November 18, 2013

Games Definitely Don’t Harm Kids, Says Huge Study

The key findings that came out of the study included that exposure to video games from the age of five was shown to have no effect on behaviour, attention or emotional issues. Neither television nor video games caused attentional or emotional problems and there was no difference between boys and girls in the survey results.

End of story.

Ghost in the Cloud: Dealing with Data After Death

“By and large, the students, who are 18 to 23, look terrified,” he says. “The most pressing issue [with postmortem data ownership] is that no one really knows what to do with it, how it will be stored or for how long it will be stored. Standard Estate and Property Rights law could be used for passing the data along to next-of-kin, but there’s always the possibility that a person may not want their next-of-kin to see that data.”

It is kind of hard to think about. But it is a serious question for all of us to ponder about.

Google to Pay $17 Million to Settle States Safari Probe

The deal, announced Monday morning, ends a nearly two-year probe by the states into allegations that Google bypassed the privacy settings of customers using Apple Inc’s Safari Web browser by placing “cookies” into the browser.

The Safari Web browser used on iPhones and iPads automatically blocks third-party cookies, but Google altered the computer code of its cookies and was able to circumvent the blocks between June 2011 and February 2012, according to the states’ allegations.

Google caught being bad. $17 million is hardly anything to the “big G” though.