Man gave $200K to fake online girlfriend

Police in Illinois said a man "was in disbelief" when officers told him the online girlfriend to whom he had given $200,000 was not a real person.

Naperville police said the 48-year-old man called investigators Wednesday to say he believed the woman, with whom he had been involved in a 2 1/2-year online relationship, had been kidnapped in London, the Chicago Sun-Times reported Friday.

The man told police he had wired $200,000 to the woman during the relationship to different bank accounts in Nigeria, Malaysia, England and the United States.

Investigators said the ID card the woman showed the man was a sample driver's license from Florida.

The man "was in disbelief" when officers told him the woman was not real, police said.

Billboards That Can See You

Inside the bustling Shinagawa train station here, a futuristic-looking vending machine has replaced rows of drink bottles and cans with a 47-inch touch-screen monitor.

When a person stands in front of the screen, a camera captures his image and a sensor determines the person's gender and approximate age.

Based on that reading, the machine "recommends" drinks that fit the customer's profile.

"With this machine, we can actually see who is buying what, instead of relying on educated guesses," said Toshinari Sasagawa, general manager of sales at an East Japan Railway subsidiary that operates vending machines in train stations.

Attached to Technology and Paying a Price

This is your brain on computers.

Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information.

These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored.

The resulting distractions can have deadly consequences, as when cellphone-wielding drivers and train engineers cause wrecks. And for millions of people like Mr. Campbell, these urges can inflict nicks and cuts on creativity and deep thought, interrupting work and family life.

While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress.

Web Browser Privacy Settings Flawed

Do you believe that your browser's privacy settings hide your viewing habits? Think again.

According to researchers from Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon, their first-ever study of the privacy mode in browsers found multiple weaknesses, which attackers could exploit to reconstruct a browser's true history. The researchers plan to present their findings at this week's Usenix Security Symposium in Washington.

To assess the security of browsers' privacy modes, the researchers examined privacy controls, cookie controls, and object controls in Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 8, Google Chrome, Apple Safari 4, and Opera 10. They also evaluated numerous add-ons, including CookieSafe for cookie controls in Firefox, AdBlock Plus for controlling objects -- such as suppressing banner advertisements from displaying -- in Firefox, and PithHelmet for Safari object control.

What the researchers found were numerous vulnerabilities in how these browsers and add-ons approach privacy. As a result, "current private browsing implementations provide privacy against some local and web attackers, but can be defeated by determined attackers," they said.

The Web Means the End of Forgetting

Four years ago, Stacy Snyder, then a 25-year-old teacher in training at Conestoga Valley High School in Lancaster, Pa., posted a photo on her MySpace  page that showed her at a party wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, with the caption “Drunken Pirate.” After discovering the page, her supervisor at the high school told her the photo was “unprofessional,” and the dean of Millersville University School of Education, where Snyder was enrolled, said she was promoting drinking in virtual view of her under-age students. As a result, days before Snyder’s scheduled graduation, the university denied her a teaching degree. Snyder sued, arguing that the university had violated her First Amendment rights by penalizing her for her (perfectly legal) after-hours behavior. But in 2008, a federal district judge rejected the claim, saying that because Snyder was a public employee whose photo didn’t relate to matters of public concern, her “Drunken Pirate” post was not protected speech.