A team from Chicago University’s Booth Business School conducted an experiment using BlackBerry devices to test the will power of 205 people between the ages of 18 and 85 in the German city of Wurtzburg.

Participants were asked seven times a day over the course of a week to identify desires they were experiencing and the strength of said desires.The team sifted through thousands of responses and came up with some telling results.

Though the need for sleep and leisure topped the list of “self-control failure rates”, checking in with social media, email and work came ahead of the urge to have a Camel Light, while sipping on that glass of 12-year single malt scotch.“Desires for media may be comparatively harder to resist because of their high availability and also because it feels like it does not ‘cost much’ to engage in these activities, even though one wants to resist,” the Discovery News quoted lead researcher Wilhelm Hofmann as telling the Guardian.“With cigarettes and alcohol there are more costs — long-term as well as monetary — and the opportunity may not always be the right one.

“So, even though giving in to media desires is certainly less consequential, the frequent use may still ‘steal’ a lot of people’s time,” Hofmann added.

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 Additional Civil Judge Praveen Singh also posed a query to the counsel appearing for petitioner Mufti Aijaz Arshad Qasmi, as to whether the blog service-providing companies can be made a party to the case for any content posted by the users on the blogs.

 The court, which will further hear the matter at 12:30 pm today, also asked Google Inc as to why it was not coming up “properly” with a reply and brushed aside its contention that it had received the copy of the judgement and other documents related to case only on last Friday.”Why are you (Google Inc) not coming properly with your reply?” the court said. “Don’t tell me you have been served only on Friday. After all this hullabaloo that has been created in the last few months you should have been prepared,” it stated.

 The court also asked the petitioner to supply the copies of all the documents relied upon, to all the opposite parties. The court had on December 20 last year, in a ex-parte order issued summons to 22 social networking websites asking them to remove “anti-religious” or “anti-social” content in the form of photographs, videos or text which might hurt religious sentiments.It had on December 24 set February 6 as deadline for the websites for the same.

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In its blog post, titled ‘Tweets Must Flow’, the San Francisco-based micro-blogging company has said that it could “reactively withhold content from users in a specific country” if legally required to do so.

The proposed move came amid reports of a legal clash between India and global Internet giants, including Google, Yahoo, Twitter and Facebook, over pre-screening user contents and removal of offensive materials from their websites.

A Delhi court had last month asked 21 social networking websites to remove derogatory content by February 6 this year.

In its blog, citing France or Germany which ban pro-Nazi content as examples, Twitter said yesterday, “As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression. Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We haven’t yet used this ability, but if and when we are required to withhold a tweet in a specific country, we will attempt to let the user know, and we will clearly mark when the content has been withheld.”

However, the micro-blogging service with over 100 million active users, said the removed content would be available to the rest of the world. Earlier when it used to delete a tweet, it would disappear worldwide, media reports said.

Along with social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, which is currently banned in China, is said to have played a pivotal role in uprisings that swept the Middle East region, particularly in countries like Egypt and Tunisia.

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 Google and Facebook are among 21 companies whose executives have been summoned to appear in person in a lower court in Delhi on March 13 for allegedly hosting obscene and objectionable content.”I’m hoping there will be a balanced debate around it and eventually the right thing would happen,” Google’s chief business officer Nikesh Arora said.

 The companies have challenged the summons in the high court. The next hearing is due on February 2.”We cannot censor the Web. We cannot censor the ability of people to express themselves around the world,” Arora told a news chaneel on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum at Davos.”You are asking not just censor the Web in India, you are asking to censor the entire world wide web. The Web has no borders.”I think the idea of censoring everything and pre- clearing everything is going to fundamentally, sort of, taint the growth of the Indian economy in India and vis-a-vis the world,” he added.

During the last hearing in court, Google and Facebook had argued that there was no way for them to screen content before it was posted online.

Google had also said the Indian subsidiary could not be held responsible for an act by its parent company.

The legal trouble for companies including Orkut, Yahoo and YouTube is based on a petition filed by Vinay Rai, a Delhi resident who has pointed the court to obscene depictions that he found online of Hindu deities, the Prophet Mohammed and Jesus Christ.

It may sound like another Rajinikanth joke, but a new website dedicated to the superstar runs ‘without an internet connection’! Visitors to www.allaboutrajni.com are greeted with a warning that “He is no ordinary man, this is no ordinary website. It runs on Rajini Power” and are advised to switch off their internet connection to enter the website.

Only when the web is disconnected, one is allowed to explore the site. Netizens can trace the story of the legend from the beginning, read inside scoops from his films and get a glimpse of behind-the-scenes action, while browsing through famous Rajini jokes about impossible feats only he can achieve.

“The unbelievable spectacle of running a website without the internet is a tribute to Rajinikant’s larger than life image,” claimed Webchutney’s creative director Gurbaksh Singh, who developed the site for Desimartini.com.

With a heady mix of foot-tapping music, vibrant splash of colours, quirky quotes and illustrations, and icons in true Rajni style and lingo, the unique website reflects Rajini’s signature style. Singh told PTI that the website is based on a complex algorithm running in the back-end that keeps an eye on the propagation of data packets between two terminals.

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And no, it isn’t the first time. The website had gotten hacked a couple of months ago, too, by the same outfit,

stealing all the sensitive data like names, email addresses and phone numbers of the subscribers, claiming that the details were safe with them and they just wanted the government organization to better their security.

According to Telecom Talk, the hack was first spotted at 2:21 am on December 4th, 2011, and the group comprises of five hackers by the aliases x-c0p, nginx-adm1n, enc0der, k3rnel and sm0ky.

The website is currently loading just fine, but we think it’s high time the telecom operator concentrated more on cyber security.

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The European Commission is planning to stop the way the popular social networking website “eavesdrops” on its users to gather information about their political opinions, sexuality, religious beliefs — and even their whereabouts, ‘The Sunday Telegraph’ reported.

Using sophisticated software, Facebook collects information from people’s activities on the social networking site — whatever their individual privacy settings — and make it available to advertisers, it claimed.

However, following concerns over the privacy implications of the practice, a new European Commission directive, is to be introduced in January, which will ban such advertising unless users specifically allow it, the newspaper said. Even though most of the information it harvests is stored on computers in the USA, if Facebook fails to comply with the new legislation it may face legal action.

Viviane Reding, the vice-president of European Commission, said the directive would amend current European data protection laws in the light of technological advances and ensure consistency in how offending firms are dealt with across the EU.”I call on service providers — especially social media sites — to be more transparent about how they operate. Users must know what data is collected and further processed (and) for what purposes.”

Facebook has, however, denied the claims.

A spokesman for the company said: “We do not share people’s names with an advertiser without a person’s explicit consent and we never sell personal information to third parties.”

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Many of these passwords keep re-appearing in the list of common passwords year after year, signaling that people either can’t be bothered to change their passwords or don’t understand the importance of keeping their online identities safe.”If you’re one of those people who thought it was clever to use “password” as your password, it’s time to wisen up and make a change. Switching the “o” to a zero to make it ‘passw0rd’? Not much better,” advised SplashID.

 By using simple numerical passwords or short common words as your password, you’re making it easy for computers or cybercriminals to break into your accounts.”

Hackers can easily break into many accounts just by repeatedly trying common passwords,” warned SplashID CEO Morgan Slain. “Even though people are encouraged to select secure, strong passwords, many people continue to choose weak, easy-to-guess ones, placing themselves at risk from fraud and identity theft.”Slain added, “[w]hat you don’t want is a password that is easily guessable. If you have a password that is short or common or a word in the dictionary, it’s like leaving your door open for identity thieves.”

 Microsoft advises that the keys to creating strong passwords are “length and complexity” on its Safety and Security Center website. Lifehacker suggests using multi-word phrases with spaces — which are much easier to remember — to make your passwords more secure (rather than using a more risky six-character-only password).

 Want to know how long it would take a desktop computer to crack your password? Test it with http://howsecureismypassword.net/.SplashID identified the most commonly used passwords list for 2011 by trawling through files “containing millions of stolen passwords” that were posted online by hackers.

 The top 25 most commonly used passwords for 2011 according to SplashID:

1. password

2. 123456

3. 12345678

4. qwerty

5. abc123

6. monkey

7. 1234567

8. letmein

9. trustno1

10. dragon

11. baseball

12. 111111

13. iloveyou

14. master

15. sunshine

16. ashley

17. bailey

18. passw0rd

19. shadow

20. 123123

21. 654321

22. superman

23. qazwsx

24. michael

25. football

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More than 125,000 people have already signed the ‘No More Kardashian’ petition organised by Cyndy Snyder at GoPetition.com to ask E! to take the family’s reality series off the air, reported New York Post.”‘Keeping up with the Kardashians’ is just not viewing that we the public, would like to see from your network. Enough is enough,” so reads the petition addressed to E!.

Meanwhile, 53,152 people have “liked” the petition on Facebook. The petition takes aim at the shows ‘Keeping Up with the Kardashians’, ‘Kourtney & Kim Take New York’, and ‘Kourtney & Khloe Take Miami’.The petition has gained steam in the public backlash stemming from Kardashian filing for divorce from Kris Humphries, apparently against his will, just weeks after E! aired a four hour special called ‘Kim Kardashian’s Fairytale Wedding’.

“We feel these shows are mostly staged and place an emphasis on vanity, greed, promiscuity, vulgarity and over-the-top conspicuous consumption. While some may have begun watching the spectacle as mindless entertainment or as a sort of ‘reality satire’, it is a sad truth that many young people are looking up to this family,” said Snyder.

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Denying a recent media report, Facebook said that there have been inaccurate reports of users’ accounts being hacked in India.”This is not true. Protecting the people who use Facebook from spam and malicious content is a top priority for us”.Facebook has 25 million users in India.Earlier, a report on the Midday tabloid website said accounts of more than 200,000 Facebook users were hacked and weblinks to their morphed pornographic pictures were sent as news feeds to friends and family.However, Facebook denied this, saying users’ photos were not transferred to an unwanted site and that no accounts were compromised.

Facebook’s denial comes as the company Tuesday acknowledged a “coordinated spam attack” in the U.S. over the weekend, where some of its users were tricked into pasting and executing “malicious javascript” in their browser URL bar, causing them to share offensive content without knowing it.”Our efforts have drastically limited the damage caused by this attack, and we are now in the process of investigating to identify those responsible,” Facebook said, in a separate response to the attack overseas.

The company has a no-nudity policy and requires that members be at least 13 years old. Users are encouraged to report questionable content via links on Facebook pages. The social network also removes pornography on its own initiative.

“We are always working to improve our systems to isolate and remove material that violates our terms, and take action on those who is responsible for these types of content,” the company said Thursday.

The site is facing challenges at a time when it is set to unveil a major redesign of the profile pages of its 800 million users. The redesign, called Timeline, is supposed to allow Facebook users to let the site organize all of their actions chronologically.

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