Blogs / Discoblog

In what looks like an act of conveniently looking the other way, social networking site Facebook doesn’t seem to mind that a new Facebook fad is violating the site’s terms of service.

If you are a self-respecting Facebooker, you must have come across a bunch of people changing their profile pictures during “Doppelganger Week,” in which people change their picture to that of the celebrity they think they resemble.

While this is allowing a busload of people to unabashedly proclaim that they resemble the world’s hottest celebrities, it also flies in the face of the Facebook terms of service. As CNET reports, the legalese states explicitly:

“You will not post content or take any action on Facebook that infringes or violates someone else’s rights or otherwise violates the law… We can remove any content or information you post on Facebook if we believe that it violates this Statement.” So unless you took that celebrity photo yourself or bought the rights to it, it’s probably infringing on someone’s copyright.

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It’s official. Even people in space are tweeting. NASA announced today that astronaut T.J. Creamer on the International Space Station has become the first person to tweet directly from space, making use of a brand new direct Internet connection. Creamer tweeted: “Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station — the 1st live tweet from Space! More soon, send your ?s”

Yay. Space tweets. Sweet.

In the past, astronauts could use email and twitter–but they had to relay their messages to ground control in Houston, who then sent them on. But now, thanks to the new system of personal Web access, called the Crew Support LAN, astronauts can take advantage of existing communication links to and from the station and browse the Web directly.

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“The internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes,” former Republican Senator Ted Stevens explained back in 2006.

And now, thanks to that series of tubes, you can watch a bear give birth. We don’t know what Stevens would make of this, but here comes the bear-cam.

The BBC reports that for the very first time, a webcam has been placed inside the den belonging to a pregnant wild black bear named Lily, and the “bear-cam” will stream live images to the web as she gives birth.

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There might just be some truth to the notion that excessive indulgence in the “interweb” makes people a tad–just a wee bit–cuckoo.

Research being conducted by the Clalit Health Maintenance Organization, Israel’s largest HMO, points to a possible connection between unrestricted Internet use and the occurrence of psychotic episodes.

According to the Israeli paper Haaretz, researchers presented three cases of individuals who experienced psychotic episodes in the wake of intensive, prolonged Web surfing that included the development of a close online relationship with another person. All the three subjects were women between the ages of 30 and 50 with no significant psychiatric history. Two of them had no previous history of mental problems, although one had been treated for anxiety in the past.

Each of the three ladies had experienced an unsatisfactory intimate relationship in the past, and developed a dependent relationship with a man over the Internet without ever meeting him face-to-face.

As Haaretz explains:

The subjects’ psychoses included a total disconnection from reality, and in the case of one of the women also involved tactile hallucinations; she imagined that she could feel the man with whom she was having a “virtual relationship” touching her.

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It snowed and snowed and snowed in Britain this week, enough that many people in the country got stuck at home. But some of those people still had a good time. A Web site intended to help restless married people meet one another called IllicitEncounters.com reports a surge in new members over the last few days—more than 2,500 in the last six days—particularly from areas hit hard by the wintry weather, like Hampshire and Berkshire. From Reuters:

“In light of these figures, I’d be interested to see how much work those ‘working from home’ have actually done,” IlicitEncounters.com spokeswoman Sara Hartley said in a statement.

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The elite online dating club BeautifulPeople.com (yes, this is a real Web site), trimmed 5,000 members from its service because they appear to have indulged in too much Christmas ham.

Feast your eyes on this excerpt from the company’s statement, via CNN:

“As a business, we mourn the loss of any member, but the fact remains that our members demand the high standard of beauty be upheld,” said Robert Hintze, founder of BeautifulPeople.com. “Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model and the very concept for which BeautifulPeople.com was founded.”

Publicity stunt? Probably. Shocking? Hardly. When vain folks sign up for a service so they can be rated by a group of narcissistic pretty people this is bound to happen.

If you’re one of the expelled 5,000, don’t let this get you down. The company says you’re welcome to reapply—after the love handles are gone, of course.

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Image: Beautifulpeople.com

Consider this post to be your daily reminder to check your social network privacy settings–too much transparency could cost you your insurance benefits, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation:

Nathalie Blanchard, a Granby resident, says she’s suffering from severe depression that has made it impossible for her to work full-time for the past 18-months.

She says her sick leave payments were cut after insurance giant Manulife obtained profile pictures on Facebook showing her at bars, whooping it up during her birthday and on a beach holiday.

Blanchard, who lives in Quebec province, said her doctor told her to go have some fun, but apparently her insurer thought she was having too much to be depressed. According to another CBC article, the moments of revelry didn’t cure her condition:

“In the moment I’m happy, but before and after I have the same problems” as before, she said.

She’s taking them to court, in what should be an interesting case to test social media’s reach into the real world. The case suggests a host of other difficult questions: Can insurance companies raise your premiums if they see a picture of you smoking a cigarette on the internet? Will the court decide you can make a medical diagnosis from a Facebook picture? What about a weekend’s worth of happy tweets?

Another take home lesson, kids, is that should you make headlines, for whatever dubious reason, your Facebook pics will also be on the news. However in this case, Blanchard offered up her photos to get her story to the media. ABC News has a short video interview with Blanchard on their site.

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Image: Facebook

Technology writer Chris Stevens calculated the weight of the Internet by adding up all the computers, iphones, blackberries, servers, cables –  and just for fun, viruses and websites. The damage comes to 498,438,559,990 kilograms, which Wolfram|Alpha tells us is 1.7 times the mass of all humans currently alive.

CNET tries to help readers imagine this bulk:

There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. The Internet is very heavy indeed. To give you some idea of just how heavy the internet is, imagine an absolutely enormous tower of computers and servers and cables reaching up into the sky like the evil fingers of some apocalyptic demon. Now imagine sparks, thunder, electrical storms. And, on top of it all, an otter screaming pointlessly. That is the closest you are likely to come to visualising the Internet.

The author claims that “for the first time in the world, we have precisely and scientifically calculated the weight of the Internet.”

Well that’s interesting, considering that Stephen Cass, writing for DISCOVER, calculated the weight of the Internet back in 2007 and came to a very different answer. Cass ignored the hardware, and instead calculated the weight of  online information by taking the total estimated Web traffic of 40 petabytes (40 x 10¹⁵ bytes: a 4 followed by 16 zeros) and figuring out the weight of the electrons required to store that information. His total?

The weight of the Internet adds up to just about 0.2 millionths of an ounce.

However, a year before that, in 2006, Russell Seitz, calculated the weight of the internet to be 2 ounces. You can read more about his calculations on his blog.

So which is it, readers? Weigh in on whose calculation is closest to the truth.

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Image: flickr / sugree

Swine flu has returned, just as predicted, and is getting the better of us—46 states have reported cases of the flu already. And even if you want to take precautions by getting vaccinated, there aren’t enough vaccines to go around.

In any case, when you take sick days to recover, the last thing you’d want to do is be at home without access to the Internet. The Washington Post brings up a good point: If the flu truly becomes a pandemic, then the sick will begin accessing their Internet from home en masse. Such an increase in traffic might overwhelm the system and clog networks run by Comcast, AT&T, Cox, and Verizon. The Post reports:

The Department of Homeland Security is in charge of communications networks during times of national emergency. But it doesn’t have a strategy to deal with overloaded Internet networks—an essential resource to keep the economy humming, and residents informed and connected during a pandemic, the GAO said. Furthermore, the DHS hasn’t coordinated with agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission to create guidelines for how telecom, cable and satellite providers can minimize congestion.

There are solutions, but each has its downsides. Adding bandwidth capacity would be a little too late, and cost too much. Slowing connections to some ‘hoods would violate service agreements to those customers. And blocking traffic to Web sites would require government approval.

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Image: flickr/ hitthatswitch

Not even one week after the Balloon Boy hoax that riveted cable networks and American audiences, two video games have already been rolled out based onb Falcon Heene’s fake-out journey. The first, called the Balloon Boy Game, is distributed by Web start-up Heyzap. The second, Balloon Boy Adventure, is hosted on Newgrounds.com. Here’s a review from the Christian Science Monitor:

Both games are pretty straightforward. In the Balloon Boy Game, seen in the image at right, the user pilots young Falcon Heene across an urban cityscape. Falcon hangs haplessly onto the balloon; there is an option to shoot at seagulls, or grab free power-ups. In Balloon Boy Adventure, neither Falcon nor his father, Richard Heene are present – there’s only that big tinfoil muffin of a balloon.

Anecdotally, the games are enjoying a good deal of success… But for tech junkies, the most interesting part about the Balloon Boy games is that they exist at all.

Yup, it took developers all of half a day to come up with a concept and execute it into a workable game. Even more impressive would be gaming that’s simultaneous with the cable news coverage.

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Image: Courtesy of Heyzap