Continue reading »]]> A British student who stole sensitive information from Facebook’s internal network was sentenced to eight months in prison Friday.

Prosecutor Sandip Patel said that Glenn Mangham, 26, had hacked into the social networking giant’s computers from his bedroom in the northern England city of York and stole what the Patel described as “invaluable” intellectual property.

“He acted with determination, undoubted ingenuity and it was sophisticated, it was calculating,” Patel told London’s Southwark Crown Court ahead of sentencing Friday. He added later: “This represents the most extensive and grave incident of social media hacking to be brought before the British courts.”

It was not immediately clear exactly what information Mangham stole, although police said that he didn’t manage to compromise any personal user data. Scotland Yard said in a statement that the breach had occurred “over a short period of time” in April of last year but did not divulge precisely how he managed to break into the computers.

The statement said that Facebook Inc. discovered the breach in May and alerted the FBI, who traced the source of the attack back to Britain. Scotland Yard’s e-crimes unit raided Mangham’s home on June 2.

The software development student pleaded guilty on Dec. 13. He had argued that he was merely trying to show the Palo Alto, California-based company how to improve its security, but Judge Alistair McCreath said that Mangham’s actions had “very serious potential consequences” which could have been “utterly disastrous” for Facebook.

“You and others who are tempted to act as you did really must understand how serious this is,” McCreath said.

Facebook, which boasts some 845 million users worldwide, recently filed papers for its initial public offering at the beginning of this month, putting it on track to price its stock in May or June.

The company is expected to be valued at $75 billion to $100 billion.

Continue reading »]]> A small but growing number of teens and even younger children who think they were born the wrong sex are getting support from parents and from doctors who give them sex-changing treatments, according to reports in the medical journal Pediatrics.

It’s an issue that raises ethical questions, and some experts urge caution in treating children with puberty-blocking drugs and hormones.

An 8-year-old second-grader in Los Angeles is a typical patient. Born a girl, the child announced at 18 months, “I a boy” and has stuck with that belief. The family was shocked but now refers to the child as a boy and is watching for the first signs of puberty to begin treatment, his mother said.

Pediatricians need to know these kids exist and deserve treatment, said Dr. Norman Spack, author of one of three reports published Monday and director of one of the nation’s first gender identity medical clinics, at Children’s Hospital Boston.

“If you open the doors, these are the kids who come. They’re out there. They’re in your practices,” Spack said in an interview.

Switching gender roles and occasionally pretending to be the opposite sex is common in young children. But these kids are different. They feel certain they were born with the wrong bodies.

Some are labeled with “gender identity disorder”, a psychiatric diagnosis. But Spack is among doctors who think that’s a misnomer. Emerging research suggests they may have brain differences more similar to the opposite sex.

Spack said by some estimates, 1 in 10,000 children have the condition.

Offering sex-changing treatment to kids younger than 18 raises ethical concerns, and their parents’ motives need to be closely examined, said Dr. Margaret Moon, a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ bioethics committee. She was not involved in any of the reports.

Some kids may get a psychiatric diagnosis when they are just hugely uncomfortable with narrowly defined gender roles; or some may be gay and are coerced into treatment by parents more comfortable with a sex change than having a homosexual child, said Moon, who teaches at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics.

It’s harmful “to have an irreversible treatment too early,” Moon said. Doctors who provide the treatment say withholding it would be more harmful.

These children sometimes resort to self-mutilation to try to change their anatomy; the other two journal reports note that some face verbal and physical abuse and are prone to stress, depression and suicide attempts. Spack said those problems typically disappear in kids who’ve had treatment and are allowed to live as the opposite sex.

Guidelines from the Endocrine Society endorse transgender hormone treatment but say it should not be given before puberty begins. At that point, the guidelines recommend puberty-blocking drugs until age 16, then lifelong sex-changing hormones with monitoring for potential health risks. Mental health professionals should be involved in the process, the guidelines say. The group’s members are doctors who treat hormonal conditions.

Those guidelines, along with YouTube videos by sex-changing teens and other media attention, have helped raise awareness about treatment and led more families to seek help, Spack said.

His report details a fourfold increase in patients at the Boston hospital. His Gender Management Service clinic, which opened at the hospital in 2007, averages about 19 patients each year, compared with about four per year treated for gender issues at the hospital in the late 1990s.

The report details 97 girls and boys treated between 1998 and 2010; the youngest was 4 years old. Kids that young and their families get psychological counseling and are monitored until the first signs of puberty emerge, usually around age 11 or 12. Then children are given puberty-blocking drugs, in monthly $1,000 injections or implants imbedded in the arm.

In another Pediatrics report, a Texas doctor says he’s also provided sex-changing treatment to an increasing number of children; so has a clinic at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles where the 8-year-old is a patient.

The drugs used by the clinics are approved for delaying puberty in kids who start maturing too soon. The drugs’ effects are reversible and Spack said they’ve caused no complications in his patients. The idea is to give these children time to mature emotionally and make sure they want to proceed with a permanent sex change. Only one of the 97 opted out of permanent treatment, Spack said.

Kids will more easily pass as the opposite gender, and require less drastic treatment later, if drug treatment starts early, Spack said. For example, boys switching to girls will develop breasts and girls transitioning to boys will be flat-chested if puberty is blocked and sex-hormones started soon enough, Spack said.

Sex hormones, especially in high doses when used long-term, can have serious side effects, including blood clots and cancer. Spack said he uses low, safer doses but that patients should be monitored.

Gender-reassignment surgery, which may include removing or creating penises, is only done by a handful of US doctors, on patients aged at least 18, Spack said. His clinic has worked with local surgeons who’ve done breast removal surgery on girls at age 16, but that surgery can be relatively minor, or avoided, if puberty is halted in time, he said.

The mother of the Los Angeles 8-year-old says he’s eager to begin treatment.

When the child was told he could get shots to block breast development, “he was so excited,” the mother said. He also knows he’ll eventually be taking testosterone shots for life but surgery right now is uncertain.

The child attends a public school where classmates don’t know he is biologically a girl. For that reason, his mother requested anonymity.

She said she explained about having a girl’s anatomy but he rejected that, refused to wear dresses, and has insisted on using a boy’s name since preschool.

The mother first thought it was a phase, then that her child might be a lesbian, and sought a therapist’s help to confirm her suspicion. That’s when she first heard the term “gender identity disorder” and learned it’s often not something kids outgrow.

Accepting his identity has been difficult for both parents, the woman said. Private schools refused to enroll him as a boy, and the family’s pediatrician refused to go along with their request to treat him like a boy. They found a physician who would, Dr Jo Olson, medical director of a transgender clinic at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.

Olson said the journal reports should help persuade more doctors to offer these kids sex-changing treatment or refer them to specialists who will.

“It would be so nice to move this out of the world of mental health, and into the medical world,” Olson said.

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We know it’s cliche to say something sounds like science fiction, but this is seriously one of the more far out there concepts we’ve ever heard. Researchers from UT Arlington and Northwestern University are working with surgeons from the Brooke Army Medical Center on a project called Biomask. The idea is to skip surgery and have patients wear a mask, layered with sensors, actuators and medicine delivery tools for several months while their face slowly regenerates. The outside of the medical miracle would be a hard shell to protect the electronics and the injured person’s healing face. Underneath, a second layer would monitor tissue growth, watch for infections and feed data back to doctors. An on board system would be able to dynamically alter the treatment, sending antibiotics or stem cells where they’re needed. The team actually hope to turn this facial reconstruction mask into a reality by 2017, a goal that we’ll diplomatically call optimistic. Full PR is after the break.

Biomask project could regrow burn victims’ faces originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 31 Jan 2012 19:31:00 EDT.

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Point-and-shoot refreshes may not get you all hot and bothered like some new, networked DSLRs might, but Nikon’s doing its best to reinvigorate the category. Announced today, the new line of Coolpix digital cameras crams an assortment of dedicated features — Intelligent Auto, ultra-zoom and ruggedization — into a spread of budget-friendly, 720p HD-capable offerings. The leader of this updated bunch, the L810, combines a 26x (22.5mm-585mm) lens, 19 exposure settings and a 3-inch LCD screen with VR image stabilization for users who want to get up close and personal without compromising detail. While the bar-lowering L26 makes the art of imaging a bit simpler and removes that pesky need for photographic know-how, capturing pictures using a 5x Zoom-NIKKOR lens in tandem with its array of automatically-selected scene modes. And for the accident prone amongst you amateur Ansel Adamses, the company’s S30 packs a 10.1MP sensor and 3x wide angle lens into a drop-resistant, waterproof shell. These three digital imaging amigos are available starting this February in an assortment of colors, with the L810 retailing for $280 and its category siblings pegged for $120 each. Head on past the break to peruse the official presser and get the lowdown on the extended feature set.

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When you’re producing chips for the iPad and iPhone, you need a serious facility to meet those demands. And evidently, Samsung’s not foreseeing its legal battles with Apple to cause any wrinkles in said plans. In fact, Bloomberg is reporting that Sammy has “sent requests for proposals to banks to borrow as much as $1 billion to expand production capacity at its factory in Austin, Texas,” with the bonds to be issued by Samsung’s US unit. It’s bruited that the company — which has around $19.2 billion in cash — may sell its first overseas bonds since 1997 due to the impossibly low cost of borrowing money these days, and in a time where positive economic news is tough to come by, it’s quite the relief to see a bit of forward progress come from historically low interest rates. Reuters is reporting that the investment will mostly be used to “boost production of mobile chips and next-generation OLED (organic light-emitting diode) display panels,” but specific details beyond that remain murky.

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The last time HP unveiled a monitor it was chasing gamers looking for a little 3D on a budget, but this time around, it’s got business users on the brain. Specifically, the kind of workers who spend a lot of time away from the office, or perhaps share a workspace with others. That’s the idea behind the 23-inch Compaq L2311c Notebook Docking Monitor, which connects to laptops via USB. That same cable will also transmit video, though even HP will admit you’ll get far better results if you use USB 3.0 instead of 2.0. Taking a tour of the monitor itself, you’ll find a four-port USB hub and VGA socket, along with a 720p webcam, which should pair nicely with HP’s bundled MyRoom software. The 1080p display is also adjustable, with 130mm of space to slide it up and down.

At the lower end of spectrum, HP also announced the LV1911 and LV2011, a pair of 18.5- and 20-inch monitors, both of which forgo niceties like a webcam or USB hub. Either way, the resolution is low, given the spacious screen sizes: 1366 x 768 for the 18.5-incher, and 1600 x 900 for the 20-inch number. The smaller LV1911 will arrive stateside in March for $125, while the LV2011 will go on sale next month for $135. As for the L2311c docking monitor, it’ll cost $319, and be available in the US, Japan and other Asian markets later this month.

Gallery: HP Compaq L2311c Notebook Docking Monitor

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China has launched its first test train that is said to be capable of reaching 500 km per hour from the present 300 km per hour a feat if accomplished would be a big leap forward in high speed train technology.

China’s largest rail vehicle maker, CSR Corp Ltd, over the weekend launched the train.

The six-car train with a fair shaped head is the newest in the CRH series.

It has a maximum tractive power of 22,800 kilowatts, compared with 9,600 kilowatts for the CRH380 trains currently in service on the Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway, which holds the world speed record of 300 km per hour.

The grey-coloured train carries testing and data processing facilities, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

Ding Sansan, the company’s chief technician, said the concept of the the super-speed train design was inspired by China’s ancient sword.

The bodywork uses plastic materials reinforced with carbon fiber.

Shen Zhiyun, a locomotive expert and academician said the testing of the super-speed train with speeds of up to 500 km per hour will provide useful reference for current high-speed railway operations.

Continue reading »]]> Local company offering Free Singing Personalized Messages from SANTA

Send a Greeting That Sings Their Name

Your peeps may want to check out a new App that sings a Personalized Message from Santa to the Greeting Recipient for Free. Send a Greeting That Sings Their Name  http://www.FriendlySongs.mobi/apps/index

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Albert Einstein is the most famous scientist ever history. He is also called as the father of modern physics. Einstein’s most famous low is “theory of reality” and one fact of it is “if some particle goes in a speed of light the mass of that particle should be zero”. Established fact among the community is “Any particle’s speed cannot exceed the light speed”.

But things changed in September 23, 2011. The group of scientist (OPERA) in Europe said that they found a new particle that can exceed the speed of light. But traditional scientists do not agree to this and they ask for evidence. Then the OPERA scientists have proven their innovation with a group of technical committee and officially published that “Neutrino” is the fastest particle in the universe and it exceed the speed of light.

In this experiment, a beam of Neutrino sends from “Geneva Switzerland” to “Grand Sasso Italy” (Distance 730km). Neutrino beam beats the speed of light with 60 nS (nano Seconds) ahead. If they prove this again with the world community, it will be the end of most of the modern physics equations and theories also Einstein.

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It’s a first-world issue: running out of honey when we need just a little more to sweeten up that bowl of oatmeal or cup of coffee. What we need is a constant supply of the golden stuff, and Philips has thankfully come up with this urban beehive to provide precisely that. It’s the latest addition to the company’s germaphobe-unfriendly “microbial home” concept.

The system is half flowerpot, half hive, with bees able to travel between flower pollination and your domestic honey factory their honeycomb house. Honey can be ‘tapped’ from the base, with a smoking system in place to “calm the bees” before opening the hive. Now, if Philips could fashion something to keep us in a constant supply of maple syrup, then maybe even bakery dreams have a future, after all.