First human 'infected with computer virus'

source: bbc.co..uk A British scientist says he is the first man in the world to become infected with a computer virus. Dr Mark Gasson from the University of Reading had a chip inserted in his hand which was then infected with a virus. The device, which enables him to pass through security doors and activate his mobile phone, is a sophisticated version of ID chips used to tag pets. In trials, Dr Gasson showed that the chip was able to pass on the computer virus to external control systems. If other implanted chips had then connected to the system they too would have been corrupted, he said. Medical alert Dr Gasson admits that the test is a proof of principle but he thinks it has important implications for a future where medical devices such as pacemakers and cochlear implants become more sophisticated, and risk being contaminated by other human implants. "With the benefits of this type of technology come risks. We may improve ourselves in some way but much like the improvements with other technologies, mobile phones for example, they become vulnerable to risks, such as security problems and computer viruses." He also added: "Many people with medical implants also consider them to be integrated into their concept of their body, and so in this context it is appropriate to talk in terms of people themselves being infected by computer viruses." However, Dr Gasson predicts that wider use will be made of implanted technology. "This type of technology has been commercialised in the United States as a type of medical alert bracelet, so that if you're found unconscious you can be scanned and your medical history brought up." Professor Rafael Capurro of the Steinbeis-Transfer-Institute of Information Ethics in Germany told BBC News that the research was "interesting". "If someone can get online access to your implant, it could be serious," he said. Cosmetic surgery Professor Capurro contributed to a 2005 ethical study for the European Commission that looked at the development of digital implants and possible abuse of them. "From an ethical point of view, the surveillance of implants can be both positive and negative," he said. "Surveillance can be part of medical care, but if someone wants to do harm to you, it could be a problem." In addition, he said, that there should be caution if implants with surveillance capabilities started to be used outside of a medical setting. However, Dr Gasson believes that there will be a demand for these non-essential applications, much as people pay for cosmetic surgery. "If we can find a way of enhancing someone's memory or their IQ then there's a real possibility that people will choose to have this kind of invasive procedure." Dr Gasson works at the University of Reading's School of Systems Engineering and will present the results of his research at the International Symposium for Technology and Society in Australia next month. Professor Capurro will also talk at the event.

Acer Ferrari One 200

source: http://tech.tbreak.com/2010/01/acer-ferrari-one-200-review/ Like the car it represents, this laptop will make eyes turn and engines burn. Posted on January 12, 2010 by Abbas Jaffar Ali Editor's Score Features: Performance: Value: The Verdict: Slightly bigger but much faster than a netbook, the Acer Ferrari One hits all the right spots. The Acer Ferrari One sure brings back memories. Before I switched to Macs, I was a proud owner of the 3200 series which was based on the Mobile Athlon CPU and a Radeon 9700 GPU. This was in the year 2004 and back then, it was one of the fastest laptops along with being a bit big and heavy. The Ferrari One that I'm looking at today is targeted towards the smaller/lighter market segment but still manages to throw a punch or two compared to other laptops in its class. Acer/AMD dont want to call the Ferrari a netbook but judging it by its size and pricing, it could very well fit in that segment like the Sony P series. Packaged in a mean looking black box, the Ferrari One comes with bare essentials- a charger, a quick start guide and with a cleaning cloth. I did receive an Acer branded external optical drive that was outside the package but this unit came to us directly from AMD instead of Acer. So although I'm not sure if the optical drive is bundled with the retail packaging, I'd be surprised it it wasnt. The Ferrari One is nice and small in size- comparable, but not as small as some of the netbooks we've looked at. The lid, like earlier Ferrari models, is a shiny red color and features the prancing horse badge on it. Needless to say, it looks magnificent. The right side of the Ferrari One has a Gigabit LAN port, power connector, SD/Mem Stick reader, two USB ports and audio input and output jacks while the left side has an additional USB port, the VGA DSUB connector and XGP Port which technically allows you to connect and external graphics cards. Towards the front, you have sliders to enable/disable WiFi and Bluetooth. Flipping the lid open reveals a 11.6 inch LED screen with a 1366×768 resolution. The slightly larger than netbook size accommodates an excellent keyboard with keys that feel as big as your desktop keyboard. Above the keyboard, the power switch emits a brilliant red light while white LEDs let you know of any hard disk activity and NUM/CAPS lock. Below the keyboard, you have an interestingly shaped trackpad that supports multi-touch. The palm rest looks like its made of carbon fiber. The Ferrari One we received featured a 1.2GHz dual core AMD Athlon X2 L310 CPU along with 3GB RAM and a 5400 RPM 320GB Hard Drive. The onboard Radeon HD3200 GPU takes some RAM out of your system memory but offers pretty impressive performance. Acer uses the 802.11n draft specification for WiFi along with Bluetooth 2.1. While the model I recd did not offer HSDPA connectivity, there apparently is a model that will allow 3G access. Audio is powered by the Realtek. Usability-wise, the Ferrari One feels extremely zippy. The dual core processor, while low in clock speed, does a good job of keeping up with everyday usage applications while the onboard GPU is very capable of playing 720p movies or even a bit of gaming with less demanding games like World of Warcraft. I liked the keyboard very much as well with the larger sized keys that seemed easy to type on. The touchpad, although small in size, works quite well and the mouse buttons don't require much pressure to click. We ran our usual set of benchmarks on the Ferrari One to see how it compare to other netbooks/notebooks. It produced a Cinebench 10 score of 2134, PC Mark Vantage Score of 2089 and WinRAR score of 548. This makes the Ferrari One MUCH faster than your 1.6GHz Atom based netbook- even the ones powered by the nVidia ION chipset which score around 1529 in Cinebench, 1797 in PCMark and 472 in WinRAR. Battery life on the Ferrari One is decent. While it doesn't match some of the netbooks we've looked at, such as the ASUS 1101 with a battery life of almost 7 hours, it is in line with other netbooks that offer close to a four hour battery life with their standard batteries. Heat was not much of an issue with the Ferrari One either- yes, it did get warm during heavy loads but not the levels of being intolerable like some of my MacBook Pro machines. Acer also does a good job of keeping the Ferrari running quietly- you'll barely hear the fan. Overall, I am extremely impressed with the Ferrari One. It costs about AED 2,999 (US$800) which is somewhat between netbooks that cost about 1,400 to 1,800 and decent notebooks that are in the range of 3,500 to 4,000. Atom based netbooks have often left me frustrated because of their sluggish performance while bigger laptops are often a bit heavier and larger than I like to lug around. The Ferrari One proves to be a perfect middle-ground.

Please explain: why Google wants your Wi-Fi data

Google Australia will today be sent a "please explain" letter from two local privacy organisations demanding to know why the company has been collecting personal Wi-Fi network data from Australian homes alongside the images it takes with its Street View cameras. The letter comes in response to recent reports that the company has been quietly collecting Wi-Fi data around the world when taking pictures of streets and houses for its mapping service. Street View, which has already rolled out in a number of countries including Australia, displays panoramic street-level photos taken by specially equipped vans which are also equipped with Wi-Fi receivers that scan private network signals as it drives through neighbourhoods. The Google Street View car. Photo: Ron Erdos The Street View photos are overlayed onto Google Maps and concerns that Wi-Fi data could potentially be used to match mobile devices to residential addresses has privacy campaigners on alert, and they claim Google has failed to explain adequately the purpose for which the company is collecting this data in Australia. "The question is why an organisation like Google that already knows so much about individuals, that is driving around and taking photos of every street in Australia, is collecting data that could enable it to physically map that information to a physical street and presumably a physical house," asked Geordie Guy, vice-chairman of Electronic Frontiers Australia. The EFA and Australian Privacy Foundation are jointly drafting a letter that will be sent to Google today. Privacy concerns Google has taken some heat lately about its commitment to privacy after officials from 10 governments - including New Zealand, Canada and France - wrote a letter to chief executive Eric Schmidt to express their concern over data collection for Street View and the implementation of its Buzz social networking tool. Google claims the Wi-Fi data is only being used to help pinpoint the location of mobile devices on Google Maps and other location services much like a GPS signal, and that no details it collects about the network are published online. However, privacy advocates are seeking details of exactly what data is being captured by the Street View cars as well as assurances that its use will not extend beyond this application. "In terms of what they are collecting about Wi-Fi networks, there's a bajillion questions we have that aren't answered there, and we're likely to have more. Google talks about wireless routers at home but what about the printers, computers, mobile phones and other devices that might be sending out wireless information?" Guy said. The German government was surprised last month to discover that Wi-Fi data was being collected alongside Street View photographs. German newspaper Der Spiegel reported that Germany's Data Protection Commissioner Peter Schaar was "horrified" by the revelations. The UK Information Commissioner's Office said it was also ignorant of the practice. "At no point did Google make us aware that it would be scanning Wi-Fi too," ICO spokesman Nick Day told New Scientist magazine. Little is known about Google's collection of this data. Although the company argues the information is public and therefore not in breach of any laws, it conceded last week that it could have been better publicised. In response to why Google had not specifically informed governments of its activities, the company's privacy spokesman Peter Fleischer said: "Given it was unrelated to Street View, that is accessible to any WiFi-enabled device and that other companies already collect it, we did not think it was necessary. However it's clear with hindsight greater transparency would have been better." Wi-Fi data in Australia Google Australia confirmed yesterday it was collecting Wi-Fi data in Australia. It said the collection of such data was commonplace, although the EFA said it was not aware of any such projects here. One of the companies gathering this type of data for creation of location-based services is Skyhook Wireless, which operates from the US. Guy said: "If what Google's doing is an apples-to-apples comparison with Skyhook, and that information is already collected globally by Skyhook, why not buy it off them? Cheaper than driving a van down every street in Australia, right? "Google is in a position to make inferences about that kind of data. Skyhook doesn't have a year's worth of search history." Karen Curtis, Australian privacy commissioner, who did not sign the letter from government officials to Google last month, said she had been informed of the Wi-Fi data collection by Google. "From a privacy perspective, our preliminary inquiries have indicated that the information about Wi-Fi data that Google is collecting would not be considered personal information under the Privacy Act," she said. However, Guy said more assurances were needed. "A MAC address on a home wireless connection or any other piece of electronics that uses Wi-Fi is a serial number, it's unique. If Google rang you up - or anyone else - and asked you to read out a serial number of your mobile phone, what would you say? I'd tell them its none of their business. If I saw them on the street with binoculars trying to read it, I'd close the curtains." Social network security This is not the first time Google has been questioned over its privacy policies. The botched roll-out of its Buzz social network, which made the contact lists of Gmail users public to other subscribers, was highlighted in last month's letter to the company from international privacy officials. "It is unacceptable to roll out a product that unilaterally renders personal information public, with the intention of repairing problems later as they arise. Privacy cannot be sidelined in the rush to introduce new technologies to online audiences around the world. "Unfortunately, Google Buzz is not an isolated case. Google Street View was launched in some countries without due consideration of privacy and data protection laws and cultural norms. "We therefore call on you, like all organisations entrusted with people's personal information, to incorporate fundamental privacy principles directly into the design of new online services," the letter to Google said. Google responded to that letter this week with assurances that it took personal privacy seriously. "Respecting privacy is part of every Googler's job. We also have a team of seasoned privacy professionals, including legal, policy, security and engineering experts, to help guide the development of responsible privacy policies across Google," it said.

Researcher reveals Safari zero-day bug

Computerworld - Apple's Safari browser contains a critical, unpatched bug that attackers can use to infect Windows PCs with malicious code, researchers at US-CERT and other security firms said today. Hackers could compromise PCs with simple "drive-by" attack tactics, researchers added. The vulnerability, first reported by Danish vulnerability tracker Secunia and confirmed by the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), was disclosed by Polish researcher Krystian Kloskowski on Friday. The bug is caused by an error in the handling of the browser's parent windows. "This can be exploited to execute arbitrary code when a user visits a specially-crafted Web page and closes opened pop-up windows," said Secunia's alert. The vulnerability can also be exploited by attackers who dupe users into opening rigged HTML-based e-mail within Safari, added US-CERT in its advisory. That scenario likely would involve tricking users into opening malicious messages in a Web mail service, such as Gmail or Windows Live Hotmail. Both Secunia and US-CERT confirmed today that the proof-of-concept attack code published by Kloskowski successfully compromises the Windows version of Safari 4.0.5, the most up-to-date edition. Secunia rated the vulnerability as "highly critical," the second-most-dangerous ranking in its five-step threat scoring system. It's not known whether the vulnerability also exists in the much more widely used Mac OS X version of Apple's software. "Other versions may also be affected," cautioned US-CERT. Charlie Miller, the noted vulnerability researcher who won $10,000 by hacking a Mac in March at the Pwn2Own contest, was out of his office and not able to verify that the bug also exists in Safari on Mac OS X. US-CERT urged users of the Windows version of Safari to disable JavaScript as a temporary defense. Apple last patched Safari in mid-March when it fixed 16 flaws, including six that applied only to the Windows version of the browser. It's not unusual for Apple to patch Windows-only vulnerabilities when it updates Safari. Apple patched Miller's $10,000 vulnerability in mid-April by plugging a hole in ATS (Apple Type Services), a font renderer included with Mac OS X. Miller accessed the ATS bug via Safari during Pwn2Own.

Was Apple right? Adobe Flash crashes twice during mobile demo

Nothing sucks more than being on stage in front of a bunch of techies and having your demo crash on you twice. Actually, the only way that sucks more is if you're Adobe and it's Flash that's crashing on a mobile device, forcing folks to wonder if Steve Jobs was right about the stability of Flash. This incident happened last week at FlashCamp Seattle, according to a blog post by Jeff Croft, a Seattle developer who also moderated a panel at the event. Flash Platform evangelist Ryan Stewart was demoing Flash Player 10.1 on a Nexus One phone during the opening keynote when things went bad and then got worse. Croft wrote in his blog: Here's what happened: On his Mac, Ryan pulled up a site called Eco Zoo. It is, seemingly, a pretty intense example of Flash development — full of 3D rendering, rich interactions, and cute little characters. Then, he pulled up the same thing on his Nexus One. The site's progress bar filled in and the 3D world appeared for a few seconds before the browser crashed. Ryan said (paraphrasing), "Whoops! Well, it's beta, and this is an intense example — let's try it again." He tried it again and got the same result. So he said to the audience, "Well, this one isn't going to work, but does anyone have a Flash site they'd like to see running?" Someone shouted out "Hulu." Ryan said, "Hulu doesn't work," and then wrapped up his demo, telling people if they wanted to try more sites they could find him later and he'd let them play with his Nexus One. Ouch. To be fair, Croft notes that the problem with Hulu may not be the fault of Adobe and may be more with Hulu - but no one knows for sure. Also, he notes that Flash on Android is beta, which means it's expected to be "crashy and buggy" at this stage. Still, the natives are getting restless, he says, and are anxious to see a full Flash player that works well on mobile. A demo that crashes does little to help build confidence around a product or to prove that it's almost ready for prime time. Under normal circumstances, a crash at during an on-stage demo at a techie conference might have been no big deal. But the public sparring between Adobe and Apple over Flash has put the topic into the spotlight. The pressure is on for Adobe. Croft is right in suggesting that Adobe avoid any more demos until it's really solid.

Did Your Boss Thank You For Coding Yourself to Death?

by Alan Skorkin on February 25, 2010 Programmers love to work long hours! There I said it, c'mon admit it, your job/boss doesn't make you do it, we do it to ourselves. Alright, I'll concede, maybe not all programmers love long hours, but surely with the amount of overtime that is prevalent in this industry at least half of us must love it. Right? I can hear the excuses already. "No, no that's not it, we just love working with cool tech and don't want to leave a problem unsolved. It is actually a good thing it's what makes us awesome!" I say – you're not seeing the forest for the trees. Here is some perspective, you're not doing this for yourself, you're doing it for "the man". Admittedly he might be a nice man, but you don't owe him slavish commitment. Here is even more perspective, how often are you actually playing with interesting problems and cool tech and how many times are you churning out code desperately trying to get something delivered and meet some arbitrary deadline that someone has assigned to you? But hey, you're a business savvy developer, you're helping the company succeed, your manager has explained the financial situation to you – it has to be done, we're relying on you. Well, unless that same manager is right there with you, entertaining you with amusing anecdotes at 2 am, his words are worthless. Let me tell you a story that a friend once told me. It is about a brilliant developer – lets call him John. John was a superstar, a one in a million programmer. He had an uncanny ability to understand and write code and was 20 times more productive than anyone else. One day the company got a big contract that needed a fast turn-around. The client sent a massive spec document – to everyone's dismay. John came to the rescue, he took the spec home and noone heard from him for 3 days. When he came back to work, he looked like hell, but he had gone through the whole spec and had an outline of the solution already finished. Except for one bit which was impossible to implement, though the spec said otherwise – even the client didn't realise this, but John picked it up. Amazing! When I first heard that story, I was pretty impressed, my first question was, "So, where is this guy now?". To which my friend replied – "He is dead, too much hard living!". Too much hard coding would be more like it. Kinda takes the wind out of that story a little bit – John was in his early 30s. Programmers take a perverse pleasure from sharing death-march war stories. Even when we do it with disgust, it is a disgust tinged with pride – daring our peers to do "better". But it is a bit like those guys who wear their pants so low you can see ALL of their underwear or the people who take up smoking for the "trendy image". They and their friends think it's cool – everybody else thinks it's stupid. Making A Bad Situation Worse I can see the necessity of occasionally putting in some extra effort and burning the midnight oil at work for a day or two. But when "occasionally" turns to "often", when your boss stops thanking you profusely for your efforts and just treats it as norm, this is when we're all in trouble. It sets bad expectations, not just for you, for the whole industry. Humans are like dogs, we're eminently susceptible to positive and negative reinforcement. And this whole industry has been conditioned by years of death-marches to the point where it even rewards this behaviour. Every time we give-in to the long hours argument, we continue to negatively reinforce this trend. It doesn't help that we're herd animals, you only need to get one person and everyone else wants to conform. Guilt comes into the equation – "we can't leave our mates by themselves to do the hard-yards, we gotta help them". The more people conform, the more pressure on the rest of the herd to do so until the whole team is chugging coke and eating pizza at midnight. But how do they suck even one person in, where is that famed programmer independence. We're happy to "stick it to the man" and do whatever we want in school, but as soon as we're in the workforce all bets are off. It is puzzling. Interestingly, sometimes these gargantuan efforts aren't even tracked properly, as it would make the project look bad. So they "cook the books", as far as the client is concerned everybody is doing 40 hours a week (i.e. they get billed for 40 hours) and the project is coming in on schedule (maybe), never mind the other 40 hours that everyone on the team puts in. OK, maybe they'll track the real effort in a "second set of books". Accountants go to jail for these kinds of shenanigans, but our industry expects it – nay almost demands it. The Sustainable Pace Effort Most Agile processes talk about sustainable development pace. But, I've seen even self-confessed agile teams knuckle under and put in the hours, you know, for the greater good and all. They were still agile though, and don't you dare say otherwise. When I think about this stuff I am always reminded of lawyers. You come in as a new lawyer and you put in massive amounts of effort and time, it is the accepted way to get ahead in that industry. No developer wants to be compared to lawyers, but often the situation is similar except you're not going to get ahead by doing a lot of overtime as a developer (unless you're working for a big 4 consulting company and then you might as well be a lawyer :)). So, lawyer vs programmer, which one is the chump? Studies about productivity declines when working more than 40 hours a week surface with disturbing regularity. As a developer your creativity declines, you make more mistakes, you miss existing issue etc., to the point where you're doing more harm than good. Should I even mention the health concerns when you spend that much time engaged in the same activity (they even had rules about spending too much time at work in the Soviet Union, and those guys were all about putting in the time for the good of the people). What about diet, you can only survive on coke for so long – poor John couldn't even make it to 40. Can you tell that I am against long hours and death marches yet :)? Maybe one of these days I'll tell you how I got my wake-up call, it is an interesting story. Herding cats is easy compared to getting developers to make a concerted effort in the same direction, it is something I both love and hate about our people (programmers) :). But I do wish that once in a while all the smart developers just took a stand to eliminate at least one of the truly crappy and counter-productive trends in our industry. As far as I am concerned, smart programmers don't like to work long hours and won't be pressured into it – there is more to life. SOURCE: http://www.skorks.com/2010/02/did-your-boss-thank-you-for-coding-yourself-to-death/

The iPad: Pros and Cons

by Robert Quigley | 6:08 pm, January 27th, 2010 So: if you have just awoken from a coma and/or discovered the Internet, Apple rolled out their tablet today. It's called the iPad. After the wave of iTampon/Max-iPad/other feminine hygiene product-related jokes died down, folks came to this realization: there are some good things about the iPad, and some bad things about it. It's fair to say that the reaction to the iPad has been mixed. This can be explained away, in part, by the absurd buildup to the thing. But what substantive features define it? The good and the bad: Pro Third-party support: the iPad will be able to run third-party apps without modifications. Kind of like the iPhone! Yes, Apple will profit off of an even more hyped-up app store, but users will benefit from the flexibility and creativity brought in by (mostly profit-seeking) developers. Also key: the iBooks e-reader app. It may not instantly rescue all of journalism, but it's a start, and this may make the iPad an attractive choice for consumers who don't want to buy black-and-white, restricted Internet e-readers. More broadly, in the words of David Carr, "the iPad is creating and killing categories at the same time;" the free market says that third-party devs will best be able to figure out what to do with all of that potential. Con It's running on the iPhone operating system (currently, version 3.2); no OS X. Among other things, this means no multitasking: as in, you can't run two applications at the same time. Also: no Flash (see below). Engadget: "There's no multitasking at all. It's a real disappointment. All this power and very little you can do with it at once. No multitasking means no streaming Pandora when you're working in Pages… you can figure it out. It's a real setback for this device." Pro HTML5, the still-developing next generation of HTML, has been thoroughly embraced by the iPhone's OS, and, by extension, the iPad's. HTML5 isn't yet fully there, but it's promising: Ask a bunch of web geeks about HTML5 and you'll hear a lot of answers to the effect that it's the future of the Internet, both because it patches up much of HTML4's clutter and because it's seen as a freer, more open development platform. (Counterpoint: see H.264 codec) Con The flipside of that: no Flash. This isn't totally a minus — see above —  but the Web is a long way to go from being all HTML5, with the result that big chunks of it will be shut off to early iPad users. The top comment on a critical thread on Reddit:  "[N]o Flash support. It literally is just a big iPod Touch with some free apps included." Pro The cheapest iPad, which has the minimum 16 gigabytes of storage, costs $500; this is well below the $1000 pricetag predicted by some. Con The cheapest iPad doesn't come with 3G coverage; for that, you'll need to bump it up to $629, which doesn't factor in the $30/month you'll be paying for unlimited data. (because you will be paying for unlimited data and not 250 MB a month, right?) Pro 10 hours of battery life while watching video, with up to a month of standby! At least according to Steve Jobs. Given that it's so thin and weighs only 1.5 pounds, this is pretty remarkable. Con The battery is built in, which means you're screwed if it conks out. This was one of the things that people most disliked about the MacBook Air. Pro The iPad has a digital compass, 3G-assisted GPS, accelerometer, ambient light sensor, Apple's custom 1 GHz Apple A4 chip, and is multitouch-compatible. Con For all of that, no camera, at all. No Skype, no augmented reality, no photos on the go. Seriously: the accelerometer over that? Again: the iPad is a mixed bag, and it is not the mythical unicorn-like creature that the hype cycle inevitably built it up to be. But there's a lot to like about it, and, like it or not, when it hits shelves two months down the road, there are going to be some long, long lines outside the Apple Store. SOURCE: http://www.geekosystem.com/ipad-pros-and-cons-specs-features/

Antisocial Networking?

"HEY, you're a dork," said the girl to the boy with a smile. "Just wanted you to know." Enlarge This Image Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times Andy Wilson, 11, left, and his brother Evan, 14, go on Facebook in their treehouse in Atlanta. "Thanks!" said the boy. "Just kidding," said the girl with another smile. "You're only slightly dorky, but other than that, you're pretty normal — sometimes." They both laughed. "See you tomorrow," said the boy. "O.K., see you," said the girl. It was a pretty typical pre-teen exchange, one familiar through the generations. Except this one had a distinctly 2010 twist. It was conducted on Facebook. The smiles were colons with brackets. The laughs were typed ha ha's. "O.K." was just "K" and "See you" was rendered as "c ya." Children used to actually talk to their friends. Those hours spent on the family princess phone or hanging out with pals in the neighborhood after school vanished long ago. But now, even chatting on cellphones or via e-mail (through which you can at least converse in paragraphs) is passé. For today's teenagers and preteens, the give and take of friendship seems to be conducted increasingly in the abbreviated snatches of cellphone texts and instant messages, or through the very public forum of Facebook walls and MySpace bulletins. (Andy Wilson, the 11-year-old boy involved in the banter above, has 418 Facebook friends.) Last week, the Pew Research Center found that half of American teenagers — defined in the study as ages 12 through 17 — send 50 or more text messages a day and that one third send more than 100 a day. Two thirds of the texters surveyed by the center's Internet and American Life Project said they were more likely to use their cellphones to text friends than to call them. Fifty-four percent said they text their friends once a day, but only 33 percent said they talk to their friends face-to-face on a daily basis. The findings came just a few months after the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that Americans between the ages of 8 and 18 spend on average 7 1/2 hours a day using some sort of electronic device, from smart phones to MP3 players to computers — a number that startled many adults, even those who keep their BlackBerrys within arm's reach during most waking hours. To date, much of the concern over all this use of technology has been focused on the implications for kids' intellectual development. Worry about the social repercussions has centered on the darker side of online interactions, like cyber-bullying or texting sexually explicit messages. But psychologists and other experts are starting to take a look at a less-sensational but potentially more profound phenomenon: whether technology may be changing the very nature of kids' friendships. "In general, the worries over cyber-bullying and sexting have overshadowed a look into the really nuanced things about the way technology is affecting the closeness properties of friendship," said Jeffrey G. Parker, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Alabama, who has been studying children's friendships since the 1980s. "We're only beginning to look at those subtle changes." The question on researchers' minds is whether all that texting, instant messaging and online social networking allows children to become more connected and supportive of their friends — or whether the quality of their interactions is being diminished without the intimacy and emotional give and take of regular, extended face-to-face time. It is far too soon to know the answer. Writing in The Future of Children, a journal produced through a collaboration between the Brookings Institution and the Woodrow Wilson Center at Princeton University, Kaveri Subrahmanyam and Patricia M. Greenfield, psychologists at California State University, Los Angeles, and U.C.L.A. respectively, noted: "Initial qualitative evidence is that the ease of electronic communication may be making teens less interested in face-to-face communication with their friends. More research is needed to see how widespread this phenomenon is and what it does to the emotional quality of a relationship." But the question is important, people who study relationships believe, because close childhood friendships help kids build trust in people outside their families and consequently help lay the groundwork for healthy adult relationships. "These good, close relationships — we can't allow them to wilt away. They are essential to allowing kids to develop poise and allowing kids to play with their emotions, express emotions, all the functions of support that go with adult relationships," Professor Parker said. "These are things that we talk about all the time," said Lori Evans, a psychologist at the New York University Child Study Center. "We don't yet have a huge body of research to confirm what we clinically think is going on." What she and many others who work with children see are exchanges that are more superficial and more public than in the past. "When we were younger we would be on the phone for hours at a time with one person," said Ms. Evans. Today instant messages are often group chats. And, she said, "Facebook is not a conversation." One of the concerns is that, unlike their parents — many of whom recall having intense childhood relationships with a bosom buddy with whom they would spend all their time and tell all their secrets — today's youths may be missing out on experiences that help them develop empathy, understand emotional nuances and read social cues like facial expressions and body language. With children's technical obsessions starting at ever-younger ages — even kindergartners will play side by side on laptops during play dates — their brains may eventually be rewired and those skills will fade further, some researchers believe source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/fashion/02BEST.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1272877228-Io2cOlZpLaEr9zVdC2hksw