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Their study, #StatusofMind, surveyed almost 1,500 young people aged 14 to 24 on how certain social media platforms impact health and well-being issues such as anxiety, depression, self-identity and body image.

YouTube was found to have the most positive impact, while Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter all demonstrated negative affects overall on young people's mental health.

Instagram -- the image-saturated app with over 700 million users worldwide -- topped the list in terms of negative impact, most notably among young women, stated the report, published Friday.

Instagram draws young women to "compare themselves against unrealistic, largely curated, filtered and Photoshopped versions of reality," said Matt Keracher, author of the report.

"Instagram easily makes girls and women feel as if their bodies aren't good enough as people add filters and edit their pictures in order for them to look 'perfect,' " an anonymous female respondent said in the report.

To tackle the problem, the Royal Society for Public Health has called for social media platforms to take action in order to help combat young users' feelings of inadequacy and anxiety by placing a warning on images that have been digitally manipulated.

"We're not asking these platforms to ban Photoshop or filters but rather to let people know when images have been altered so that users don't take the images on face value as real," Keracher said.

"We really want to equip young people with the tools and the knowledge to be able to navigate social media platforms not only in a positive way but in a way that promotes good mental health," he added.

The survey concluded that while Instagram negatively affected body image, sleep patterns and added to a sense of "FOMO" -- the fear of missing out -- the image app was also a positive outlet for self-expression and self-identity for many of its young users.

"Because platforms like Instagram and Facebook present highly curated versions of the people we know and the world around us. It is easy for our perspective of reality to become distorted," she said. "Socializing from behind a screen can also be uniquely isolating, obscuring mental health challenges even more than usual."

Green added that it is important we lay the groundwork now to minimize potential harm as the first generation of social media users become adults.

YouTube was the only social media platform that demonstrated an overall positive impact on young people's mental health in the study.

The report also found that it's not just what young people are engaging with on social media but also how long they are engaging with it.

Young people who spend more than two hours per day connecting on social networking sites are more likely to report poor mental health, including psychological distress, according to the report.

"Platforms that are supposed to help young people connect with each other may actually be fueling a mental health crisis," Shirley Cramer, chief executive of the royal society, noted in the report.

To address this, the society has also recommended the introduction of a pop-up warning to alert users that they have been online for too long.

Seven in 10 young people surveyed supported the recommendation, but with experts describing social media use as more addictive than cigarettes and alcohol, it's not clear whether a "heavy usage" pop-up would be enough to break through that barrier.

Sir Simon Wessely, president of the UK's Royal College of Psychiatrists, supports an education-based approach and warns that demonizing social media is not the answer.

"I am sure that social media plays a role in unhappiness, but it has as many benefits as it does negatives," he said. "We need to teach children how to cope with all aspects of social media -- good and bad -- to prepare them for an increasingly digitized world. There is real danger in blaming the medium for the message."

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Instagram worst social media app for young people's mental health - CNN

Orkut is coming back to India with something brand new. No, we are not talking about the once-popular social networking platform that had the air taken out of it with Facebooks advent. Instead, we are talking aboutOrkut Bykkkten the platforms founder, whose new app Hello is now open for Indian users.

Back in the day, Orkut was probably thesocial network to have around. Everyone we knew was using Orkut and everyone who wasnt, was getting pestered by their friends to do so. Things were going great until Facebook came. With Zuckerbergs platform, we had one of the largest mass migrations in human history as droves of people left Orkut. The service dragged on its existence for a few years until 2014, when Google announced that it would be shutting it down for good.

It took Orkut two years to find his next idea, Hello. In 2016, he announced a platform that would be built around common beliefsand wold seek to connect people who held shared interests. The service is finally available in India as well.

The service is app only, and it has two different iterations for iOS and Android. Again, it is important to note that the platform does not lay as much focus upon people as it does upon activities. So, folks who like doing the same sort of stuff are more likely to be thrown together.

While announcing Hello, Orkut had said:

The world is a better place when we get to know each other, when we are a little less strange to each other Fear and hatred have no place when you make such a simple and friendly gesture to someone else.

The company currently has around 20 members, and is headquartered in San Francisco. Meanwhile, there isnt much buzz about its India launch yet, and Orkut may find pulling users from Facebook and all of its other properties, harder than it was for Facebook to pull users from Orkut back in 2008.

The rest is here:
Hello, the social network launched by Orkut's founder, is now open to Indian users - The Tech Portal

Attorney says judge violated Murfreesboro dad's 4th Amendment rights and took kids away. PHOTO: WZTV FOX 17 Nashville

Murfreesboro's Daniel Russell has two kids with his wife Kimberly and three from a previous marriage. Those three kids lived in Wayne county.

Out of the blue one day, he gets a phone call from DCS saying they are taking his kids from his ex-wife and going into state custody. Russell says he was told "if you want them, you have two hours."

I left work and got them, said Russell.

This wasn't easy. His family of four became a family of seven. His 16-year-old daughter was pregnant, and his son has a learning disability.

Nevertheless , Russell never hesitated. He got a bigger apartment and rolled up his sleeves. He and his wife joyfully accepted their new big family.

We keep a tight ship," Russell said. "We keep a calendar on the wall and have dinners planned out for a week. The kids came from a totally different environment, and the DCS workers saw that when they came to my house."

Truth was, Daniel Russell and his wife were loving it and his kids were too.

I got a permanent parenting plan in the mail, and they said they were closing the case, Russell said.

Russell went down to Waynesboro to close the case. Out of the blue, Russell says Juvenile Court Judge James Ross ordered him to take a drug test.

Keep in mind, Russell has no drug history. There is no order anywhere requiring drug screening during the process.

The judge was like 'you ain't gonna take a drug test?' and I said hold stop right there I think I need to consult an attorney, Russell said. "That's not what I said, that's not what is happening."

Russell said he would go to a commercial lab and take a drug test right then and there. The court said not good enough and dismissed the motion the close the case.

Judge Ross then rules there is probable cause that the children are neglected or abused and takes the kids from Daniel.

"All of a sudden, boom, I am under the bus, said Russell.

After that shocking hearing, Russell hired well-known family law attorney Connie Reguli.

Look at this objectively," Reguli said. "He came in and saved the day; took kids who were in a bad situation, got them re-stabilized in his home, in school, his daughter medical care, and he had to change his life with two hours notice, and then he thinks it's over and he goes to court and the next thing you know before the sun sets that day he is turning his kids over to DCS custody."

Daniel says Mikayla, Christopher and Hannah are heartbroken, ripped away from a dad who was showing how much he cared.

Judge Ross gives two kids to Daniel's brother and his daughter to his ex-wife's grandmother. They are not even living in the same county anymore.

Connie Reguli says this is a violation of Fourth Amendment rights, the right against illegal search and seizure without probable cause.

When you have someone walk in and there has never been an allegation , never a positive screen, no referral, no complaint there has never been anything that would even suggest this is a parent who abused drugs, this is a Fourth Amendment violation," Reguli said. "There is no loophole."

This man, who has already spent thousands of dollars to make a real home for his kids, is spending thousands getting them back.

Russell did take that drug test at a private lab, and it was negative. Now five weeks later, he still doesn't even have a court date to get his kids back.

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Attorney says judge violated Murfreesboro dad's 4th Amendment rights and took kids away - WZTV

If there is one thing to take away from the entire WannaCry ransomware debacle, it is how the NSA is largely responsible for these problems. To be more specific, the intelligence agency successfully kept a Windows vulnerability hidden from the public. Although the agency reported said issue to Microsoft, it is doubtful they did so right away. That may come to change, thanks to a new legislative proposal.

It is not entirely surprising to learn the US government is not too happy with NSA exploits being used to shut down computers all over the world. The WannaCry ransomware attack makes use of the EternalBlue vulnerability affecting the Windows SMB protocol. The NSA was all too aware of this problem, and it is their exploit code which was distributed on the internet which facilitated this global attack. Moreover, it continues to fuel other ransomware attacks as well.

To put things in order, a new legislative proposal has been drafted by Democratic Texas Senator Brian Schatz. If his bill were to be approved, the NSA will be legally obligated to share cyber exploits with the manufacturer immediately. Disclosure of such undocumented attack vectors will allow for companies to patch security holes a lot quicker and keep enterprises and consumers safe.

Part of this legislative proposal revolves around establishing a Vulnerability Equities Review Board. This board is made up of heads of US security agencies and Presidential Cabinet members. Their goal would be to create new policies and regulations to determine when non-government entities will need to be informed regarding tech exploits. Doing so should eventually reduce the number of cyber attacks as a whole.

For the time being, it remains to be seen if this bill will gain any major support from other politicians. Its a public secret the NSA has a lot more sway among politicians than most people would like. Keeping the country safe at all times is a very demanding job, even though the NSA as overextended its legal powers numerous times in the past. It is due time something changes to address this problem.

Moreover, Microsoft publicly criticizes the existing US cybersecurity policies for allowing security agencies not to disclose these vulnerabilities in a timely manner. In fact, the NSA did the opposite, as they created an in-house developed exploit to take advantage of this weakness whenever they wanted. Stockpiling such powerful weapons is a very dangerous business, as is evident in this particular case.

Although it took a group of hackers stealing the NSA exploits to bring this information to light, it is evident the NSA is not always acting in the publics best interest. In a strange way, the entire world should be grateful for what The Shadow Brokers did, as they exposed some of the NSAs most powerful hacking tools known to date. Unfortunately, their publication of said exploits has been used for nefarious purposes.

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Legislative Proposal Wants to Force NSA to Disclose Tech Exploits Sooner - The Merkle

This article first appeared on the Council on Foreign Relations site.

When giving talks on cybersecurity, I often get asked what keeps me up at night.

My short and glib answer is my four-year-old (he really is a horrible sleeper). I certainly dont sit up at night worrying about a cyberattack on the power grid or the manipulation of the stock market by cybercriminals.

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In fact, nothing I ever saw in classified channels about a cyber threat cost me a wink of sleep.

Other intelligence did, though, about planned terrorist attacks and nuclear proliferation and other horrors managed by other directorates. During the year I spent working on counterterrorism at DHS before I went to work on cybersecurity at the White House, I spent many nights wondering if we had made the right decisions to counter some very dangerous threats.

So when it comes to WannaCry, I dont discount the possibility that the closure of hospital ERs and the rescheduling of operations may have cost lives.

Many pundits in the field seem to agree with Edward Snowden, who told the Guardian that the NSA should have disclosed the vulnerability exploited by the malware when they found it, not when they lost it.

Yet, even Snowden hedges on whether disclosure would have prevented the attack. If the NSA had disclosed the vulnerability earlier, the attack may not have happened (emphasis added).

Snowden hedges because no amount of warning would have been enough to get Windows XP out of hospitals, or get hospitals to install the latest patches in a timely manner. If NSA had disclosed the vulnerability years ago, it would likely still remain exploitable today.

But I am also attuned to the reality that the intelligence collected by NSA through exploiting this vulnerability likely saved lives, possibly many.

Contrary to prevailing sentiments in the privacy community, NSA does not exploit vulnerabilities for its own amusement. I dont know what intelligence NSA collected using this exploit kit. What I do know is that it is difficult to overstate the importance of signals intelligence to our national security.

This picture taken on November 3, 2016 shows on a A viruses list at the LHS (High Security Laboratory) of the INRIA (National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation) in Rennes, France, November 3 2016. Robert K. Knake writes that the NSA deserves blame for losing the exploit kit but not for developing it in the first place. DAMIEN MEYER/AFP/Getty

That vulnerability may have been exploited to gather intelligence vital to negotiating the Iranian nuclear deal, slowing North Koreas program, or, yes, stopping a terrorist attack.

NSA deserves blame for losing the exploit kit, not for developing it in the first place. I am deeply disturbed that seven years after the Manning leaks, and four years after the Snowden leaks, we still dont have good protections against insider threats within the defense and intelligence community.

But NSA is a spy agency. More specifically, it is a signals intelligence agency. In the 21st century, that means it will, for certain missions, need to develop and exploit zero day vulnerabilities and not release them to the public.

Contrary to what Microsoft President Brad Smith has written, this incident doesnt show the dangers of stockpiling vulnerabilities. There is no evidence that NSA was hoarding hundreds or thousands of vulnerabilities it was not using (stockpiling). Instead, it shows they were actively exploiting a small number of very useful vulnerabilities.

Smith is right that this incident is comparable to the U.S. military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen. To continue the analogy, his solution suggests that the theft of a Tomahawk missile should mean that the U.S. government should remove them from its arsenal instead of tightening security controls around them.

We can blame NSA for poor operational security (though we should applaud them for getting information to Microsoft so a patch could be issued two months ago).

We can blame the criminals behind WannaCry for targeting hospitals.

And we can blame hospital administrators for wanting the benefits brought with the IT revolution without taking on the costs of securing or updating those systems.

But we cant blame the NSA for spying. Thats what they do.

Robert K. Knake is the Whitney Shepardson senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

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Don't Blame NSA for Making the WannaCry Cyberattack Program - Newsweek