The names and e-mails of customers of Citigroup Inc and other large U.S. companies, as well as College Board students, were exposed in a massive and growing data breach after a computer hacker penetrated online marketer Epsilon.
In what could be one of the biggest such breaches in U.S. history, a diverse swath of companies that did business with Epsilon stepped forward over the weekend to warn customers some of their electronic information could have been exposed.
But there’s a catch. As shale-gas drilling has ramped up, it’s been met with a growing environmental backlash. There are complaints about spills and air pollution from closely clustered wells and fears of wastewater contamination from the hydraulic fracturing process ”” also known as fracking ”” that is used to tap shale-gas resources. In the U.S., the gas industry is exempt from many federal regulations, leaving most oversight to state governments that have sometimes been hard-pressed to keep up with the rapid growth of drilling. The investigative news site ProPublica has found over 1,000 reports of water contamination near drilling sites. New York State ”” spurred by fears about the possible impact of the industry on New York City’s watershed ”” has put hydraulic fracturing on hold for further study, while some members of Congress are looking to tighten regulation of drilling. “We were not ready for this,” says John Quigley, former head of Pennsylvania’s department of conservation and natural resources. “We weren’t ready for the technology or the scale or the pace.”
And that’s what makes this new energy revolution ”” because that’s what it is ”” so complex. The richest shale-gas play and potentially the second biggest natural gas field in the world is called the Marcellus, and its heart runs straight through parts of Pennsylvania and New York. This drilling isn’t taking place in the Gulf of Mexico, the Saudi deserts or lightly populated western Canada. It’s happening right in the backyard of the U.S. Northeast, a densely populated place accustomed to consuming fossil fuels, not producing them. But if the global appetite for gas and oil keeps growing, rural Pennsylvania won’t be the last unlikely place we’ll drill. Because for all our fears of running out of oil, we should be able to find more than enough fuel to keep the global economy humming ”” provided we’re willing to drill in deeper, darker, more dangerous or more crowded places. The Arctic, the ultra-deep ocean off Brazil and New York City’s watershed all could go under the drill as we enter what the writer Michael Klare has called the Era of Extreme Energy. The power will keep flowing ”” but with environmental and even social costs we can’t yet predict.
KIM LAWTON, correspondent: On any given weekend, some 15,000 people worship with the evangelical Northland Church, but about a third of them never set foot in the building here in Longwood, Florida. They’re worshiping online via the Web and Facebook and Smartphones.
MARTY TAYLOR (Northland Church, Director of Media Design): We call ourselves a church distributed because we don’t want to be confined to this space. We want to be everywhere, every day, and technology is a great tool for us to be able to do that.
LAWTON: On site, worship leaders always welcome the online participants. On this Sunday that includes a small gathering at a nearby prison and people from as far away as Japan. As the main service progresses, online minister Nathan Clark connects with his virtual flock….
Cheating has become more common in recent years. But a recent French case is the most sensational, and the most troubling.
In January, the French Chess Federation accused three of its members, including Sebastien Feller, a 20-year-old grandmaster, of cheating during last year’s Chess Olympiad. Feller, who is ranked No. 4 among French players, played Board 5 for the national Olympiad team and won an individual gold medal for his performance.
But the federation said he had help from Cyril Marzolo, an international master, who watched Feller’s games online and put the positions into a computer, which suggested moves. Marzolo relayed the suggestions to Arnaud Hauchard, a grandmaster and the French team’s captain, who used a code in transmitting the suggestions to Feller, the federation said.
From the start, we need to think about how to think about growing old””and, in particular, how to think not simply of aging but of human aging. This will require that we learn from but also move beyond what has become the standard way to think about aging. Scholars study both why we age and how we age. The first seems to invite talk about a purpose, the second a mechanism. The first is more germane to my inquiry here.
Why do we age? The dominant answer today is that of evolutionary biology. We age because nature has relatively little stake in keeping us alive beyond our reproductive years. Insofar as we may speak of our lives having a point, it is to be carriers of DNA. Having passed that on to the next generation, we are dispensable. Any genetic trait harmful enough to cause death before the reproductive years will have difficulty surviving the filter of natural selection. Those who have such traits are less likely to reproduce, less likely to be effective carriers and transmitters of DNA. And, by contrast, natural selection will have relatively little effect on harmful genes if those harms appear only in the post-reproductive years.
The European Commission on Monday unveiled a “single European transport area” aimed at enforcing “a profound shift in transport patterns for passengers” by 2050.
The plan also envisages an end to cheap holiday flights from Britain to southern Europe with a target that over 50 per cent of all journeys above 186 miles should be by rail.
Top of the EU’s list to cut climate change emissions is a target of “zero” for the number of petrol and diesel-driven cars and lorries in the EU’s future cities.
Around the country, law enforcement officials and educators are struggling with how to confront minors who “sext,” an imprecise term that refers to sending sexual photos, videos or texts from one cellphone to another.
But adults face a hard truth. For teenagers, who have ready access to technology and are growing up in a culture that celebrates body flaunting, sexting is laughably easy, unremarkable and even compelling: the primary reason teenagers sext is to look cool and sexy to someone they find attractive.
Indeed, the photos can confer cachet.
“Having a naked picture of your significant other on your cellphone is an advertisement that you’re sexually active to a degree that gives you status,” said Rick Peters, a senior deputy prosecuting attorney for Thurston County, which includes Lacey. “It’s an electronic hickey.”
A favorite pastime of Internet users is to share their location: services like Google Latitude can inform friends when you are nearby; another, Foursquare, has turned reporting these updates into a game.
But as a German Green party politician, Malte Spitz, recently learned, we are already continually being tracked whether we volunteer to be or not. Cellphone companies do not typically divulge how much information they collect, so Mr. Spitz went to court to find out exactly what his cellphone company, Deutsche Telekom, knew about his whereabouts.
The results were astounding. In a six-month period ”” from Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010, Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times. It traced him from a train on the way to Erlangen at the start through to that last night, when he was home in Berlin.
The Japanese electricians who bravely strung wires this week to all six reactor buildings at a stricken nuclear power plant succeeded despite waves of heat and blasts of radioactive steam.
The restoration of electricity at the plant, the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, stirred hopes that the crisis was ebbing. But nuclear engineers say some of the most difficult and dangerous tasks are still ahead ”” and time is not necessarily on the side of the repair teams.
The tasks include manually draining hundreds of gallons of radioactive water and venting radioactive gas from the pumps and piping of the emergency cooling systems, which are located diagonally underneath the overheated reactor vessels. The urgency of halting the spread of radioactive contamination from the site was underlined on Wednesday by the health warning that infants should not drink tap water ”” even in Tokyo, 140 miles southwest of the stricken plant ”” which raised alarms about extensive contamination.
Beck Ag is a small agricultural marketing firm that helps companies get good word of mouth among farmers. Clients often ask the Omaha-based firm to set the farmers up with video conferences, chat groups and Web-based meetings. But John Finegan, founder and owner, offers a surprising response: Nah.
“I try to talk clients out of it,” he said. “Farmers are usually out in the field, or riding in a tractor, and when they’re home they don’t want to spend all their time glued to a screen. They like to talk on the phone.” So Beck Ag focuses on hooking the farmers up via conference calls. And given that the company increased its revenue 30 percent last year, it’s hard to argue that the firm is missing something.
This behavior in the lab, the researchers noted, squares with studies in recent decades showing an increase in the number of college students who admit to cheating. During this same period, other studies have shown a weakening in the popular belief in free will (although it’s still widely held).
“Doubting one’s free will may undermine the sense of self as agent,” Dr. Vohs and Dr. Schooler concluded. “Or, perhaps, denying free will simply provides the ultimate excuse to behave as one likes.”
Episcopal Church congregations are more and more turning to the internet and social media in particular to communicate with their members and their communities, according to a just-released summary of a nationwide survey of faith communities.
Results for Episcopalians in the Faith Communities Today Survey (FACT) show that 95 percent of congregations surveyed report that they use email to communicate with members and 86 percent have websites. The latter is an increase from 81 percent in 2008 and 76 percent in 2005. Forty-one percent report having used Facebook or other social media in 2010. Congregations frequently reported using electronic newsletters, text messaging and Twitter, the survey said.
High school junior Kelsey Upton was puzzled….
Without her knowledge, someone had placed her name and phone number on the site next to a photo of a naked woman, in an explicit position, who somewhat resembled her.
How could that be?
A mere three years ago, Diana Davis published a hands-on book for church leaders titled “Fresh Ideas For Women’s Ministry.”
When flipping through its pages, she said, one of the first things she notices is a missing word — Facebook. She needs to rewrite the whole book to cover this reality gap.
“That obvious, isn’t it? It’s so obvious that we ought to be using Facebook to tell more women about our Bible studies and prayer groups and retreats and things like that,” said Davis, who has been married to a Southern Baptist pastor and administrator for nearly four decades, working in Texas and Indiana.
What advice can you give readers of TIME?
We talk about love in a way that’s very unrealistic: “If you’re in love, you’re not going to want to have sex with anyone else but that person.” That’s not true. We need to acknowledge that truth so that people don’t have to spend 40 years of marriage lying to and policing each other.
I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.
For the most part, assiduous commenting on a friend’s Facebook updates and periodically e-mailing promises to “catch up by phone soon” substitute for actual conversation. With friends who merit face time, arrangements are carried out via electronic transmission. “We do everything by text and e-mail,” said Laurie David, a Hollywood producer and author. “It would be strange at this point to try figuring all that out by phone.”
Of course, immediate family members still phone occasionally. “It’s useful for catching up on parenting issues with your ex-husband,” said Ms. David, who used to be married to Larry David, the star of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” “Sometimes when you don’t want to type it all, it’s just easier to talk.”
But even sons, husbands and daughters don’t always want to chat. In our text-heavy world, mothers report yearning for the sound of their teenage and adult children’s voices. “I’m sort of missing the phone,” said Lisa Birnbach, author of “True Prep” and mother of three teenagers. “It’s warmer and more honest.”
Take a guess at the seven first and then read it all.
The government said Saturday that it had found higher than normal levels of radioactive materials in spinach and milk at farms up to 90 miles away from the ravaged nuclear power plants, the first confirmation by officials that the unfolding nuclear crisis has affected the nation’s food supply.
While officials played down the immediate risks to consumers, the findings further unsettled a nation worried about the long-term effects of the damaged nuclear power plants.
The Tokyo Electric Power Company, with help from the Japan Self-Defense Force, police officers and firefighters, continued efforts to cool the damaged reactors on Saturday to try to stave off a further fuel meltdown and stem the radiation leak. The latest plan involved running a mile-long electrical transmission line to Reactor No. 2 at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station to try to restore power to its cooling system.
The RSA Security division of the EMC Corporation said Thursday that it had suffered a sophisticated data breach, potentially compromising computer security products widely used by corporations and governments.
The company, which pioneered an advanced cryptographic system during the 1980s, sells products that offer stronger computer security than simple password protection. Known as multifactor authentication, the technology is typically based on an electronic token carried by a user that repeatedly generates a time-based number that must be appended to a password when a user logs in to a computer system.
Watch “Bond” roll down the hall, and, if you’re of a certain age, at least, you might flash back to The Jetsons, Lost in Space or 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Bond bears a passing resemblance to a headless Rosie, the Jetsons’ robot maid, or an armless Robot ”””Danger, Will Robinson!” ”” on Lost in Space. And it (he?) speaks in the mellifluous tones of HAL, the rogue computer in 2001.
This robot is no sci-fi character, though. Bond is one of three TUGs (named for what they do ”” tugging carts and other things) that are employed by the Washington Hospital Center pharmacy here. They can work 24/7, ferrying drugs throughout the hospital without a human tagging along.
The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.
A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an “online persona management service” that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.
The project has been likened by web experts to China’s attempts to control and restrict free speech on the internet….
Increasing alarm has been expressed in the US about the crisis at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan.
Greg Jaczko, chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), said attempts to cool reactors with sea water and prevent them from melting down appeared to be failing.
Emergency workers in the vicinity could be exposed to “potentially lethal” radiation doses, he said.
At least 750 workers were evacuated on Tuesday morning after a separate explosion ruptured the inner containment building at Reactor No. 2 at the Daiichi plant, which was crippled by Friday’s earthquake and tsunami. The explosion released a surge of radiation 800 times more intense than the recommended hourly exposure limit in Japan.
But 50 workers stayed behind, a crew no larger than would be stationed at the plant on a quiet spring day. Taking shelter when possible in the reactor’s control room, which is heavily shielded from radiation, they struggled through the morning and afternoon to keep hundreds of gallons of seawater a minute flowing through temporary fire pumps into the three stricken reactors, Nos. 1, 2 and 3, where overheated fuel rods continued to boil away the water at a brisk pace.
The nuclear power industry had been experiencing something of a rebirth in the United States, following decades of doubt. That’s been put at risk by the crisis unfolding at a nuclear power plant in Japan in the wake of a devastating quake and tsunami there.
With that situation still in flux, attention should remain focused on dealing with the immediate safety issues in Japan, says Jim Owen, a spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, an association of electric utility companies.
“There will be plenty of time later on for a, hopefully, thoughtful dialogue,” Owen says.
But officials in Owen’s industry recognize that problems in Japan are bound to have repercussions when it comes to nuclear policy in the U.S.
People used to give up food for Lent, usually something they needed to cut back on like sweets.
These days, people are vowing to give up Facebook.
It makes sense, says Lisa Hendey, webmaster at St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, Fresno’s largest Roman Catholic congregation.
“In the past, it might have been giving up the extras, like chocolate or TV, but Facebook has become such a big part of people’s daily lives, they’re contemplating giving it up, praying about it.”
[David] Brooks is right to insist that emotional ties, social interaction and the communal transmission of norms are essential in forming individuals for a decent life, and that habit, perception and instinct form a large part of the individual character. But there is moral and intellectual laziness in his sentimental devaluation of conscious reasoning, which is what we have to rely on when our emotions or our inherited norms give unclear or poorly grounded instructions.
Life, morality and politics are not science, but their improvement requires thought ”” not only thought about the most effective means of shaping people, which is Brooks’s concern, but thought about what our ends should be. Such questions don’t appeal to him, since they cannot be settled by empirical evidence of the kind he feels comfortable with. Brooks is out to expose the superficiality of an overly rational view of human nature, but there is more than one kind of superficiality.
Television writer-producer Jill Soloway turned off her electronic devices for 24 hours last Saturday and spent the morning playing with her 2-year-old son in her yard in Silver Lake.
“It was excruciating and kind of wonderful. I struggled with a feeling of anxiety that there was something in my inbox I needed to tend to,” she said. “Then came a moment when it felt like a holiday. Holiday means holy day. What a huge gift.”
Soloway, executive producer of the Showtime series “United States of Tara,” and a self-described smartphone junkie, was taking part in the “National Day of Unplugging,” organized by Reboot, a group of urban media professionals who try to reconnect with Jewish tradition in a way that is meaningful to their hectic lives.
Amid all these commentaries, I have yet to hear anyone speculate on how the communications media that fueled the Arab revolutions will reshape and define the societies and states that emerge from these uprisings. For much of the 20th century such thinking was the realm of Roman Catholic layman and media critic Marshall McLuhan (1911-80). Any student of McLuhan’s (mostly proven) theories would know this: sooner or later the structures that emerge will be rooted in the technological extension of senses implicit in these communications technologies.
McLuhan’s landmark 1964 book Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man presented his primary thesis: the dominant communications medium in any society unconsciously shapes our psychic and social lives irrespective of the content presented through that medium. His still-famous dictum was “The medium is the message.” His insights provoke a number of questions about current events in North Africa. How does mobile phone texting extend our natural capacities? How does it fit into the mélange of graphic and typographic communications technologies used in these cultures? What values are embedded implicitly in these technologies and the process of interacting with them? How does this reshape their consciousness and societies?
A leading IVF clinic is helping clients choose the sex of their baby by sending them to an overseas clinic it co-owns, avoiding Australian rules which allow the practice only for medical reasons.
Sydney IVF, which has several clinics in NSW as well as in Canberra, Perth and Tasmania, is part-owner of Superior ART, a Thai clinic that will provide IVF for ”family balancing” – when families with children of one gender are seeking another child of the opposite sex.
It costs $11,000 including flights and accommodation, a spokesman for Sydney IVF said.
A quick search of YouTube today for “Anwar al-Awlaki” finds hundreds of his videos, most of them scriptural commentary or clerical advice, but dozens that include calls for jihad or attacks on the United States.
The story of You Tube and Mr. Awlaki is a revealing case study in the complexity of limiting controversial speech in the age of do-it-yourself media, as the House prepares for hearings next week on the radicalization of American Muslims.
In eloquent American English or Arabic with English subtitles, Mr. Awlaki can be seen in videos decrying America’s “war on Islam”; warning Muslims why they should “never, ever trust a kuffar,” or non-Muslim; praising the attempt by his “student” to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner; and patiently explaining why American civilians are legitimate targets for killings. Such videos have been posted in multiple copies and viewed hundreds or thousands of times.