He did what? Innnnteresting…

Thorough scientific study has revealed that lots of supposed vices can have surprising upsides: alcohol, sex, caffeine. Thanks to UC Berkeley researchers, we can now add another so-bad-but-oh-so-good habit to the list: Gossip, their new study suggests, can be a selfless act of public service.

Surreptitiously passing along the news that someone has behaved badly—what’s technically called “prosocial gossip”—can relieve stress, as well as warn others to regard the rule-breaker with a wary eye, the researchers say. (The study didn’t look directly at other forms of gossip—rumormongering, telling lies, anything said to a confessional cam on reality TV—so make of that what you will.)

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Don’t lie. Don’t steal. And don’t buy lollipops allegedly mouthed by infected children peddled over the internets. Apparently the third piece of advice doesn’t go without saying; parents who don’t want to give their kids vaccines in several states have turned to Facebook to find lollipops, spit, or rags from chickenpox-ridden youngsters, according to the Associated Press. Federal prosecutor Jerry Martin warns that the practice is dangerous and illegal—it’s a federal crime to ship known pathogens across state lines. It’s also likely to fail at spreading the virus since chicken pox needs to be inhaled to infect children, according to doctors, and is dangerous, since it could spread other diseases that more readily persist in saliva like hepatitis.

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Hopefully this guy has the “I’m Getting Arrested” app.

Plan on going to #OccupyWallStreet and getting arrested? There’s an app for that! A Brooklyn programmer (abhorred by getting so much coverage in the “lame-stream” press, no doubt) has made a free android app that allows would-be arrestees to alert their friends. Beforehand, you can program in a message and recipients, who you can alert upon pushing a single button. The app is appropriately called “I’m Getting Arrested.”

Once you’re in jail, you may need help calming down (if you manage to smuggle in your phone). Look no farther than MyCalmBeat, a smartphone app that measures your heart rate and helps you establish an optimal breathing rate, or “resonant frequency.” It works by calculating the breathing rate at which your heart rate has the highest variability, which is correlated with how relaxed you feel. Stressed people, the app’s programmers say, have relatively constant rates of heart rate, which makes stress worse.

Now all we’re missing is an app that redistributes wealth and does our job for us.

Image: WarmSleepy / Flickr

That’s walking dangerously—better slip on your flip-flops to avoid the cops.

Your walk is surprisingly distinctive, and it’s not just the way you waggle your fanny: it’s how your feet touch the ground. Just a few steps is enough for a program to recognize you 99% of the time, report scientists who had more than a hundred people leave their prints on sensors. The goal? Identifying people through carpet, of course. In case you can’t get to their fingerprints or retinas and so on.

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Get yer streetwalking permit here!

From 8:15 pm to 6:00 am each day, prostitution is legal in Germany, where working call girls staff brothels, sauna clubs, and other such establishments. In the city of Bonn, which, uh, “boasts” around 200 prostitutes, an average of 20 freelancers go cruising each night, picking up clients on the street and heading to garage-like structures called “consummation areas” the city put up especially for that purpose. They’ve thought of everything, those Germans!

Girls in the various brothel-like establishments have always been subject to a prostitution tax, but streetwalkers, apparently, haven’t being paying. Now, though, the city has a way to make things fair for everyone: a parking meter for prostitutes.

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Not just the Russians: A biometric ATM in Korea

ATMs in Russia may soon be outfitted with intelligence services–style lie detection software, designed to help banks pick out consumer credit fraud—without bank employees actually having to go through the arduous business of talking to and evaluating potential cardholders.

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IT consultant Sohaib Athar was just “taking a break from the rat-race by hiding in the mountains with his laptops” in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad when he described, in 140 characters or less, a helicopter hovering overhead and a “huge window shaking bang”—accidentally live-tweeting the U.S. raid that ended a decade-long manhunt and killed Osama bin Laden.

It’s clear from Athar’s tweets (@ReallyVirtual) that he had no idea what was going down—as evidenced by his reference to the “abbottabad helicopter/UFO“—but the unusual presence of helicopters and  Taliban disclaimer suggested to him that whatever was happening, it “must be a complicated situation.” UFO, not so much; situation, definitely.

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“Phishing” is the word used for the now-ubiquitous scams that try to pry money and personal information out of anybody being careless online. “Spear-phishing” is the term used for the more artful and dangerous practice of directed scams—the kind that can steal $8 million with a single email. Which is exactly what happened recently to magazine publisher Condé Nast.

It all started with an email last November from a man allegedly named Andy Surface to the accounts payable department of Condé Nast, which publishes Wired, Vogue, and many other popular magazines. The email provided a bank account number and asked Condé Nast to send its printing payments to the new account from now on. Because this new account was for Quad Graph, and Condé Nast’s printer is a company called Quad/Graphics, everything looked legitimate, which is why a company employee signed the request and began funneling payments.

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Tap that teddy bear and pay the price: $120,000. Or at least, that’s what Dianna Divingnzzo and her father, Sam Divingnzzo, are due to pay out after being slapped with federal wiretapping charges.

The fines arose from a custody case over Divingnzzo’s daughter with ex-husband William “Duke” Lewton. After Lewton was awarded unsupervised visitation, Divingnzzo put a recorder inside her daughter’s teddy bear (cutely, if not creatively, named “Little Bear”) to document suspected physical and verbal abuse by Lewton. The recorder taped continuously, while Divingnzzo occasionally copied the files and sent them to her father for transcription.

The Little Bear plan got hairy when Divingnzzo tried to use the material to win back sole custody, explains Ars Technica:

All of this material was then turned over to Dianna’s lawyers, who submitted it to the state court and waited for a ruling on its legality. In the summer of 2008, the state judge decided that the recordings were not admissible as evidence in the custody trial, since they violated the Nebraska Telecommunications Consumer Privacy Protection Act and were therefore obtained illegally.

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