Are you friends with a former lover on Facebook? You could be damaging your health. According to a recent study conducted at Brunel University, as many as half of Facebook users are risking psychological damage by using the site to spy on their former flames, The Cleveland Leader, an online Cleveland-based news publication, has reported.

 

Even though users may have initially joined the site to do something as innocent as look at family members’ photos, the temptation to stop yourself from keeping tabs on an ex when their face pops up on your timeline is too much for many.

 

Knife through the heart

 

Clicking on his or her profile to see the former partner embracing another, or even enjoying an evening out with mutual friends can feel like a knife through the heart.

 

Before Facebook and social networking, keeping tabs on exes was a lot more difficult, and required stalker-like dedication.

 

These days, however, it is easy to keep up continual surveillance, checking on what they are doing, who they are with, and where they are. According to psychologist Dr. Tara Marshall, who led the study, it can make it more difficult to move on.

 

Dr. Marshall and her team found that those who remained Facebook friends with an ex experience more distress and took longer to move on compared to those who immediately clicked “unfriend.” 

 

She explained: “Overall, these findings suggest that exposure to an ex-partner through Facebook may obstruct the process of healing after a relationship.”

 

Rekindling contact while being married 

 

Furthermore, friending an ex on Facebook can lead to more questionable moves, like rekindling contact while you are married or involved with another. It may not lead to actual cheating, but is still upsetting and disrespectful to current partners, especially if done secretly.

 

You’ve probably had an inkling that it is not the best idea to friend your exes on Facebook, but now science can confirm that it’s true. Facebook friending former flames is only asking for trouble, so spare yourself the drama now and click “unfriend.”

 

Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc., the world’s biggest online social networks, are increasingly being used by terrorists to recruit sympathizers and spread their propaganda, a United Nations report revealed on Monday.

 

Internet based social media platforms are being used for terrorist purposes by tech-savvy extremists, the international organization claimed.

 

Google Inc., and YouTube were also identified as facilitators of communication between terrorist actors. 

 

The report, researched by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, was released during a meeting of counter-terrorism officials in Vienna.

 

The U.N. is calling on countries to ratify legislation to prevent so-called cyber terrorism and boost cross-border collaboration between law-enforcement agencies.

 

Terrorists can develop ties regardless of borders, Germany’s top anti-terror official, Hans-Georg Maassen, was quoted as saying by Bloomberg news.

 

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said that the Pentagon and American intelligence agencies are seeing an increase in cyber threats. These could become as devastating as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks if they aren’t stopped, he claims.

 

 

 

Tehran is set to block access to Google and Gmail in Iran as a response to the anti-Islam film which has already triggered worldwide protests.

 

Iran has restricted access to the Google search engine and Gmail. The move by the Iranians coincides with protests throughout the Muslim world – including Tehran – against an anti-Islamic film posted on Google’s video sharing site YouTube.

 

A deputy government minister announced the ban on Sunday on state television.

“Google and Gmail will be filtered nationwide and will remain filtered until further notice,” said Abdul Samad Khoramabadi, an advisor to Iran’s public prosecutor’s office.

 

Google services which require a secure SSL [Secured Sockets Layer] are already reportedly out of service in Iran.

 

Data issued by Google showed that traffic in Iran was substantially down Monday, compared to the rest of September.

 

However, the unsecured version of the site, which is much easier to eavesdrop on, remains accessible. Users can access Gmail accounts by using virtual private networks (VPNs), which allow them to surf the web behind heavily encrypted firewalls.

 

Many Iranians, including school children, regularly use VPNs to bypass government restrictions on blocked Western websites.

 

The decision to filter Google and Gmail coincides with Iranian government plans to launch the initial phases of a national internet, an Iranian wide network, which will substitute services currently run through the World Wide Web.

 

The project has prompted fears that the Iranian authorities might be planning to pull out of the global market, but some experts believe the main reason they are creating it is to secure sensitive military and banking data from the outside world.

 

An Iranian IT expert told British newspaper The Guardian earlier in the year that, “Iran has fears of an outside cyber-attack like that of Stuxnet and is trying to protect its sensitive data from being accessible on the World Wide Web.”

 

Stuxnet was a computer worm designed to sabotage Iran’s uranium enrichment process, which hit the country’s nuclear industry in 2010.

 

The websites of many Western media outlets such as the BBC and CNN are already blocked in Iran. Facebook and Twitter are also often censored.

 

But many Iranians have voiced their dismay at the government on social networking sites like Twitter.

 

Golnaz Esfandiari, who has a blog called Persian Letters on the Radio Free Europe website, tweeted, “By blocking Gmail/Google, Iran government punishes its own people over anti-Islam movie. Most Iranians have not seen it/don’t care.”

 

Iran is widely considered to be one of the most censored countries in the world.

 

An estimated 5.6 million Facebook clients - about 3.5 percent of its U.S. users - are children who the company says are banned from the site.

 

Facebook and many other web sites bar people under age 13 because the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) requires web sites to give special treatment to children 12 or younger.

 

The law aims to stop marketers prying personal information from children or using their data to advertise to them. Sites must get parental permission before allowing children to enter, and must take steps to protect privacy.

 

Facebook declines to acknowledge that many of its efforts to block children are not working.

 

The issue has taken on new relevance as the Federal Trade Commission finalizes rules to further restrict companies and Web sites that target youths or are geared to young audiences.

 

Facebook, the world's leading social media company with 955 million users, has said that the law does not apply to it because it explicitly restricts use of its site to people aged 13 and older.

 

Facebook has made some progress in identifying preteens and excluding them from the site. A June Consumer Reports study showed that Facebook eliminates as many as 800,000 users under age 13 in a year through its tiered screening process, which the company declines to describe.

 

The study still estimates 5.6 million children are on Facebook, a figure that experts say includes many who create accounts with help from their parents.

 

The Consumer Reports data comes from a January 2012 survey of 2,002 adults with home Internet. Participants were chosen by TNS, a research firm. The margin of error is plus or minus 2 percentage points.

 

"It's not surprising to us to see 12-year-olds sneaking onto Facebook," said FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, saying the situation was "particularly complicated" if parents helped them. "Is it troubling? In some ways it is. Is it a story in black and white? Not really."

 

A Reuters test of Facebook's signup process shows that a child could bypass the site's screening features with relative ease. The site effectively blocked a fictitious sign-up from an underage prospective user.

 

But after an hour's wait, the site accepted a sign-up using the same name, email, password and birthday but citing a different birth year.

 

Facebook declined to discuss the data or describe its efforts to outlaw children. Spokesman Frederic Wolens said in an email that Facebook is "committed to improving protections for all young people online".

 

Larry Magid, who serves on Facebook's advisory board and co-directs the Internet group Connect Safely, said he and others studied the issue for a year and found no way to tell if children were lying online.

 

"The only solution that I am aware of is to access some sort of national ID or school records," he said. "There are good reasons that we don't do this. ... I'm sure this is really easy to do in totalitarian regimes."

 

Senator Richard Blumenthal, an outspoken privacy advocate whose youngest child is 18, said children's vulnerability to potential sexual predators and susceptibility to advertising were reasons to keep the 12-and under set off most web sites. "Our children were not on Facebook at that age, and they would not be now," he said.

 

When gullible preteens or "tweens" go online they often reveal sensitive data, said Kathryn Montgomery, who teaches at American University and was an early advocate of the 1998 COPPA Tlaw.

 

"What we hoped to do with these kinds of rules is to get companies to act responsibly toward kids. It's not easy to do," said Montgomery.

 

Facebook now boasts 158 million U.S. users, according to May figures from the data firm comScore. If the site more effectively banned children, it could stand to lose about 3.5 percent of its U.S. market.

 

Ironically, one reason it's easy to game Facebook's screening process is the law passed to protect children. COPPA bars companies from saving most data on children. The FTC has said it would look skeptically on companies saving childrens' names or email addresses even if the data simply helped them prevent children logging onto their sites.

 

Children who aren't savvy enough to game Facebook's system often get parental help, according to a 2011 study headed by Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research. She found that 55 percent of parents of 12-year-olds said that their child was on Facebook and that 76 percent of those had helped the child gain access.

 

"Many recent reports have highlighted just how difficult it is to enforce age restrictions on the Internet, especially when parents want their children to access online content and services," said Facebook's Wolens.

 

On Facebook, children are exposed to advertising for sugary, high-fat foods, the kind increasingly pulled from children's television shows.

 

"We found lots of food products on Facebook being advertised, including many which are targeted to children," said Jennifer Harris, director of marketing initiatives at Yale University's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity.

 

One is Kellogg's new Krave cereal, a product which is roughly one-third sugar. With advertisements featuring an animated, pudgy Krave Krusader, it now counts 456,000 "likes" on Facebook.

 

Kellogg's said it did not intend to market Krave to tweens and complied with an industry initiative to not market high-fat, high-sugar products to children. "Krave follows Facebook's policy that all fans must be 13 or older," the company said in a statement.

 

Dr. Victor Strasburger, chief of the division of Adolescent Medicine, University of New Mexico Department of Pediatrics, said the Krave Krusader ads are part of what he called "unethical" appeals by sugary cereal makers. Nearly 20 percent of U.S. children aged 6-17 are obese, according to a 2011 government report.

 

Child advocates say that even if Facebook is not appealing directly to children, the company needs to realize that ads aimed at teenaged users will also attract tweens, who imitate older peers.

 

"I don't think Facebook deliberately goes out and gets kids at the moment," said Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy. "I think when they target teens the way they do, they know that they'll pull in a lot of younger kids."

 

 

Source: Reuters

 

Two independent teams of researchers studying the Flame computer virus believe that the maker of the malware — all but certain to be the United States — has architected three additional programs to conduct clandestine cyberwar or espionage.

 

Both Symantec Corp of the United States and Kaspersky Lab of Russia acknowledged on Monday that their research of Flame has led them to believe that whoever had a role in creating that virus has also put their efforts behind three other similar programs.

 

A team of engineers at Kaspersky released new information on Monday collected during forensic analysis of Flame command-and-Control servers that were examined with the assistance of Symantec, ITU-IMPACT and CERT-Bund/BSI.

 

Researchers had first disclosed in May that Flame, a sophisticated espionage virus, targeted computer systems in Iran and was likely the product of a nation-state, specifically the US.

 

With this week’s update, however, it appears as if the United States’ endeavors in cyberwar may have stretched past even what researchers had imagined.

“Based on the code from the server, we know Flame was a project from a list of at least four. The purpose and nature of the other three remain unknown,” the group concludes.

 

Although the United States government has not gone on the record to take credit for either Flame or Stuxnet, a similar computer worm that targeted Iranian nuclear facilities first discovered in 2010, experts have long maintained that the US is involved in both viruses, perhaps even enlisting Israeli scientists for assistance.

 

Speaking at a TED Talk in 2011, researcher Ralph Langner said, "My opinion is that the Mossad is involved but that the leading force is not Israel. The leading force behind Stuxnet is the cyber superpower – there is only one; and that's the United States."

In January of this year, Mike McConnell, the former director of national intelligence at the National

 

Security Agency under George W Bush, told Reuters that the US had indeed attacked foreign computer systems at one time or another, and confirmed that America has “the ability to attack, degrade or destroy” the e-grids of adversaries.

 

When the New York Times followed up with a report of their own only five months later, members of US President Barack Obama’s national security team admitted on condition of anonymity that the White House continued cyber-assaults on Iran’s nuclear program through Stuxnet, which Mr. Obama himself endorsed.

 

Once compared with coding from Flame, security experts saw an immediate correlation.

“We are now 100 percent sure that the Stuxnet and Flame groups worked together,” Kapsersky’s Roel Schowenberg concluded earlier this year.

 

With America all but confirmed as the culprit behind both viruses, this week it’s revealed that the United States may have crafted another three coded programs to target Iran and its allies.

 

Speaking to Reuters, researchers involved in the latest analysis say they are still trying to figure out the basic facts about the three new viruses, but believe that the same entity responsible for Stuxnet and Flame are at it again.

 

"We know that it is definitely out there. We just can't figure out a way to actually get our hands on it. We are trying," Symantec researcher Vikram Thakur tells Reuters.

Also in their report, Kaspersy say that the heavy encryption and nature of the newest programs “fits the profile of military and/or intelligence operations."

 

A Chinese reporter allegedly went undercover as an employee at a Foxconn, experiencing first hand what workplace conditions are like in one of the company's plants. 

 

The in-depth report from the Shanghai Evening Post, translated by MIC Gadget, doesn't offer much in the way of new information regarding hardware, but manages to give insight into the stresses Foxconn workers face on a daily basis.

 

It should be noted that AppleInsider cannot confirm the Shanghai Evening Post's report as the purported "facts" are unverifiable at this time.

 

The Chinese publication's reporter managed to stay inside the walls of Foxconn's Tai Yuan factory for ten days, seven of which were spent on orientation. During the short stay, he was able to gather a great deal of information, with most of the focus trained on the grueling working conditions and living situation.

 

Sleeping at Foxconn's dormitory is a "nightmare," the reporter writes, and smells of garbage, dirty sweat and a "foam smell." Trash was piled high in front of the dorm rooms' and cockroaches infested the linen closet. Bedsheets were also in a sad state being full of "dirts and ashes."

 

A warning sign reading "TOP SECURITY AREA" (possibly better translated as "Top Secret") greets workers as they enter the factory floor, walking through metal detectors both coming and going to ensure nothing is brought in our out of the area. Those found in violation are immediately fired. 

 

Once on the assembly line, the reporter was tasked with preparing the iPhone 5's back plate for painting by marking the areas on which masking tape would be applied, though his liberal use of the oil-based pen earned him the ire of his supervisors.

 

His partner in charge of affixing the tape and plastic covers over the earphone jack and connector ports of the backplate was also reprimanded for moving too slowly.

 

“This is the new unleashed iPhone 5 back plate, you should be honored having the chance to produce it,” a supervisor said.

 

From the report:

"By my own calculations, I have to mark five iPhone plates every minute, at least. For every 10 hours, I have to accomplish 3,000 iPhone 5 back plates. There are total 4 production lines in charge of this process, 12 workers in every line. Each line can produce 36,000 iPhone 5 back plates in half a day, this is scary.

 

I finally stopped working at 7 a.m. We were asked to gather again after work. The supervisor shout out loud in front of us: “Who wants to rest early at 5 a.m !? We are all here to earn money ! Let’s work harder !” I was thinking who on earth wants to work two extra hours overtime for only mere 27 yuan (USD$4) !?"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After coming under fire for its treatment of workers, Foxconn in August was reported to be making strides in rectifying a number of inadequacies found by the Fair Labor Association inspectors in March. 

 

Apple is widely expected to debut the very product the undercover reporter allegedly worked on, the sixth-generation iPhone, at a special event on Wednesday starting at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. AppleInsider will be providing live coverage of the presentation.

 

 

 

Source: Appleinsider.com

Even after the killing of an American ambassador in Libya, YouTube refused to take down the video that enraged Muslims around the world. Instead it blocked access to the 14-minute clip in the two countries where American embassies were attacked.

 

Due to an executive decision by YouTube, Internet users in Egypt and Libya will be unable to access the video that sparked public outrage in those countries over claims that it insulted the prophet Muhammad, AP reports. 

 

Enraged Muslims stormed the US Embassy in Cairo Tuesday, replacing the American flag with an

Islamic banner, hours before believers in Benghazi, Libya set fire to the US consulate there, killing the US ambassador and three consular staffers.

 

The low-budget, amateur film, entitled "Innocence of Muslims," runs for 14 minutes and portrays Muhammad as a womanizer who approved of pedophilia.

 

Any depiction of the prophet, full stop, is highly offensive to Muslims – let alone in such an inflammatory manner.

 

YouTube has left the video up on its site, but due to the violence in Northern Africa, has selectively blocked access to it in Egypt and Libya.

 

In a rare public commentary, YouTube said in a statement that maintaining an environment in which all opinions can be expressed, and which everyone can enjoy, "can be a challenge because what's OK in one country can be offensive elsewhere."

 

This video – which is widely available on the web – is clearly within our guidelines and so will stay on YouTube. However, given the very difficult situation in Libya and Egypt we have temporarily restricted access in both countries. Our hearts are with the families of the people murdered in yesterday's attack in Libya."

 

The video was posted in early July by a user calling himself Sam Bacile. It received only a handful of views for two months, when suddenly it was dubbed into Arabic – then shown on Egyptian television, enraging conservative Muslim viewers.

 

Following the attacks on American diplomatic missions, US President Barack Obama condemned the violence and called on American security services to ramp up protection of the country's diplomats stationed abroad.

 

In the Wednesday statement, Obama promised to "bring justice to the killers who attacked our people."f

 

"We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others," he said. "But there is absolutely no justification for this type of senseless violence, none."

 

An Afghan official says the government has temporarily blocked access to YouTube to prevent people from watching a film that ridicules Islam's Prophet Muhammad.

 

Aimal Marjan, general director of information technology at the Ministry of Communications, says the site was blocked for about 90 minutes Wednesday until YouTube took the video down.

 

He says access to the site was then restored. Marjan says the government decided to temporarily deny access to YouTube because of concerns the video could spark protests.

 

The decision came after President Hamid Karzai condemned the film he described as "inhuman and insulting."

 

Earlier this year, Afghans rioted after U.S. soldiers serving at Bagram prison north of Kabul mistakenly burned hundreds of Qurans and other religious materials that had been taken from the facility' library.