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Saturday, January 5, 2013

Dead on Facebook: Pranksters kill accounts with fake death reports

8 hrs.

Helen A.S. Popkin

While vacationing with his wife in Cancun, Rusty Foster did something many would find inexplicable?? he?didn?t check his Facebook account. Not once.?

But when the couple returned to their home in Peaks Island, Maine earlier this week, Foster?learned much to his surprise that he was dead???at least as far as Facebook was concerned.

?Everything seemed OK, but?I didn?t try to post anything until Thursday,? Foster told NBC News. Foster says he attempted to log on to his Facebook account, and got the ?pink box? instead???the one that reads:

This account is in a special memorial state. If you have any questions or concerns, please visit the Help Center for further information.

Turns out, while Foster was away, his prankster pal had him declared dead on Facebook, where it?s surprisingly easy to falsely memorialize an account. Since Facebook has no realtime customer service hotline,?getting one?s profile resurrected in this case?required outside intervention ... from BuzzFeed.?When Foster couldn't get Facebook's immediate attention, he wrote a note to the social news site asking for help.

How did BuzzFeed's intrepid reporter?Katie Notopoulos?help out? By turning around and Facebook murdering her colleague John Herrman, of course.

Being dead???at least on the Internet???is ?a little bit anticlimactic,? says Herrman. "I?ve been worrying about it?my whole my life and it turned out to just be a Facebook status update."?

Unbeknownst to him, Notopoulos had reported him dead for the purposes of investigating Foster's claims, not to mention the possibility of an awesomely annoying (and some might say, dark)?prank made possible by Facebook's service for the grieving.

When NBC News turned to Facebook to make sense of this apparently?slipshod policy, a spokesperson emailed the following statement:

We have designed the memorialization process to be effective for grieving families and friends, while still providing precautions to protect against either erroneous or malicious efforts to memorialize the account of someone who is not deceased.?We also provide an appeals process for the rare instances in which accounts are mistakenly reported or inadvertently memorialized.

Prior to 2009, Facebook users who sloughed off this mortal coil had the unfortunate habit of haunting the living???their pictures popping up on the profiles of their former friends, along with the friendly suggestion from Facebook that y?all should ?reconnect.? Four years into the network's existence, and with more than 300 million active users at the time, Facebook realized it had had its fair share of user fatalities, and the pile of creeped-out user?complaints that came with it.?

So the??Memorializing? function came into being, allowing loved ones to alert Facebook to their friends? passing and?preventing the social network from making potentially upsetting, wildly inappropriate suggestions. Any profile that has been?memorialized?is locked down: Only friends previously?approved by the deceased can even?view it, and personal information such as phone numbers are removed.?

Before contacting BuzzFeed, Foster had?attempted to?resuscitate?his profile by following?Facebook?s appeal process? ??filling out the online form titled ?My Personal Account is in a Special Memorialized State.? But he?wasn't?keen on killing time in social-media purgatory, and the automated reply Foster first received?didn't?inspire his confidence.??We are very sorry to hear about your loss,? it read, along with some reassurance that his report would be reviewed in according the site?s policies.

?Since I?couldn't?get on Facebook, I had a lot of time to kill on the Internet,? Foster said. ?So I Googled.? Foster says he?found more than a few search results about similarly pranked users who had difficulty getting the memorial status removed from their accounts, dating back to 2009. Finally, he sent his note to BuzzFeed.

Like Foster?s puckish friend, Notopoulos filled out a?memorialization?form for Herrman, and included ?proof of death? in the form of an online obit. For Rusty Foster, 36, who lives in Maine, his pal sent a link to the obit for a Russell Foster, 80, of Mississippi. Sure, the names more or less match, but the ages and places of residence do not.

For?BuzzFeed?s Herrman of New York, Notopoulous sent in an obit for John Herrmann of Nebraska, who, as Notopoulous noted ?is way older? than her coworker. In addition to the?age and geographic discrepancies, there's a small matter of the last names being spelled differently.

Like Foster, Herrman didn't know he was "dead" until he tried to access his account.?Herrman told NBC News that he attempted to log on, got that pink box telling him he was dead, filled out the form to get things fixed and received the same?perplexing ?sorry for your loss? automated response.

Yet less than an hour after Notopoulous? story ?How Almost Anyone Can Take You Off Facebook (And Lock You Out)? went live on BuzzFeed, Herrman?s account rose from the grave. Herrman also received another response that may very well be from a real human, which read:

It looks like your account was suspended by mistake. I'm so sorry for the inconvenience. You should now be able to log in. If you have any issues getting back into your account, please let me know.

Foster, meanwhile, says he finds it interesting that Hermann, who was Facebook-dead days less than himself, got the Lazarus treatment before Foster. His own profile did get reinstated eventually?on Friday ? but without a cheerfully apologetic note.

The spookiest part of the social media ghost story, at least for Foster, wasn?t getting declared dead. It?s what he says happened after he created a second account in order to troubleshoot his problem.?He friended just one person, and almost immediately Facebook started suggesting he friend people who were linked to his ?dead? account. The thing is, these people are not Facebook friends with the new account's only?acquaintance; Facebook was digging deeper into its data?to reconnect Foster with his people.

?It?s weird how Facebook is so good about knowing things about you, but you find this one little hole where they pretend they don?t know you at all.?

There's no word itself?from Facebook?on precautions regarding pranks, but then again, it?s not like there are a lot of jerks on the Internet.

Helen A.S. Popkin?goes blah blah blah about the Internet. Tell her to get a real job on?Twitter?and/or?Facebook.?Also,?Google+.

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/dead-facebook-pranksters-kill-accounts-fake-death-reports-1B7833218

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Copying common in electronic medical records

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Most doctors copy and paste old, potentially out-of-date information into patients' electronic records, according to a new study looking at a shortcut that some experts fear could lead to miscommunication and medical errors.

"The electronic medical record was meant to make the process of documentation easier, but I think it's perpetuated copying," said lead author Dr. Daryl Thornton, assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland.

Electronic health records have been touted as having the potential to transform patient data from indecipherable scribbles into easy-to-read, searchable, standardized documents that could be shared among hospital staffers and a patient's various other health care providers.

In 2011, the U.S. government started giving financial incentives to hospitals for adopting electronic medical recordkeeping. Those incentives will expire in 2015.

Many electronic recordkeeping systems allow text to be copied and pasted from previous notes and other documents, a shortcut that could help time-crunched doctors but that could also cause mistakes to be passed along or medical records to become indecipherable, critics argue.

To see how much information in patient records came from copying, Thornton's team examined 2,068 electronic patient progress reports created by 62 residents and 11 attending physicians in the intensive care unit of a Cleveland hospital.

Progress notes are typically shared among doctors, nurses and other hospital staff and are meant to document the progression of a patient's tests and treatments.

Using plagiarism-detection software, the researchers analyzed five months' worth of progress notes for 135 patients.

They found that 82 percent of residents' notes and 74 percent of attending physicians' notes included 20 percent or more copied and pasted material from the patients' records.

In their report, published in Critical Care Medicine, Thornton and his colleagues did not examine what motivated physicians and residents to copy and paste, or whether the shortcut affected patient care.

In one case, though, Thornton told Reuters Health, a patient left the ICU and was readmitted a couple of days later. The patient's medical record included so much copied and pasted information, the new team of doctors wasn't able to decipher the original diagnosis. In the end, the new team called the physicians who originally diagnosed the patient.

Nothing about a patient - length of stay, gender, age, race or ethnicity, what brought them into the ICU or how severely ill they were - affected how often a physician copied information into the medical record.

Although residents' notes more often included copied material, attending physicians tended to copy more material between notes. They also tended to copy more of their own assessments from other notes.

Experts suggested that copying signifies a shift in how doctors use notes - away from being a means of communication among fellow healthcare providers and toward being a barrage of data to document billing.

"What tends to get missing is the narrative - what's the patient's story?" said Dr. Michael Barr, senior vice president in the Division of Medical Practice, Professionalism and Quality at the American College of Physicians. Barr was not involved in the current study.

In an unrelated editorial published this week in The Journal of Urology, Dr. Deborah Erickson points out that summarizing a patient's history at the start of notes is longstanding tradition, and it's just as easy to carry forward an error in handwritten or dictated notes as in electronic records.

Erickson worries more that repeatedly copying and pasting large chunks of text, possibly along with images and other records, will result in "a long, rambling note that does not make clear points." Moreover, for a physician's own thinking process, she writes, "It is much better for each day's note to synthesize and interpret the prior data, leaving out old information that is no longer relevant."

"If your communication isn't accurate, timely, complete and factual, then you really could be transmitting bad information forward that then creates this tumbling effect," said Ann Gaffey, president of Healthcare Risk and Safety Strategies, a consulting firm in Arlington, Virginia.

In her own study, Gaffey found copying and pasting to be common in over 50 physician practices that use five different electronic medical record programs.

Part of the problem is that doctors may not have the time to fully learn the new medical recording systems and may resort to short cuts, said Gaffey, who was not involved in the current research.

Ellen Balka, medical communications professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, cautioned that copying might not lead to poor care for patients.

"In general, physicians want to provide good care," Balka, who was not involved in the current study, told Reuters Health. "If they're engaging in a practice like copying, there must be a reason for it."

(This story has been corrected to change location of Healthcare Risk and Safety Strategies to Arlington, Virginia, in paragraph 18.)

SOURCE: bit.ly/UKgOcP Critical Care Medicine, online December 20, 2012.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/copying-common-electronic-medical-records-144944438.html

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Friday, January 4, 2013

Leader of Web piracy group sentenced to 5 years in prison for ... - RT

Internet piracy leader sentenced to 5 years

The US leader of Internet piracy group IMAGiNE, which for two years distributed unauthorized versions of theatrical films online, has been sentenced to five years in jail.

?In addition to his prison term, Jeramiah B. Perkins was sentenced to three years of supervised release and ordered to pay $15,000 in restitution for criminal copyright conspiracy.?

Last year, Perkins pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement.

According to a representative of the Motion Picture Association of America, IMAGiNE was the most prolific motion picture piracy group operating on the Internet from 2009 to 2011.

According to court documents, Perkins directed and participated in using receivers and recording devices in movie theaters to secretly capture the audio sound tracks of copyrighted movies. Perkins synchronized the audio files with illegally recorded video files to create completed movie files, which were then shared on the Internet among members of IMAGiNE.

The man admitted he was renting computer servers in France and elsewhere for use by IMAGiNE, the Department of Justice said.

He also admitted to registering domain names for use by IMAGiNE, opening email and PayPal accounts to receive donations and payments from persons downloading or buying IMAGiNE releases of pirated copies of films.

Source: http://rt.com/art-and-culture/news/online-piracy-leader-sentenced-346/

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Communications satellites no longer classed as weapons, US ...

For the first time since in over a decade, American companies will be permitted to sell and export communications satellites to foreign companies. Such satellites have been in use since the mid-sixties, but although the US was a major player in the market, but in 1999 a new law passed that defined them as weapons, forbidding their export. As The New York Times reports, President Obama has signed a defense bill that reverts the ban and reclassifies communications satellites as civilian technology.

"This is a tremendous assist... it will ensure our place at the forefront of space."

The move will benefit American companies that had their satellite programs crippled by the 1999 ban, but the new bill retains some restrictions. Companies like Boeing will still be forbidden to export satellites to nations like North Korea, China, and Iran. The industry unsurprisingly reacted positively to the news; "this is a tremendous assist for an industry that is inherently international," the president of the Satellite Industry Association told The New York Times, "it will ensure our place at the forefront of space."

Source: http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/4/3834680/communications-satellites-us-export-ban-lifted

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Source: http://www.djandjuju.com/2013/01/03/the-best-the-reason-behind-best-registry-cleaner-on-your-own-laptop-or-desktop-pc/

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StickNFind Bluetooth stickers let you tag and locate your goods with a smartphone (hands-on video)

We've all misplaced keys, gadgets and occasionally even children. Well, no more. StickNFind is a nifty, inexpensive solution for tagging and locating electronics, keys and pets. For roughly $25 a pop (estimated retail), you get a small adhesive disk that can be affixed to any flat surface or attached to a keychain. Inside, there's a replaceable CR2016 watch battery that's said to last more than a year, a Bluetooth module and antenna, an LED-lit ring and a piezoelectric speaker. A free Android or iOS app then lets you hone in on any stickers within a roughly 100-foot (line of sight) range. The current version can only display distance, but an update, set to hit before StickNFind ships, will add direction, leading you directly to your target. You can also activate a (fairly faint) beeper, and an LED ring around the perimeter of the sticker, further helping you to find the device, even in a dark room. The app will offer several other features, including a "Virtual Leash" that alerts you when the sticker goes out of range -- a "Reverse Virtual Leash" will make the device (perhaps attached to your keys) beep, letting you know you've left your smartphone behind.

The product designers will also be offering an SDK, so developers can even create their own apps for StickNFind. For example, you could write an app that uses the stickers as triggers -- apparently one museum plans to affix the device to art, so as visitors approach, a text notification will pop up describing the piece. Another company is considering using stickers at an upcoming conference, and with Bluetooth transmitters placed around a venue, they can track the precise location of attendee badges (and the individuals wearing them), and even send "pages" by triggering the beeper and light. During our hands-on, StickNFind worked quite well, though as we mentioned, the current alpha version of the app only displays distance, not direction. The device is currently available for "pre-order" on Indiegogo, with an estimated March ship date. You can snag a sneak peek of it in action though, in our hands-on video after the break.

Gallery: StickNFind Bluetooth Location Stickers hands-on