Forthnightly Science News Digest - 30/06/12

Tractor Beams might be a reality:  the idea is be based on negative radiation pressure, using just light. In order to drag an object, negative pressure is needed. Previous ideas implemented gravitational pressure, heating air or inducing electrical or magnetic charges in objects. The latest proposal implements pressure differences created by light. This is already used in experiments as optical tweezers and can be used for making "tractor beams" thanks to unusual materials with negative refractive index. The mechanism depends on light that has group velocity and phase velocity travelling in opposite directions, which are able to create negative pressure. The applications can also span into the medical field, where it can be implemented in lung surgery as suction device.


Fuel cell runs on brain power:  the very idea under The Matrix movie might be right after all. Of course, with its limits. Scientists at MIT have developed an implantable fuel cell that generates electricity from the cerebrospinal fluid around the brain through glucose oxidation. This cell, unfortunately, with its hundreds of microwatts produced would not be able to power an electrical device through our body, but it can be a first step to more powerful machine being able to allow paralized patients to regain control of their arm and legs. The cell, which looks like a computer chip, strips electrons off the glucose and uses them to generate electricity.


Fracking can cause Earthquakes:  the National Research Council reports that fracking is linked to an increase in earthquakes magnitude and can even anticipate earthquakes which were due at a later time. The practice of fracking consist in pumping pressurised water and chemicals into cracks in the terrain and can create conducts to oil or gas reservoir. Shall we stop fracking then? Not really, as it is not the practice of fracking itself which causes the increase quakes chance, but the fact that the wastewater is stored into deep sandstone or other formations for permanent disposal, instead that on the surface. Most troubling, the committee found that there is no set of industry best practice in the operation, which might complicate the action of establishing rules on it.


Change in exoplanet atmosphere:  an international team of astronomers detected an abrupt change in an exoplanet atmosphere, using data from Hubble telescope. This exoplanet has been named HD 189733b and it was discovered in 2010 and classified as a gas giant bigger than Jupiter with an orbit very close to its sun, making it just a bit more than 2 Earth days. This incandescent fast ball of gas has been recently discovered to lose part of its atmosphere at rates of a thousand of tons a second! This was due to a solar flare, which due to the proximity of the planet made this catastrophic change to happen! The planet will still be a gas giant, since that much loss in gas is like a blow of wind for such big planets, but it was the first time we detected such a phenomenon and it is interesting to study planets with sudden changes in their atmosphere.


Chinese crew in space:  for the first time in history, on June 17 the Chinese launched and docked a crewed capsule in space. It is only the third nation being able to do that (US and Russia being ahead). This is a fantastic progress for Chinese space exploration and surely means that money and effort have been put to achieve it, and will be in the future. On the other side, Chinese effort in space exploration can be a worrying sign of a race similar to the one between US and Russia during the cold war. There is no doubt that it brings innovation, but space was becoming a peaceful target, especially with the construction of the ISS. It is good to know that there is another country being able to perform manned missions into space, especially now that cuts in NASA budget are killing most of the space missions in the US. Hopefully, China will be collaborative to space exploration with other nations, rather than an adversary.

Natural selection and prime numbers

The adults [of periodical cicadas] live for a few weeks, but the 'juvenile' stage (technically 'nymphs' rather than larvae) lasts for 13 years (in some varieties) or 17 years (in other varieties). The adults emerge at almost exactly the same moment, having spent 13 (or 17) years cloistered underground. Cicada plagues, which occur in any given area exactly 13 (or 17) years apart, are spectacular eruptions that have led to their incorrectly being called 'locusts' in vernacular American speech. The varieties are known, respectively, as 13-year cicadas and 17-year cicadas.
Now here is the really remarkable fact. It turns out that there is not just one 13-year cicada species and one 17-year species. Rather, there are three species, and each one of the three has both a 17-year and a 13-year variety or race. The division into a 13-year race and a 17-year race has been arrived at independently, n fewer that three times. It looks as though the intermediate periods of 14, 15 and 16 years have been shunned convergently, no fewer than three times. Why? We don't know. The only suggestion anyone has come up with is that what is special about 13 and 17, as opposed to 14, 15 and 16, is that they are prime numbers. A prime number is a number that is not exactly divisible by any other number. The idea is that a race of animals that regularly erupts in plagues gains the benefit of alternately 'swapping' and starving its enemies, predators o parasites. And if these plagues are carefully timed to occur a prime number of years apart, it makes that much more difficult for the enemies to synchronize they own life cycles. If the cicadas erupted every 14 years, for instance, they could be exploited by a parasite species with a 7-year life cycle. This is a bizarre idea, but no more bizarre than the phenomenon itself. 

Richard Dawkins - The Blind Watchmaker

Why scientists will never be popular

There's things that will never change, and one of them is here right in front of our eyes.

I know the news is a bit old, but I've bumped on this link which I saved in my favourites a while ago:

http://www.google.com/trends/?q=scarlett+johansson&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=0

I am curious by nature and I love interpreting data, then one of my favourite services of Google is of course, Google Trends. But this search shows something obvious to any reader. The amount of queries for "scarlett johansson" was ridiculously increased when there was the news that her nude pictures taken from her phone by some hacker and published over the internet. Then, it went back to almost normal after a few days (when people obtained the pictures or could not manage to get them).

I've found this particular search query so incredibly relevant to easily explain two problems:

-   Science will never be popular between the general public, as it is clear that people are interested in something else: porn. And all that comes with it, from nude pictures to light gossip between celebrities. If you ask people to name who won the Academy Awards in 2009 I am sure you'll get more right answers than asking who won the Chemistry Nobel prize in 2009. I can't even name anyone who won the ducking Nobel prize that year, figure how well would do someone not involved in science.

-   Never consider anything on your happily connected-to-the-internet smartphone as safe. If people wanted it, they could easily get something you consider private and share it. And don't think that legal actions will make you justice, as Ms. Joahnsson desperately tried. Anything which is (or has been) on the internet once, is public forever.
Oh, and if you use facebook on your mobile, everything in it is property of facebook, anyway.

Forthnightly Science News Digest - 15/06/12

Welcome to the very first FSND (Forthnightly Science News Digest)!

Every two weeks, I will group and give a brief comment about the news that I think are most relevant in science, so that you don't need to hunt for them or you won't feel ashamed the next time your geek friend will tell you "oh, have you heard...".

The past two weeks have been quite full of good exciting news and I've struggled to keep it short, but here we go:

Venus transit has happened:  it was all over the news the past week, so it was difficult to miss, but on the 6-7th of June, the Sun, Venus and Earth were in conjunction, which means that the Sun was "eclipsed" by Venus. Since the eclipse would be tiny, we call that transit, but we can still see the shadow of Venus passing in front of the Sun, creating the opportunity for fantastic shots. Unfortunately, if you want to see it again, you would have to wait until 2117, so this was a one-chance in a lifetime event. The strange periodicity of the transit is given by a simple recipe: Venus year being about 3/5 of Earth year and the Venus ecliptic being 3.4° tilted to the Earth ecliptic.
A peculiar event related to the transit puts some light on the thick Venus atmosphere (literally). A few days before the transit astronomer Daniele Gasparri took a shot of Venus, showing something we are not used to see: instead of seen one side of Venus illuminated by the Sun (like crescent Moon) there is a ring surrounding Venus. This is caused by refracted light.
And if you want to know more about the history behind the event.


Speeding neutrinos are not speeding:  you might remember the other big news from OPERA in Gran Sasso laboratory claiming the speed of neutrinos being faster than the speed of light according to measurements. This has shaken the scientific community, as Einstein's theory of relativity is solid and now scientifically accepted, because it explains many phenomena which are otherwise unexplained.
On the 8th of June, at the Neutrino 2012 conference in Kyoto, Japan, the OPERA collaboration announced that according to later measurements, the speed of neutrinos is almost the same as the speed of light (but not faster for sure). This is good news, even if kind of expected for two reasons: the precision of the experiment being ridiculously high for such speeds and Einstein's theory being rock solid. Case closed, now OPERA can focus on its real objective: finding tau neutrinos.


Higgs hunt is coming close to an end:  CERN is accumulating enough luminosity to be close to the statistical significance of a discovery for the Higgs boson. After the announcement of the past December there was lots of excitement about a peak building up in both ATLAS and CMS detectors around the masses of 124-126 GeV. It was a blinded experiment, meaning that ATLAS and CMS did not share any data in order to eliminate bias on the measurements.
Data collected over this months will be analysed in the summer and a major scientific achievement could be made this year: the discovery (or not) of the Higgs boson. Both outcomes are exciting and provide more research in both directions.
Even if I have personally worked in a group at ATLAS about W and Z bosons, and consequently the Higgs, my hope is that the Higgs boson will not be found and the peak will disappear into the background with enough statistics. My reasons for that is that the Higgs mechanism is a contrived theory in many ways and the theory being true, I think, would be a miracle itself, as it was developed as desperate theoretical model to explain the masses of the W and Z bosons.
Still, any news on the topic will be really exciting and the discovery of the most hideous particle would surely be something to celebrate and many people say, a sure Nobel Prize for Peter Higgs.


Fusion research funding restored in the US:  fusion research has been a dubious field for decades now. Since its advent, which predicted unlimited amount of energy, there has been only predictions of unlimited postponements. It is known, as a joke, that fusion has always been 20 years ahead. That is true, but it is also true that a success in fusion energy production would seriously solve the world's energy problem once and for all.
Two days ago, US Reps. Rush Holt visited the Princeton Plasma laboratory to announce that the $76 million funding has been restored for fusion energy research.
This is excellent news, as I think that even if fusion is not possible in reality, we need to get a clear answer, very soon, about its feasibility. A negative answer would be sad, but at least we could be able to move on and focus on alternatives. Holt said: “Fusion research is key to America’s energy future, and we are proud to have this important work in New Jersey”. I would replace America with World and I would agree on that. I hope that big news in the clean energies field will come soon.

10 Nautilus tips and tricks

This page has been moved to my new blog dedicated to Linux, here.

The eye's complexity

The light-sensitive cells ('photocells') are not the first thing the light hits, but they are buried inside and facing away from the light [...]. The first thing the light hits is, in fact, the layer of ganglion cells which constitute the 'electronic interface' between the photocells and the brain. Actually the ganglion cells are responsible for preprocessing the information in sophisticated ways before relaying on it to the brain and in some ways the word 'interface' doesn't do justice to this. 'Satellite computer' might be a fairer name. Wires from the ganglion cells run along the surface of the retina to the 'blind spot', where they dive through the retina to form the main trunk cable to the brain, the optic nerve. There are about three million ganglion cells in the 'electronic interface', gathering data from about 125 million photocells. [...] As you look at the fine architecture of the photocell, keep in mind the fact that all that complexity is repeated 125 million times in each retina. And comparable complexity is repeated trillions of times elsewhere in the body as a whole. The figure of 125 million photocells is about 5,000 times the number of separately resolvable points in a good-quality magazine photograph. The folded membranes on the right of the illustrated photocell are the actual light-gathering structures. Their layered form increases the photocell's efficiency in capturing photons, the fundamental particles of which light is made. If a photon is not caught by the first membrane, it may be caught by the second, and so on. As a result of this, some eyes are capable of detecting a single photon. The fastest and most sensitive film emulsions available to photographers need about 25 times as many photons in order to detect a point of light.

Richard Dawkins - The Blind Watchmaker

How to circumvent the Pirate Bay censorship

The annoying screen many people are
experiencing when trying to access
the domain piratebay.org.

I wrote a post about Pirate Bay being censored in Italy a few years ago. I was disgusted at the time and I provided some methods to get around the block.

When I've heard the same news here, not so long ago, I could not believe it. How ignorant and naive must a government be to think that blocking a torrent website should stop piracy?

I will not go into describing all of the copyright problems and morality of using Pirate Bay, as the debate is big and still going on, but I must comment on how stupid is the choice of blocking it.

First of all, I am against any form of censorship and this alone puts me against that choice.
Most importantly, though, Pirate Bay is only one of the million torrent websites. Stopping one is like vaccinating one person against malaria and thinking of having eradicated the bacteria forever.
On top of that, people will always find way around to such puny barriers, and I will list a few down:

1. This is the most hilarious. There is already a new domain with Pirate Bay on it for UK people:
   
   tpb.pirateparty.org.uk
   
   This might be brought down as well, but no worries.
   
2. Use a web-proxy, such as Anonymouse. This is the "anonimized" link to Pirate Bay:
   
   http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http://thepiratebay.se/
   
   It's as easy as that and safe on the long-term.
3. Use a proxy (there are many) or VPN services as TOR or Hotspot Shield. Which might be even useful to bypass other country-dependent blocks. 

If you want to stop piracy, you need to think of other smarter and indirect ways. We are in 2012 and it is still much easier to download a pirated version of a movie or a game rather than buying it. This means that a service provided by pirates, for free, is better than any one provided by big money-eater production companies, which only good job is putting irrelevant locks and pointless anti-piracy videos on their products.

Take as an example a person wanting to see a movie already out on DVD:

Legal way:
- Find movie on Amazon.
- Look for cheapest price and buy.
- Wait a few days (or more) for the DVD to be shipped and arrive.
- Put on DVD and watch 10 minutes of trailers even if you didn't ask for it (and can't be skipped).
- Watch the same anti-piracy video for the billionth time, even if you know it by heart, and even if, to watch it, you must've bought your beloved DVD in the most legal way possible.
- Finally watch the movie, if you still have some time left.


Illegal way:
- Find movie on any torrent website.
- Look for positive reviews and download torrent.
- Wait 20 minutes.
- Enjoy movie.


Honestly, I would pay for the illegal way.
A big applause to the incompetent, narrow-minded governments, production companies and anti-piracy associations around the world.

Facebook Change of Regulations

From the 1st of June to the 8th of June 2012, Facebook opened a "voting" which I would rather call "pool", because at the end it is Facebook itself that decides what actions to take.

Nevertheless, I think it is important to vote. Firstly because they gave us a chance to, but also because some sort of action must be taken from its side, if too many people are not happy with the changes in the SRR (Statements of Rights and Responsibility) and Data Use Policy.

Yes, yet another change in Facebook regulations. For some reason, though, Facebook did not publicize this very well. I got to know this just today, while events such as the introduction of the Timeline were repeatedly posted in the Facebook main page. Is there something going on? I don't know, but this time I wanted to be sure I read all the regulations carefully (or as much carefully as I can).

Unfortunately, even if everyone should have and should do, I am sure only a few percentage of the Facebook users actually read the regulations. Mostly because of lack of time (which is a bit contradictory, given that time will be wasted on Facebook anyway) or laziness.
For that reason I wanted to be of some help and read all of the old and new regulation, trying to group the main changes and the points which stand out of the long and tedious list of already known regulations.
Also, Facebook provided some pages related to the changes, but they might be misleading in the sense that they (obviously) depict the change as an improvement and do not talk about the potential problems.

Proposed changes (as of April-May 2012)

SRR

• Section 2.3: the sentence: "When you use an application, the application may ask for your permission to access your content and information" was completed with "as well as content and information that others have shared with you".
  
  What does this mean? If you share something with your friend, e.g. like a page "I love doughnuts", an application which your friend uses may steal (rightfully) this information about you.
  
  Is this fair? Of course not, because everything you now share can be potentially sold to companies not by you, but by your friends using some application. For example, it might be a news application, that your friend uses, that knowing that you love doughnuts, will now show more doughnut-related news to you. But according to Facebook, it was already in the Privacy Policy since May 2008, and now has also been specified in the SRR. I do not agree with this, but Facebook finds its ways, apparently, and cover this as an "improvement in the social experience".
  
  Fortunately, not many people know, but you have control about what apps can see about your information and turn them off (reccomended) in the Privacy Settings under “Apps and Websites”.
• Section 3.7: not a big deal (hopefully), changing the word hateful to hate speech.
• Section 5.9: added a clause "You will not tag users or send email invitations to non-users without their consent". This is not a change in the tagging system, but a statement.
• Section 6.3: change of wording, maybe a bit more general now, but the meaning is the same. This applies for mobiles. The concept is that anything you have on your device can be rightfully used by Facebook within their regulations when you sync it. It is a horrible thing, but it was there already.
• Section 8: changed the word "Share links" to "Social Plugins". This may seem like a small change but it is not quite. This whole section is dedicated on the rights they have if you put the "Share on Facebook" or "Like on Facebook" button in your website/blog. Before, there was only the share button, but now, with many changes, there are others, like the Like, so basically if any of these Social plugins is in your website, you will be strictly tied up on Facebook. You can find the Social plugins here, I'm sure you've seen them already in other sites.
  
  The consequences? Everything you write on your website/blog post must follow Facebook regulations, and you give permission to use the content of the page in which the Social Plugin is. This was the case before with the Share button, but now it has extended to every single plugin. Is the change fair? Maybe, since they had the same regulations just for the share button before, but many of the plugins are not related at all with sharing, but only to post comments or recommend similar pages.
  
  What is not fair is in the fact that putting any of those button in your website gives some rights to Facebook. It is like when banks give out free pens as advertisement, then they ask you that whatever you write with those can be used by them against you. But that was already there in previous regulations.
• Section 13: this is a new section regarding updates on any Facebook Software (since this is a new thing) and pointing out the fact that it is not open source.
• Section 14: this section regards the change on the regulation itself and how will you be notified and when. There are a few points added here, regarding how you accept the regulations.
  
  For how ridiculous it might sound: you automatically accept the regulations if you continue using Facebook, even if you haven't read the regulations. It's like signing a contract automatically because you have not obliged. And the only way to do so, is leaving Facebook. Very democratic, I would say.
  Also, it is in your interest to read the new regulations on the Site Governance Page (that come up less than yearly now) and "accept" them by continuing using Facebook.
• Section 17: this section is about legality in global terms, for countries outside USA. The change is that they added "non-users" in the regulations. For non-user they mean pages of companies or websites which are not single users. I think this is a fair change, as that could have been a hole now that even non-users can have pages on Facebook.
  
  Unfortunately, according to this section, anything you have on Facebook can be used by the US government against you. But this was present in the previous regulation as well.
  
  
  

Data Use Policy

There are some general changes on words due to the introduction of Timeline, but let's pass to the main points:

•  Section I: describes the information they receive and how is it used
  
  -   There are a few more sources of how they receive information from your friends or your actions, but it should be obvious that anything done while logged in Facebook is a source of information for them.
  -   They removed this clause on how they treat data about you coming from advertising companies: "When we receive data about you from our advertising partners or customers, we keep the data for 180 days. After that, we combine the data with other people's data in a way that it is no longer associated with you." . This is a big (negative) change and the consequence is that Facebook will keep data associated with your name for as long as they want to, giving them more power of choice.
  -   They added more specific (but confusing) uses of your data, as providing specific ads based on your interests (they were already doing that, though), or mysterious data analysis and research.
  -   There are more detailed information about account deactivation and deletion, and data retention, which were already applied, but not specified (they keep information about your account even after deletion).
• Section II: this section describes the sharing and finding of users
  
  -   More information and tips about privacy are added, some of them obvious and some of them not really adding anything new, but not a bad thing overall.
  -   More tips for mobile users and reminders of privacy concerns, connecting with SRR:Section-6.
  -   Addition of new rules for new tools coming from the swap to Timeline.
• Section III: this section describes regulation for social plugins, other websites and applications
  
  -   Again more information about Facebook Platform and social plugins, which are new since the last regulations. I have talked about them in the SRR regulations, above.
• Section IV: this section describes the working of advertising and sponsored stories
  
  -   There is more information about cookies.
  -   More details about the ads off Facebook, which may be based on information about you gathered from the website. Delicious news for advertisement companies, but nothing really new.
  -   Explanation of the difference between sponsored stories and ads.
  
   
• Section V: a new section specifically on cookies and similar evilry. They suggest that cookies can be removed or blocked, but the problem is that they do not tell that Facebook needs cookies to work otherwise it won't work at all.
• Section VI: this section is about other information which didn't fit into previous sections. This is mostly about legal disputes. But, also, they introduce a new "Download Your Information" tool that permits to download the user information and history. The problem is that using that you will download only part of the information they keep within the servers, which might be the public information. It does not provide a way to download the raw entire information about a profile. The rest is new features and Timeline changes.

General comments on the changes

In conclusion, my view on the changes is that I oppose them.

Facebook is trying to get slowly more power, by the action of slow changes and by letting users "accept" the changes without asking for permission. The SRR has worsened and the Data Use Policy contains more information of things Facebook was doing already but that were not specified in written form (and it's not good things, unfortunately).

Whatever your view is, please vote, as it will not do harm, but most importantly, you should also read carefully what you are going into, before giving out your life to a company.

Boris bikes

It has been a while since Boris Johnson, current Major of London, introduced the bicycle sharing scheme and I had a chance to use them as well, now.

There are really many advantages in using "Boris bikes" as:

-   It's cheap and easy to rent. You can purchase a day or week access fee and then you are off. The first 30 minutes of renting is free, which is reasonable for any short distance in Central London, more convenient than taking a bus, for which a return ticket would cost almost three times the price of renting a cycle.

-   Cycling is good for your health, etc. etc.

-   You don't need to worry about where to tie down your own cycle, and then no need to worry about cycle thieves (which I'm still thanking for easing my decision towards buying a new wheel and a new saddle).

The downsides, though, can unfortunately be pretty terrible:

-   You can't leave your cycle everywhere and you need to find a docking station and then plan your route in advance, unless you have a lot of confidence in your luck (sometimes they are hidden from the main roads).

-   It is amazing how difficult is to find a cycle at certain times. As many people are using them, the locations in the centre are filled up in the morning and emptied at night, while the opposite happens for locations outside the centre. This is understandable as people go back home at night and go to work in the morning. Unfortunately, I need exactly the opposite (usually: going back home drunk at night and leaving home when I wake up in the afternoon) and it is extremely frustrating and time-wasting looking for the nearest docking station with cycles in it, and it also becomes a problem when you have to leave your cycle and the docking station is full.

I think that I'll continue to use the service, though. Not that I don't mind walking for 20 minutes looking for a non-empty docking station, but maybe the desire to find it full when I need it will regulate my already messed-up body clock.

My (second) take on Facebook

"Once you have shared any information online, even with a restricted audience, you need to consider that as being in the public domain. Although you may be able to control which members of your social circle can see that information, you can't control what they do with it."

-Rik Ferguson

What would have been the best way to celebrate the re-opening of this blog?
Looking at the motivations that moved me to open it, of course!

I've looked at the first post on this blog, back in 2009 and I've been repeatedly pierced by its sharpness. I had some good hate against Facebook, such that I even put the label "hate" to the post and deleted my account. Good move, I'd say now, but I think I rejoined Facebook after a week, if I remember well.

That was only 3 years ago and the world has changed much, and I have as well with it. And so did Facebook. Let's see some of its milestones:

- Facebook is approaching 1 billion users. Humans are bad in judging dimensions, so I'll try to let it picture to you in easier words: one every seven persons in the World (including poor countries) is on Facebook. That is more than three times the population of US.

- A movie has been made about Facebook. If you would have told someone in the nineties that a movie about a website would be shot, they would just laugh at you and wrote about your outrageous idea on their geocities.

- Facebook has decided to go through its initial public offering, and the company could value as much as $105 billion. It hopes to raise $10 billion when it begins to sell its shares and that would dwarf Google's. (Update: it did already!)

- Timeline has been introduced and the general look and workings of Facebook has changed.

In a few words, Facebook has now got power. This is something that did not happen before. We all know what happened to social networking websites as MySpace or Live Messenger. They have been very popular and they are now a cemetery of the past. Will this happen to Facebook as well? I do not think so. It has established well on the internet (and now even the market) and it will be hard to see its end soon thanks to its slick CEO and the huge popularity it has reached. In social networking websites people look for places where they can find most of the friends they know in real life and that is already a huge disadvantage for any other website that wants to take off.

What scares me most is when people say: "Internet is Facebook". If that would be the case in the future, I would officially declare the internet dead. I might be a bit too nostalgic, but the golden period of internet was right at the beginning of Web 2.0. For those who think Internet is Facebook, I can safely say that they have never known the Internet. Nowadays, though, it is difficult to stay away from Facebook as it is the most convenient and free (for now, even if I think it will always be) way to connect with friends. It has cunning traps, though, so if we can't avoid it, what to do?


Use your brain before sharing. This is my philosophy. People should really understand that everything that goes on the internet with their name, can be easily considered public and non-removable from anyone's eyes, for an unlimited period of time. Writing something on the internet is more effective than throwing thousands of flyers off a plane, and that is not an exception on Facebook. Even if something is shared only with a certain group of people, don't take it granted it's safe. In the case of Facebook it's even worse, since everything you share is now in possession of Facebook. The disgusting side of the coin is that it uses it to track your interests so that it shows the perfect advert to you and makes money from it. If you are even fine with that, do not think the information is still safe, as Facebook has changed many times its privacy regulations at its will. The ironic part, though, is that last year it even made public some private photos of its CEO Mark Zuckerberg. So, if even the founder of Facebook is not safe from it, why would you think you are?

Last month Facebook introduced the Timeline. I've seen thousands of people lamenting. Unfortunately they were lamenting for the change of interface. I hope people did also see what Facebook was trying to do. They are trying to get everything from the user's life, trying to reconstruct the events even before we joined facebook. Smart marketing move as Facebook is trying to convince us to give all of our privacy information, for free, with the clever excuse of "improving our social experience". But the scary part comes from the big part of the young population on facebook, who shares irresponsibly every moment of their life. Facebook has become the new diary, but if in the past diaries had locks, now they are more public than an advert board, and held by an external company.

Facebook is not that evil overall (nothing can get as evil as banks) but it is now entering people life more than it should, especially in youngsters. I think a new branch of education should be formed: internet education. This will surely go against interests of Facebook and many other websites, but it is necessary from protecting ourselves from the chaotic dungeon that has now become the Internet.