By Mike Sulka

Truly amazing! Red Bull F1 driver Sebastian Vettel has taken the Pole for the 2010 Hungarian Grand Prix in a qualifying he thoroughly dominated. Vettel’s lap of 1:18.773 was easily clear of his teammate Mark Webber by nearly four tenths of a second.

For Vettel, it is his seventh pole of the 2010 season and 12th of his Formula One career. This is Vettel’s fourth straight Formula One Pole as he also took the top starting position at the European Grand Prix at Valencia, the British Grand Prix at Silverstone, and last weekend’s German Grand Prix. This is also Vettel’s first career Pole at the Hungarian Grand Prix after Fernando Alonso beat him to the top spot by .04 in 2009.

For Red Bull it was a reserved garage as the team definitely expected Vettel or Webber to grab their 11th Pole in twelve Grand Prix of the 2010 season. It was also their sixth one-two front row lockout of the 2010 Formula One season.

Vettel thanked his team for the result saying, “Thanks guys!” He continued, “Starting on Friday, it has been a very good weekend for us. We are pushing hard to finish first and second. It is a wonderful car!”

Unless you ask other team bosses in the paddock like Martin Whitmarsh of McLaren who is complaining about the ‘flex’ in the wing of the Red Bull.

Webber was second quick and said of his qualifying, “I did my best, that’s the way it goes. We knew it was going to be a battle between Vettel and I, and whoever does the cleanest lap would take Pole.”

Ferrari F1 driver Fernando Alonso was best of the rest and he too was easily clear of his teammate Felipe Massa by nearly four tenths of a second which may be a small consolation considering the controversy following the German Grand Prix.

“We did our job to be best of the rest,” said Alonso. “Hopefully tomorrow we can make the race difficult for them, but the track is very difficult to overtake. But much will depend on the Turn One outcome.”

Qualifying fifth quick Lewis Hamilton will start on the clean side of the circuit, and will be well placed to take Massa heading into Turn One.

Nico Rosberg was simply amazing with his sixth quick run in qualifying. Rosberg was .8 quicker than 7-time F1 World Champion Michael Schumacher. Rosberg continues to blossom at Mercedes while his elder teammate continues to struggle in his comeback. Once the Mercedes is built properly, Rosberg will certainly be challenging for the World Championship.

Finally! Vitaly Petrov is fighting for his job at Renault with at least eight drivers lined-up outside the Renault garage and today he bested Robert Kubica for the first time this season! Nice work Vitaly!

Heading into tomorrow’s 2010 Hungarian Grand Prix the Red Bulls are well placed to crush the rest of the field. Vettel has a 1.2 second advantage over third place Fernando Alonso, and Webber is .8 quicker. The best one could hope for is that Red Bull will let their drivers race, but….

We shall see.

Stay tuned for more Formula One news, rumors, and results! Our race preview will be up shortly!

 

Copyright. Paddocktalk.com. 2010. All Rights Reserved

Fernando Alonso Q&A: My reputation is intact

 

books

Want To Live Forever?

Anti-aging scientists and their quest for the youth pill.

By Emily Yoffe
Posted Thursday, July 22, 2010, at 9:50 AM ET

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Human development is gorgeous, Jonathan Weiner writes in Long for the World: The Strange Science of Immortality. The union of sperm and egg results in precise, pre-ordained splitting and budding, creating something predictable yet wholly unique. Human aging is a mess. Our cells break down in a chaotic fashion, and mutation piles upon mutation. Our organs and bones seem to decompose while we still depend on them. It’s a cascading decline leading to our inevitable death.

We age because nature loses interest in us, Weiner argues in his new book, an investigation into our ugly endings and what science can do about this disorderly process. He embraces the widely accepted theory postulated by the Nobel Prize winning zoologist, the late Peter Medawar, that evolution’s push is to get us up and reproducing. So, for example, we need calcium to help solidify our young bones. But once we’re sturdy enough to grab a mate and pass on our genes, we’ve done our work. Nature doesn’t care if some of the calcium then hardens our arteries, causing late-in-life heart attacks.

We care, however, and David Stipp in The Youth Pill: Scientists at the Brink of an Anti-Aging Revolution joins Weiner in exploring the frontiers of the science that is tackling the possibilities of beating aging and cheating death. Weiner brings a lyrical, even meditative, approach to his portraits of the people who are at work tweaking the evolutionary process. Stipp has the workmanlike doggedness of a business reporter as he tracks a field that has migrated from the medical margins toward the scientific mainstream over the past 40 years. Both left me certain that the science of longevity is going to empty neither hospitals nor mortuaries within any of our lifetimes.

Against those who might argue that the last thing we need is yet more old people sucking up resources, the researchers counter that aged populations are a global fact and their goal is to keep people healthy for as long as possible, a benefit not only to each old person, but to society. The surge in the elderly as an age group certainly is impressive. At the beginning of the 20^th century, a baby born in the developed world had an average life expectancy of less than 50 years. As the century progressed, advances in public health, widespread vaccination, and the introduction of antibiotics sent infant mortality rates plummeting, which gave more people the chance to get old. By the end of the 20^th century, a baby born in the developed world could expect to live to around 80. As Weiner writes, this 30-year addition in life expectancy was “as much time as our species had gained before in the whole struggle of existence.” (The outer limit of the human lifespan remains at around 120 years; only a handful have gotten close to this milestone.)

The good news is that more of us are striding, not tottering, into old age, which could be the result of our healthier childhoods. Weiner cites the theory that fewer childhood infections mean we experience less chronic inflammation, an engine of disease. Even so, if we live long enough, eventually for most of us a myriad of possible miseries await, from neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s to long-simmering but sudden killers like heart attacks and strokes to the runaway frenzy of cancer.

The researchers profiled by Stipp are seeking to master the mechanisms of our decline, so that we can frolic vigorously for eight or nine decades before dying in a brief and efficient fashion. Weiner’s muse is prophet, maverick, and crank Aubrey de Grey of Cambridge University, whose vision is more ambitious. A theoretician in the gerontology field, he challenges bench scientists to come up with the necessary biological fixes so humans can reach something close to immortality.

Either quest is a tall one. Both Weiner and Stipp describe the difficulties of establishing scientific credibility in a field that has a disreputable, even ignominious past. In the early 20^th century, one rejuvenator transplanted ape testicles into men. Another, Eugen Steinach, performed vasectomies as a way to restore flagging virility. Sigmund Freud is said to have been “Steinached,” as was William Butler Yeats—a snip for that “tattered coat upon a stick.” In that era, the fix for female revitalization was irradiating the ovaries.

But by the 1970s a handful of serious scientists had begun studying other species’ lifespans, with methods that ranged from documenting them in the wild to selectively breeding lab animals to identify longevity genes. “Comparative gerontology” looks at the amazingly diverse aging styles in the animal kingdom. Fruit flies live weeks; the quahog can live four centuries. Mice and rats live only a few years, even in the cosseted safety of the laboratory, getting scruffy and sluggish in the process. It’s another rodent that entrances researchers of longevity. The naked mole rat spends decades digging burrows while barely showing any sign of age (scientists call this “negligible senescence”) until dropping dead of unknown causes. If only we could get old like naked mole rats, the cosmetic rejuvenation industry would go out of business.

Of course, extrapolating from animals to humans is always a big leap, but almost three-quarters of a century ago, once-forgotten research on the life-lengthening effects of manipulating animals’ environment turned up something provocative. In the 1930s, a nutrition researcher at Cornell, Clive McCay, did a four-year study which demonstrated that putting rats on a near-starvation diet enhances their health and vastly extends their life. This was, Stipp writes, an astounding, heretical finding: “McCay showed that the rate of aging is incredibly plastic, and that it’s supremely simple to brake it in animals whose inner workings aren’t all that different from ours.”

For decades McCay’s discovery was neglected. But in recent years, calorie restriction (CR) has become the basis for one of the hottest areas of life extension research. Across many species, evidently including monkeys, being hungry stimulates resistance to cancer, neurodegeneration, and immune disorders. Stipp says the secret to the long lives of Okinawans—their number of centenarians per capita sets the world record—may lie in their sparing consumption of the traditional Japanese diet of mostly vegetables and fish.

The obvious problem with applying this finding in the developed world is that people with access to unlimited food find it hard to get through a single day on CR. So researchers are looking for CR “mimetics”—that is, drugs that would allow us to sate ourselves while triggering the molecular pathways that make being hungry such a good way to stay young. It’s the pharmacological version of having your cake and eating it, too.

The underlying mechanisms that make us age remain a matter of speculation. De Grey champions an increasingly accepted view in the field of aging that the overarching cause of our decline lies in what some scientists call “the garbage catastrophe.” As Weiner deftly explains the theory, it has instinctive appeal to any homeowner. The idea is that on the cellular level things start breaking down, and junk and gunk accumulate, overwhelming the mechanisms that are supposed to keep our cells humming. Researchers who study what actually are called “housekeeping” genes—which rid cells of the detritus—complain their important work is considered marginal and unglamorous. De Grey hopes their discoveries could lead to what will be a kind of molecular solvent to get rid of the crud—but it is a colossal “could.”

Which brings us to the “youth pill” of Stipp’s title and the ongoing search for a life-extending pharmaceutical that would keep us young by mimicking the effects of CR and keeping our cellular cleaning crew on duty. Stipp gives a lengthy account of the travails of Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, the company that hopes to package some form of the recently discovered class of enzymes called sirtuins. It’s thought they protect cells from damage to the DNA and repair those mutations that happen. (Resveratrol, a substance found in red wine, apparently activates sirtuins in the body.) Then he introduces rapamycin, an immune suppressant drug used in transplant patients, which has shown a life-extending effect in lab animals. As I slogged on, ever more convinced that Sirtris was not going to find the solution to our mortal dilemma, Stipp’s book began to resemble the process of aging itself: clogged with unnecessary information that should have been swept away.

Weiner, who has a gift for making science lucid and for weaving in the perfect literary allusion, is a pleasure to read. But he, too, slows down toward the close. His book ends with a lengthy philosophical meditation on the meaning of immortality, which his previous chapters failed to convince me is a subject worth spending too much of one’s limited time worrying over. Not even Weiner buys Aubrey de Grey’s vision of a human lifespan of hundreds, even thousands of years.

I did come away convinced to keep drinking coffee and indulging judiciously in red wine and dark chocolate. These foodstuffs have small amounts of the chemicals that may activate natural anti-aging pathways. And even if they don’t send me to what De Grey calls “escape velocity,” they make what time I do have more pleasurable.

Like Slate on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.

Emily Yoffe is the author of What the Dog Did: Tales From a Formerly Reluctant Dog Owner. You can send your Human Guinea Pig suggestions or comments to emilyyoffe@hotmail.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2260786/

 

German Grand Prix in 90 seconds by Martin Brundle BBC F1 analyst Formula 1′s governing body, the FIA, should immediately assemble all the commissions, councils and empowered people required to cancel regulation 39.1 which prohibits team orders. It is unworkable and largely not policeable. The fans, media, and sponsors are best placed to firmly control this one with their remote controls, attendance, words, and cash. There are hundreds of shades of grey around the interpretation of what constitutes team orders and when it is acceptable through the season to start applying them. But points won at the first race have the same value as those at the last race. Watching two world-class sportsmen and a team principal, among others, having to fabricate stories around both this regulation and the circumstances of the German Grand Prix was excruciatingly painful and infuriating. Eddie Jordan goes in hot pursuit of Ferrari boss Of course Ferrari wanted Alonso to win the German Grand Prix; it’s their only chance of salvaging something from this season. They’re off the back of three dismal races for various reasons, and Alonso was 21 points ahead of Massa having been performing comfortably better than the recovering Brazilian so far this season. I would have wanted the same, as would any other leading team on the grid. So why on earth did Ferrari handle it so badly before, during and after the race? I’m afraid they deserve everything that is thrown at them. Obviously, they never imagined Massa would be leading from Alonso, although he started on the cleaner side of the grid in third, otherwise they would have pre-empted and choreographed everything so much better. The fans and media are not stupid. 606: DEBATE Alonso is Ferrari’s only hope and has been driver of the year by a mile in terms of getting pace out of what he has been given YeehaaF1 The radio discussions which were transmitted are very damning, with Massa’s engineer Rob Smedley initially, as he always does, motivating and encouraging his man to drive faster still. Then he has to deliver the killer message which we all understood to mean let Alonso past. On lap 49 it happened, and Massa made it very clear what was going on with a long lift between turns six and seven. No fumbling on the brakes, or sliding at the exit. Alonso was slightly faster after he went past, which is a good job as the ‘slower’ Massa was still pumping in some fast laps. Massa should have either have said ‘no’, or done it with some conviction. After the stops on lap 23 Alonso was clearly quicker on hard tyres, but he fumbled his one chance of a genuine overtake by going the wrong side into Turn Seven. I’ve seen a lot of this team strategy business and my strong advice to any established driver is to simply ignore the request, win the race, and handle the nuclear fallout afterwards. Otherwise you self-esteem and public credibility are finished. Mark Webber has a good handle on this, I would say. My decision to let Alonso pass – Massa Rule 39.1 was introduced after team orders by Ferrari at Austria in 2002 meant Michael Schumacher inherited the lead from team-mate Rubens Barrichello when the German already had a very healthy lead in the championship well before half season. Back in 2002, Ferrari were fined $1m for team orders but only $100,000 on Sunday, right? No, they were fined $500,000 with another $500,000 suspended for improper procedure on the podium when Schumacher pushed Barrichello onto the top step and gave him the trophy. At that time team orders were perceived and accepted as part of the history and normal operating procedure of a two-car F1 team. Teams are obliged to run two cars in their fight for drivers’ and manufacturers’ titles – 24 one-car teams is not practical. There are any number of ways a driver can be perceived to be assisted or disadvantaged within a team due to testing, parts supply, quality of personnel on each car, tyre and race strategies, fuel loads, pit stops, media releases, psychological and physical support, and many other aspects around running a grand prix car around the globe. There are numerous occasions where one driver has had to support another and races and championships have been won or lost. Team result is most important – Alonso Massa had a ‘long’ pit stop in Brazil to help Raikkonen take the title in 2007. Kovalainen was often helping Hamilton at McLaren, Irvine assisted Schumacher at Ferrari which could well have lost him the title in 1999 after Schumacher broke his leg. I could go on and on, taking you right back to the 1950s when drivers last stepped out of their cars mid-race to hand them over. In Austria in 1986 at Bernie Ecclestone’s Brabham, Derek Warwick had to get out of his car on the grid and they wheeled it forward for Riccardo Patrese whose car had failed on the way to the start! A team operates its two cars in the best manner in order to win one or both titles, and that’s the way it is, folks. I just don’t buy the ‘what if somebody betted on that’ line; people should understand that racing cars have punctures and crashes, or get changed around tactically, before they risk their money. In Jerez 1997 we even had Williams and McLaren using their four cars against Ferrari. Millions of fans will adore Alonso, millions more will despise him, and he doesn’t give a fig. Horner criticises ‘team orders’ He’s a winning machine who’s found his way from Asturias to already having two F1 championships in his pocket. Champion racing drivers are ruthless, selfish, complex people. If you’re looking for someone to love or take on holiday then it’s the wrong place to look. I played the sportsmanlike and balanced role in my career because that’s my nature, like Massa, and I significantly underperformed my potential. I could have done with some Schumacher and Alonso unreasonableness. I remember very early in my race commentary on Sunday saying that the wrong Ferrari was in the lead with regard to the championship and it would be interesting to see how they sorted it. Later we heard the radio calls followed by the lap 49 of 67 lead swap, plus the slowing down lap and podium procedure. At no time did we read a message that the incident would be investigated by the stewards after the race. It’s not unreasonable to think that the FIA were reacting to the post race furore. Maybe that’s unfair but they have a problem now. The $100,000 fine has been applied so the team are officially guilty of breaching the regulations. Surely the World Council can only add to that penalty at their yet-to-be announced hearing. FIA president Jean Todt was of course the long-time boss of the Ferrari team, and his son manages Massa, but from the outset of his appointment he removed himself from an official role in any sporting enquiries. In a few days’ time we have the Hungarian GP, and Hockenheim will be an old story until the World Council meets.

 

 

Copyright. BBC.com Sports. F1. 2010. All Rights Reserved.

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GO TO EARLIER STORY GO TO THE NEWS INDEX   Alonso unfazed by team orders row By Jonathan Noble and Pablo Elizalde Thursday, July 29th 2010, 15:49 GMT Fernando Alonso says he is not affected at all by the team orders controversy involving his Ferrari squad following the German Grand Prix. Ferrari was fined $100,000 for illegal use of team orders last weekend, when Alonso was handed the lead of the race by team-mate Felipe Massa. The Italian squad will also face the FIA’s World Motor Sport Council for its actions. But despite the turmoil triggered by the events, Alonso says he is unfazed and insists he remains completely focused on the championship. “Of course it doesn’t affect me. Not at all,” Alonso told Spanish journalists in Hungary. “If we lost one per cent of our concentration in everything they say we’d be lost. “Not only because of Germany, but because there’s always a small anecdote in every race. One time is the crash between the Red Bulls in Turkey, another time is the overtaking in the pitlane between Massa and me. “There’s always something to talk about next week so we can’t pay too much attention.” He added: “There are many opinions and many things have been said in the last couple of days. “The only important thing for us is that the car is competitive and we can do well here in Hungary as well. But the opinion of everybody, some of the drivers or team principals, it is their opinion and we respect everything, but we concentrate on our job.” “There is nothing to say right now. That is your opinion – what you think about the fans. For sure some of them are unhappy with some races and not only in Germany, there were some more races this year, and some of them they don’t care. “I arrive today in Hungary, the airport was full, the hotel was full of people cheering for us, and that is the fans I saw today so far. Maybe I see some others that you mention now, but at the moment I only saw those ones.” The Spaniard echoed Massa’s comments from earlier, when the Brazilian said he was not a number two driver. “I think there is not a number one or number two driver. I think it is more about respect of each other, respect of racing for the Scuderia – which means a lot,” he said. “I think we are happy with the performance of the car in the last couple of races and in Germany finally there was the point we arrived with both cars at the chequered flag without problems and we scored points. “But also in Silverstone and Valencia the car was good, so our aim here is to continue in this line. The talks of the not talks, it is the past and we have nothing to say any more. We all said everything in Germany.” The Spanish driver said he didn’t believe his reputation had been affected by the events. “That is your opinion, and you have one opinion, that is very respectful, but I don’t think anything changed to me or anything happened back to me,” he said. “I am still the same and I will fight always for the best things possible, for my team, for the sport and hopefully I can do well always in my career.” He also claimed he was not wasting any time thinking of the verdict of the WMSC meeting. “I think we will see. At the moment the drivers, now we need to concentrate on driving, we have a very interesting GP here in front of us now, here in Hungary, we have some good possibilities of doing some good performance so anything that happens in the future of the WMSC is not in our hands. “From a drivers’ point of view we just need to concentrate and drive well and be okay.”

Copyright.Autusport.com 2010. All Rights Reserved

The New Meadowlands Stadium uses new video technology.

 

To Pack a Stadium, Provide Video Better Than TV

By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — How do you keep football fans as regular visitors to stadiums when the television coverage of every play is so good?

For the Giants and the Jets, the answer, perhaps surprisingly, is more and better video than people can get at home. This season, the New Meadowlands Stadium will offer fans free smart-phone applications that they can glance at to see video replays, updated statistics and live video from other games — and that will work only inside a stadium.

Over the next few years, stadium officials say, the applications will provide fans with statistics on the speed of players and the ball, and fantasy games that will allow them to pick players and compete against other fans.

A real-life game no longer seems to be enough.

In recent years, television coverage of the National Football League has become so rich and detailed that teams and stadiums have no choice but to respond with their own technology plays. Last spring the league’s commissioner, Roger Goodell, said the experience for fans in stadiums needed to be elevated to compete with television broadcasts, to keep fans engaged — and to keep them buying tickets — in a challenging economic climate.

To do that, stadium officials here have taken steps few other N.F.L. stadiums have. About $100 million has been spent on the stadium’s technology, and a former television production executive was hired to oversee the fan experience to offer more than fans can get sitting at home on their couches in front of their high-definition television sets.

“It’s become an arms race,” said Peter Brickman, the former television production executive who was hired as the chief technology officer for the New Meadowlands Stadium last year to channel his knowledge about television into the experience in the stadium.

Mr. Brickman, who worked for the N.F.L. for several years enhancing its television productions, pioneered the popular “Red Zone” alerts that tell fans watching games on “NFL Sunday Ticket” on DirecTV about other games in which a team is about to score.

It is unclear how the smart-phone applications will change the atmosphere of games. Fans praised Cowboys Stadium, which opened in Arlington, Tex., last year, for its twin video boards that are suspended over the field and stretch nearly from one 20-yard line to the other so that fans can watch the action live both on the field and on a big screen.

The four video screens at the New Meadowlands Stadium are smaller, but officials say the stadium’s innovations go further than at Cowboys Stadium or any other in the country.

“I think I’m not like most people who want someone blabbering in their ear and constant stats and information,” said Jeff Laible, 63, a football and baseball fan from Manhattan who attended a game at Giants Stadium. “I just want the ambience, to watch the players and feel the crowd. I would much rather have the feel of the game brought into the home, not the other way around.”

But Matthew Stone, 32, a San Francisco 49ers season-ticket holder from Oakdale, Calif., said there were many times in recent years when he wished he had been in front of a television when he was at a game.

“You want to know about injuries or fights on the field or hear from one of your favorite commentators,” Mr. Stone said. “It’s great to be at the game, but you miss things. I think an application is a great idea.”

For those fans who do not have smart phones, 2,200 televisions with 48,000 square feet of screens have been installed in and around the stadium, the most of any N.F.L. stadium. The applications and stadium video screens will access video feeds that can be used only in the stadium because of the N.F.L.’s television agreements. If the fan leaves, the application will no longer work and will direct fans to the teams’ Web sites, which will offer less.

Mr. Brickman said he thought 7,000 to 10,000 fans would use the application in the first season at the stadium. To accommodate them, 500 wireless antennas have been installed in the stadium.

“We want to keep things leading edge but not bleeding edge,” Mr. Brickman said, adding that different parts of the application would be slowly rolled out during the stadium’s first season. A few other N.F.L. stadiums hope to introduce some of the technology this season, too.

“The worst thing for me is a Steve Jobs moment,” he said, referring to a news conference in June at which Mr. Jobs could not use the Internet on an iPhone because the wireless network was overloaded.

The introduction of the smart-phone applications comes as teams confront an increasingly difficult environment to attract fans to stadiums. The images of N.F.L. players blocking and tackling on high-definition television have become increasingly life-like at the same time that the price of attending a game in person is higher than ever.

The Jets and the Giants have attached personal seat licenses for a majority of the seats — fees from $1,000 to $20,000 that fans must pay before they are allowed to buy their tickets, which cost $90 to $700 a game.

The Giants have sold nearly all their personal seat licenses, and the Jets have cut the prices of theirs but have still not sold them all.

Across the N.F.L., attendance is down a little more than 3 percent from its height in 2007, but television ratings have continued to climb. The average regular-season N.F.L. game was seen by 16.6 million viewers last season — the most since 1990 — and by two million more viewers than in the 2008 season, according to figures from Nielsen.

The technology behind the applications, which is powered by Cisco and Verizon, has other benefits. The applications will alert fans to which concession stands have the shortest lines and provide traffic updates.

Security officials will have special bracelets that parents can have placed on their children. In the event that a child is lost, the stadium’s video security system can immediately locate the child on a television screen.

“Teams shouldn’t have an imbalance in the television experience and the stadium experience,” said Vince Gennaro, who is a marketing consultant to several sports teams and teaches sports management at Columbia University’s School of Continuing Education. “Once you raise the bar on one, you have to raise the bar on the other. I think it’s really important now that high definition and DirecTV have innovated, that teams compete essentially with themselves and bring that experience to the seat.”

Copyright. New York Times Company. 2010. All Rights Reserved

 

29 July 2010 Last updated at 20:37 ET

Details of 100m Facebook users collected and published

By Daniel Emery Technology reporter, BBC News

Personal details of 100m Facebook users have been collected and published on the net by a security consultant.

Ron Bowes used a piece of code to scan Facebook profiles, collecting data not hidden by the user’s privacy settings.

The list, which has been shared as a downloadable file, contains the URL of every searchable Facebook user’s profile, their name and unique ID.

Mr Bowes said he published the data to highlight privacy issues, but Facebook said it was already public information.

The file has spread rapidly across the net.

On the Pirate Bay, the world’s biggest file-sharing website, the list was being distributed and downloaded by more than 1,000 users.

One user, going by the name of lusifer69, described the list as “awesome and a little terrifying”.

In a statement to BBC News, Facebook said that the information in the list was already freely available online.

“People who use Facebook own their information and have the right to share only what they want, with whom they want, and when they want,” the statement read.

“In this case, information that people have agreed to make public was collected by a single researcher and already exists in Google, Bing, other search engines, as well as on Facebook.

“No private data is available or has been compromised,” the statement added.

‘Privacy confusion’

But Simon Davies from the watchdog Privacy International told BBC News that Facebook had been given ample warning that something like this would happen.

“Facebook should have anticipated this attack and put measures in place to prevent it,” he said

“It is inconceivable that a firm with hundreds of engineers couldn’t have imagined a trawl of this magnitude and there’s an argument to be heard that Facebook have acted with negligence, he added.

Mr Davies said that the trawl of data fed into “the confusion of the privacy settings”.

“People did not understand the privacy settings and this is the result,” he said.

Earlier this year there was a storm of protest from users of the site over the complexity of Facebook’s privacy settings. As a result, the site rolled out simplified privacy controls.

Facebook has a default setting for privacy that makes some user information publicly available. People have to make a conscious choice to opt-out of the defaults.

“It is similar to the white pages of the phone book, this is the information available to enable people to find each other, which is the reason people join Facebook,” said a spokesman for the firm.

“If someone does not want to be found, we also offer a number of controls to enable people not to appear in search on Facebook, in search engines, or share any information with applications.”

But Mr Davies disagreed, saying the default settings should be changed.

“This highlights the argument for a higher level of privacy and proves the case for default nondisclosure,” he said.

“There are going to be a lot of angry and concerned people right now who will be wondering who has their data and what they should do.”

However, Mr Davies pointed out that this was something of an “ethical attack” and that more personal information, such as email addresses, phone numbers and postal addresses had not been included in the trawl

 

Copyright. B.B.C. News. 2010. All Rights Reserved

Felipe Massa: “I think it’s a very special place…”

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Maureen Dowd

 

Lost in a Maze

By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

The waterfall of leaks on Afghanistan underlines the awful truth: We’re not in control.

Not since Theseus fought the Minotaur in his maze has a fight been so confounding.

The more we try to do for our foreign protectorates, the more angry they get about what we try to do. As Congress passed $59 billion in additional war funding on Tuesday, not only are our wards not grateful, they’re disdainful.

Washington gave the Wall Street banks billions, and, in return, they stabbed us in the back, handing out a fortune in bonuses to the grifters who almost wrecked our economy.

Washington gave the Pakistanis billions, and, in return, they stabbed us in the back, pledging to fight the militants even as they secretly help the militants.

We keep getting played by people who are playing both sides.

Robert Gibbs recalled that President Obama said last year that “we will not and cannot provide a blank check” to Pakistan.

But only last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in Pakistan to hand over a juicy check: $500 million in aid to the country that’s been getting a billion a year for most of this decade and in 2009 was pledged another $7.5 billion for the next five. She vowed to banish the “legacy of suspicion” and show that “there is so much we can accomplish together as partners joined in common cause.”

Gibbs argued that the deluge of depressing war documents from the whistle-blower Web site WikiLeaks, reported by The New York Times and others, was old. But it reflected one chilling fact: the Taliban has been getting better and better every year of the insurgency. So why will 30,000 more troops help?

We invaded two countries, and allied with a third — all renowned as masters at double-dealing. And, now lured into their mazes, we still don’t have the foggiest idea, shrouded in the fog of wars, how these cultures work. Before we went into Iraq and Afghanistan, both places were famous for warrior cultures. And, indeed, their insurgents are world class.

But whenever America tries to train security forces in Iraq and Afghanistan so that we can leave behind a somewhat stable country, it’s positively Sisyphean. It takes eons longer than our officials predict. The forces we train turn against us or go over to the other side or cut and run. If we give them a maximum security prison, as we recently did in Iraq, making a big show of handing over the key, the imprisoned Al Qaeda militants are suddenly allowed to escape.

The British Empire prided itself on discovering warrior races in places it conquered — Gurkhas, Sikhs, Pathans, as the Brits called Pashtuns. But why are they warrior cultures only until we need them to be warriors on our side? Then they’re untrainably lame, even when we spend $25 billion on building up the Afghan military and the National Police Force, dubbed “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight” by Newsweek.

Maybe we just can’t train them to fight against each other. But why can’t countries that produce fierce insurgencies produce good standing armies in a reasonable amount of time? Is it just that insurgencies can be more indiscriminate?

Things are so bad that Robert Blackwill, who was on W.’s national security team, wrote in Politico that the Obama administration should just admit failure and turn over the Pashtun South to the Taliban since it will inevitably control it anyway. He said that the administration doesn’t appreciate the extent to which this is a Pashtun nationalist uprising.

We keep hearing that the last decade of war, where we pour in gazillions to build up Iraq and Afghanistan even as our own economy sputters, has weakened Al Qaeda.

But at his confirmation hearing on Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gen. James Mattis, who is slated to replace Gen. David Petraus, warned that Al Qaeda and its demon spawn represent a stark danger all over the Middle East and Central Asia.

While we’re anchored in Afghanistan, the Al Qaeda network could roil Yemen “to the breaking point,” as Mattis put it in written testimony.

Pakistan’s tribal areas “remain the greatest danger as these are strategic footholds for Al Qaeda and its senior leaders, including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri,” the blunt four-star general wrote, adding that they “remain key to extremists’ efforts to rally Muslim resistance worldwide.”

Questioned by John McCain, General Mattis said that we’re not leaving Afghanistan; we’re starting “a process of transition to the Afghan forces.” But that process never seems to get past the starting point.

During the debate over war funds on Tuesday, Representative Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, warned that we are in a monstrous maze without the ball of string to find our way out.

“All of the puzzle has been put together, and it is not a pretty picture,” he told The Times’s Carl Hulse. “Things are really ugly over there.”

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