m. Central on Cartoon Network.

Scott Thill covers pop, culture, tech, politics, econ, the environment and more for Wired, AlterNet, Filter, Huffington Post and others. You can sample his collected spiels at his site, Morphizm.
Follow @morphizm on Twitter.

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Why Give Up Facebook for Lent, or Ever?

Lent is in full swing, and so are the commitments to 40 days without Facebook. In this framework, Facebook use is seen as negative and an addiction. It becomes just another one to add to Americans' list of overindulgences, of things that push us away from each other and further into self.

'The idea of giving up Facebook for Lent goes with Internet use as addiction,' says Alexandra Samuels, who penned 'Plug In Better': A Manifesto' on The Atlantic. 'I think one of the things that we experience, certainly those who spend a significant amount of time online and especially on social media, is you develop this sort of porousness between self and other when you're constantly disclosing thoughts via Facebook, Twitter, email. The intellectual habit of writing your thoughts as you have them has become widespread. It is a distancing kind of experience.' But is that act an addiction, or just a byproduct of using social media?

Duluth-based freelance writer Felicia Schneiderhan decided to give up Facebook for Lent this year. She says that she didn't think too much about the decision, but that it's turned out to be pretty hard.

'I use it throughout the day just to check in,' Schneiderhan says. 'If I am online and I need a mental break, I'll just glance at it quickly.'

Like everything new, the first few days were the hardest because Facebook had transcended just a random, once-in-awhile kinda thing. It had become a habit.

'Last night my son was in bed, I was tired, I went to my computer and didn't want to do emails - I wanted to see Facebook,' she says. 'But I can't. I've been calling people more, like my brothers, but I've been missing events.'

The break from Facebook has helped Schneiderhan realize how much she actually uses Facebook for legitimate purposes, and has helped her rethink how to use it more effectively.

'Once Lent is over, I think I'm going to restrict my time to just once in the morning and once at night,' she says.

For Schneiderhan, Facebook is a useful tool and not an addiction. Yet there is still a cultural undertone which implies that Twitter, for instance, is as addictive as alcohol and cigarettes.

'Addiction has become this framework we use in our culture to contain and medicalize dysfunctional behavior,' says Samuels. 'So anytime you stop doing it, you will have withdrawl symptoms. You have to ask yourself, what do we eliminate and obscure by framing that behavior as addiction?'

Samuels suggests that this framework is indeed counterproductive because it purports that people should quit Facebook cold turkey. To Samuels, this sounds 'hopeless and counterproductive.' Instead, she offers some practical advice.

'Ask yourself: Is my use of the Internet helping me create the life I want? I think part of it is that people are not clear with what they're trying do with their life,' she says. 'If you get up from the computer on a regular basis and you wonder where the time went and you don't feel very good, maybe you should reassess your Internet use.'

But for those devoted to a Facebook-free 40 days of Lent, that's not going to happen. We're talking about the devout here.

'I'm doing it again this year,' writes Rosie Perera on the blog Faith and Technology. 'I'd been planning to just give up procrastination but one of my biggest ways of procrastinating is checking Facebook ('just one quick little check' and then I get sucked in), so I think that really needs to go too.'

Perera takes it one step further, suggesting that people who want to give it up actually deactivate their accounts. She files her blog post under the topic 'Tech Sabbath.'

But the idea of giving up Facebook completely may not really be a positive thing.

'When I go back to regular non-Lent Facebook usage, I wonder if I'll go back to my old pattern,' says Schneiderhan. 'I don't think Facebook is a bad habit to have, for me. And that's a good question because I thought it would be a huge time-waster.'

If you're still devoted to a Facebook-free Lent, be sure to check out the Pope's Twitter feed. He's tweeting Gospel themes or messages until Easter.

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U.N. aid chief seeks access to battered Syrian city

AMMAN (Reuters) - The U.N. humanitarian chief headed on Wednesday for a Syrian city where authorities have yet to let a Red Cross aid convoy into a former rebel area amid opposition reports of bloody reprisals by President Bashar al-Assad's forces.

Valerie Amos had wanted to visit Syria last week, but was denied access. The Syrian military drove armed rebels from the battered Baba Amr district on Thursday after a month-long siege and state media say civilians have begun returning there.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has been trying to deliver relief supplies and evacuate the wounded, but has failed to get permission from the authorities so far, raising fears about the fate of survivors in Baba Amr.

Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Geneva, said Amos left for Homs after meeting Foreign Ministry officials in Damascus.

Amos is on a three-day mission to try to persuade Syrian authorities to grant unhindered access for aid workers to deliver life-saving assistance to civilians.

Syrian tanks bombarded other opposition areas in Homs overnight, anti-Assad activists said, although an ICRC spokesman in Damascus said the city was quieter than before.

No independent witnesses have been allowed into the devastated Baba Amr district since rebels withdrew.

In the latest of several accounts of killings and other abuses, local activist Mohammed al-Homsi said troops and pro-Assad militiamen had stabbed to death seven males, including a 10-year-old, from one family on Tuesday. "Their bodies were dumped in farmland next to Baba Amr," he told Reuters.

Syria imposes severe media restrictions, making such reports hard to verify, although U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has voiced alarm at reports that Syrian government forces have executed, imprisoned and tortured people in Baba Amr.

MATTER OF TIME

President Barack Obama said it was only a matter of time before Assad left office, but he opposed a call by a senior U.S. senator for American-led military action to force him out.

The world has found no way to halt a year of bloodshed since many Syrians rose against Assad in what has proved the longest and bloodiest of Arab revolts against entrenched rulers.

At the United Nations, the five permanent Security Council members and Morocco met on Tuesday to discuss a U.S.-drafted resolution urging an end to the Syrian government's crackdown on demonstrators, a text some Western envoys said was too weak.

Russia and China, adamantly opposed to any Libya-style intervention in Syria, have vetoed two previous draft measures that would have condemned Damascus and it is not clear whether the latest one stands any chance of success.

According to a text seen by Reuters, the U.S. draft demands "unhindered humanitarian access" and "condemns the continued widespread, systematic, and gross violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms by the Syrian authorities".

In another effort to stop the violence, former U.N. chief Kofi Annan plans his first visit to Damascus as joint envoy of the United Nations and the Arab League on Saturday.

Diplomacy has yet to brake a conflict likely to have cost more than 10,000 lives: the United Nations says security forces has killed well over 7,500 people and Syria said in December that "terrorists" had killed more than 2,000 security personnel.

PROMISED ELECTION

Assad, who has promised a multi-party parliamentary election in May, told a visiting Ukrainian lawmaker that Syrians had proved they would pursue reforms and "confront terrorism backed by foreign sides", state news agency SANA reported on Wednesday.

Apart from the shelling of the Homs districts of Karm al-Zeitoun, Jub al-Jandali and Deir Baalba, opposition sources said Syrian troops had staged raids in the towns of Qara and Yabroud north of Damascus, and in the northern city of Aleppo.

The White House said Obama was committed to diplomacy to end the violence, saying Washington wanted to isolate Assad, cut off his sources of revenue and encourage unity among his opponents.

"Ultimately this dictator will fall," Obama said, while rejecting a call by Senator John McCain for a U.S.-led effort to protect Syrian civilians with air strikes on Assad's forces.

"For us to take military action unilaterally, as some have suggested, or to think that somehow there is some simple solution, I think is a mistake," the president said.

Assad can still count on powerful allies such as Russia and China, as well as others including Iran, Venezuela and Cuba.

Chinese envoy Li Huaxin told reporters in Damascus on Wednesday that Syria had welcomed a six-point Chinese plan to promote a political solution to the year-long conflict.

The plan, unveiled on Sunday, called events in Syria "deeply worrying" and said: "We oppose anyone interfering in Syria's internal affairs under the pretext of 'humanitarian' issues."

China is bringing workers home from Syria in an apparent attempt to avoid a repeat of last year's rescue of its nationals from Libya due to violence there.

Only about 100 Chinese workers will be left behind to guard work camps and equipment, Commerce Minister Chen Deming said, without saying how many Chinese workers would be repatriated.

Air France said it had halted all its flights to Damascus due to worsening security in Syria.

France, which has led calls for Assad to step down closed its embassy in Damascus on Tuesday.

(Additional reporting by Oliver Holmes, Dominic Evans and Erika Solomon in Beirut, Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva, Louis Charbonneau at the United Nations, Lucy Hornby and Aileen Wang in Beijing, James Regan and John Irish in Paris and Tabassum Zakaria in Washington; Writing by Alistair Lyon; editing by Janet McBride)

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Android 4.0 update for Galaxy S II said to arrive on March 15

The Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich update for the Samsung Galaxy S II has been a long time coming but it seems that the wait is soon to get over. Although Samsung did earlier mention that the S II, along with a few other Samsung devices will be getting the update sometime in March, it did not provide the actual date.

Now, however, a Samsung importer in Isreal called Sunny Communications have revealed on its Facebook page that the update will arrive on March 15, just over a week from today. Here is the translated quite from Facebook:

We promised that we're working on it. You waited patiently. On 15 March it comes: the Android version 4, ICS, tens of thousands of the devices purchased GALAXY SII cellular companies in the country or directly from us. We here are very excited for the launch, hope you :)

This does not mean, however, that all Galaxy S II devices will get the update on March 15. Some may get it later or probably, some may even get it sooner, with the date mentioned above probably being only for the Israeli market. Either way, you won't be having to wait too long now.

Source (in Hebrew)

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Facebook Messenger for Windows Comes Out of Beta

After three months of testing, Facebook Messenger is coming to a Windows desktop near you.

The social network on Monday announced that Messenger for Windows, a standalone app that lets you IM friends via Windows 7, will be coming out of beta in a few weeks.

“Millions of people log into Facebook every day to keep up with friends. They also browse other websites and run computer programs, so it’s easy to miss important stuff,” reads a post on Facebook’s blog. “Maybe a cousin just posted about getting a new job, or a best friend wants to chat about dinner plans for tonight. You should be able to stay in touch anytime, no matter what you’re doing.”

Of course, you could do the same thing if you left Facebook open on your browser all day, but this is a way to keep in touch even if you close out of Facebook.

The desktop sequel to Messenger has been a long time coming. Facebook introduced the Android and iOS-based mobile Messenger app last August. Based on technology from Beluga, a Facebook acquisition, Messenger provides seamless integration with SMS.

In December, a version of Messenger for Windows 7 leaked. Hours later, Facebook released a version of the software. That, however, was a test, a Facebook rep says. The new iteration will be available to everyone. The rep added that Facebook designers are working on a Mac version. Facebook isn’t saying when that version will be out.

When Facebook released the test version in December, we found that the Windows app looked almost identical to the chat bar on Facebook.com. As with that feature, users get notifications when friends want to chat. Friend activity is also shown, however clicking on these items will take you to a web browser. The same goes for messages in your Facebook inbox. As the pics provided by Facebook below show, this version looks the same:

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AT&T expands its LTE coverage to twelve more areas

AT&T may be the LTE underdog in the States, after Verizon beat it to the punch, but the carrier isn't putting its head down. Today the company announced that twelve more markets will be joining the LTE revolution.

Here are the cities that will be joining the AT&T LTE list of markets:

Cleveland, OHAkron, OHCanton, OHNaples, FLBloomington, INLafayette, INMuncie, INBaton Rouge, LANew Orleans, LASt. Louis, MOBryan-College Station, TXStaten Island, NYC

The carrier hasn't disclosed any specific dates, but expect the LTE expansion to finish in April or May at the latest. Moreover, the said new markets will also enjoy the new 4G-capable devices like the HTC One X, Samsung Galaxy Note and of course the new iPad.

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Google Slashes Storage Prices: Still no GDrive

Google announced today that it's dropping its pricing on Google Cloud Storage and its integration with several enterprise storage offerings. Google's updated pricing scheme puts it roughly in line with Amazon's S3, but what else does Google have to offer except a new pricing scheme?

I spoke to Google's product manager for Cloud Storage, Navneet Joneja on Monday about the pricing change and how Google stands out in storage.

First, Joneja emphasizes Google's performance and scalability. Unfortunately, Google won't make with much in the way of details about its underlying infrastructure. (For example, does Google use SSD or standard drives? They won't say.)

The big argument for Google's offering, says Joneja, is what you can do with data when you've got it in Google Cloud Storage. Developers using Google Cloud Storage can tap into Google's App Engine and Google Big Query as well.

The pricing changes, says Joneja, should drop pricing by as much as 15% – depending on how much storage is used. Like Amazon S3, Google has a tiered pricing model that includes three dimensions, how much data is stored, amount of transfer, and the requests.

The request and data transfer pricing aren't changing, but they've shaved the cost of storage. Previously the first tier, up to 1TB, was priced at $0.13 per GB. Now it's at $0.12 up to 1TB. The next 9TB was priced at $0.12 per GB, but is now $0.105 per GB.

The partnering companies Google announced today are Gladinet, Panzura, Storsimple, TwinStrata and Zmanda. So far, most of the solutions that Google is announcing don't seem to be using Cloud Storage in conjunction with other Google services, but perhaps we'll be seeing a few more offerings that combine App Engine or Big Query and storage.

Google Cloud Storage is available in two regions. Joneja says customers can choose from two containers, either in the U.S. or Europe. Currently, Google does not offer a region in Asia.

With the staggering growth of Amazon S3, it should be interesting to see if Google is able to cut in on Amazon's action significantly.

No doubt quite a bit of S3's growth owes to Dropbox, which uses Amazon S3. I did ask Joneja if the slew of partnerships announced today meant that Google preferred to let customers build solutions rather than offering is own (fabled) GDrive. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, Google is still not commenting on when or if we'll be seeing GDrive.

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Record-seeking skydiver makes 13-mile test jump

Skydiving daredevil Felix Baumgartner is more than halfway toward his goal of setting a world record for the highest jump.

Baumgartner lifted off Thursday for a test jump from Roswell, N.M., aboard a 100-foot helium balloon. He rode inside a pressurized capsule to 71,581 feet — 13.6 miles — and then jumped. He parachuted to a safe landing, according to project spokeswoman Trish Medalen.

He's aiming for nearly 23 miles this summer. The record is 19.5 miles.

"The view is amazing, way better than I thought," Baumgartner said after the practice jump, in remarks provided by his representatives.

Thursday's rehearsal was a test of his capsule, full-pressure suit, parachutes and other systems. A mini Mission Control — fashioned after NASA's — monitored his flight.

Baumgartner reached speeds of up to 364.4 mph Thursday and was in free fall for three minutes and 43 seconds, before pulling his parachute cords, Medalen said. The entire jump lasted eight minutes and eight seconds. She stressed that the numbers are still unofficial.

With Thursday's successful test, Baumgartner is believed to be only the third person ever to jump from such a high altitude and free fall to a safe landing, and the first in a half-century.

"I'm now a member of a pretty small club," he said.

When the 42-year-old Austrian known as "Fearless Felix" leaps from 120,000 feet in a few months, he expects to break the sound barrier as he falls through the stratosphere at supersonic speed. There's virtually no atmosphere that far up, making it extremely hostile to humans, thus the need for a pressure suit and oxygen supply.

The record for the highest free fall is held by Joe Kittinger, a retired Air Force officer from Florida. He jumped from 102,800 feet — 19.5 miles — in 1960.

Baumgartner is out to beat that record. He plans one more dry run — jumping from 90,000 feet — before attempting the full 120,000 feet. The launch window opens in July and extends until the beginning of October.

For comparison, commercial jets generally cruise at over 30,000 feet.

Baumgartner has jumped 2,500 times from planes and helicopters, as well as some of the highest landmarks and skyscrapers on the planet — the Christ the Redeemer statue overlooking Rio de Janeiro, the Millau Viaduct in southern France, the 101-story Taipei 101 in Taiwan.

He's also plunged deep into the Earth, leaping face-first into a pitch-dark cave in Croatia.

Baumgartner considers that 620-foot-deep cave jump his most dangerous feat so far, soon to be outdone by his stratospheric plunge. His mission takes its name, Red Bull Stratos, from the stratosphere as well as the energy drink-maker sponsor.

"I like to challenge myself," Baumgartner told The Associated Press in a recent interview, "and this is the ultimate skydive. I think there's nothing bigger than that."

He's caught NASA's attention, even though space officially begins much higher at an even 100 kilometers, 328,084 feet or 62 miles.

Kittinger is now 83 and one of Baumgartner's chief advisers. A former NASA flight director directs the medical team: Dr. Jonathan Clark, whose astronaut wife, Laurel, was killed aboard space shuttle Columbia in 2003. The accident led Clark to become an expert in spacecraft emergency escape.

Kittinger and Clark were among those taking part in Thursday's dress rehearsal.

___

Online:

Red Bull Stratos: http://www.redbullstratos.com/

National Museum of the U.S. Air Force: http://tinyurl.com/2dsnn6

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Gingrich pins hopes Tuesday on big Georgia win

ATLANTA (AP) — Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is banking on a big win in Georgia Tuesday to keep his fading hopes of winning the nomination alive.

"It looks now like in Georgia we will carry the state by four or five times the margin that Romney had in Michigan," Gingrich told supporters in Alcoa, Tenn., Monday.

The former House speaker was hoping that momentum from an expected win in the state he represented in Congress for 20 years would propel his campaign, which has struggled since his lone victory in the Jan. 21 South Carolina primary.

But he sent signals he would continue by campaigning in Alabama Tuesday before the votes in Georgia are counted. Likewise, Gingrich plans to begin airing ads this week in Alabama and Mississippi. Both states hold their primaries Mar. 13.

Gingrich leads by wide margins in Georgia polls. He trails former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in Tennessee, although the race there is tight and Gingrich was closing the gap in some surveys.

"We have the chance to win a stunning victory here in Tennessee," Gingrich told 200 supporters near Knoxville.

Gingrich campaigned doggedly across Tennessee Monday, while a key supporter, former candidate Herman Cain, campaigned for him in Oklahoma before joining him at a rally in Chattanooga.

Gingrich touted himself as the only candidate experienced with the issues facing the nation, drawing on his four years as House speaker during the Clinton administration.

"The biggest difference in this race between the three major contenders is one of us has consistently shown leadership," Gingrich told about 150 people in the upstairs conference room of a Food King grocery store in Kingsport, Tenn.

Gingrich has been helped by four political action committees, including one financed largely by billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson.

Yet Gingrich sought to portray a win in Georgia as a triumph in light of heavy spending on anti-Gingrich attack ads by the pro-Romney political action committee Restore Our Future.

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Deluxe Limited Edition HTC One X comes with Beats headphones

HTC has made up a special offer for their domestic market in Taiwan bundling their newest quad-core One X smartphone with Beats Solo headphones.

Unfortunately, HTC is mum on any probability of releasing the special bundle globally or in other markets besides the Taiwanese one. The package's pre-order price is a shy below 25,000 TWD or $840. This works out as a great deal considering a standard HTC One X costs around $780 and Beats sell their Solo headphones for $180.

Pre-orders for the Deluxe Limited Edition start on March 20, so you still have some time to break the piggy bank and check your pockets for some change.

Via

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Pintile claims to be India's Pinterest

Gurgaon-based Fizzy Softwares has launched Pintile.com as an online bulletin board exclusively for India, inspired by Pinterest.com. According to the company, Pintile aims to depict India in the form of images where people "PIN" their cultures, styles, ideas and much more.

Pinterest is a pinboard-styled social photo sharing website. The service allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections. The site's mission statement is to "connect everyone in the world through the 'things' they find interesting." Pinterest is managed by Cold Brew Labs, a team based in Palo Alto, California.

Pintile offers people a way to connect with others to share their experiences by pinning them onto their boards that can be personalized for each person. People can also like pins, and even re-pin them on their bulletin board. While the website has a few guidelines, people are free to pin whatever they like.

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Easily Pronounced Names May Make People More Likable

Though it might seem impossible, and certainly inadvisable, to judge a person by their name, a new study suggests our brains try anyway.

The more pronounceable a person’s name is, the more likely people are to favor them.

“When we can process a piece of information more easily, when it’s easier to comprehend, we come to like it more,” said psychologist Adam Alter of New York University and co-author of a Journal of Experimental Social Psychology study published in December.

Fluency, the idea that the brain favors information that’s easy to use, dates back to the 1960s, when researchers found that people most liked images of Chinese characters if they’d seen them many times before.

Researchers since then have explored other roles that names play, how they affect our judgment and to what degree.

Studies have shown, for example, that people can partly predict a person’s income and education using only their first name. Childhood is perhaps the richest area for name research: Boys with girls’ names are more likely to be suspended from school. And the less popular a name is, the more likely a child is to be delinquent.

In 2005, Alter and his colleagues explored how pronounceability of company names affects their performance in the stock market. Stripped of all obvious influences, they found companies with simpler names and ticker symbols traded better than the stocks of more difficult-to-pronounce companies.

“The effect is often very, very hard to quantify because so much depends on context, but it’s there and measurable,” Alter said. “You can’t avoid it.”

But how much does pronunciation guide our perceptions of people? To find out, Alter and colleagues Simon Laham and Peter Koval of the University of Melbourne carried out five studies.

In the first, they asked 19 female and 16 male college students to rank 50 surnames according to their ease or difficulty of pronunciation, and according to how much they liked or disliked them. In the second, they had 17 females and 7 male students vote for hypothetical political candidates solely on the basis of their names. In the third, they asked 55 female and 19 male students to vote on candidates about whom they knew both names and some political positions.

Altogether the researchers found that a name’s pronounceability, regardless of length or seeming foreignness, mattered most in determining likability. Ease of pronunciation accounted for about 40 percent of off-the-cuff likability.

“These settings were pretty impoverished, of course. In the real world, so many other things are going on that play a role,” Alter said.

In the latter studies, Alter’s team wanted to get a better sense of name-pronunciation effects outside the lab. They collected the names of 500 randomly selected lawyers, which undergraduates then rated for pronounceability and likability. When the researchers compared their tastes against the lawyers’ academic pedigrees, average salaries and corporate positions, they found a small but noticeable correlation.

With other variables eliminated, about 1.5 percent of a lawyer’s success — at least in this study — seemed to rest on the pronounceability of his or her name.

“Obviously that’s a lot smaller than 40 percent, and we don’t know which lawyer is most competent, which is clearly going to matter the most,” Alter said. “But the name still matters.”

Alter has already been influenced by his own work. If and when he has children, he said, he plans to keep their names simple.

Image: Dave Mosher/Wired

Citation: “The name-pronunciation effect: Why people like Mr. Smith more than Mr. Colquhoun.” By Simon M. Lahama, Peter Kovala and Adam L. Alter. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, published online Dec. 9, 2011. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2011.12.002

Dave Mosher is a Wired.com contributor and freelance journalist obsessed with space, physics, biology, technology and more. He lives in New York City. G+
Follow @davemosher and @wiredscience on Twitter.

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Greek man shoots two, takes hostages over layoff

In 2012, Yahoo! News will tell the nation’s story through the experiences and views of real Americans like you. Watch the first Remake America video »

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Alt Text: Disturbing Science Books for Kids

Stories about rocket monkeys and other spacefaring animals are perfect for children.
Photo: U.S. Army

Former astronaut Mike Kelly — I like the phrase “former astronaut,” as if he decided that the astronaut game wasn’t for him and went into real estate instead — is writing a children’s book called Mousetronaut: A Partially True Story.

In it, he tells the tale of a mouse who supposedly enjoyed being in zero gravity, unlike all the other rodents in his cage who clung to the sides of it in pure, searing murine terror.

Ignoring the fact that a “mousetronaut” is technically someone who travels through a mouse, I’m happy that we’re finally seeing stories about lab animals that are at least partially true. Previous children’s favorites like Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH and Monkey Shines: An Experiment in Fear have taken tremendous liberties with the truth. For instance, in Frisby the titular mouse wears a little cape, and in Monkey Shines, the murderous, jealous, mind-reading tufted capuchin makes noises that sound much more like a golden-bellied capuchin.

Let’s hope Mousetronaut is a tremendous success, if not for the children’s sake, then for me personally. I have a series of amusing and edifying children’s books about lab animals in the works.

For example:

Bravebunny, The Rabbit Who Was Probably Somewhat Less Terrified Than the Other Experimental Rabbits

One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Control Group

Gaster, The Eyeless Fruit Fly

Are You My Mother, Or Just Chicken Wire Wrapped With Terrycloth?

The Special Amazing Friendship Club: Animals Who Were Launched Into Space and Left to Die

Screw You, Professor Jerk, and Screw Your Stupid Maze Twice

Vivisection Vivian, The Inside-Out Frog

The Prettiest Bunny: A Story of Cosmetic Testing

The Giving Beagle

Junkie: The Rat Who Died Because He Preferred Heroin to Food

Where the Statistically Valid Things Are

The Very Hungry Caterpillar Who Was Not Allowed To Eat in Order to Learn Something About Carbohydrates or Something

Pat the Bunny for Precisely 10 Seconds at 10 Minute Intervals for Three Weeks

Everyone Poops; Graduate Students Have to Clean It Up

Bread and Iodopropynyl Butylcarbamate for Frances

Clifford the Big Red Swollen Infected Dog

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie Laced With Pesticide

The Cat in the Lab

Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears: An Analysis of Frequency Modulation in the Female Aedes aegypti (Journal of Entomological Research, Vol XXVII, No. 3)

Puff, the Magic Dragon Does Not Exist

The Runaway Bunny and the Resulting Tularemia Outbreak

Curious George Is Not So Curious Now, Huh?

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Research

Frog and Toad Are Excellent Instruction Tools for High School Biology Classes

The Tale of Squirrel No. 341593-B

Chocolate, the Chocolate Lab Who Ate Chocolate in a Lab

The Cat Who Could See Colors: A Psychoactive Tail

The Ugly Duckling Who Got Uglier

The Lorax Drinks Clorox

The Monster at the End of This Academic Career

Old McDonald Had a Laboratory Animal Supply Company

Grab Your Sister’s Hamster: Fun Science Experiments for Kids

The Tale of 4,000 Bad Rats

The Poked Little Puppy

- - -

Born helpless, naked and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a control group, a control freak and a control tower.

Award-winning humorist Lore Sjöberg is the author of The Book of Ratings, a founder of The Brunching Shuttlecocks, and the creator of The Cyborg Name Decoder. His work has appeared in Wired magazine, Adbusters, and has appeared on NPR's Talk of the Nation and All Things Considered.
Follow @loresjoberg and @theunderwire on Twitter.

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Yelp is worth $1.5 billion... Now what?

So Yelp shares popped in the company’s first full day of trading, closing up more than 60 percent over the initial price of $15 per share. This is just the latest in a string of tech IPOs — after Brightcove and LinkedIn — with big first-day gains.  And now at $24.58 a share, Yelp has a market cap of about $1.5 billion.

So what’s Yelp to do with its new riches? Well, if it’s anything like LinkedIn or Zynga, it will start sniffing around for acquisitions to augment its existing platform, to integrate new features and to add talented engineers. Here’s a list of some interesting possible acquisition targets for the company.

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Taliban Suicide Attacks Have Held Steady for Most of the War

U.S. military doctors at Bagram Air Field treat a boy wounded by a suicide bomber, 2007. Photo: U.S. Air Force

Since the Taliban became an insurgent movement to oust the U.S.-backed government in Kabul, it’s found a steady stream of recruits to blow themselves up in the hopes of killing others. A review of official NATO statistics finds that whatever tactics the U.S. and its allies have thrown at it throughout the course of the war, Taliban suicide attacks have largely remained constant, averaging about one every three days. And since the surge, those attacks have grown more deadly.

A study compiled by the Army (.PDF) for the U.S.-led NATO command in Afghanistan looked at suicide attacks throughout most of the war. The Taliban launched 119 suicide attacks in 2006, when there were about 30,000 U.S. troops fighting a newly resurgent guerrilla and terrorist force. By 2010, when U.S. forces peaked at roughly 100,000, there were 106 suicide attacks.

That was the same number of suicide attacks as in 2009, when U.S. focus returned to Afghanistan. During two of the Taliban’s peak years of resurgence, 2007 and 2008, the Taliban launched 132 and 116 attacks, respectively.

The methods of suicide bombing have remained relatively constant as well. For the five years the study focused on — the insurgency picked up force around 2005 — the Taliban split about evenly between strapping bombs to a person’s body and sending someone to drive a car packed with explosives. The split was literally even in 106, with 53 attacks of either kind. The greatest variance came in 2009, when car bombs outpaced body bombs, 59 to 47.

Determining the number of suicide attacks in 2011, a year the study doesn’t include, wasn’t possible. A spokeswoman for the NATO command, Australian Lt. L.M. Rago, told Danger Room, “It has been determined we can’t provide you with the level of detail you have requested.” But the United Nations reported in February that the number of suicide attacks last year “did not increase over 2010.”

That said, those attacks grew much deadlier for Afghans. The U.N. also reported that suicide bombings killed 431 civilians, an 80 percent increase from 2010.

The Army study was more concerned with their effect on NATO troops. And there, it found, those effects were marginal. “More than 3 suicide bombers are required to inflict a single casualty on the international forces,” it concluded.

And suicide bombing is hardly the insurgent tactic of choice. That would be the homemade bomb — which are on the upswing, despite the Obama administration’s troop surge.

But over the last year, the United Nations found, suicide bombing has grown “more complex, sometimes involving multiple suicide bombers, and designed to yield greater numbers of dead and injured civilians.”

The NATO command recently argued that the deadlier bomb attacks are a marker of progress. The “freedom of action [insurgents] show today is increasingly in [homemade bombs and suicide bombing," Lt. Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, the day-to-day commander of the war, told Pentagon reporters earlier this month. "They don't have the capability to take us on directly." The troop surge, he said, has "pushed them into a certain [set of tactics] which isn’t ideal.”

Perhaps, but after ten years of war, Scaparrotti’s predecessors and colleagues have yet to figure out how to erode the Taliban’s ability to convince young men to kill people and die trying.

Spencer Ackerman is Danger Room's senior reporter, based out of Washington, D.C., covering weapons of doom and the strategies they're used to implement.
Follow @attackerman and @dangerroom on Twitter.

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Freeze! You Just Broke Copyright Law

By Lorien Crow | Tue Mar 13, 2012 9:55 am

Online copyright laws are becoming increasingly complex, confusing the public and resulting in unintentional legal violations.

Copyright law is intricate, and even lawyers and lawmakers argue over how to apply it. If industry experts can barely agree on what the laws are, how can the public be expected to adhere to laws they don't understand and might not even be aware of?

The simple answer: they can't. Users must navigate tricky laws and confusing loopholes, facing penalties if found in violation. The result is that the simplest of online activity can result in copyright infringement, whether it's watching a YouTube video or downloading a BitTorrent file for a must-see TV show.

YouTube, for instance, has millions of videos of just about any song a user could ever want to listen to. Even though the videos can't be stored in MP3 format, they can still be bookmarked and revisited. Record labels constantly pull copyrighted materials from the service, but many files garner thousands or millions of views before being yanked from the service.

Beyond music, trying to watch TV on the Internet can also create copyright violations with steep penalties. Users caught downloading a television episode can lose Internet service, pay a fine, or even incur jail time, depending on how big the offense is. But making a mix tape or CD of favorite songs as a party favor and distributing it to 25 friends, while technically illegal, is a widely tolerated practice.

Posting digital files of those songs online to share with friends is legally prohibited, and carries fines similar to those listed above. Users can just give friends the password to Amazon accounts, giving them access to Cloud drives and all the media stored on it.

Copyright issues become even more convoluted when dealing with premium cable subscriptions and streaming services. Derek Bambauer, a professor of internet law and intellectual property in New York City, touches on the complex situations that result when cable companies withhold some of their choice properties from video streaming.

"If you want to see Game of Thrones (and I do), your options are 1) subscribe to cable plus HBO, or 2) pirate," said Bambauer. "I think the series rocks, but I'm not paying $100 a month for it...HBO charges not only for the content, but bundles it with one particular delivery medium."

Many shows and movies are available on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and iTunes, but Game of Thrones isn't one of them, leaving an eager viewer with few options. HBO service is not available without purchasing a cable channel package, and the costs can add up quickly, and "if that medium is unavailable to you, or unaffordable, you're out of luck. Unless, of course, you have broadband, and can BitTorrent," Bambauer continues.

But using BitTorrent, even when encrypted, is illegal, as is removing Digital Rights Management tags in music files, failing to get permission from original sources when creating a derivative work, or using commercial software without paying for it.

The result is a potential minefield of violations for an entertainment industry struggling with how to effectively implement copyright laws. The entertainment business is taking aggressive action to fight piracy, but its difficulty adjusting projects mixed messages to the public and may even be sparking more violations with stringent actions.

The music industry, with the rapid rise of Apple's iTunes, reluctantly came to embrace online technology, discouraging illegal file sharing. ITunes did help stem the tide of copyright violation among music consumers, but record labels still wrestle with issues around online storage and cloud services, recently supporting high-profile shutdown of services like MegaUpload.

The movie industry hasn't fared as well with the transition, struggling to form content deals with streaming sites like Netflix, fighting against online piracy with gusto, and supporting controversial bills like the Stop Online Privacy Act to circumvent it.

Yet the industry refuses to stop "windowing" movies, meaning buzzed-about films d?but in the U.S., say, months before they appear in Europe, leading frustrated viewers to obtain the movies illegally and leading critics to blame Hollywood itself for the growing rates of movie piracy.

Meanwhile, the television industry lies somewhere in the middle. Networks successfully cater to the social networking crowd with live chats, Facebook fan pages and instant viewer feedback. But cable companies are struggling to find a way to compete with streaming services and online TV sites like Hulu.

As mobile technology becomes more prevalent, consumers want immediate access to media on their tablets and smartphones. With so many people breaking laws whether they know it or not, and few resources that offer clear definitions of copyright laws to consumers, the fight against copyright infringement could ultimately be a losing battle as consumer desire and technology outpace the ability of the industry to adapt.

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