KSU Anthropology

You and your family are the "real thing." And maybe that's why so many companies (particularly big corporations) are so eager to get their hands on these photos that they seem to be using them without permission.

Case in point: A 15-year-old girl from Dallas discovered that a photo of her at a youth car wash posted on Flickr was later used in an advertising campaign by Virgin Mobile in Australia. The photo was not displayed in a flattering way. She was portrayed as the dorky pen pal that Virgin wanted you to dump in favor of its text-messaging service. She only discovered she has been "photonapped" when a friend sent her a copy of the ad.

With childhood obesity rates tripling in the last 15 years, Kaiser Permanente has decided to do something about this growing epidemic: It plans to introduce a video game.

The DVD features two hours of footage from the band’s first performances since its 2004 farewell show, and will be packaged in eco-friendly material. In addition, the set comes with a 10-track bonus CD featuring some of the best songs from the shows, as well as a 30-minute documentary on Zimbabwe. Part of the profits from the sale of the DVD will go to benefit the Dispatch Foundation.

the numbers of characters that have fallen victim is thought to be in the thousands.

The digital disease instantly killed lower level characters and did not take much longer to kill even powerful characters.

Many online discussion sites were buzzing with reports from the disaster zones with some describing seeing "hundreds" of bodies lying in the virtual streets of the online towns and cities.

Here's a dream-come-true for Web addicts: college credit for watching YouTube. Pitzer College this fall began offering what may be the first course about the video-sharing site. About 35 students meet in a classroom but work mostly online, where they view YouTube content and post their comments.

She hopes the course will raise serious issues about YouTube, such as the role of "corporate-sponsored democratic media expression."

YouTube is "a phenomenon that should be studied," student Darren Grose said. "You can learn a lot about American culture and just Internet culture in general."

Stony Stevenson writes to mention that some security researchers are claiming that the Storm Worm has grown so massive that it could rival the world's top supercomputers in terms of raw power. "Sergeant said researchers at MessageLabs see about 2 million different computers in the botnet sending out spam on any given day, and he adds that he estimates the botnet generally is operating at about 10 percent of capacity. 'We've seen spikes where the owner is experimenting with something and those spikes are usually five to 10 times what we normally see,' he said, noting he suspects the botnet could be as large as 50 million computers. 'That means they can turn on the taps whenever they want to.'"

Internet giant Google said Thursday it will give $20 million to the first private group to land a roving robot on the lunar surface

For a team to win the $20 million grand prize, its vehicle must ramble at least a quarter-mile over the lunar surface and send video back to Earth. A $10 million second prize is reserved for the first spacecraft that can't rove but still transmits data from moon to Earth.

Surfing the net has become an obsession for many Americans with the majority of U.S. adults feeling they cannot go for a week without going online and one in three giving up friends and sex for the Web.

48 percent of respondents agreeing they felt something important was missing without Internet access.

"People told us how anxious, isolated and bored they felt when they are forced off line," said Ann Mack, director of trend spotting at JWT, which conducted the survey to see how technology was changing people's behavior. "They felt disconnected from the world, from their friends and family," she told Reuters.

Here's the next step in mankind's never-ending quest for eternal life: Ink Afterlife, where cremated and ground-up ashes are mixed in with printer ink, and end up in a photograph.

The Storm Worm botnet (thought to be the largest network of compromised machines in the world) has begun to figure out which security researchers are trying to disrupt its command-and-control systems and knock them offline with unmanagable crapfloods from its zillions of zombie machines. The worm can figure out which users are trying to probe its command-and-control servers, and it retaliates by launching DDoS attacks against them, shutting down their Internet access for days, says Josh Korman, host-protection architect for IBM/ISS, who led a session on network threats. “As you try to investigate [Storm], it knows, and it punishes,” he says. “It fights back.”

There is evidence that the massive Storm Worm botnet is being broken up into smaller networks, and a ZDNet post thinks that's a surefire sign that the CPU power is up for sale to spammers and denial-of-service attackers.

The debate over RFID implants continues to rage on several fronts, as California has just enacted a measure prohibiting employers from requiring employees to get tagged.

Indaba, which launched earlier this year, provides a meeting ground for musicians. Anyone can upload a track — whether it's a beat, or a melody or a full-fledged song — and can solicit other musicians to record new or different parts. Similarly, musicians looking to add or build on other people's songs can search for these open "sessions," which are tagged by genre and instrument. They can ask to be invited to play and can send audition tracks.

Though the Indaba guys were at Harvard at the same time as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and plan to release their own Facebook application