Full face transplant 'a success'

A man injured in a shooting accident received the entire facial skin and muscles - including cheekbones, nose, lips and teeth - of a donor.

The man is recovering well after the 22-hour operation, said a spokesperson from Vall d'Hebron University Hospital.

Another 10 face transplants have been carried out around the world, but this is believed to be the most complex.

Hospital spokesperson Bianca Bont told the BBC: "This is the first total face transplant.

"There have been 10 operations of this kind in the world - this is the first to transplant all of the face and some bones of the face."

BBC News

While economy crumbled, top financial watchdogs at SEC surfed for porn on Internet

At the SEC, all they thought about was SEX.

The country's top financial watchdogs turned out to be horndogs who spent hours gawking at porn Web sites as the economy teetered on the brink, according to a memo released Thursday night.

The shocking findings include Securities and Exchange Commission senior staffers using government computers to browse for booty and an accountant who tried to access the raunchy sites 16,000 times in one month.

NY Daily News

There Will Come Soft Rains( Soviet Cartoon of Ray Bradbury story)

Thanks Melvillian

Free to be human

Google: U.S. Demanded User Info 3,500 Times in Six Months

For years, search engines and ISPs have refused to tell the public how many times the cops and feds have forced them to turn over information on users.

But on Tuesday, Google broke that unwritten code of silence, unveiling a Government Requests Tool that shows the public how often individual goverments around the world have asked for user information, and how often they’ve asked Google to remove content from their sites or search index for reasons other than copyright violation.

The answer for U.S. users is 3,580 total requests for information over a six month period from July 2009 to December 2009. That number comes to about 20 a day, and includes subpoenas and search warrants from state, local and federal law enforcement officials. Brazil just edges out the U.S. in the number of requests for data about users, with 3,663 over that six months. That’s due to the continuing Brazilian popularity of Google’s social networking site, Orkut.

Wired

Study: Teens prefer texting to talking

Like previous generations, today's teens seem to be constantly on the phone. But now they're doing a lot more texting than talking.

One third of teens in the U.S. text more than 100 times a day, according to a study released Tuesday by Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Based on a survey and focus groups conducted with teenagers between 12 and 17, Pew found that text messaging is by far the most common way that kids communicate with each other, more than chatting on the phone, e-mailing, using social-networking sites, or talking face to face.

CNET

Microsoft Kin Ad (note nipple pic 'sexting' snippet)

Pa. District Took 56,000 Images on Student Laptops

A suburban school district secretly captured at least 56,000 webcam photographs and screen shots from laptops issued to high school students, its lawyer acknowledged Monday.

"It's clear there were students who were likely captured in their homes," said lawyer Henry Hockeimer, who represents the Lower Merion School District.

None of the images, captured by a tracking program to find missing computers, appeared to be salacious or inappropriate, he said. The district said it remotely activated the tracking software to find 80 missing laptops in the past two years.

The Philadelphia Inquirer first reported Monday on the large number of images recovered from school servers by forensic computer experts, who were hired after student Blake Robbins filed suit over the tracking practice.

Robbins still doesn't know why the district deployed the software tracking program on his computer, as he had not reported it lost or stolen, his lawyer said.

ABC News

The New Rules of War

Every day, the U.S. military spends $1.75 billion, much of it on big ships, big guns, and big battalions that are not only not needed to win the wars of the present, but are sure to be the wrong approach to waging the wars of the future.

In this, the ninth year of the first great conflict between nations and networks, America's armed forces have failed, as militaries so often do, to adapt sufficiently to changed conditions, finding out the hard way that their enemies often remain a step ahead. The U.S. military floundered for years in Iraq, then proved itself unable to grasp the point, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, that old-school surges of ground troops do not offer enduring solutions to new-style conflicts with networked adversaries.

Foreign Policy