Students are addicted to social media

According to research from the University of Maryland, American students are so addicted to mobile phones, social media and the internet that the students shows withdrawal symptoms if they have to do a day without social media.

The investigators asked 200 students to abstain from all forms of social media for one day. After 24 hours many of them showed signs that correspond to those of people are drug and alcohol rehabilitation, such as fear and greed and they could not function without their social relationships.

The students complained the most about the need to send SMS messages, chat, mail and to use Facebook. ‘Text messaging and IM, gives me a constant comfortable feeling’, wrote one of the students. ‘Without these two luxuries, I felt very alone and disconnected from my life’.

Feet for the iPad

Apple offers for $69 a keyboard to make it more comfortable to type on the recently launched iPad. The company Bluelounge offers a cheaper solution: feet which can be stick under the tablet of the iPad.

By placing the plastic feet under the iPad, there will be arroused an optimal quarter for typing via the virtual keyboard. A set consists out of two higher feet and two lower ones which can be fixed on the iPad with suction cups. For that matter, the feet can also be used for the notebook. A set ' iPad feet' costs just $12.95.

Advertisements on Twitter

The American micro blog service Twitter started Tuesday with inserting advertisements on the site. The advertisements become visible by search tasks of the user, reported the American business paper The Wall Street Journal.

In the first instance Twitter ensnared ten advertisers, including Starbucks en Best Buy. Between two and ten percent of the users of Twitter will be seeing the advertisements. That number will increase the next days, thus the concern.

This step has to lead to the profitability of Twitter. There are millions of people who disperse tweets, messages with a maximum of 140 signs daily, but that did not produce much sales. The first revenues came in recently out of agreements with Google and Microsoft about the delivering of tweets on the search engines of that companies.

Mobile phone for spying on employees

New software for the mobile phone enables curious bosses to follow every movement of their employees at a distance.
Investigators of the Japanese telephone giant KDDI developed a mobile phone which can even register the smallest movements of the users. Next the data will be sent to a head office.

The program makes uses of gear meters which normally can be found in modern sets.
By an analyze of these sensors, complex movements can be different from each other. The program sees of the use walks, climbs a three or of the user is cleaning. Even the difference between the cleaning activities such as scrubbing or sweeping can be distinguished by the program.
The company has the intention to sell the technique to managers, chef or Job Centers, but it can also be skilful by monitoring a patient at a distance.

Efficienty
The aim of the new system is according to KDDI to enable employees to work more efficient and it gives managers the possibility to judge their employees better.
“Of course there is the privacy aspect and the employers have to achieve an agreement before they are going to use the system” says Hiroyuki YokoYama, chief web data research of KDDI.
It is not the first time that employees are spied on via their mobile phones by their bosses. Japanese truck chauffeurs are spied on for a longer time with the GPS-receiver in their mobile phones.

Machines
Privacy interest groups are not pleased with the developments in Japan, where the privacy discussion is less fierce then elsewhere. “People are treated as machines, or as cattle’s which are watch out constantly” says human rights layer Kazuo Hizumi. “New techniques have to be used to improve our quality of life, not to spy on us”.

Amber Alert from now on via Twitter !

Amber Alert from now on via Twitter !

Amber Alert is the national warning system by urgent child missing and child kidnapping. With this system the police can warn whole Netherlands - via SMS, TV-screens, websites, e-mail, instant messaging, TV and radio - by a missing of a kidnapping. At this way the change of a good outcome will be increased. Everyone can come forward voluntary of the Amber Alert.

Amber Alerts are from now on spread via Twitter. In the messages there will be a link to the photo of the missing people.

The aim of this new way of communication is to show the photo of the kidnapped child to much as possible people. Bert Hoen, director of the software company ‘Netpresenter, says that in a official statement. Netpresenter is the company behind the Amber Alert and thinks Twitter is exceptionally suited for this.

Especially for people who travel a lot and keep up Twitter with their mobile phone, they can deliver a useful contribution by tracing missing people. Posters of the missing people will be sent by e-mail.
That posters can be printed immediately and can be disperse by stores etcetera.
Since the launching in November 2008 about three thousand organizations and people are member of the national alarm system Amber Alert.

Cybercrime

First of all it is important to make clear what cybercrime exactly is. Cybercrime is a form of crime where the Internet or computers are used as a medium to commit crime. Issues surrounding this type of crime have become high-profile, particularly those surrounding hacking, copyright infringement, child pornography and child grooning. There are also problems of privacy when confidential information is lost of intercepted, lawfully or otherwise. Cybercrime has a lot of consequences. One important consequence for companies is the theft of personal datas.



Second, we can notice that at this moment cybercrime is still a treat for a lot of companies. A quarter of these companies does not take any measures to protect them against spam and virusses. Research bureau Ernst & Young did a research about cybercrime. Last year, 42 percent of the examined companies had more troubles with cybercrime than in 2008. A salient detail is that in one of the eight cases the own employees are responsible for the
cybercrime.

Less than a quarter of the companies has already take some measures to prevent the cybercrime. It is important that more companies follow, so they can pretent the cyber crime in their company.

Fingerprints on your passport?

Do you want you fingerprints on your passport?


Since the 21th of September in 2009 the law of the passport is in force. After that day it is obligatory to give your fingerprint to get a new passport or identity card. In the Netherlands the judiciary is going to make a database of all the fingerprints of the people in the Netherlands. This is not an European rule, but a decision of the Netherlands.

Aaron Boudewijn, a 24 years old student is going to the judge for his passport. His own passport is expired, but he doesn't get a new passport. He turns down the request of giving his fingerprints. Without the fingerprints, he will not receive a new passport. He said: 'They are allowed to place my fingerprints in my passport, but I do not want my fingerprints in the database'. When they put all the fingerprints in a database, they infringes the privacy of the citizens. Besides that, fingerprints are easy to copy. Aaron is assisted by an lawyer and the privacy organization 'Vrijbit'.

The judgment of this case is not familiar yet. Aaron thinks that finally the European Court for the Human Rights is going to deal with this case.

I think it is good to have a system for fingerprints, but only as it is a watertight system.
At this way also the police can use it to trace criminals. and that is good for the society.
The problem is that it is easy to copy the fingerprints, and you can never prove, for example by an theft, that it wasn't you that commited the theft. So, that is an disadvantage of the system with the fingerprints.