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Calcutta News.Net Tuesday 25th September, 2012

LONDON Facebook has termed as false a rumour that users' private messages were appearing on public timelines even as the social network's managers were summoned by the French government to explain claims that some users' privacy had been breached.

Users, mostly in France, reported that "private messages" sent between 2007-2009 were suddenly public.

Facebook told the BBC: "[The] messages were older wall posts that had always been visible on the users' profile pages.

Industrial Renewal Minister Arnaud Montebourg and the junior minister for the digital economy, Fleur Pellerin, said Facebook managers had been summoned before France's CNIL data watchdog to explain the rumours.

"Clear and transparent explanations must be given without delay," they said.

"This incident underlines once again the importance of protecting personal data in the digital world and the lack of transparency in handling them," reports AFP.

A meeting was held between Facebook managers and CNIL officials.

A source at the company told the BBC that engineers said there was "no way" the two areas of data could get mixed up.

The source said that "no mechanism" had ever been created that would allow a private message to be published onto a user's wall or timeline.

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Social networking site Facebook denies private messages becoming public

By Matikas Santos INQUIRER.net

3:51 pm | Tuesday, September 25th, 2012

MANILA, PhilippinesA man who allegedly hacked his ex-girlfriends social networking and email accounts and demanded sex in exchange for the passwords was arrested by the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG).

Police Director Samuel Pagdilao Jr., Chief of the CIDG, identified the suspect as Joewell Santos Chan, 28, from Paraaque City. He was arrested after his ex-girlfriend identified only as Dominique sought the help of the CIDG Anti-Transnational and Cyber Crime Division (ATCCD) regarding the hacking of her account and the demands of Chan.

Dominique told the CIDG that Chan admitted hacking her account and was demanding to meet with her in exchange for the passwords. She however was taken to a motel and given alcoholic drinks by Chan. She also found out that the password given by Chan did not work.

She said that Chan again requested to meet with her but when she refused, he threatened to post in a social networking site the videos and pictures he took when they were in the motel. It was at this point that she sought the help of the police, she said.

Initial investigation conducted by the CIDG found that Chan opened a new account using Dominiques name and photos.

Chan was later arrested after he set a meeting with Dominique on September 21, 2012. She informed the police about the meeting and they made preparations to catch the suspect.

Dominique said that Chan was again demanding her to come with him to a motel. When she refused, he forcibly dragged her to his car. Police were quick to swoop in and arrest Chan.

Police found in Chans cell phone several images downloaded from Dominiques email account as well as text messages for her containing threats, harassment, intimidation and coercion.

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Man arrested for hacking ex-girlfriend’s social networking, email accounts

Doctors may soon have a new zit zapper, thanks to the discovery that a harmless virus living on human skin seeks out and kills pimple-causing bacteria.

A paper on this pimple enemy is in the latest issue of the American Society for Microbiology's mBio.

"Acne affects millions of people, yet we have few treatments that are both safe and effective," co-author Robert Modlin was quoted as saying in a press release. "Harnessing a virus that naturally preys on the bacteria that causes pimples could offer a promising new tool against the physical and emotional scars of severe acne."

ANALYSIS: Is This the Perfect Face?

Modlin is chief of dermatology and professor of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He and his colleagues investigated two microbes: Propionibacterium acnes, a bacterium thriving in our pores that can trigger acne; and P. acnes phages, a family of viruses that live on human skin. They seem to hate zits but nothing else, rendering them harmless to people.

P. acnes is the bane of many teenagers and other acne victims. When this bacteria aggravates the immune system, it causes the swollen, red bumps associated with acne.

"We know that sex hormones, facial oil and the immune system play a role in causing acne, however, a lot of research implicates P. acnes as an important trigger," explained co-author Laura Marinelli, a UCLA postdoctoral researcher in Modlin's laboratory. "Sometimes they set off an inflammatory response that contributes to the development of acne."

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For the study, she and her colleagues lifted acne bacteria and the P. acnes viruses from the noses of both pimply and clear-skinned volunteers. After studying the material, they discovered that the small size, limited diversity and killing capabilities of the viruses make them good candidates for a new anti-acne therapy.

"Our findings provide valuable insights into acne and the bacterium that causes it," co-author Graham Hatfull said. "The lack of genetic diversity among the phages (a virus parasitic in bacteria) that attack the acne bacterium implies that viral-based strategies may help control this distressing skin disorder."

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Excellent Idea of the Day: Viral Pimple Killer

Threatwatch is your early warning system for global dangers, from nuclear peril to deadly viral outbreaks. Debora MacKenzie highlights the threats to civilisation and suggests solutions

It's one of those stories where bemused interviewers ask, how worried should we be? Two people from the Arabian peninsula picked up a virus no one has ever seen before; one is now very ill, the other has died. The virus belongs to the same family as SARS, another virus no one had seen before when it emerged from China in 2002.

SARS circled the globe and killed almost 800 people, and those are just the ones we know of. Were it not for a landmark global effort in disease control and a fair amount of luck it would probably still be out there. Is the still-nameless Middle Eastern virus the next SARS?

No it isn't yet. But this column is about watching for threats, so we can protect ourselves. And this story is exactly that. We know about this virus solely because of a European Union project set up in response to SARS. It funds scientists to monitor unusual infections and spot the next SARS, or whatever, before it's crawling through city tower blocks and international airports.

"If we had known about SARS when it had only infected a few people, we might have stopped it then," says Ab Osterhaus of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, who helped set up the system.

A 60-year-old Saudi man died in July of pneumonia plus kidney failure. Doctors there sent samples to Ron Fouchier at Erasmus, who caused a storm last year with work that made H5N1 bird flu virus transmissible among mammals.

A man from Qatar with the same symptoms was flown to London for intensive care in September. Rotterdam asked for a sample. Preliminary sequencing suggests both men were infected by the same new virus, says Osterhaus.

The technology now available for sequencing whole viruses within days means new human respiratory viruses are being discovered at the rate of about one per year, says John Oxford of Queen Mary College in London. But sequencing is too expensive to routinely screen every unexplained illness without help.

"It's like stamp collecting," says Osterhaus. "You don't know when something is going to turn out to be interesting," so ordinary research funding doesn't cover it. Neither the Saudi nor the Qatar sample would have been sequenced, he says, without the European Union's EMPERIE programme, set up after SARS to watch for novel viruses with the aim of catching the next epidemic before it gets out of control.

"It gives us a whole virus discovery machine," says Osterhaus, from screening bats, to sequencing samples from humans, to alerting medics to watch for odd cases. Now they know this family of coronaviruses can kill people, they also know to handle it at safer levels of containment.

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Threatwatch: New killer virus in the Middle East

It is called Novel Coronavirus, it is deadly and it is a nightmare: it seems the virus that causes the common cold has mutated to a pathogenic strain which causes severe respiratory problems and kidney failure. It has been confirmed that this type of virus has never been found before in humans. The epicenter seems to be Saudi Arabia; to date there is one death and one person in the ICU.

The human toll so far is one man dead in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (a 60-year-old Saudi national) and one Qatari national with a history of travel to Saudi Arabia seriously ill in an Intensive Care Unit in a London hospital, where he is in isolation with serious respiratory problems and kidney failure.

The patient is a previously healthy 49-year-old male, a Qatari national, whose symptoms began on September 3. Before the symptoms appeared, he had traveled to Saudi Arabia (Riyadh) and by September 7 he was in an ICU in Doha, Qatar. He was transferred to London on September 11.

Laboratory tests carried out by the Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands has confirmed that the virus isolate present in the latter case indicates a 99.5% similarity with the identity of the isolate obtained from the fatal case earlier this year. There is a mismatch of one nucleotide.

According to the World Health Organization, "Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses which includes viruses that cause the common cold and SARS. Given that this is a novel coronavirus, WHO is currently in the process of obtaining further information to determine the public health implications of these two confirmed cases". These cases, however, are not SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Symdrome, which broke out in the Far East in 2002-2003, causing nearly one thousand fatalities worldwide and was linked to civets).

The WHO (as usual) does not recommend travel restrictions.

Several questions are raised here:

1. Does the mismatch in the nucleotide mean that the virus is evolving?

2. Are we about to see a deadly remake of the Swine Flu Pandemic (A H1N1) of 2009, when the authorities which are supposed to protect us stood back and limited themselves to informing the world's population as to how the virus was progressing?

3. Does swift and decisive action by the authorities mean that the pharma industry loses out on billions in revenue from research and development and commercialization of medicines?

Originally posted here:
Killer new mystery virus