Facebook has confirmed that some application developers sold identifying user information to a data broker. The offending developers—not named directly by the company—have been placed on suspension for six months, Facebook wrote in a post on its Developer Blog.The data in question is supposedly limited to Facebook user ID numbers (UIDs), which were gathered by numerous Facebook apps and subsequently transferred to their respective advertising networks—a behavior that came to light in October. In some cases, the gathering of UIDs was inadvertent due to the way browsers pass information, but the Wall Street Journal discovered that some apps had also scraped other personal information from user profiles and then sold the information—a violation of Facebook's terms of service.
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Free Middle Earth: LOTRO loses subscription, gains players
Last year, Turbine did an experiment, taking the previously subscription-based Dungeons and Dragons Online and adding a free-to-play option. The result was an almost immediate success. More players joined the game, revenues increased, and subscription numbers even rose. So this past September Turbine did the same thing with Lord of the Rings Online, adding a free option to an already successful subscription game.Ars spoke with several members of the LOTRO team to see just how things are going two months after the change.
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Texting under the covers may affect kids' sleep, moods
Texting yourself to sleep at night may be counterproductive, according to some preliminary research of kids with sleeping problems, but it's hard for many parents to control. Doctors at the JFK Sleep Disorders Center in New Jersey surveyed 40 of their young patients about their activities and found that most of the young teens in the study were texting, gaming, or computing after they "went to bed."The survey found that the kids sent an average of 34 texts per night after lights out, sometimes falling asleep with their phones beside their heads, only to wake again when a new text arrived. The authors link these behaviors to poor sleep, irritability, and even problems like anxiety disorders.
It's up to parents to handle such problems, of course—but they can only do that if they know what's happening in the first place. While kids in the past might sneak a flashlight into bed in order to read comic books under the cover, it's almost impossible to know what your child is doing when she has an Internet-connected computer or a cell phone in the bedroom. Texting? Sexting? Web surfing? Watching video? Shopping online? Facebook? Downloading P2P files that could put your family on the hook for thousands of dollars? Who knows! (At least we know that kids aren't e-mailing.)
Parents could ask what kids are doing, of course, and have a talk about proper usage limits. They could require that electronic gadgets stay in the living room at bedtime (though mom and dad would then have to follow the same rule, which could prove painful to the CrackBerry addicts among us). Or they could secretly install spy tools like SMS mirroring software onto their kids' cell phones. What could possibly go wrong?
Of course, parents would have to read a lot of texts. Research earlier this year from Pew shows three-quarters of all teens have a cell phone and that one-third of teenagers send more than 3,000 texts per month (and half send more than 1,500 texts per month). And the numbers keep going up.
One small sleep study isn't enough to draw any definitive conclusions, but parents may want to consider some simple ways to give kids a break from the real-life drama they can now access at any time through their phones.
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Walking Dead on AMC improves on comic, revives zombie fiction... again
The first episode of AMC's TV adaptation of Walking Dead is better than the comics it's adapting. I don't say that to slight Robert Kirkman's writing, just to point out that the show has the advantage of years and years of excellent comics to draw from. In the first issues of a comic, everyone, including the creators, are often in the dark about who the characters are and where they're going. The first episode of the TV show can be much more confident when it comes to characterization and pacing.A warning: we're going to talk about the show in detail, so if you haven't seen it yet, there will be some items people may consider spoilers.
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Entangled in red tape, Redbox eyes Internet with longing
Redbox has rented more than a billion DVDs out of its cute red kiosks; at a buck apiece, why not pick one up on your way out of the grocery store? But Redbox, like Netflix, has seen the future, and it is movies delivered digitally, right over the Internet. The company recently laid out its plans for Internet delivery.Digital delivery is more convenient than even the most convenient of kiosks, of course. The selection can be nearly infinite, rather than limited to whatever can fit inside the little red box. And of course you don't need to buy all those little red boxes, work out revenue-sharing deals with partners, and deal with city zoning officials.
"What's that?" you say. "Who could possibly care if a store sticks a Redbox next to its front door?"
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Introducing the Ars Technica Reader for iPad
We're pleased to announce the official availability of the Ars Technica Reader for iPad, made possible in partnership with IBM. We thank IBM for supporting the Reader for iPad, and we hope you will enjoy version 1.0. In the rest of this column, we'll tell you about the app, explain some choices we made, and ask you to help spread the Ars goodness.Read the comments on this post
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People could carry future phone network nodes
Rolling out mobile phone infrastructure is expensive, difficult and often meets public resistance, but it’s an essential step for increasing coverage. So researchers are looking at alternatives, including one proposal that could see members of the public carrying portable nodes in the network.The study, which is being conducted at Queen’s University in Belfast, would involve wearable sensors carried by members of the public. These would interact to transmit data between each other, allowing for far lower power requirements than a traditional antenna, greater coverage, and the capability to adapt to demand.
The way it works is simple. Instead of hundreds or thousands of separate connections between different devices and a single phone mast, each participant in the network would send signal to someone nearby, who would send it to the next person, and then to the next person, and so on until it reaches its destination.
These body-to-body networks, or BBNs, could be embedded within existing devices like your phone, so you wouldn’t need to carry extra equipment. One of the significant benefits offered by such a system would be the way that large crowds would actually increase the coverage in an area, rather than making it more difficult to place a call.
“If the idea takes off, BBNs could also lead to a reduction in the number of base stations needed to service mobile phone users, particularly in areas of high population density,” said Simon Cotton, from Queen’s University’s Institute of Electronics, Communications and Information Technology. “This could help to alleviate public perceptions of adverse health associated with current networks and be more environmentally friendly due to the much lower power levels required for operation.”
While such networks are still in their infancy today, Cotton reckons that they could reach more than 400 million devices across the world by 2014.
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Anti-cyberbullying 101: soon required at your public school?
Online Pugsleys everywhere be forewarned: a major government program designed to help schools upgrade their Internet connectivity will soon require them to teach kids how to stop "cyberbullying" and "act responsibly on social networking sites like Facebook."The Federal Communications Commission plans to circulate rules by the end of this year that will tell schools that get federal cash for computer and networking gear to comply with various child-protection measures included in the Broadband Data Improvement Act. The law orders these schools to "educate minors about appropriate online behavior, including online interaction with other individuals in social networking websites and in chat rooms and cyberbullying awareness and response."
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Universal gripper bests robotic hands in adaptability
Picking things up is a surprisingly difficult task for robots, especially because the best gripper we know of—a human hand—is really difficult to imitate. A group of researchers have passed on modeling articulating fingers in favor of a simpler, more adaptable gripping mechanism: a sack filled with granular material that can conform to complex surfaces. Combined with a vacuum that takes the air out of the sack, the device can hold a huge variety of things.Robots that can pick up and hold pretty much anything are in high demand, for use in fields from manufacturing to bomb dismantlement. But it's hard for them to compete with a human hand, which has among its assets five separate fingers with stress and pressure levels that can be adjusted individually.
To circumvent hand-modeling difficulties, a group of researchers have developed a gripper that is similar in design to a stress ball or a hacky sack. It's an airtight bag filled with granular material, like sand or PVC pebbles, that can mold itself over the object in question. Once the air is sucked out from the inside, it forms a tight grip around the object.
The gripper is able to pick up a variety of objects, even ones with complex surfaces or low profiles, such as a screw. A bunch of robotic fingers asked to grab something that small might be left scrabbling endlessly unless they are delicate fingers specifically designed for getting under small objects. The granular bag, however, seemed equally adept at gripping small or larger, heavier objects.
Of course, the gripper did struggle with some objects—one of the more elusive targets was a cotton ball. Still, the authors note that the gripper would be useful in situations where it might be called upon to grasp an unknown set of objects, as well as for use underwater or in other volatile environments.
PNAS, 2010. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1003250107 (About DOIs).
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Apple tries short-circuiting Droid with patent lawsuit
A little over five years ago, Apple and Motorola were still buddies. Although Apple had famously announced its intention to drop the PowerPC processors manufactured by Motorola (and IBM) in favor of Intel's x86 architecture, the companies were cooperating on the launch of a new Motorola phone, the ROKR (the first handset with any iTunes integration). My, how times have changed. Apple and Motorola are battling for mobile phone market share, and the war is moving further away from store shelves and into the courtrooms with a new patent infringement lawsuit.Patently Apple was first to report that, late Friday, Apple filed two patent infringement lawsuits against Motorola in the US District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin, both mentioning the Droid by name. One lawsuit accuses Motorola of infringing on Apple's multitouch patents. The other targets Motorola's alleged infringement of patents covering smartphone user interface elements.
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Weird Science shocks its brain into an acid trip
Triggering the bad flashbacks of PTSD: It's apparently possible to trigger flashbacks without resorting to any of the chemical hallucinogens that are famed for producing this sort of effect. The downside is that you have to send electric currents into specific areas of the brain. "Electrical stimulation of the temporal cortex in awake human subjects, mostly in the right hemisphere, can elicit the reenactment and reliving of past experiences," according to a paper on post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD patients suffer from flashbacks, and the new paper suggests that they have overactive neural connections in this area of the brain—in essence, their neurons act as if they've been hit by an electric shock. The genome of a weird nonscientist: There's no paper here, just the fact that the latest human to have his genome sequenced is Ozzy Osbourne. The finest joke I've seen so far is a reference to "heavy Mendel." Some of the better coverage is at Technology Review. In the end, though, there probably won't be much to say about the completion of Ozzy's genome that couldn't be said about any of the others on the rapidly expanding list—we simply can't link any of the features that make a genome distinctive with much of the traits that we identify in a person, even if that person has Ozzy's oversized personality. In fact, we probably get more out of the sequencing from a completely different ethnic group.
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