The Peoples' Choice...

PCWorld: Air Apparents! Ultrabooks and Other Slimmed-Down Windows PCs

2011-11-18T13:31:00.001-08:00

PCWorld

Air Apparents! Ultrabooks and Other Slimmed-Down Windows PCs

Nov 18th 2011, 20:44

The MacBook Air is a hit; here comes the competition.

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Share Your Memories of The Internet in 1996 [OPEN THREAD]

2011-10-07T09:29:00.000-07:00

In this episode Pizza... in... SPAAAAAACE! Domino's unveils plans for the first pizza joint on the Moon Mind-controlled, self-powered robot bugs: University of Michigan researchers invent a tiny generator for cyborg insects Toss your cell phone, win a prize: Finland … Continue reading ?

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Google Reveals Details About Its Carbon Footprint

2011-10-07T02:47:00.000-07:00

Google is coming clean about how green it has become. Among other things, the technology giant has revealed that, for all its services, its servers use less energy for a month, per user, than a light bulb that burns for three hours.

But, put together, the company's data centers continually use about 260 million watts, or about 25 percent of what a nuclear power plant generates.

Zero-Carbon Footprint

The company's greenness was detailed for the first time in a posting Thursday on its official Green Blog, and elsewhere. On the blog, Urs Hoelzle, senior vice president for technical infrastructure, noted that, because Google has been a carbon-neutral company since 2007 -- that is, it saves or removes the same amount of carbon emissions as it creates -- even the three hours of a light bulb per user is offset. The resulting carbon footprint of the company is zero.

Previously, Google has been general in discussing its energy use, possibly to avoid releasing competitive information. Now, in an apparent effort to show off its successful conservation and impact-less use of energy, the company is releasing some statistics.

It said its custom-built data centers used only about half the energy of most other centers. About 30 percent of its current electricity use is from renewable sources, including renewable energy already in the grid and renewable energy the company buys directly. That figure is expected to grow to over 35 percent next year.

The company's solar-generated electricity, bike-to-work programs, and other efforts remove the equivalent of about 10,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year. At the Mountain View, Calif., headquarters alone, solar panels generate about 3 million kWh of clean energy annually.

Reusing a Paper Mill

A huge part of Google's energy needs, of course, are its massive data centers. The company has said that it emphasizes four concepts to increase energy efficiency. It accurately measures power usage, keeps the centers warm to reduce cooling costs, designs each element in the data center to operate at optimal efficiency, and cools data centers without chillers.

The company's newest data center, in an old paper mill in Hamina, Finland, uses a variety of innovative techniques to reduce energy use. For instance, raw seawater from the Gulf of Finland uses an existing seawater tunnel, originally built for the paper mill. The seawater is run through heat exchangers, then sent to a "tempering building," where it mixed with more, cooler seawater. It is then returned to the Gulf at a temperature close to the natural one. No compressor-based or refrigerant-based cooling is used.

On Thursday, the company also released a study about the energy savings from using cloud-based services versus housing local servers. It cited data showing that "cloud-based services like Gmail allow organizations of all sizes to reap" advantages of increased efficiency, reduced overhead, and creating a smaller carbon footprint.

Laura DiDio, an analyst with Information Technology Intelligence Corp, said that the greening of data centers "is not a passing fad," because it can be a substantial cost-saving measure. She noted that Dell, IBM, Apple, Microsoft, and HP have also been leaders in this area.

The biggest savers, she said, are virtualization, cloud services and the rise of the remote, mobile workforce, which often mean fewer local power needs.

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Summary Box: US could improve credit card security

2011-10-06T20:34:00.000-07:00

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John Wiley eyes greater share of e-book sales: CEO

2011-10-06T13:39:00.000-07:00

(Reuters) - Publisher John Wiley & Sons Inc said it is planning a major digital push to grab a bigger slice of the lucrative e-book market, which is witnessing an explosive growth, fueled by the popularity of tablets and e-readers.

"Some of the larger publishing houses have 25-30 percent of sales from e-books. We hope to achieve those levels," Chief Executive Stephen Smith told Reuters in an interview.

E-books represent 11 percent of the company's professional/trade (PT) unit sales, which account for 23 percent of overall revenue, and their sales saw strong growth at Amazon Inc's Kindle store and Apple Inc's iBookstore.

"In the first quarter of this year, we have seen a three-fold rise in e-book sales at our professional and trade segment," Smith said. "We expect to see e-books becoming a much larger proportion of our revenue."

The 204-year old company -- which started off as a publisher of 19th century American authors like Washington Irving, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe -- is now known for brands such as "For Dummies" instructional texts, "Frommer's" travel guides, "Betty Crocker" cookbooks and Wiley-Blackwell academic journals.

Digital sales, which include e-books and other products and services, accounted for 40 percent of the company's total revenue across all its segments in fiscal year 2011.

Digital sales comprised 59 percent of scientific/technical/medical/scholarly (STMS), 10 percent of PT, and 16 percent of global education revenue. While e-books make up 16 percent of STMS, 7 percent of PT and 5 percent of global education revenue.

The company's STMS unit, its largest by sales, was the first to migrate to digital in 1995 followed by its global education unit.

Wiley also signed sales agreements with Amazon Germany, ChristianBooks.com, and Blio in the first quarter to push e-book sales.

Its larger rivals include McGraw-Hill Companies Inc, Reed Elsevier Plc, Pearson, Axel Springer AG.

ALLIANCES & ACQUISITIONS

While growth in Asia, which accounts for about a fifth of the company's revenue, continues to be strong, Wiley is also looking to enhance its digital content through services acquisitions, partnerships and in-house development.

"We are finding sources of growth in more mature markets in North America and Europe particularly through expansion of services," Smith said.

Smith, who is undergoing cancer treatment, said the company is looking at technology to speed its digital transition and move to "content-based services" and it is "vigilantly looking at strategic opportunities at the right price."

Wiley is interested in acquiring companies that helps build capabilities in search technology, content enrichment, semantic tagging, distance learning, curriculum development, test preparation, among others.

The company generated $270 million of free cash flow in 2011 and said it is "comfortable making large acquisitions."

Wiley's $1.12 billion buy of UK's academic journal and reference book publisher Blackwell Publishing in 2007 was its most recent and largest acquisition in its history.

The Hoboken, New Jersey-based also reaffirmed its profit outlook of $3.15-$3.20 for the year on mid-single digit revenue growth. At constant U.S. dollar rates, the company expects to add 10 cents a share to profit.

With regards to Apple taking a 30 percent cut on sales through its App Store, the company said it is "absolutely not coordinating with our competitors regarding negotiations with Apple on any terms or pricing."

(Reporting by Soham Chatterjee in Bangalore; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty)

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Correction: Hewlett-Packard-webOS

2011-10-06T06:39:00.000-07:00

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Opel to introduce EV concept car that costs pennies to drive

2011-10-06T00:04:00.000-07:00

Take to the road in a zero-emission coupe built for two

As green thinking becomes a world affair, electric vehicles are beginning to pop up in all shapes and sizes. The economic Nissan Leaf can already be seen buzzing around U.S. roads, while Cadillac and BMW both have more luxurious electric offerings poised to hit dealerships shortly. German automaker Opel is now getting in on the mix, with a two-seat electric concept vehicle set to be revealed at the Frankfurt Motor Show next week.

The compact cruiser doesn't have an official name, but is instead being touted as the "One Euro Car" because it can travel 100 kilometers (roughly 62 miles) for just one euro (or $1.41). With mobility in mind, the new vehicle boasts one-third the weight of a typical compact car and a top speed of 75 miles per hour.

Opel "One Euro Car"

The company is positioning the new vehicle as an affordable, environmentally-friendly option for younger drivers. An Opel press release even suggests that a speed-limited version of the two-seater could be introduced which could selectively top out at around 28mph — making it fine for city driving, but preventing lead feet. As with all concept cars, there's no guarantee that the futuristic EV will ever make it to market, but in the cost-conscious times of today it certainly has a fighting chance.

Opel hasn't sold cars in the United States under its own nameplate since the early 70s. But as it is a General Motors brand, several of Opel's designs have come to U.S. dealerships under GM brands including Saturn, Buick, and Cadillac, so don't be entirely surprised if a version of the conceptual electric speedster eventually makes it stateside.

[via Autoblog Green]

This article originally appeared on Tecca

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Shuttered SAP subsidiary charged in Oracle theft

2011-10-05T17:14:00.000-07:00

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Copyright charges for NinjaVideo operators

2011-10-05T10:24:00.000-07:00

Four Americans and a Greek national have been indicted on conspiracy and copyright infringement charges for alleged involvement with a website, NinjaVideo, which offered illegal downloads of movies and television shows, the Justice Department said Friday.

Many of the movies offered by NinjaVideo.net, which was shut down by US law enforcement in June 2010, were still playing in theaters and others had not yet been released publicly, the department said in a statement.

The indictments were handed down on Thursday by a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, the department said.

The five were charged with one count of conspiracy and five counts of copyright infringement for their involvement with NinjaVideo, it said.

According to the indictment, NinjaVideo was launched in February 2008 and allowed visitors to illegally download copyright-protected movies and TV shows in high-quality formats.

Many movies were offered for free and a greater selection was available for a donation of at least $25, the Justice Department said.

It said the operators allegedly collected more than $500,000 during the website's two-and-a-half years of operation.

The five charged were Hana Amal Beshara, 29, of New Jersey; Matthew David Howard Smith, 23, of North Carolina; Joshua David Evans, 34, of Washington state; Zoi Mertzanis, 36, of Greece; and Jeremy Lynn Andrew, 33, of Oregon.

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AT&T fights back at U.S. challenge of T-Mobile deal

2011-10-05T04:07:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - AT&T Inc and T-Mobile USA fought back against the Justice Department's challenge to their proposed merger, arguing the deal would "usher in more intense competition."

AT&T and T-Mobile, owned by Deutsche Telekom AG, argued in a federal court filing on Friday that the massive $39 billion deal would free up spectrum and create new capacity for Americans whose mobile devices are transmitting increasingly large amounts of data.

"The Justice Department's complaint fails to come to grips with the significant efficiencies this transaction will generate," the companies said in their filing.

In the brief, AT&T asked the court to allow its purchase of T-Mobile to go forward and to require the Justice Department to pay its costs in the challenge.

The Justice Department filed a lawsuit aimed at stopping the deal last week, saying the acquisition of T-Mobile USA, the No. 4 carrier, by AT&T, the No. 2, would harm competition in the wireless market and lead to higher prices.

The department, in particular, seemed determined to preserve T-Mobile as an innovative, discount carrier that held down wireless prices.

Responding to that concern, AT&T said "T-Mobile is not a unique or material competitive constraint on AT&T."

"T-Mobile has not been a meaningful or unique innovator in terms of network development and deployment, nor is it likely to become one in the foreseeable future," AT&T said in the filing with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

The deal partners took issue with the Justice Department's review of the effect of the merger on a national basis instead of on a local basis. They argued that more than 90 percent of U.S. consumers currently have at least five wireless carriers to choose from in their local markets.

They also disputed the method the Justice Department used to analyze the deal, saying it was too simplistic.

If the merger goes through, AT&T will unseat Verizon Wireless as the No. 1 U.S. mobile carrier. Verizon Wireless is a venture of Verizon Communications Inc and Vodafone Group Plc.

"We continue to believe this transaction as currently proposed is anti-competitive and harmful to consumers," Justice Department Spokesperson Gina Talamona said. "We will respond further in our court filing."

The lawsuit is the biggest antitrust challenge yet by the Obama administration.

The case is the Department of Justice v. AT&T, T-Mobile USA, U.S. District Court, District of Columbia, No. 11-01560.

(Reporting by Sinead Carew and Diane Bartz; editing by Gary Hill, Tim Dobbyn and Andre Grenon)

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Adobe Offers Server Solution To Flash Video on iOS

2011-10-04T21:51:00.000-07:00

Adobe has been showcasing new tool capabilities to handle HTML5 technologies, but the company has not completely given up its efforts to get Flash on Apple's iOS mobile devices. This week Adobe announced its new Flash Media Server 4.5, with a new workaround solution so that Flash-based video will play on the iPad and iPhone.

The new Media Server adds iOS support, and allows content owners to create HTTP-based content on the fly. It also provides integrated content protection, for simplification of deployment or lowering of infrastructure cost.

HTTP Live Streaming

Users of the Media Server can now stream Flash-encoded video content as HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), which Apple's iOS supports, instead of MPEG4 in the F4F file format. When the Media Server detects that a device, such as an iPad, does not have Flash, it provides the video as MPEG2 in HLS format on the fly.

Browsers that are designed to support HTML5 technologies can handle HLS. However, Adobe's solution only works with video streaming, not with games or animation created in Flash.

While this could solve publishers' problem of providing video that displays on Apple's devices as well as on others, it also can be seen as a sign that Adobe is resigned to having to straddle both worlds.

Last month, Adobe released a new HTML5 tool, called Edge, for creating Web motion and interaction design using those standards-based technologies. Apple in particular has favored HTML5 technologies over Flash, and has complained about Flash's performance, security, and power drain on mobile devices.

Edge, New Flash Access

When it released Edge, Adobe said it saw the tool as a complement to its Flash Professional and Flash Builder software. The company pointed out that it had previously issued a variety of significant HTML5 milestones, including contributions to jQuery, code for WebKit, and enhancements to HTML5 in the company's flagship product, Creative Suite 5.5.

While Edge is HTML5-specific, Adobe has been clear about its intention to appear as a champion of these open-standard technologies throughout its product line. Its Creative Suite 5.5, announced in May, went further than earlier versions in its support of content created using HTML5 as well as Flash.

Along with Media Server, the company on Thursday released its Adobe Flash Access 3.0, for delivering content with a single, back-end workflow. Access now has the ability to leverage the same content delivery, protection, and monetization infrastructure for mobile devices and platforms.

Access also now offers the ability to deliver many TV channels to millions of online subscribers, with a content protection solution that the company said is cost-efficient. The updated software is also compatible with an industry-standard, cloud-based digital rights locker, UltraViolet, that allows consumers to create their own video libraries and watch them across various devices.

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Tecca TV: TechLife on cyborg bugs, fire surfing, pizza in space, and more!

2011-10-04T15:12:00.000-07:00

Thanks for tuning in to TechLife on Tecca TV, where we give you the 5 best technology-meets-lifestyle news stories in only 5 minutes! We try to bring a bit of Friday Fun to you each week.

Be sure to peruse the detailed show notes above to find more information on all the stories we covered in this episode. And if you missed our episode last week, be sure to check it out for our take on street-legal Batmobiles, an amazing time-lapse video of the stars, real-life bionic humans, and more.

As always, we would love your feedback on this week's episode of TechLife! Please let us know your thoughts in the comments, and be sure to tune in next Friday for another episode of TechLife on Tecca TV!

This article originally appeared on Tecca

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Apple wins German court ruling on Samsung tablets

2011-10-04T08:35:00.000-07:00

DUESSELDORF, Germany (Reuters) - Apple Inc scored a symbolic legal victory in efforts to keep its lead spot in the tablet computer market when a German court upheld a ban barring Samsung's local unit from selling its Galaxy 10.1 tablets in Europe's biggest economy.

Samsung, which said it will appeal the decision, and Apple have been locked in a global battle over smartphone and tablet patents since April.

Samsung's Galaxy devices are seen as among the biggest challengers to Apple's mobile products, which have achieved runaway success.

Samsung said it was disappointed by the ruling and that it believed the ruling restricts design innovation and progress in the industry.

It said it would explore all legal options, including continuing to aggressively pursue Apple for what Samsung said are a violation of its wireless technology patents around the world.

Craig Cartier, analyst at consultancy firm Frost & Sullivan, said that while Friday's ruling would not greatly affect Samsung it could set a precedent for other courts and have repercussions for patent battles worldwide.

"There has been an arms race in the patent world which has led to a high valuation of patent portfolios, including Nortel's $4.5 billion patent auction," Cartier said.

"Companies may start to question if patent values are simply another bubble waiting to burst."

STILL FOR SALE

The temporary injunction upheld by the court on Friday bars Samsung Germany from selling the Galaxy 10.1 tablet in Germany.

But retailers such as consumer electronics chain Media Markt will still be able to sell the device by selling off existing stock or getting new supplies from the South Korean group's parent Samsung International.

Media Markt said it was too early to say what the verdict would mean for its business.

Patent expert Florian Mueller said in his blog www.fosspatents.com that the sales ban in Europe for Samsung Germany has no practical consequences.

The German subsidiary is also barred from selling the tablets in Europe, excluding the Netherlands where Apple requested a separate injunction.

Giving the ruling, Judge Johanna Brueckner-Hofmann said in court in Duesseldorf that the overall impression of the tablet was too similar to the design of Apple's iPad.

"It (the tablet) is distinguished by its smooth, simple areas," Brueckner-Hofmann said.

By contrast, a Dutch court ruled last month that it found no infringement for Samsung's tablets.

Apple repeated its usual statement saying that: "This kind of blatant copying is wrong, and we need to protect Apple's intellectual property when companies steal our ideas."

In a global intellectual property battle, Apple has claimed the Galaxy line of mobile phones and tablets "slavishly" copied the iPhone and iPad and has sued the Korean company in the United States, Australia, Japan and Korea as well as in Europe.

Samsung, whose tablets are based on Google Inc's Android software, has counter-sued Apple.

On Thursday, Apple also filed a suit against Samsung in Japan, seeking to ban sales of some of its gadgets there.

That same day, smartphone maker HTC said that it extended its lawsuit against Apple to include more patents the Taiwanese company acquired from Google as legal battles become increasingly common in the hi-tech industry.

(Additional reporting by Harro ten Wolde; Editing by David Holmes, David Cowell and David Hulmes)

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NinjaVideo illegal downloading site operators indicted: ICE

2011-10-04T02:17:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A federal grand jury has indicted five individuals involved with the website NinaVideo.net with conspiracy and copyright infringement, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said on Friday.

The site provided millions the ability to illegally download high-quality, copyrighted movies and television programs, ICE said in a statement.

It said NinjaVideo operated from February 2008 until it was shut down by authorities in June 2010 -- after the defendants allegedly collected more than $500,000 and facilitated millions of dollars worth of copyright infringement.

ICE said the charges are exemplary of efforts to "safeguard the nation's economic security against those who seek to profit illegally from American creativity, innovation and hard work."

Defendants Hana Amal Beshara of New Jersey and Matthew David Howard Smith of North Carolina were identified as the founders and administrators of NinjaVideo, and Jeremy Lynn Andrew of Oregon was allegedly the site's head of security.

Joshua David Evans of Washington state and Zoi Mertzanis, a resident of Greece, were alleged to be two of the most active uploaders of copyrighted material to the website.

The federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia returned the indictment Thursday, charging the five defendants with one count of conspiracy and five substantive copyright infringement counts for their involvement with NinjaVideo.

Many of NinjaVideo's offerings were still in theaters or not yet released. NinjaVideo also offered many of its movies and shows for free, but opened greater access to its selections for a "donation" of a minimum of $25 dollars, ICE reported.

But the website generated significant revenue during its two-and-a-half-year run through advertising, according to ICE.

Thursday's indictment was part of the investigation being conducted by ICE's Homeland Security Investigations, which fights criminal counterfeiting and piracy, in conjunction with the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center.

The defendants are scheduled to be arraigned on September 16.

(Editing by Jerry Norton)

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AOL shares fall; report of possible Yahoo tie-up

2011-10-03T19:49:00.000-07:00

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Defibrillator

2011-10-03T13:13:00.000-07:00

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Windows Live Services Hit by Global Outage

2011-10-03T07:10:00.000-07:00

Microsoft's cloud-based Windows Live offerings were cut off from users worldwide for several hours on Thursday evening due to a domain name service (DNS) issue.

The software giant has 360 million Windows Live Hotmail users globally as well as 299 million active Windows Live Messenger accounts.

Though Microsoft thought it had restored service for all Hotmail, Office365 and SkyDrive accounts by 9:45 PM PT Thursday, some customers continued to report problems. At 11:02 PM, the software giant said it was working on propagating the requisite DNS configuration changes for fixing the problem, but that it would take some time to restore service to everyone.

Microsoft notified Windows Live users at 11:49 PM that it had completed propagating its DNS configuration changes around the world, and had restored service for most customers.

"Depending on your location you may still experience issues over the next 30 minutes as the [DNS] changes make their way through the network," explained Microsoft blogger Chris Jones. "Thank you for your patience as we have worked to address these issues."

Lost In Translation

DNS translates Internet domain names meaningful to human beings into the numerical identifiers required by networking equipment to locate and address computing devices worldwide. Moreover, the system makes it possible for domain names to be assigned to groups of Internet resources and users in ways that are independent of each entity's physical location.

DNS is often compared to a telephone book because it likewise cross references individual names with their numerical equivalents. For example, the domain name cnn.com has an equivalent IP address of 157.166.224.25.

As Thursday's Windows Live outage indicated, however, DNS issues can have unintended consequences for users of services that are based in the cloud. What's more, fixing an unexpected DNS problem takes time. On Friday morning, Microsoft was still working to resolve the continuing problems experienced by a small number of Windows Live users, according to an Office365 tweet.

Nothing is 100 Percent Reliable

This week's Windows Live service disruption followed on the heels of an August outage that likewise prevented some Office365 and SkyDrive users from accessing their accounts for several hours. Those Office365 customers hit last month by the outage are slated to receive "a 25 percent credit on a future monthly invoice," Microsoft said in a statement given to the Seattle Times.

However, Microsoft's latest cloud difficulty was overshadowed in Southern California, where 1.4 million residents of San Diego County and adjacent areas were without electrical power from Thursday afternoon into early Friday morning. The electrical grid shutdown, which also affected parts of Arizona and Mexico, was being investigated by U.S. regulatory authorities.

The juxtaposition of the two service disruption events demonstrates that cloud environments are not the only infrastructures vulnerable to outages from time to time.

"Nothing will ever be 100 percent reliable and -- especially in IT -- nothing is going to stay the same forever or even for a long enough time," said Andrea DiMaio, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner Research.

"So, besides learning to feel less desperate if tweets are stuck or VOIP does not work, we all need to really understand that technology is fallible, and we will always need to exercise our creativity to react to unexpected situations," DiMaio wrote in a blog late last year.

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Google to Iran: Change your password

2011-10-03T00:24:00.000-07:00

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc is advising its Gmail email service customers in Iran to change their passwords in the wake of a cyberattack that has affected a major swath of the country.

Google itself was not compromised, but the attackers may have been able to break into the link between Gmail and a person's computer, essentially. As such the attack was the latest illustration of the difficulty and complexity of securing the Web.

"We learned last week that the compromise of a Dutch company involved with verifying the authenticity of websites could have put the Internet communications of many Iranians at risk, including their Gmail," Google said in a post on its official blog on Thursday.

"While Google's internal systems were not compromised, we are directly contacting possibly affected users and providing similar information below because our top priority is to protect the privacy and security of our users," Google said.

A certificate guarantees that a Web surfer is securely connected with a website and not being monitored by someone else.

In mid-July, Dutch Information Technology company DigiNotar's systems were hacked and security certificates were stolen for a number of domains, DigiNotar and its owner, U.S.-listed VASCO Data Security International, said on August 30.

The stolen certificates were immediately revoked after detection of the theft but one, for the site Google.com, was only "recently" revoked after a warning from the Dutch government, DigiNotar and VASCO said.

Google, which alerted users to the threat last week, recommended on Thursday that all users in Iran follow a series of steps to protect themselves, including changing their Gmail passwords and verifying their account recovery options.

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Peter Henderson and Richard Chang)

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Summary Box: Shuttered SAP subsidiary charged

2011-10-02T17:52:00.000-07:00

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Sprint Reportedly To Offer Unlimited Data for iPhone 5

2011-10-02T11:30:00.000-07:00

First, The Wall Street Journal reported that Sprint would get the iPhone 5. Now, Bloomberg is reporting that Sprint will follow in the footsteps of Verizon and offer an unlimited-data package plan. But some analysts are wary of the rumors.

Two weeks ago, the Journal cited people familiar with the matter saying Sprint would start selling the iPhone 5 in mid-October. That would help Sprint compete with Verizon and AT&T and leave a struggling T-Mobile out of the iPhone loop.

Bloomberg picked up where the Journal left off, also citing people familiar with the matter, with a report that Sprint would rely on unlimited-data service plans to distinguish itself from the other iPhone carriers.

"It's a competitive disadvantage if your two larger competitors have the iPhone and you don't," Matthew Thornton, an analyst at Avian Securities, told Bloomberg. "Getting the iPhone closes that gap."

Rumors Likely True

The rumors aren't so farfetched. Sprint does, after all, offer unlimited data plans on high-profile smartphones for $100 a month. BlackBerry and HTC devices that run on the third-largest carrier can tap into plans for all-you-can eat voice and data service.

But carriers have run into problems with unlimited-data plans for the iPhone.

Even if Sprint did get the iPhone 5 -- and even if Sprint offered unlimited-data plans on the device -- the unlimited plans might be short-lived.

The unlimited plans were offered as Verizon rolled out its iPhone 4, in a move to win customers from AT&T. But in July Verizon put the kibosh on the all-you-can-eat services for new accounts.

"I think it's a little too early to discuss because the rumors have been spring rumors," said Avi Greengart, an analyst at Current Analysis. "I am going to wait until there is something to comment on. I am not saying Sprint won't get the iPhone 5, but Sprint didn't say it."

Death of Unlimited?

Verizon's kibosh was followed by AT&T's decision to throttle the heaviest mobile broadband users on its network. Starting Oct. 1, AT&T smartphone customers with unlimited plans -- the wireless carrier describes these customers as those whose extraordinary level of data usage puts them in the top 5 percent of heaviest users in a billing period -- may experience throttling, or reduced connection speeds.

AT&T stressed that the action would only affect a minority of consumers, those who use 12 times more data on average than typical smartphone data customers. Essentially, consumers that aren't data hogs won't notice any difference in connection speeds.

So, again, even if "people familiar with the matter" are reporting that Sprint will get the iPhone 5 in mid-October, and that it will offer unlimited data plans, it likely would be a matter of time before Sprint's network would become overloaded by the mobile broadband hogs -- and the third-largest carrier would have to do what its competitors are doing, shift down.

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Fatigue

2011-10-02T04:33:00.000-07:00

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Google Pays Chump Change for Zagat

2011-10-01T22:30:00.000-07:00

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A Steve Jobs Death Rumor Sweeps Through Twitter

2011-10-01T15:37:00.000-07:00

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Stanford Hospital privacy breach puts data online

2011-10-01T08:39:00.000-07:00

PALO ALTO, Calif. (AP) — Stanford Hospital in California is blaming a subcontractor used by an outside vendor for a privacy breach that led to the posting online of medical information for thousands of emergency room patients.

The breach was first reported Friday by the New York Times (http://nyti.ms/p84zWa ). The data of 20,000 patients, including names and diagnosis codes, remained on a commercial website for nearly a year until it was discovered last month and taken down, according to the newspaper.

In a statement, Stanford Hospital said the file that contained the patient information and was posted to the site was created by a subcontractor employed by one of its vendors, Multi Specialties Collection Services.

The hospital did not name the subcontractor, but it said Multi Specialties Collection Services is investigating how the company caused patient information to be posted to the website. Stanford said that in the meantime, it has suspended working with Multi Specialties Collection Services.

"This incident was not caused by the hospital, and responsibility has been assumed by a contractor working with the vendor," the hospital said in its statement.

Breaches of medical data are common though most typically involve lost or stolen computers or storage devices.

Roughly one-fifth of the publicly disclosed breaches in the last seven years have involved health care providers, according to a database kept by the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

The digitization of medical data is creating new problems, as the information travels more easily among the dozens of contractors that are typically authorized to handle a person's medical records and is more easily lost or accidentally posted online.

Last month, The Associated Press reported on a California firm that posted the medical files of nearly 300,000 workers' compensation patients on a website that the firm mistakenly believed only its employees could see.

In the Stanford case, the data ended up on a homework-help website called Student of Fortune, according to the New York Times.

Someone needing help converting data into a bar graph posted a spreadsheet along with the sensitive information, Gary Migdol, a spokesman for the hospital, told the Times. The spreadsheet first appeared there a year ago Friday, Migdol said.

The privacy breach did not involve any hacking, and data weren't on Stanford's or the collection agency's website, but on Student of Fortune's.

The information also contained medical record numbers, hospital account numbers, emergency room admission and discharge dates and billing charges, according to the hospital. It did not contain credit card or Social Security numbers, information commonly associated with identity theft.

The affected patients were seen by the hospital's emergency department between March 1, 2009, and Aug. 31, 2009.

"The hospital notified affected patients quickly and also arranged for free identity protection services, though the data involved is not associated with identity theft," the hospital said in its statement.

Migdol told the Times that he expected the federal Department of Health and Human Services to conduct its own investigation. Susan McAndrew, a deputy director in the department's Office for Civil Rights, said she could not discuss whether an investigation was in progress.

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T-Mobile deal leads to more competition: AT&T

2011-10-01T02:17:00.000-07:00

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NBC News's Twitter Account Pulled Pulled After 9/11 Hack

2011-09-30T19:29:00.000-07:00

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Court rules Samsung can't sell tablet in Germany

2011-09-30T12:37:00.000-07:00

BERLIN (AP) — Samsung Electronics cannot sell its new Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet computer in Germany after a court ruled Friday that its design "too closely" resembles Apple's iPad2.

The ruling by a Duesseldorf state court, however, only applies to direct sales from the Seoul, South Korea-based company, meaning distributors who acquire the Galaxy Tab 10.1 from abroad could resell them in Germany.

Apple had taken Samsung to court over its Galaxy line, arguing their design is too close a copy of their own products.

Samsung said in a statement it will appeal the ruling, which it said "severely limits consumer choice in Germany."

Already in August, the court ruled in favor of Apple, based in Cupertino, California, forcing Samsung to withdraw its tablet from the European market. It later determined the injunction only applied to sales in Germany, where it had not yet been launched.

"We also believe that by imposing an injunction based on this very generic design right, this ruling restricts design innovation and progress in the industry," Samsung said.

Judge Johanna Brueckner-Hofmann said in her ruling that Samsung, "did not keep the necessary distance" in its design, the news agency dapd reported. Apple patented its design in 2004, and Brueckner-Hofmann cited products from Asus, Acer and Toshiba as examples of tablet computers that nonetheless have a clearly different design.

Apple and Samsung are involved in a series of legal disputes in countries around the world over allegations that each copies the other's technology.

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AT&T defends T-Mobile deal in response to DOJ suit

2011-09-30T06:12:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON (AP) — AT&T is countering the U.S. government's attempt to block its $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile by depicting the deal as a way to provide consumers with better cell phone service at lower prices.

The argument, submitted in a Friday court filing, is AT&T Inc.'s first legal response to a lawsuit that the Department of Justice filed last week in an effort to ensure T-Mobile remains independent. AT&T's 25-page document echoed the company's previous contention that buying rival T-Mobile will enable it to expand its mobile communications network so there are fewer dropped connections in a world where constant online access is becoming the norm.

The Justice Department believes there wouldn't be enough competition if AT&T devours T-Mobile, creating a void that would increase prices and reduce the incentive to develop new technology.

AT&T's lawyers contend that the Justice Department's analysis reflects a misunderstanding of the market. They say T-Mobile, the fourth largest cell phone carrier with 33.6 million customers, isn't a significant competitive threat to AT&T, the No. 2 carrier with nearly 100 million customers. T-Mobile has been losing market share in recent years, a trend that AT&T argues will discourage its German parent, Deutsche Telekom, from investing to improve its own wireless network.

In contrast, AT&T says it spent more than $30 billion in network upgrades from 2008 through 2010, yet still can't keep up with customers' growing demand to transfer data over phones and other wireless devices, according to the court documents. But if it can snap up T-Mobile, AT&T believes the added capacity will put it in a better position to deliver better services. AT&T already has pledged to invest at least $8 billion and transfer 5,000 jobs currently in overseas call centers back to the U.S. if the T-Mobile purchase goes through.

The court filing also seeks to counter the Justice Department's theory that the U.S. cell phone market would be dominated by just three carriers — AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel Corp, if T-Mobile disappears from the market. AT&T's filing cites "innovative upstarts" MetroPCS and Leap/Cricket and regional carriers such as US Cellular and Cellular South as viable alternatives for most consumers.

"The (Justice) Department does not and cannot explain how, in the face of all these aggressive rivals, the combined AT&T/T-Mobile will have any ability or incentive to restrict output, raise prices, or slow innovation," the AT&T's lawyers wrote.

It's unusual for the Justice Department to challenge a proposed acquisition in court. Most companies back out of deals to avoid tangling with the government. But AT&T has a huge incentive to fight: It will have to pay a $3 billion termination fee if its agreement with T-Mobile unravels.

The first hearing in the case is set for Sept. 21 in Washington before U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle.

AT&T, which is based in Dallas, is seeking a quick resolution to the case.

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Sprint Cancels Store Leave, Confirms iPhone 5 Launch Window [REPORT]

2011-09-30T00:10:00.000-07:00

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US gets chance to catch up on credit card security

2011-09-29T17:27:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK (AP) — The next time you swipe your credit card at check-out, consider this: It's a ritual the rest of the world deems outdated and unsafe.

The United States is the only developed country still hanging on to credit and debit cards with those black magnetic stripes, the kind you swipe through retail terminals. The rest of the industrialized world has switched —or is in the process of switching— to "smart" chip-based cards.

The problem with that black magnetic stripe on the back of your credit card is that it's about as secure as writing your account information on a postcard: everything is in the clear and can be copied. Card fraud, and the measures taken to prevent it, costs U.S. merchants, banks and consumers billions each year.

The smart cards can't be copied, which greatly reduces the potential for fraud. Smart cards with built-in chips are the equivalent of a safe: they can hide information so it can only be unlocked with the right key. Because the important information is hidden, the cards can't be replicated.

But the stripes have been so entrenched in the vast U.S. payment system that banks, payment processors and retailers have failed to reach consensus on how to revamp it, leaving the U.S. behind the rest of the world.

"The card system in this country has been dysfunctional for a long time," says Mallory Duncan, general counsel of the National Retail Federation. "We have far, far too much fraud because we have a very antiquated payment system relative to the rest of the world. This is something they should have fixed a long time ago."

Yet even here, there are now serious moves to swap conventional cards for smart cards in a few years.

Last month, Visa announced new policies that will give U.S. banks a reason to issue smart cards and stores several reasons to accept them, starting in 2015.

Eric Schindewolf, product manager for smart cards at Wells Fargo & Co., says Visa's announcement is a "watershed" moment.

"I think that the U.S. has reached a tipping point. You'll begin to see more and more smart cards in the hands of U.S. consumers," Schindewolf says.

Smart cards are recognizable by the fingernail-sized gold contacts embedded on one side. Through the contacts, a chip inside the card can transmit information to a terminal when slid into a slot.

Here's how a smart card works in practice: When it's time to settle the bill at "Le Gaspard de la Nuit," a tiny restaurant just off the Place de la Bastille in Paris, the waiter brings to the table a wireless payment terminal. The customer inserts his chip-equipped "smart" credit card and enters his code on the keypad.

Voila! The foie gras is paid for without the card leaving the customer's sight, and the combination of chip and PIN code kept the transaction safe from fraud.

The U.S. payments industry has so far been locked up in a "chicken and egg" quandary, Schindewolf says. Stores had little reason to install terminals for smart cards if banks didn't issue them, and aside from some contactless cards, banks didn't issue them because stores wouldn't accept them.

The impasse has left U.S. businesses and consumers struggling with higher fraud rates. Richard Sullivan, the senior economist in payments research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, says that in 2006, 9 cents out every $100 paid by card in the U.S. ended up in the pockets of criminals. The comparable figure for Spain was 2 cents. Sullivan believes the use of smart cards there is a big reason for the difference. Other factors play a role, too. Spaniards, for instance, are less likely to shop online.

Javelin Strategy & Research puts the amount of fraud based on stolen card numbers in the U.S. at $14 billion. Fraud based on new card accounts created using stolen identities adds billions more — the total cost of identity fraud in the country is $37 billion.

Visa's move comes as industry experts are warning that U.S. merchants are set to become targets for fraudsters in other countries where payment systems already have tighter security. Since counterfeit magnetic-stripe cards are now difficult to use in other countries, these criminals will probably ship the cards to the U.S.

That prospect is especially worrisome now that Mexico and Canada, are adopting smart cards, experts say.

"There's already evidence that that type of channel for fraud is increasing in the U.S.," says Sullivan.

The U.S.'s status as a holdout has also started to cause problems for travelers. While most European stores and restaurants still accept magnetic-stripe cards, Americans are finding that their credit cards don't work in European automated kiosks, like the ones that sell tickets for the Paris Metro. Some U.S. banks, like Wells Fargo, have started issuing smart cards to customers who travel abroad.

Next year, Visa will start dangling this carrot in front of store owners: If they replace most of their terminals with ones that accept smart cards, they will no longer need to have their payment-system security checked every year. U.S. stores spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year for these audits, according to the NRF.

In an even more momentous shift, in 2015 Visa is shifting the liability for a certain kind of fraud from the banks to stores.

The specific case is this: If a customer presents a smart card in a store that can't accept it, then it will fall back to using the backup magnetic stripe on the card. If that transaction turns out to be fraudulent, the payment processor will be liable, and in practice, make the store eat the loss. Today, the bank would be liable for the fraud.

The change means that banks will have an incentive to put chip-based cards in their customers' hands, since their fraud liability will be reduced when the cards are used. For their part, stores will have a reason to install smart card terminals, because otherwise, their fraud costs could increase.

Javelin puts the cost of moving to chip-based cards at about $8 billion, mostly for upgrading payment terminals in stores.

The retail federation's Duncan calls Visa's move a necessary step, but not a fully satisfactory one. One of the shortcoming he sees is that it doesn't mandate the use of PIN codes with smart cards, so even if the cards can't be copied, they could still be used on a signature basis if stolen.

Smart cards won't help secure online payments either, at least not initially, so that will remain an avenue for fraudsters. But they could help secure online transactions if paired with computers that can communicate with the chips, perhaps through accessory card readers. (American Express issued PC readers for its Blue smart card in 1999. But the "smart" features on the card were proprietary to Amex, and saw very little use.)

Phone makers are also starting to build smart-card chips into cellphones, which could then be used in place of cards at "contactless" terminals and perhaps help secure online shopping done through the phone.

The world's largest retailer, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. can't wait for smart cards to come fast enough. It's frustrated with the gaping security holes in the current payment system and wants to save money on card-acceptance fees that are inflated by fraud.

Wal-Mart has already installed terminals with slots for smart cards in all its U.S. stores, and it's working on getting the behind-the-scenes software working, so it can start accepting payments. It, too, sees PIN codes as essential to the security of the system.

"Signatures are a waste of time," says Jamie Henry, senior director of payment services at the company. "They add no value to anyone."

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What Makes a Droid a Droid? Verizon

2011-09-29T10:38:00.000-07:00

What's the difference between a Droid and an Android phone? Is the former just an abbreviation for the latter?

Not exactly. Though all Droid phones are Android, not all Androids are Droids.

Confused? You're probably not the only one. As Verizon Wireless adds more of its exclusive, branded Droid phones to its smartphone lineup, there are bound to be some questions from buyers who don't follow the latest wireless industry news.

Droid Mania

The first Droid device, from Motorola, debuted in November 2009, widely seen as an answer to Apple's iPhone with a large touchscreen interface and fast processor. Then came HTC's Droid Incredible in April 2010, Motorola's Droid X in July 2010, and the Droid Pro in November.

The original Droid now has two refreshes, and the Droid X has one. HTC's latest Incredible is no longer a Droid, now called the Incredible S.

The newest Droids on the block are Samsung's Droid Charge, released last May, and this week's Motorola Droid Bionic, both for Verizon's high-speed, long-term evolution network. That makes a total of nine devices from three manufacturers bearing the name Droid, for which Verizon pays a license fee to Lucasfilm Ltd., for using a trademarked term for robot characters from the six "Star Wars" films.

All the devices run Google's Android operating system.

"The Droid brand is owned by Verizon Wireless and is reserved for premium devices that offer customers a superior experience, " said Verizon Wireless spokeswoman Brenda Raney.

So what makes a phone superior enough to be called a Droid?

"While we don't disclose the standards, all of the Droid-branded devices offer customers an experience unique to Verizon Wireless," Raney said.

Verizon offers several other Android phones that are not called Droid, including the flagship of the carrier's LTE fleet, HTC's Thunderbolt.

Comparing the new Bionic to the Thunderbolt may give some indication of superior specs that make a smartphone a Droid in Verizon's book.

Both gadgets have 4.3-inch displays, 8-megapixel cameras and a 1-GHz processor, but the Bionic has a dual-core processor and 1 GB of RAM, compared with 768 MB of RAM for the Thunderbolt, which at $199 at Verizon is $100 cheaper than the Bionic.

Give and Take

Stacking up the $199 Droid 3, released in July against the Android-powered, non-Droid Samsung Continuum, released in November, the Droid has a dual-core, 1-GHz processor, 4-inch display, and an 8-megapixel rear camera with 0.3-megapixel front camera, while the Continuum has a single-core, 1-GHz processor, a 3.4-inch screen, and a 5-megapixel rear camera and no front-facing camera.

The Droid 3 has 512 MB of RAM, compared with the Continuum's 336. The Continuum, (currently only pre-owned models are for sale) does, however, boast a one-of-a-kind "ticker" screen for important updates such as weather, scores or Facebook statuses.

"They can't have everything to be a flagship device," said Ramon Llamas of IDC Research, who says the veneer eventually wears off trendy phones.

"A few years ago the Razor was the premium device that everyone lined up for. I don't know what strategy Verizon uses to decide what does and doesn't fall into the Droid category, but there are some very good devices out there that are not Droids," Llamas said. "You have to stack them all head to head and see what the big differences are."

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Google paid $125 million for Zagat: WSJ

2011-09-29T03:52:00.000-07:00

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Summary Box: Hospital breach puts data online

2011-09-28T21:52:00.000-07:00

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Hackers send fake terror alerts from NBC's Twitter

2011-09-28T15:05:00.000-07:00

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The AOL Email Address Debate: Stigma or Status Symbol?

2011-09-28T08:47:00.000-07:00

Back in the day, AOL email addresses were all the rage. (They even made a movie about it!) Over the year, however, the popularity of AOL's email service--along with AOL itself--waned with the introduction of better, hipper products like Gmail, but not everybody switched. Whether out of convenience or brand loyalty, AOL email loyalists have become sort of conspicuous, and bloggers love to point out when famous people still use @aol.com email addresses to peg them as out of touch with technology. But Ben Smith at Politico has a different take on the hangers-on. "This is not, to say the least, a crowd of technophobes," says Smith. "Some, like Joe Trippi and Arianna Huffington, are seen as techno-sages. Rather, it's a generation of the political and media elite."

Smith is not wrong. A lot of people that are considered the political and media elite have email addresses. He made a list of them in his post on "AOL email as status symbol":

POLITICS: David Axelrod, Jim Messina, John Weaver, Joe Trippi, Mandy Grunwald, Dick Morris (a recent defector to gmail), Frank Luntz, Ed Rollins, Guy Cecil, Al Franken, Aaron Schock
MEDIA: Matt Drudge, Arianna Huffington (who was holding onto an AOL account long before AOL bought her company), David Brooks, David Corn, Robert Draper, Rick Perlstein, Ann Coulter, Tina Brown, Lawrence O'Donnell

The same bloggers who like to use @aol.com email address to make fun of these political and media elite did not take kindly to Smith's remarks. "Sorry Ben, there's nothing cool about an AOL email address. And your list of people who have them doesn't scream 'hip,'" tweeted Markos Moulitsas, founder of The Daily Kos. "I already knew AOL email addresses were status symbols. I found it at AskJeeves.com," said political blogger David Waldman. "Whether they check their AOL accounts at the public library or on their purple Blackberries while flying first class, the AOL address is nothing more than a digital AARP card," wrote Adrian Chen at Gawker.

If AOL email addresses aren't status symbols, then what are they? Well, the personalized search site Hunch crunched some numbers based on some data they'd collected from nearly half a million email users. Here's how they described the average AOL emailer:

AOL users are most likely to be overweight women ages 35-64 who have a high school diploma and are spiritual, but not religious. They tend to be politically middle of the road, in a relationship of 10+ years, and have children. AOL users live in the suburbs and haven’t traveled outside their own country. Family is their first priority. AOL users mostly read magazines, have a desktop computer, listen to the radio, and watch TV on 1-3 DVRs in their home. At home, they lounge around in sweats. AOL users are optimistic extroverts who prefer sweet snacks and like working on a team.

In contrast, they said of Gmail users are "career-focused and plugged in--they mostly read blogs, have an iPhone and laptop, and listen to music via MP3s and computers." We'll leave the social commentary of Hunch's hunches to others.

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Reports say Sprint will entice iPhone owners with unlimited data

2011-09-28T02:30:00.000-07:00

The rumors about the next iPhone showing up on Sprint’s network have moved on from “it’s happening” to “here’s how,” with a new report suggesting Sprint will offer unlimited data to set itself apart from Verizon and AT&T.

The report comes from Bloomberg, which cites unnamed sources “familiar with the matter.” The iPhone is set to launch on Sprint in October, and the company wants to make sure that current iPhone owners on Verizon and AT&T will consider switching over the Sprint’s service, since both those carriers have a pretty big lead on the No. 3 cellular carrier.

Sprint is struggling to keep up with Verizon and AT&T, especially since both have carried the iPhone since February (and AT&T since its inception). Given that Apple is supposedly ordering a total of 56 million iPhones to sell this year, and that iPhones account for 26 percent of the U.S. smartphone market, Sprint should get a serious shot in the arm by offering Apple’s latest device this fall.

But while just having the iPhone should lead to Sprint trading in a lot of customers’ phones and selling a whole lot more phones to new customers, Sprint obviously won’t be content to just be on equal footing with AT&T and Verizon. It has suffered a serious disadvantage without the iPhone, but now that the company might have it, it’ll need to offer a little something more to convert customers from the other two networks. Hence unlimited data for a flat rate – and I wouldn’t be surprised if Sprint was even more aggressive with deals and incentives.

Sprint declined to comment about the iPhone or the possibility of unlimited data, Bloomberg writes. It does offer unlimited data and voice already, though, for smartphones like the Google Android-running HTC EVO and Research In Motion’s BlackBerry devices. Unlimited voice and data plans currently go for $99.99 a month (or $69.99 with 450 minutes talk-time).

On the other side of the fence, both AT&T and Verizon have phased out unlimited data offerings for new or plan-switching customers. AT&T offers an unlimited voice plan at $69.99 a month and then data plans at $15 monthly for 200 megabytes, $25 for 2 gigabytes, or $45 for 4 gigabytes. Meanwhile, Verizon skips the lower tier offering and goes straight to a 2-gigabyte plan for $30 monthly, but offers a much higher tier at 10 gigabytes for $80 per month. It also offers a $69.99 unlimited voice plan.

If rumors are true about Sprint and the iPhone, which it seems more and more likely they are, expect to see that company get aggressive about pulling customers away from its rivals. That’ll be especially true if one other rumor bears out that T-Mobile will also end up with the iPhone. Sprint is in a position to do some damage with Apple’s device if it plays its cards right, but in a field where all four cellular carriers have Apple’s device, Sprint will need to make customers really think twice before renewing their contracts with Verizon and AT&T.

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Twitter Crosses 100 Million Active-User Milestone

2011-09-27T19:55:00.000-07:00

Twitter has a long way to go before its micro-blogging service catches up with Facebook, but the social-media darling just crossed another milestone: 100 million active users, and in only five years.

Twitter reports that more than half of those 100 million active users log on every day to follow their interests. In other words, Twitter isn't all about sending 140-character posts. Many sign in just to eavesdrop on what's happening around the world in their areas of interest.

"Twitter's global reach gives a voice to people around the world and as far away as the International Space Station," Twitter said in a blog post. "After launching Hindi, Filipino, Malay and Simplified and Traditional Chinese in the coming weeks, Twitter will support 17 different languages."

Twitter's Shrewd Moves

To its credit, Twitter shrewdly opened its API so that companies of all sizes -- most notably media organizations -- could tweet articles and blog posts and, most recently, follow accounts without having to leave the web page they are on, said Jake Wengroff, global director of social media strategy and research at Frost & Sullivan.

"Twitter also allowed for the creation of thousands of Twitter companion products and applications, including mobile clients, increasing its reach exponentially. This move, however, is being reconsidered: Twitter has made several big moves of late to rein in the ownership of its product, platform, and brand," Wengroff said.

"In May 2011, Twitter purchased TweetDeck, one of the largest social media engagement platforms, for $40 million, and soon after rolled out its own URL-shortening and photo-upload services, ostensibly to wrest usage away from third-party apps."

Twitter VIPs

Choosing to focus more on trends than controversy, Twitter went on in its announcement to break down some of its more notable users. It turns out that 35 global heads of state use Twitter, including 84 percent of U.S. governors and every major presidential candidate. And more than 40 percent of what Twitter has classified as "top global religious leaders" are on Twitter, including @DalaiLama and the Pope, who sent his first Tweet from @news_va_en in June.

Beyond religion, humanitarians are also aboard the Twitter bandwagon -- 99 percent of America's top 200 nonprofits to be exact. Twitter noted the Red Cross's recent response to Hurricane Irene -- @redcross -- signed up lists of official volunteers to assist in four-hour shifts to disseminate the latest information to those affected by the storm.

On the athletic front, every team in the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL and MLS tweets. Two-thirds of NBA players are on Twitter.

Entertainers are a given for the micro-blogging service. Eighty-seven percent of Billboard's Top 100 musicians of 2010 are active on Twitter, along with each of the top 50 Nielsen-rated TV shows and plenty of comedians.

Of course, no numerical survey of Twitter would be complete without a look at how reporters are using Twitter. After all, there's been so much talk about how citizen journalists are beating traditional reporters to the punch.

Major newsrooms from @AJEnglish to @WashingtonPost actively use Twitter to supplement their reporting efforts, Twitter noted. And ordinary citizens break news, like the now-famous Space Shuttle image that was retweeted over 2,300 times, and the first photo of the US Airways plane that landed in the Hudson River in 2009.

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HP puts parts of webOS division under tech chief

2011-09-27T13:23:00.000-07:00

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AOL shares fall; report of possible Yahoo tie-up

2011-09-27T06:40:00.000-07:00

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NBC News's Twitter Account Pulled Pulled After 9/11 Hack

2011-09-26T23:52:00.000-07:00

Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.

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Google paid $125 million for Zagat: WSJ

2011-09-26T17:46:00.000-07:00

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Fewer screening colonoscopies OK for some: study

2011-09-26T11:40:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - People who've had a colonoscopy with no signs of cancer may be able to delay the next one or not have it at all, German researchers suggest.

Guidelines from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a federally supported expert panel, currently recommend that people at average risk of colon cancer start screening for the disease at age 50, using one of a number of tests that have all been found to cut the risk of dying from colon cancer.

The advantage of colonoscopy, which costs around $3,000, is that it only has to be repeated once every ten years, as opposed to every year for the much cheaper stool test.

Although the German study isn't definitive, it does suggest that doing even fewer colonoscopies might be reasonable in some cases.

Dr. Hermann Brenner at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg and colleagues asked nearly 2,000 colon cancer patients and 2,400 healthy people whether and when they'd had colonoscopies.

Compared with people who'd never undergone the procedure, those whose test came back negative -- meaning they had no trace of colon tumors -- had five times lower odds of developing cancer down the road.

Writing in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the German researchers say their results challenge current guidelines.

"The finding of sustained low risk for 20 years and beyond after a negative colonoscopy suggests that a screening colonoscopy might not need to be repeated after 10 years as was previously recommended," they note.

For those who light up, however, that might not be the case. Ten years from a negative test, current smokers had the same colon cancer risk as non-smokers who'd never had a colonoscopy.

According to the American Cancer Society, about one in 20 people get colon cancer, and the disease causes nearly 50,000 U.S. deaths every year.

Longer screening intervals could have a significant impact on the overall cost-effectiveness of colonoscopy as well as lower the rate of colonoscopy-related complications, according to the German team.

Dr. John Inadomi of the University of Washington in Seattle said the new findings are not surprising, because a negative colonoscopy sorts people at low risk of colon cancer from those at higher risk.

He added that the first intervention to prevent a disease is always the most effective because of diminishing returns on any subsequent interventions that cost the same.

Still, he told Reuters Health, "perhaps lengthening the interval between screening colonoscopies is a reasonable proposal" for patients with a negative colonoscopy.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/mTdu4R Journal of Clinical Oncology, online August 29, 2011.

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Weight Watchers works, study finds

2011-09-26T05:05:00.000-07:00

Adults referred to the commercial weight loss programme Weight Watchers shed twice as much weight as people who received standard care over a 12-month period, according to a study published Thursday.

In clinical trials, researchers led by Susan Jebb of the UK Medical Research Council assessed 772 overweight and obese adults in Australia, Germany, and Britain.

About half the patients received a year's standard care, while the other half were given a 12-month free membership for a Weight Watchers group near their homes.

Sixty-one percent of the participants assigned to the commercial programme completed it, while 51 percent of the "standard care" group finished their programme.

Overall, individuals in Weight Watchers lost around twice as much weight as did those in the other group, a mean loss of 5.1 kilograms versus 2.2. Among those who stuck with either programme to the end, the figures were 6.7 against 3.3 kg, respectively.

Participants randomised to Weight Watchers were also more than three times as likely to lose at least five percent of their bodyweight, said the study, published in The Lancet.

Weight Watchers offers weekly weighing and group support. It also promotes a balanced, reduced-energy diet along with increased physical activity.

Primary care providers -- sometimes nurses, sometimes doctors -- generally offer weight-loss treatment in line with national guidelines, but vary in the level of supervision.

"The similar weight losses achieved in Australia, Germany, and the UK implies that this commercial programme, in partnership with primary care providers, is a robust intervention that is generalisable to other economically developed countries," the researchers concluded.

The researchers emphasised the important role of family doctors and primary health-care providers in giving advice, and in making referrals to commercial weight-loss programmes.

"Further research is needed to examine long-term weight loss maintenance, together with a formal analysis of cost-effectiveness," they added.

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Female smokers have more bladder symptoms

2011-09-25T23:05:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Bladder problems seen more often among smokers than nonsmokers may be further motivation for women to quit smoking, a new study suggests.

Looking at 2,000 Finnish women ages 18 to 79, researchers found that smokers were three times as likely to say they frequently had to urinate -- with fewer than two hours between trips to the bathroom.

They were also almost three times as likely to report "urgency." That means frequently feeling that you need to get to a bathroom quickly -- a problem often diagnosed as overactive bladder.

There was no clear link between smoking and the risk of having so-called urge incontinence, in which actual leakage follows a sudden, strong urge to urinate.

But that may be because too few women in the study had urge incontinence to be able to detect a connection to smoking, according to senior researcher Dr. Kari A. O. Tikkinen, of McMaster University in Ontario, Canada.

The findings, reported in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology, do not prove that smoking, itself, causes bladder problems.

But there are already plenty of reasons to quit smoking, or never start, Tikkinen noted in an interview.

"If you smoke, definitely you should try to quit," he said. "This is one more potential reason."

The findings are based on questionnaires mailed to 3,000 women randomly chosen from a population register. Of the 2,000 who responded, seven percent reported frequent urination, while 10 percent reported urgency.

In addition, 11 percent had stress incontinence, the most common form of urinary incontinence, in which leakage happens when there's pressure on the bladder -- from things like exercise, heavy lifting or coughing. Another three percent of the women had urge incontinence.

Among current smokers (one-quarter of the group), between 10 percent and 15 percent reported frequency or urgency. When the researchers weighed other factors that affect the risk of bladder symptoms -- like age, body weight and childbirth -- current smokers were about three times as likely as non-smokers to have frequency or urgency.

There are reasons that smoking could directly affect those symptoms, according to Tikkinen. Based on animal research, nicotine may trigger excessive bladder muscle contractions. And over time, smoking may damage nerve function in the bladder.

Smokers did not, however, have a higher risk of incontinence, either the stress or urge types.

Tikkinen said the finding on urge incontinence should be interpreted cautiously; smokers did have a higher risk of the problem, but the difference was not significant in statistical terms.

As for stress incontinence, Tikkinen said it's not surprising there was no link. Some past studies have reached the same conclusion, he noted. And it may be that the underlying causes of stress incontinence -- like physical changes caused by childbirth or menopause -- are more important than nicotine's potential effects.

So will kicking the smoking habit improve bladder symptoms like frequency and urgency? There have yet to be clinical trials to answer that question, according to Tikkinen.

But, he said, "everybody knows that smoking is harmful. So you should try to quit."

The link to bladder symptoms, Tikkinen noted, might get more young smokers to consider quitting.

Well-known risks, such as lung cancer and heart disease, can seem like distant threats to young people, he pointed out. "But bladder symptoms, you can get when you're young."

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/nTyvNV Obstetrics & Gynecology, September 2011.

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Twitter Crosses 100 Million Active-User Milestone

2011-09-25T16:24:00.000-07:00

Twitter has a long way to go before its micro-blogging service catches up with Facebook, but the social-media darling just crossed another milestone: 100 million active users, and in only five years.

Twitter's Shrewd Moves

Twitter VIPs

On the athletic front, every team in the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL and MLS tweets. Two-thirds of NBA players are on Twitter.

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EU to maintain safety checks on food from Japan

2011-09-25T09:24:00.000-07:00

The World Health Organization says an outbreak of hand, foot and mouth disease has surged in Vietnam, killing 98 children and sickening more than 42,000 others this year.

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Analysis: Prognosis poor for U.N. chronic disease meeting

2011-09-25T03:18:00.000-07:00

LONDON (Reuters) - Ten years after committing to fight AIDS, the United Nations is taking on an even bigger bunch of killers -- common chronic diseases -- in what is shaping up to be a bruising battle between big business, Western governments and the world's poor.

Tobacco, food and drinks companies are in the firing line for peddling products linked to cancer, diabetes and heart disease, while politicians in the rich world are accused of failing to set firm targets or provide funds for a decent fight.

"This is a once in a generation opportunity. We could save millions of lives here, and it's shameful and immoral that industry lobbying has put short-term profits in front of a public health disaster," Rebecca Perl of the World Lung Foundation (WLF) told Reuters. WLF has been involved in tetchy preliminary talks for several months.

The fear is that big business has successfully lobbied rich governments to be only half-hearted in battling non-communicable diseases, or NCDs, despite predictions that they could cripple healthcare systems of developing countries.

A bit like climate change, preventing and treating non-communicable diseases requires wealthy nations and multinational firms to take a near-term financial hit to help prevent poor nations being overwhelmed in the future.

In these austere times, fears are already growing that a high-level U.N. meeting in New York on September 19-20 -- only the second to focus on disease after one on AIDS in 2001 -- could be a flop.

The gathering will include scores of delegates from U.N. member states, including around 20 heads of government as well as representatives from public health groups, non-governmental organizations, the private sector and academia.

According to those close to the negotiations, a draft version of the political declaration that will form the cornerstone of the U.N.'s thinking on NCDs contains many platitudes but few tangible commitments.

"There are no strong, time-bound commitments in there," Ann Keeling, chair of the NCD Alliance which groups 2,000 health organizations from around the world, told Reuters. "It's a great disappointment from that point of view."

NOT ROCKET SCIENCE

The scale of the problem is immense. Around 36 million people die every year from NCDs -- around 80 percent of them in poor nations where prevention programs are virtually non-existent and access to diagnosis and treatment is very limited.

As a result, death rates from NCDs are nearly twice as high in poor countries as in the industrialized world.

Preventing these deaths -- or at least a good proportion of them -- isn't rocket science. Proven measures such as reducing smoking rates, improving diets, making simple drugs available and boosting exercise could knock a huge hole in that figure.

"There is a common story that unites cancer, cardiovascular, diabetes and respiratory medicines around tobacco, alcohol, diet and exercise -- and that is where we have the most cost-effective impact," says David Kerr, president of the European Society of Medical Oncology.

The crucial sticking points are targets, taxes and money.

Stopping a billion people from lighting up every day or providing cheap drugs like aspirin and statins to prevent heart attacks and strokes may be cost effective, but the payback won't be quick and it is unlikely to win many votes.

"The time horizon for the return on that investment is very long and beyond many political horizons. So it's difficult to get people to commit to these kinds of resources," says Gordon Tomaselli, president of the American Heart Association.

The NCD Alliance says spending $9 billion a year on tobacco control, food advice and treatment for people with heart risks would avert tens of millions of untimely deaths this decade.

Is that a lot? By comparison, caring for HIV patients in developing countries already costs around $13 billion a year.

In contrast to the AIDS fight that was the UN's focus a decade ago, the price of drugs is less an issue here, since many are available as cheap generics, although there are disputes over the cost of some more pricey products like insulin.

STUBBING OUT TOBACCO

The sharpest focus this time is on makers of fatty foods, sugary drinks and -- above all -- the tobacco industry, which World Health Organization director general Margaret Chan has described as "an industry that has much money and no qualms about using it in the most devious ways imaginable."

With tobacco predicted to kill more than a billion people this century, if current trends persist, the public health lobby says if the U.N. meeting does nothing else, it should at least make a smoke-free world one of its central targets.

Smoking alone causes one in three cases of lung disease, one in four cases of cancer, and one in 10 cases of heart disease, says Perl. "So look what a bang you get for your buck there."

Conflicted governments will find it tough. Japan Tobacco, for example, is 50 percent owned by the Japanese government, and the massive profits of U.S. cigarette makers bolster the U.S. economy.

In China, home to a third of the world's male smokers, the combination of taxes and sales from China National Tobacco -- a wholly state-owned entity -- account for around 9 percent of the government's annual fiscal revenues.

This is all the more reason, according to Paul Lincoln of the UK National Heart Forum and Jaakko Tuomilehto, an epidemiologist at the University of Helsinki, to hike cigarette taxes, curb advertising and insist on graphic health warnings.

"There are no more excuses," said Lincoln. "We have the know-how. The challenge as ever in public health is to overcome the ideological and vested interests."

Tuomilehto is more blunt: "It's a crazy thing to have a product in the shops that kills every second consumer -- it's madness."

(Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)

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More ground turkey recalled because of salmonella

2011-09-24T20:46:00.000-07:00

CHICAGO (AP) — Cargill Inc. announced a second recall of ground turkey products Sunday after a test showed salmonella in a sample from the same Arkansas plant tied to a recall issued last month.

The second recall is much smaller than the one the company issued Aug. 3 for 36 million pounds of ground turkey. That recall followed a salmonella outbreak that federal health officials said had sickened 107 people in 31 states, killing one person.

No illnesses have been tied to the second recall, which was initiated after a sample from the company's plant in Springdale, Ark., tested positive for salmonella, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said.

Cargill halted production of ground turkey products at the plant Aug. 2 in anticipation of the recall announced the next day, spokesman Mike Martin said. Equipment was taken apart and steam-cleaned. Limited production resumed Aug. 10 after the USDA approved additional anti-bacterial safety measures, Martin said.

The sample that tested positive for salmonella was taken Aug. 24, the USDA said. It was the same strain of salmonella tied to the earlier illnesses, the agency said.

Martin said Cargill added two additional anti-bacterial washes to its processing process in Springdale after the first recall and instituted what he called "the most advanced sampling and monitoring system in the poultry industry."

The problem, he said is that salmonella is "ubiquitous" and can come from soil, water, poultry feed and any number of sources. The challenge for Cargill and other food processors is to try to identify and eliminate the sources, reduce the amount during processing and then test for it.

"Food safety is a top priority and taken extremely seriously at Cargill because we know that millions of people throughout the U.S. are eating food that we produce every day and we want to do everything we can to make sure that people are getting the safest food possible," Martin said.

Ground turkey production at the Springdale plant has been suspended again while the Minnesota-based company looks at what other safety procedures might be needed, he said. Production of other products, such as whole turkeys, continues, he said.

USDA officials did not immediately respond Sunday to messages requesting comment.

The second recall covers about 185,000 pounds of ground turkey products, including trays of ground meat, patties and chubs, the USDA said. The products were distributed nationwide under the Kroger, Fresh HEB and Cargill's Honeysuckle White brands.

All ground turkey made at the Springdale plant has "P-963" or "963" on the package, in a USDA seal or perhaps on the cellophane, Martin said. Consumers who bought products bearing that identification number can call 1-888-812-1646 for instructions on what to do, he said.

The recall covers products made Aug. 23 and 24. Cargill also is recalling ground turkey made on Aug. 30 and 31 pending a positive match with a sample, the USDA said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 50 million Americans get sick each year from food poisoning, including about 3,000 who die. Salmonella causes most of these illnesses.

Government officials say even contaminated ground turkey is safe to eat if cooked to 165 degrees. But it's also important that raw meat be handled properly before it's cooked and that people wash their hands with soap for at least 20 seconds before and after handling it. Turkey and other meats should also be properly refrigerated or frozen and leftovers heated.

The most common symptoms of salmonella are diarrhea, abdominal cramps and fever within eight hours to 72 hours of eating a contaminated product. It can be life-threatening to some with weakened immune systems.

___

Online:

USDA recall announcement: http://www.fsis.usda.gov/News_&_Events/Recall_071_2011_Release/index.asp

Cargill recall announcement: http://www.cargill.com/news/releases/2011/NA3049298.jsp

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Green-glowing cats are new tool in AIDS research

2011-09-24T14:32:00.000-07:00

CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. scientists have developed a strain of green-glowing cats with cells that resist infection from a virus that causes feline AIDS, a finding that may help prevent the disease in cats and advance AIDS research in people.

The study, published on Sunday in the journal Nature Methods, involved inserting monkey genes that block the virus into feline eggs, or oocytes, before they are fertilized.

The scientists also inserted jellyfish genes that make the modified cells glow an eerie green color -- making the altered genes easy to spot.

Tests on cells taken from the cats show they are resistant to feline immunodeficiency virus, or FIV, which causes AIDS in cats.

"This provides the unprecedented capability to study the effects of giving AIDS-protection genes into an AIDS-vulnerable animal," Dr. Eric Poeschla of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.

Poeschla said that besides people, cats and to some extent, chimpanzees, are the only mammals that develop a naturally occurring virus that causes AIDS.

"Cats suffer from this all over the world," he said.

Just as the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, does in people, FIV works by wiping out infection-fighting T-cells.

FIV infects mostly feral cats, of which there are half billion in the world, Poeschla said. It is transmitted by biting, largely by males defending their territory, but companion cats are affected as well.

In both humans and cats, proteins called restriction factors that normally fight off viral infections are defenseless against HIV and FIV because the viruses evolved potent counter-weapons. But certain monkey versions of these restriction factors are capable of fighting the virus and the team used one such gene from the rhesus monkey.

For the team, which included collaborators in Japan, the trick was to get the monkey gene for the restriction factor -- known as TRIMCyp -- into cats to block cells from becoming infected with the virus.

GREEN FLUORESCENT PROTEIN GENE

To do that, they used a harmless virus to insert the genes into the eggs, a process that has already been done in other mammals including mice, pigs, sheep and marmoset monkeys.

To make it easier to check which cells had the monkey gene, the team also inserted a green fluorescent protein gene from the jellyfish Aequorea victoria that makes them glow green.

"We did it to mark cells easily just by looking under the microscope or shining a light on the animal."

The method worked so well nearly all offspring from the modified eggs have the restriction factor genes. And these defense proteins are made throughout the cat's body.

The team has mated two of the three original green-glowing cats, which have produced litters totaling eight kittens which make glowing cells as well.

But the point is not to breed generations of disease-resistant, glowing cats. Rather, the team plans to study these felines as a new way to develop treatments for HIV and the feline version of the disease.

Researchers said the work has several potential uses.

"This technology can be applied to a wide range of species, for many of which there are clear applications and potential benefits," Dr. Laurence Tiley of the University of Cambridge said in a statement.

"It will be interesting to see how enthusiastically this capability in cats is received and adopted by the HIV and neurobiological research communities and what other research opportunities it offers. A representative non-primate animal model would be a fantastic new tool for studying HIV pathogenesis."

So far, Poeschla's team has only tested cells taken from the animals and found they were resistant to FIV. But eventually they plan to expose the cats to the virus and see if they are protected.

"If you could show that you confer protection to these animals, it would give us a lot of information about protecting humans," Poeschla said.

For cats, this may eventually lead to gene therapy or new drug treatments for FIV, he said.

(Editing by Eric Beech)

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Tecca TV: TechLife on cyborg bugs, fire surfing, pizza in space, and more!

2011-09-24T07:33:00.000-07:00

Thanks for tuning in to TechLife on Tecca TV, where we give you the 5 best technology-meets-lifestyle news stories in only 5 minutes! We try to bring a bit of Friday Fun to you each week.

This article originally appeared on Tecca

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NinjaVideo illegal downloading site operators indicted: ICE

2011-09-24T00:51:00.000-07:00

The site provided millions the ability to illegally download high-quality, copyrighted movies and television programs, ICE said in a statement.

ICE said the charges are exemplary of efforts to "safeguard the nation's economic security against those who seek to profit illegally from American creativity, innovation and hard work."

Joshua David Evans of Washington state and Zoi Mertzanis, a resident of Greece, were alleged to be two of the most active uploaders of copyrighted material to the website.

But the website generated significant revenue during its two-and-a-half-year run through advertising, according to ICE.

The defendants are scheduled to be arraigned on September 16.

(Editing by Jerry Norton)

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Shuttered SAP subsidiary charged in Oracle theft

2011-09-23T18:38:00.000-07:00

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Summary Box: Shuttered SAP subsidiary charged

2011-09-23T11:43:00.000-07:00

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Nutrient powder may fight anemia in kids

2011-09-23T04:43:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Sprinkling a vitamin- and mineral-packed powder onto young kids' food may help prevent anemia in countries where many people don't get enough iron, according to a new report.

Kids with the extra nutrients, including iron, zinc and vitamin A, were about 30 percent less likely to be anemic and 50 percent less likely to be iron deficient, researchers found.

Their work sums up data from past studies of anemia and iron deficiency in babies and toddlers who received the vitamin boost compared with those who didn't.

For other aspects of nutrition or kids' development, there's still not enough data to say if the supplements have an impact, according to the researchers, whose findings are published in The Cochrane Library.

"Anemia and iron deficiency probably are the most widespread nutritional deficiencies in the world," said study author Luz Maria de Regil, from the World Health Organization in Geneva.

Half of all young kids are affected by an iron, zinc or vitamin A deficiency, she told Reuters Health, most of them in poor countries. The studies that she and her colleagues reviewed all took place in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean.

By the time babies are six months old, they are starting to run low on the iron reserves they were born with, researchers say.

The WHO recommends exclusive breastfeeding up to six months and continued breastfeeding until kids are at least two years old. During that in-between period, parents typically start to incorporate semi-solid food into babies' diets -- possibly offering an opportunity for the addition of extra sources of vitamins and minerals.

Health programs have relied on iron drops or syrups to prevent anemia in young kids, de Regil said. However, she added, "supplements can be perceived by the mom...as something like a drug. Micronutrient powders are sprinkled into the food so that they don't change the flavor -- (parents) think that they are improving the diet without giving a medication."

In addition, iron drops "really do taste awful," said Purnima Menon, from the International Food Policy Research Institute, based in New Delhi. "A really substantial advantage of this is you can feed it really easily."

De Regil and her colleagues found six studies that compared the nutrient powders to nothing extra or a nutrient-free placebo powder in kids between 2 and 23 months old. Of more than 3,000 youngsters, those who got the extra vitamins and minerals for a few months at a time, usually daily, were less likely to be anemic or iron deficient at the end of the fortification period.

In two studies that compared the nutrient powders with iron drops or syrups, the researchers found no difference in anemia rates, but cautioned against drawing too much from the less-robust findings.

And there wasn't enough data for them to say whether the extra nutrients, including iron and zinc, made any difference in kids' general health and well-being -- but previous studies have suggested the minerals are important for growth and brain development.

The researchers also couldn't definitively address the worry that giving kids in high-malaria areas extra iron may increase their risk of infection (the parasite needs iron to grow).

"There is a huge controversy," de Regil told Reuters Health. "A possible side effect of iron supplements given very frequently is to increase the risk of malaria in some places."

In 2008, malaria caused close to one million deaths, mostly in African kids, according to the WHO.

Regarding the nutrient powder, de Regil said that "it's still a concern, but we didn't find evidence that in (high-malaria) settings it doesn't work or it is harmful."

Based on the current findings, the WHO has updated its guidelines on nutrient supplementation in young children, which now state, "Home fortification of foods with multiple micronutrient powders is recommended to improve iron status and reduce anemia among infants and children 6 - 23 months of age."

The authors note that the nutrient powder packets are convenient and could also be used in schools or refugee camps, for example. They are currently looking at their effect in older, school-age kids.

Menon told Reuters Health that the nutrient powders typically run about $2 for a 2-month supply, and that more research is needed to figure out the best way to provide them to parents in low-income countries, including whether powder packets should be given out for free by the government.

For now, the new review suggests that the powder "is a promising innovation to address childhood anemia," said Menon, who did not participate in the study. "Any innovations that take us closer to solving the problem are more than welcome."

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/nyZysy The Cochrane Library, September 6, 2011.

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Spain wants EU call for online anorexia crack down

2011-09-22T22:08:00.000-07:00

A person tries to kill themselves in China every two minutes, the government and state media said Thursday, giving the country one of the highest suicide rates in the world.

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Study casts wider net for risky blood pressure in kids

2011-09-22T15:18:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - More kids than previously thought could be at risk for dangerously high blood pressure, with as many as a quarter having blood vessels that look like those of much older people, according to a new study.

Because there is a theoretical possibility that some of these kids could suffer a stroke or a heart attack down the road, researchers say the findings mean all kids should have their blood pressure measured.

"I do think it's important that everybody gets screened for high blood pressure," said Dr. Karen Redwine of Arkansas Children's Hospital in Little Rock, whose findings appear in the Journal of Pediatrics.

"The overall rate for developing high blood pressure when you're a teenager is still very low," she added in an interview with Reuters Health. "But there is a subset of people whose rate of developing high blood pressure is anywhere from two to five times that, and a lot of those are children who would now be considered normal."

Those children have slightly elevated blood pressure and are diagnosed with so-called "prehypertension." The label is controversial, however, because it doesn't describe a disease -- rather, it is a risk factor for later developing high blood pressure, which itself is a risk factor for heart disease.

An expert who wasn't part of the new study said he worried it could be used to push medications without evidence that they will do kids any good.

"What troubles me a bit is that they talk about pharmacologic therapy," said Dr. Curt D. Furberg, an expert in heart disease prevention and drug safety at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

"When I look at the author list, there is one from Bristol-Myers Squibb," he added. "Drug companies want to increase their market. In this area, considering healthy young kids for pharmacologic therapy doesn't make sense."

The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in 2004 defined prehypertension in kids as a top blood pressure number between 120 and 139 or a bottom number between 80 and 89. High blood pressure starts at 140 over 90.

If lifestyle changes like cutting down on salt and exercising aren't enough to control high blood pressure in kids, NHLBI advises trying drugs.

In adults, high blood pressure ups the risk of stroke and heart attack a few percent. For children, however, the NHLBI acknowledges that the long-term consequences of having high blood pressure are unknown for children, as are the side effects of drug treatment.

"In my mind there are many more pressing issues in medicine than screening for hypertension in adolescents, where we don't even know if treatment is beneficial," Furberg, a professor of public health, told Reuters Health.

The new study is an attempt at estimating how often children with prehypertension go on to develop full-blown high blood pressure, or hypertension.

Tapping into data from a large screening study -- funded by drugmakers -- at Texas schools, Redwine and colleagues found that 11 out of 1,006 students developed high blood pressure during the study.

That corresponds to a rate of one in 200 teenagers every year. Although the rate appeared similar for kids with prehypertension, a broader definition created by Redwine and her colleagues nearly tripled the rate.

According to the new definition, just one blood pressure measurement above normal would put a kid in the "at-risk" group.

Up until now, Redwine explained, doctors used to think that one high blood pressure measurement might just be a fluke -- because the kid was nervous or a little sick.

Now, she said, "if it's elevated even once then you need to watch it and monitor it."

Currently, the NHLBI doesn't recommend drug therapy for kids with prehypertension. But the new report suggests investigating the use of medication in those deemed "at risk."

According to the Texas screening study, that could be as many as 26 percent of U.S. teenagers with the new definition -- including healthy kids who aren't overweight.

To Furberg and other critics, prehypertension -- let alone the expanded definition in the new study -- is a concept that comes with threats of overdiagnosis, overtreatment and wasteful health spending.

"This is what the industry is trying to do, to get people on drugs," he said. "They are pushing that for adults, and now they seem to move to kids, which is troublesome."

Redwine countered that, although one of her co-authors is employed by Bristol-Myers Squibb, her report did not advocate drug use in children with prehypertension.

"It is not the point to say that they need to be treated," she told Reuters Health.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a federally-supported expert panel, recommends screening adults for high blood pressure. It is currently updating its 2003 guidelines for children and adolescents, which noted that the evidence was insufficient to weigh the harms and benefits of screening kids.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/qwbARr The Journal of Pediatrics, online August 25, 2011.

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Summary Box: Hospital breach puts data online

2011-09-22T08:28:00.000-07:00

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FDA advisers wary of time limit on bone drugs

2011-09-22T02:11:00.000-07:00

ADELPHI, Maryland (Reuters) - U.S. health advisers declined to suggest how long women should take a class of drugs used by millions to prevent bone fractures, but agreed the labels should be changed to reflect uncertainty about the risks and benefits of long-term use.

The Food and Drug Administration had asked two of its advisory panels to recommend whether a "drug holiday" or some time limit was warranted on a class of osteoporosis drugs known as bisphosphonates that have been linked to unusual thigh fractures and other side effects.

Instead, the advisers voted 17-6 on Friday to make changes to the labeling with many in favor of specifying how often patients need a re-evaluation of whether they need the medicine.

Panelists repeatedly raised concerns that they did not have enough evidence to come up with specific suggestions or conclusions, and some recommended raising awareness of such uncertainties in the label as well.

"I don't think we have enough data to restrict anything at this point," said Dr. Maria Suarez-Almazor, professor at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and a panel member.

The drugs under review include Merck & Co's Fosamax, Warner Chilcott's Actonel, Roche's Boniva and Novartis' Reclast. This class of drugs has also been linked to osteonecrosis of the jaw, or jaw bone death, and a possible higher cancer risk.

Studies presented by the FDA and the industry did not paint a conclusive picture to estimate whether benefits outweigh the risks in taking bisphosphonates for longer than three to five years or how exactly each of these drugs affects various subgroups of patients, advisers said.

"I'm used to dealing with ambiguity in a clinical setting, but this raises it to different heights," said Brian Erstad, pharmacy professor at the University of Arizona and a member of the drug safety and risk management advisory panel.

RISKS AND BENEFITS

Some 4.5 million Americans over the age of 55 filled prescriptions for bisphosphonates in 2009, predominantly women after menopause to prevent osteoporosis, a progressive bone-thinning condition that typically causes bone fractures in the hip, wrist or spine.

FDA staff said the use of the drugs is associated with unusual femur fractures, and the risk of jaw bone death may increase the longer people take them orally. But they said the evidence for an increased cancer risk was inconsistent.

Boniva is available as either an injection or a tablet, Reclast is an injection, and the other drugs are taken orally.

FDA researchers found no advantage in staying on the drugs beyond five years and no loss of efficacy from discontinuing their use. Drugmakers, however, warned that a sweeping imposition of an interruption in treatment by the FDA may leave patients vulnerable to more fractures.

"Despite rare side effects, those patients who take bisphosphonates have fewer fractures and lower mortality, and these findings need to be shared with our patients," said Dr. Robert Adler, an invited speaker and endocrinology professor at the Virginia Commonwealth University.

With millions taking the medication, the sales of Merck's Fosamax reached $3 billion in 2007 but revenue plunged to $926 million by 2010 with the pill facing competition from cheaper generics beginning in early 2008.

Analysts have said mounting concerns about bisphosphonates may drive patients to Amgen Inc's new medicine, Prolia, a different type of osteoporosis drug.

BAD REP

Orrel Lanter took Merck's Fosamax and its generic version, known chemically as alendronate, for nine years.

"I felt something go 'snap' in my leg. My right foot flopped out to the right and my leg became a noodle, the pain was excruciating," she told the advisers on Friday. At the emergency room, she was told she had an atypical femur fracture that she attributes to years of taking bisphosphonates.

"I was a happy healthy, very active outdoors woman now left crippled because of this awful drug," said Lanter, who is now 68 and walked out of the room using a cane.

Since Merck's Fosamax became the first bisphosphonate to get approval for osteoporosis in 1995, the labels for the drugs in this class have undergone multiple reviews and changes.

In 2005, a warning of higher risk of osteonecrosis of the jaw was added to labels, and in 2009, a caution about adverse gastrointestinal reactions. Earlier this year, the labels were changed to add a warning of atypical femur fractures and Reclast's label now mentions a higher risk of kidney failure.

Still, drugmakers and some of the panelists agreed that some groups of patients, perhaps those at highest risk of bone fractures, could benefit from longer-term use of such drugs.

Whether and how to address these issues is now up to the FDA.

(Reporting by Alina Selyukh; Additional reporting by Ransdell Pierson; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)

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Drugs better than stents at preventing 2nd stroke

2011-09-21T19:55:00.000-07:00

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Inserting an artery-opening device into the brain to improve blood flow and prevent a second stroke likely does more harm than managing high-risk patients with drugs and lifestyle changes, researchers said on Wednesday

Stroke patients in a large study who were treated with drugs and a brain stent had more than twice the rate of strokes and death in the month after surgery compared with those treated with drugs alone, researchers said.

The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, looked to see if adding Stryker Corp's Wingspan stenting system to medication management improved survival in high-risk patients but found that it did not.

Researchers had expected the use of stents to help the patients but a check of safety data as the study unfolded prompted the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) to halt the trial in April.

"This study provides an answer to a long-standing question by physicians -- what to do to prevent a devastating second stroke in a high-risk population," said Dr. Walter Koroshetz, deputy director of NINDS, part of the government's National Institutes of Health, which funded the study.

"Although technological advances have brought intracranial stenting into practice, we have now learned that, when tested in a large group, this particular device did not lead to a better health outcome," Koroshetz said in a statement.

Blocked brain arteries caused by the build-up of fatty deposits called plaque account for more than 50,000 of the 795,000 strokes occurring in the United States each year.

Stroke is the fourth-leading cause of death and a leading cause of disability in the United States.

The self-expanding Wingspan device, which widens a major artery in the brain to help improve blood flow, is the only system currently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for certain high-risk stroke patients.

But other, similar devices that are not approved by the FDA for these patients are being used by doctors as well.

Researchers studied 451 patients in 50 medical centers who had recently had a stroke or stroke-like symptoms caused by narrowing of a major brain artery.

Everyone in the study was given blood-thinning drugs and treatments to lower blood pressure and cholesterol, two key risk factors for stroke.

Half the patients also were treated with stents.

The researchers had expected the stenting system to cut the risk of stroke or death by 35 percent over two years.

Instead, 14.7 percent of patients in the stenting group had a stroke or died within the first 30 days of enrolling in the study, compared with 5.8 percent of patients in the group that received drugs and lifestyle changes alone.

The increased risk from stenting appeared to expand beyond the first month of treatment.

During a nearly one-year follow-up period that began after the first 30 days of the trial, 20.5 percent of patients in the stent group and 11.5 percent of patients in the drugs and lifestyle group had a stroke or died.

Based on this information, an independent safety board recommended researchers stop adding new patients to the study. Everyone already in the trial will be followed for two years to study the long-term effects of both treatment approaches.

Marc Chimowitz of the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, who led the study, said the findings have immediate implications for doctors.

"Stroke patients with recent symptoms and intracranial arterial blockage of 70 percent or greater should be treated with aggressive medical therapy alone that follows the regimen used in this trial as closely as possible," Chimowitz said in a statement.

Some researchers who were part of the study said they still think there may be a place for stents.

"This is certainly not the final say on managing this disease," Dr. Michael Waters of the University of Florida, who worked on the study, said in a statement.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/qf1bYF New England Journal of Medicine, online September 7, 2011.

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Opel to introduce EV concept car that costs pennies to drive

2011-09-21T13:16:00.000-07:00

Take to the road in a zero-emission coupe built for two

Opel "One Euro Car"

[via Autoblog Green]

This article originally appeared on Tecca

More from Tecca:

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ACLU sues over Florida drug tests for aid applicants

2011-09-21T06:39:00.000-07:00

TALLAHASSEE, Florida (Reuters) - A new Florida law that requires low-income parents to pass drug tests before receiving public aid constitutes an illegal search, the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida said Wednesday after suing to block it.

By mandating tests for people who are not suspected of drug use, the law violates the constitutional ban on unreasonable searches and seizures, ACLU representatives and a 35-year-old Navy veteran who refused to take the test said in a conference call with journalists.

"The new law assumes that everyone who needs a little help has a drug problem," said Luis Lebron, a University of Central Florida accounting student who is the lead plaintiff in the class action lawsuit. "It's wrong and unfair. It judges a whole group of people on their temporary economic situation."

The suit was filed late Tuesday in the District Court in Orlando.

Since July 1, new applicants for temporary cash assistance have had to pay for urine tests for illegal drugs. If the test comes back negative, the fee is repaid by the state. A positive test bars the applicant from receiving benefits for a year.

The test is only required for applicants for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, a federal-state program that helps poor people with children pay for food, shelter and necessities.

The ACLU lawsuit seeks to nullify the law. The group, which includes the Miami-based Florida Justice Institute, also filed a motion to halt the testing until the court rules on the constitutionality of the law.

Lebron, a Navy veteran, is a single father with custody of his 4-year-old son and is scheduled to graduate in December. He was denied benefits when he refused to take the test, which costs between $25 and $45.

Backers of the measure, including Republican Florida Governor Rick Scott, say private businesses have been requiring such tests for years and government should be no different.

A survey released Wednesday by the Drug and Alcohol Testing Industry Association, an industry trade group, found 57 percent of employers conduct drug tests on all job candidates.

"It's important we make sure taxpayer money isn't going to help pay for someone's drug habit, but that the money is going to help the children for whom it was intended," Scott spokesman Lane Wright said in an email. "That's what this law does."

UGLY STEREOTYPES

Critics argue that recipients are being singled out based on a myth that poor people are more likely than others to use illegal drugs. They point out that other government programs such as student loans, food stamps and business grants do not require recipients to be screened for drug use.

So far, the agency set up to monitor the program said that only 2 percent of recipients have tested positive for illegal drugs, a failure rate that is below that of the general Florida population.

"It's an ugly public policy based on stereotypes and talking points," said Howard Simon, ACLU Florida's executive director.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found in a 2009 survey that about 8.7 percent of the population aged 12 or older had used illicit drugs in the previous month.

Generally, the courts have allowed suspicionless drug testing only when public safety is at risk, such as for armed officers or railroad workers who operate heavy equipment.

The Supreme Court in a 1997 decision threw out a Georgia law requiring candidates for state office to certify they had passed a drug test. In 2000, a federal court in Michigan threw out that state's attempt to require all welfare recipients to be tested.

"Things that may be appropriate in the private sector are impermissible when done by government," Simon said.

(The case is 6:11-CV-01473-MSS-DAB)

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Healthier living could cut 2.8 million cancer cases

2011-09-21T00:21:00.000-07:00

LONDON (Reuters) - Healthier lifestyles and better diets could prevent up to 2.8 million cases of cancer each year, the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) said on Wednesday, calling on governments to "avoid a public health disaster."

The number of global cancers has increased by a fifth in less than a decade to around 12 million new cases a year, and along with other chronic diseases like heart and lung disease and diabetes are the world's biggest health challenges, the Fund said.

In a report released two weeks before a United Nations summit on non-communicable diseases (NCDs), the charity said political leaders had a "once in a generation" opportunity to tackle a wave of cancer and other lifestyle diseases.

Global health experts say many deaths from NCDs, including around a third of all common cancers, could be prevented by curbing excessive alcohol intake, improving diets, discouraging smoking and promoting more physical activity.

But these measures often need government action such as taxation, regulation and advertising curbs, bringing politicians into conflict with tobacco, food and alcohol industries.

"With millions of lives at risk around the world, the stakes are incredibly high," said Martin Wiseman, WCRF's medical and scientific adviser.

"People are still unaware that risk factors such as alcohol and obesity affect cancer risk, while at the same time, from television advertising to the pricing of food, our society works in a way that discourages people from adopting healthy habits."

Non-communicable diseases such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes and respiratory diseases kill 36 million people a year, according to the U.N.'s Geneva-based health agency, the World Health Organization. Over the next 20 years, this epidemic is projected to accelerate and that by 2030, the number of deaths from NCDs could reach 52 million a year.

While they are often thought of as diseases of the rich world, NCDs actually disproportionately affect people in poorer nations. More than 80 percent of NCD deaths are among people living in low and middle income countries.

The WCRF said around seven million of the 12 million cancer cases diagnosed each year are in developing countries and that figure is also predicted to rise dramatically.

"Unless we act now..the charity appeals of the future will not be just for disasters and famines, but to pay for cancer care," Kate Allen, the fund's director of science and communications, told reporters at the briefing.

The U.N. meeting, slated for September 19 and 20 in New York, is only the second ever such high-level meeting to be convened on a threat to global health -- the first, a decade ago, was dedicated to fighting HIV and AIDS.

But there are already fears the summit could be ineffective, with major rich-world players such as the United States, Europe and Japan reluctant to commit to taxes, regulations and targets for reducing the burden of these diseases.

"The real problem is not coming up with new solutions, the real problem is having the will to implement what we already know," said Wiseman.

(Reporting by Kate Kelland; Editing by Rosalind Russell)

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Dendreon to cut 500 jobs in restructuring

2011-09-20T17:53:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Dendreon Corp said on Thursday it would cut 500 jobs as it seeks to trim expenses in light of diminished sales expectations for its high-priced Provenge prostate cancer vaccine.

The total employee-related cost of the restructuring is expected to be about $21 million, the company said, citing a need to align staffing "with the shift in the (Provenge) launch trajectory and meet the company's manufacturing requirements."

Investors appeared to be pleased by the moves, sending Dendreon shares up more than 4 percent in extended trading.

"Their SG&A (Sales, General and Administrative) cuts are more than expected and will mean $120 million in SG&A savings," said RBC Capital Markets analyst Michael Yee.

Dendreon also announced the departure of Hans Bishop, the company's chief operating officer, and said it was starting a search for a replacement.

Dendreon stunned analysts and investors last month when it withdrew its often repeated Provenge sales forecast. The surprise move sparked a massive stock sell-off in which the company lost two-thirds of its market value.

The company said with reduced expenses it expects to have sufficient cash to achieve a cash flow break-even position in the United States at an annual run rate of about $500 million in revenue.

"While the last month has been difficult for our employees, these cost reductions are necessary to ensure the long-term growth of our company," Mitchell Gold, chief executive of the biotechnology company, said in a statement.

Dendreon reported August Provenge sales of about $22 million -- a 16 percent increase over July sales -- and continues to expect modest quarter-over-quarter growth.

Given the modest growth expectations, Dendreon said it was significantly overstaffed in its manufacturing facilities and said some job cuts would also come from its Seattle headquarters. The total job cuts account for about 25 percent of the company's staff.

"To some extent they are stuck between a rock and a hard place," said Sanford Bernstein analyst Geoffrey Porges.

"Just bringing expenses down by 20 percent doesn't mean they are going to generate a significant profit and investors want profits."

Management said it would refrain from closing any of the company's three manufacturing plants in its cost cutting efforts, noting that such a move would be counterproductive to long-term growth plans.

The company previously blamed slow initial Provenge sales on manufacturing constraints, promising robust sales once it had all three of its production facilities up and running.

But last month, Dendreon management had new reasons for the disappointing sales and withdrew its bullish 2011 Provenge revenue forecast of $350 million to $400 million, with half coming in the fourth quarter.

The company blamed the slow sales ramp on a steeper-than-expected learning curve for physicians on how to use the new immunotherapy vaccine and doctor uncertainty over whether the drug, which runs $93,000 for a course of treatment, would be reimbursed by Medicare and health plans.

Dendreon told analysts and investors it was starting to see Provenge reimbursement occur within about 30 days and said in one case reimbursement came in as little as eight days.

It also cited a need to educate urologists on the appropriate patients for Provenge. "There's no doubt the patients are there," Gold said on the conference call.

Provenge, which works by stimulating a patient's own immune system to fight tumors, was approved last year to great fanfare as the first therapeutic vaccine for cancer after demonstrating it extended survival in patients with advanced disease.

But analysts have complained about management's lack of transparency and questioned its credibility after being blindsided by the pulled sales forecast.

"How can they continue to supply their market given the logistics ... with this reduction in head count?" Porges asked.

Dendreon shares rose 4.6 percent to $11.38 in after-hours trading after closing at $10.88 on Nasdaq, a decline of 6.3 percent.

(Reporting by Bill Berkrot; additional reporting by Deena Beasley in Los Angeles; editing by Andre Grenon, Gary Hill)

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Britain lifts ban on gay men giving blood

2011-09-20T11:17:00.000-07:00

Britain said Thursday it was lifting a ban on gay men giving blood providing they have had not had homosexual intercourse within a year.

A lifetime ban on blood donation by men who have had sex with another man was introduced in Britain in the 1980s as a response to the spread of AIDS and HIV.

But a review by a panel of leading experts and patient groups found it could no longer support their permanent exclusion.

However, men who have had anal or oral sex with another man in the past 12 months, with or without a condom, will still be barred from donating blood, the Department of Health said.

The experts considered the risk of infection being transmitted through blood, the willingness of potential donors to comply with the selection criteria and improvements in testing donated blood.

The change brings the criteria for men who have had sex with men into line with other groups who are deferred from giving blood for 12 months due to infection risks associated with sexual behaviour.

These include women who have slept with a man who has had sex with another man, people who have slept with prostitutes and those who have had intercourse with anyone who has injected themselves with drugs.

The announcement was welcomed by human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, but he said it fell short of lifting the ban on gay men who always use condoms.

He said: "Although the new policy is a big improvement on the existing discriminatory rules, a 12-month ban is still excessive and unjustified."

Tatchell, who launched the first campaign against the lifetime ban in 1991, added: "Most gay and bisexual men do not have HIV and will never have HIV.

"If they always have safe sex with a condom, have only one partner and test HIV negative, their blood is safe to donate.

"They can and should be allowed to help save lives by becoming donors."

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Mutant genes found for asthma, point to possible therapy

2011-09-20T05:14:00.000-07:00

HONG KONG (Reuters) - A drug used to treat rheumatoid arthritis could help asthma patients, scientists said on Friday, as they identified two mutant genes that may predispose a person to asthma.

Over 235 million people worldwide suffer from asthma and it is the most common chronic disease among children, according to the World Health Organization.

In a paper published in The Lancet medical journal, researchers in Australia said they had identified the two rogue genes after comparing 58,000 DNA samples of people living in Australia, Europe and the United States with and without asthma.

"We found two regions of the DNA that are consistently different between asthmatics and non-asthmatics," lead author Manuel Ferreira at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Brisbane told Reuters by telephone.

One of the genes is also known to be linked to rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and the researchers suggested that the drug tocilizumab, which is used to treat RA, may also work for asthma.

Tocilizumab, marketed under the brand Actemra by Roche Holding AG, targets a certain molecule in the body called "interleukin-6 receptor" and reduces inflammation in RA patients.

"Targeting interleukin-6 receptor may be a good strategy to reduce or prevent inflammation (in asthma) in the same way that it is used to prevent or reduce inflammation in rheumatoid arthritis," Ferreira said, adding that more research should be carried out to confirm if the drug may help asthma patients.

Asthma is a chronic inflammatory disease in which the airways in the lungs become inflated, narrowed and obstructed, causing breathing difficulty.

Apart from genetic reasons, other risk factors for asthma are inhaled substances that may provoke allergic reactions or irritate the airways, such as tobacco smoke, chemical irritants in the workplace and polluted air.

(Reporting by Tan Ee Lyn; Editing by Chris Lewis and Yoko Nishikawa)

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Windows Live Services Hit by Global Outage

2011-09-19T22:28:00.000-07:00

Microsoft's cloud-based Windows Live offerings were cut off from users worldwide for several hours on Thursday evening due to a domain name service (DNS) issue.

The software giant has 360 million Windows Live Hotmail users globally as well as 299 million active Windows Live Messenger accounts.

Microsoft notified Windows Live users at 11:49 PM that it had completed propagating its DNS configuration changes around the world, and had restored service for most customers.

Lost In Translation

Nothing is 100 Percent Reliable

The juxtaposition of the two service disruption events demonstrates that cloud environments are not the only infrastructures vulnerable to outages from time to time.

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Stanford Hospital privacy breach puts data online

2011-09-19T15:56:00.000-07:00

"This incident was not caused by the hospital, and responsibility has been assumed by a contractor working with the vendor," the hospital said in its statement.

Breaches of medical data are common though most typically involve lost or stolen computers or storage devices.

Roughly one-fifth of the publicly disclosed breaches in the last seven years have involved health care providers, according to a database kept by the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

In the Stanford case, the data ended up on a homework-help website called Student of Fortune, according to the New York Times.

The privacy breach did not involve any hacking, and data weren't on Stanford's or the collection agency's website, but on Student of Fortune's.

The affected patients were seen by the hospital's emergency department between March 1, 2009, and Aug. 31, 2009.

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China's suicide rate 'among highest in world'

2011-09-19T09:34:00.000-07:00

A person tries to kill themselves in China every two minutes, the government and state media said Thursday, giving the country one of the highest suicide rates in the world.

China's suicide rate is 22.23 people out of every 100,000, the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention said on its website.

"Our nation has one of the highest rates of suicide in the world," the Beijing Youth Daily quoted Beijing Health Bureau spokesman Mao Yu as saying.

About 287,000 people kill themselves in the country of 1.3 billion every year, while about two million try to commit suicide annually.

China marks World Suicide Prevention Day on Saturday, according to the Beijing Youth Daily.

The disease control centre said suicide is the biggest killer among Chinese aged 15 to 34.

Extreme pressure to perform well at school and to find employment were the main reasons behind the high rate of suicide among China's youths, media said.

The suicide rate in rural areas is three times higher than in urban centres and accounts for 75 percent of China's suicide total, it said.

According to the Guangzhou Daily, the number of suicides in China has risen sharply during the reform and open period, when the nation's economy has boomed.

A person attempts to commit suicide in China every two minutes, the paper said.

In 2009, the British medical journal The Lancet identified Lithuania, Finland, Latvia, Hungary, China, Japan and Kazakhstan as all having exceptionally high rates of suicide, 20 per 100,000 people or higher.

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Weight Watchers works, scientific study finds

2011-09-19T02:37:00.000-07:00

LONDON (Reuters) - Overweight patients told by their doctors to go to Weight Watchers lose around twice as much weight as people receiving standard weight loss care over 12 months, according to the findings of a study published on Thursday.

In the first randomized controlled trial -- considered the gold standard of scientific analysis -- to directly compare a commercial weight-loss program with standard care by family doctors, Weight Watchers was found to be more than twice as effective.

More people stuck to the Weight Watchers diet, they lost more weight and fat mass, and also shaved more off their waist measurements than those assigned to standard care.

Susan Jebb of Britain's Medical Research Council (MRC) Human Nutrition Research Unit, who led the study, said the results showed Weight Watchers is "a robust intervention that is generalisable to other economically developed countries."

"This kind of research is important so that we can identify clinically effective interventions to treat obesity," she said.

The study, published in the Lancet medical journal, comes in the wake of research last month which said obesity is a global epidemic that is fast replacing tobacco as the single most important preventable cause of costly chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

Worldwide, around 1.5 billion adults are overweight and another 0.5 billion are obese, with 170 million children classified as overweight or obese. Obesity takes up between 2 to 6 percent of healthcare costs in many countries.

In the weight loss study, which was funded by Weight Watchers International but run as an investigator-led trial with all data collection and analysis conducted by the independent research team, researchers assessed 772 overweight and obese adults in Australia, Germany and Britain.

Patients were randomly assigned to receive either 12 months of standard care as usually offered by the primary care team, or referred to and given a 12-month free membership for a Weight Watchers group in their neighborhood.

As well as losing twice as much weight as those in the standard care group, patients referred to Weight Watchers were also more than three times as likely to lose 10 percent or more of their initial body weight. Some 61 percent of patients in the Weight Watchers group lost at least 5 percent of their body weight, compared with 32 percent in the standard care group.

The average weight loss at 12 months was 5.1 kg (11.2 lbs) for those using Weight Watchers versus 2.2 kg for those on standard care. For those who completed the full 12 months, average weight loss was 6.7 kg on Weight Watchers versus 3.3 kg on standard care.

"These important findings show that obesity treatment is effective and structured commercial programs can enhance outcomes," said Nick Finer a consultant endocrinologist and bariatric physician at University College London Hospitals, who was not involved in the research.

In a commentary on the study, Kate Jolly and Paul Aveyard of the school of health and population sciences at Britain's Birmingham University said cost-effectiveness was a key factor in determining whether commercial programs like Weight Watchers become part of publicly funded health care.

They added that "the low cost of these programs -- at present about 50 to 60 pounds ($80 to $95) for 12 weeks -- makes the case for incorporation intuitively appealing."

David Kirchhoff, CEO of Weight Watchers International said the Lancet study "proves that Weight Watchers is part of the solution to help transform the health of nations."

"There is a clear need for practical treatment solutions that are proven effective, affordable and scalable to have a population-wide impact," he said in a statement.

(Reporting by Kate Kelland, editing by Paul Casciato)

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Scientists find gene that controls chronic pain

2011-09-18T20:34:00.000-07:00

LONDON (Reuters) - British scientists have identified a gene responsible for regulating chronic pain, called HCN2, and say their discovery should help drug researchers in their search for more effective, targeted pain-killing medicines.

Scientists from Cambridge University said that if drugs could be designed to block the protein produced by the gene, they could treat a type of pain known as neuropathic pain, which is linked to nerve damage and often very difficult to control with currently available drugs.

"Individuals suffering from neuropathic pain often have little or no respite because of the lack of effective medications," said Peter McNaughton of Cambridge's pharmacology department, who led the study.

"Our research lays the groundwork for the development of new drugs to treat chronic pain by blocking HCN2."

Pain is an enormous health burden worldwide, estimated to cost more than 200 billion euros ($281 billion) a year in Europe and around $150 billion a year in the United States.

Studies show that around 22 percent of people with chronic pain become depressed and 25 percent go on to lose their jobs. A 2002/03 survey by a group called Pain in Europe estimated that as many as one in five Europeans suffers chronic pain.

Scientists have known about the HCN2 gene, which is found in pain-sensitive nerve endings, for several years, but had not yet fully understood its role in regulating pain.

Because a related gene called HCN4 plays a critical role in controlling electrical activity in the heart, McNaughton's team suspected that HCN2 might have a similar function and regulate electrical activity in pain-sensitive nerves.

For the study, published in the journal Science on Thursday, the researchers engineered the removal of the HCN2 gene from pain-sensitive nerves and then used electrical stimuli on these nerves in lab dishes to find out how the nerves had been changed by the removal of HCN2.

The scientists then studied genetically modified mice in which the HCN2 gene had been deleted. By measuring the speed the mice withdrew from different types of painful stimuli, the scientists were able to show that deleting the HCN2 gene took away neuropathic pain.

They also found that deleting HCN2 appeared to have no effect on normal acute pain -- such as the type of pain caused by accidentally cutting yourself or biting your own tongue -- a factor they said was important since this type of pain acts as a useful warning signal to the body.

"What is exciting about the work on the HCN2 gene is that removing it -- or blocking it pharmacologically -- eliminates neuropathic pain without affecting normal acute pain," McNaughton said in a statement about this work. "This finding could be very valuable clinically because normal pain sensation is essential for avoiding accidental damage."

Neuropathic pain, which is distinguished from inflammatory pain, is seen in patients with diabetes -- a condition which affects an estimated 280 million people around the world -- and as a painful after-effect of shingles and of chemotherapy in cancer patients. It is a also common factor in lower back pain and other chronic painful conditions.

(Reporting by Kate Kelland, Editing by Sitaraman Shankar)

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Draft U.N. disease summit statement seen as weak

2011-09-18T13:41:00.000-07:00

LONDON (Reuters) - A draft statement from a United Nations summit on chronic diseases is a "great disappointment" and sets no new targets or commitments for tackling cancer, diabetes, heart and lung disease epidemics, a global health group said on Thursday.

NCD Alliance chairwoman Ann Keeling, who has seen the latest draft of the declaration, said it was significantly weaker than she'd hoped for.

"There is very strong language... about recognition of the problem and the need to act. But there are no strong, time-bound commitments in there, so it's a great disappointment from that point of view," said Keeling.

She said there were several crucial omissions, notably the lack of any overarching target to reduce the number of deaths from non-communicable diseases (NCDs), often known as chronic diseases.

NCD Alliance groups some 2,000 health organizations from around the world focused on chronic or non-communicable diseases and has been involved in months of negotiations ahead of the September 19-20 U.N. summit.

NCDs, such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and respiratory diseases, are the leading cause of death worldwide each year, causing 36 million deaths in 2008 and accounting for 63 percent of all deaths.

World health experts say that over the next 20 years, this epidemic is projected to accelerate and that by 2030, the number of deaths from NCDs could reach 52 million a year.

The U.N. meeting is the second ever such high-level meeting to be held on a threat to global health and has been billed as a "once in a generation" opportunity to tackle the predicted wave of these diseases.

The World Health Organization, the NCD Alliance and other health groups had been calling for the summit to enshrine a goal to cut preventable deaths from NCDs by 25 percent by 2025.

"If you don't have a global target, you have nothing to aim for, there's no accountability and you can't monitor progress," Keeling said. "That really needs to be put right."

The World Cancer Research Fund on Wednesday urged heads of state due to attend the meeting to "avoid a public health disaster" by taking concrete steps to improve diets, encourage people to get more exercise and cut levels of alcohol and tobacco use.

Keeling told Reuters the draft contains no specific aims improving the nutritional content of foods, and while there is some "language around the importance of tobacco taxes," there are no firm commitments on governments raising taxes or curbing tobacco advertising beyond an agreement to hold another, lower-level meeting next year to look again.

"The whole point of getting heads of state and heads of government to the table like this was to get political buy-in," she said.

"If things get kicked into 2012... it will not have the political buy-in that it would if heads of state signed it off this September."

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Google Pays Chump Change for Zagat

2011-09-18T06:43:00.000-07:00

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AT&T defends T-Mobile deal in response to DOJ suit

2011-09-18T00:21:00.000-07:00

The Justice Department believes there wouldn't be enough competition if AT&T devours T-Mobile, creating a void that would increase prices and reduce the incentive to develop new technology.

The first hearing in the case is set for Sept. 21 in Washington before U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle.

AT&T, which is based in Dallas, is seeking a quick resolution to the case.

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Many self-harm patients don't get psych evaluation

2011-09-17T17:33:00.000-07:00

Genevra Pittman

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Doctors in the emergency room often don't evaluate the mental health of patients who've cut or otherwise hurt themselves before sending them home, a new study shows.

As many as half of patients who aren't admitted to the hospital leave without a psychiatric checkup, and an equal proportion of them don't get follow-up therapy in the next month, researchers found.

Yet those people have higher rates of suicide and are especially vulnerable soon after a self-harm incident, according to researchers led by Dr. Mark Olfson, a psychiatrist at Columbia University in New York.

"If you present to an emergency department with deliberate self-harm, that is something that should receive a mental health assessment during the visit," he told Reuters Health.

Olfson argued that doctors need to look carefully at whether self-harm patients intended to kill themselves and what their risks are going forward.

He and his colleagues examined data from a year's worth of claims made to Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor.

In 2006, when more than 40 million people were covered by Medicaid, the researchers found 7,400 visits to ERs for self-harm injuries in adults -- for example from cutting or overdosing on pills. For 4,600 of those visits, which included multiple visits by the same people, patients were treated and then discharged without being hospitalized.

Less than 48 percent of patients who were discharged after self-harming had a mental health assessment while in the ER. The "lethality" of patients' self-harm attempts -- such as if they had shot or burned themselves, versus cutting -- didn't dictate how likely they were to get an assessment.

Similarly, about 52 percent of discharged patients had an outpatient mental health care visit in the 30 days after the self-harm incident. Patients who lived in states where Medicaid covered visits to mental health clinics were more likely to get follow-up care than people whose states didn't have those services.

Olfson and colleagues report in the Archives of General Psychiatry that the rate of suicide for people who have recently been hospitalized for self-harm is between 30 and 130 times higher than in the general public.

In the U.S. in 2007, there were about 11 suicide deaths for every 100,000 people, and more than ten times that number attempted suicide.

Still, many people who self-harm don't have any intention of killing themselves, experts say.

Dr. Cameron Crandall, from the University of New Mexico's Department of Emergency Medicine in Albuquerque, said that for patients who self-harm but aren't suicidal, "putting them under a forced evaluation is not always practical or advisable."

The current study, he said, might not reflect some patients who were discharged and referred to their primary care doctors to discuss mental health, without an official psychiatric diagnosis -- which may work fine for people who aren't at high risk.

It's also possible that some people were offered evaluations or follow-up care but turned them down, researchers explained.

Psychiatric patients are a particularly difficult group for emergency doctors to treat, said Dr. Larry Baraff, from the University of California, Los Angeles, Emergency Medicine Center, because it takes a lot of time to determine how serious their condition is, and they present with a range of different medical problems.

"By the time they are in the ER...they frequently say, 'I had thoughts about (suicide), but now I feel better and I'm not going to do it,'" Baraff, who was not involved in the new study, told Reuters Health.

However, for patients who hurt themselves with a gun, for instance, or older males who are at higher risk for suicide, "you really do need psychiatric evaluation," said Crandall, who also did not participate in the new research.

"It would be great if we had rapid and available psychiatric evaluation in the emergency room," he told Reuters Health, adding that ER overcrowding may be hitting psychiatric patients especially hard.

"Emergency departments sometimes are oriented to the next patient who comes in, and they don't have the resources to make those kinds of sustained efforts and follow-up calls," Olfson agreed.

Yet even without the funding for extra mental health practitioners, he added, other ER staff can be trained to do a basic assessment to see if the patient seems suicidal.

Olfson said his team is working on two other studies looking at what happens to teens who land in the ER for self-harm, and to adults who have private insurance.

"There's an opportunity here...for these emergency departments to play an active role in preventing suicide by making adequate assessments and really becoming engaged in what may be lifesaving patient referrals," he told Reuters Health.

"Currently we're falling short."

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/olagJN Archives of General Psychiatry, online September 5, 2011.

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US gets chance to catch up on credit card security

2011-09-17T10:41:00.000-07:00