Facebook photos swiped for dating website

A view of the Facebook homepage taken in Washington, DC. Hacking and art mixed on Friday in a freshly-launched dating website that lets visitors seek mates by sifting through profile pictures mined from Facebook.
Hacking and art mixed on Friday in a freshly-launched dating website that lets visitors seek mates by sifting through profile pictures mined from Facebook.
Lovely-faces.com boasted Facebook pictures of about 250,000 people searchable in categories that included nationality, gender, funny, smug, and "climber."
The creators of the online "dating agency" were identified at the website as artists Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovic.
'Our mission was to give all these virtual identities a new shared place to expose themselves freely, breaking Facebook's constraints and boring social rules," the website authors said in an online statement datelined in Berlin.
The artists explained that a million "stolen" Facebook profile pictures were analyzed using facial recognition software that filtered images by expressions.
"Immersing ourselves in the resulting database was a hallucinatory experience as we dove into hundreds of thousands of profile pictures and found ourselves intoxicated by the endless smiles, gazes and often leering expressions," the artists said.
"So we established a new website (lovely-faces.com) giving them justice and granting them the possibility of soon being face to face with anybody who is attracted by their facial expression and related data."
Facebook frowned on lovely-faces, saying that "scraping" or mining information violates the terms of service at the world's leading online social network. Facebook was investigating and vowed to take "appropriate" action.
Ironically, the story of Facebook's genesis tells of its founder Mark Zuckerberg getting in trouble for hacking Harvard University computers while a student to get pictures of coeds for comparison with each other at a website called "Face Mash" that he created.
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Are brains shrinking to make us smarter?
Human brains have shrunk over the past 30,000 years, puzzling scientists who argue it is not a sign we are growing dumber but that evolution is making the key motor leaner and more efficient.
The average size of modern humans -- the Homo sapiens -- has decreased about 10 percent during that period -- from 1,500 to 1,359 cubic centimeters, the size of a tennis ball.
Women's brains, which are smaller on average than those of men, have experienced an equivalent drop in size.
These measurements were taken using skulls found in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
"I'd called that a major downsizing in an evolutionary eye blink," John Hawks of the University of Michigan told Discover magazine.
But other anthropologists note that brain shrinkage is not very surprising since the stronger and larger we are, the more gray matter we need to control this larger mass.
The Neanderthal, a cousin of the modern human who disappeared about 30 millennia ago for still unknown reasons, was far more massive and had a larger brain.
The Cro-Magnons who left cave paintings of large animals in the monumental Lascaux cave over 17,000 years ago were the Homo sapiens with the biggest brain. They were also stronger than their modern descendants.
Psychology professor David Geary of the University of Missouri said these traits were necessary to survive in a hostile environment.
He has studied the evolution of skull sizes 1.9 million to 10,000 years old as our ancestors and cousins lived in an increasingly complex social environment.
Geary and his colleagues used population density as a measure of social complexity, with the hypothesis that the more humans are living closer together, the greater the exchanges between group, the division of labour and the rich and varied interactions between people.
They found that brain size decreased as population density increased.
"As complex societies emerged, the brain became smaller because people did not have to be as smart to stay alive," Geary told AFP.
But the downsizing does not mean modern humans are dumber than their ancestors -- rather, they simply developed different, more sophisticated forms of intelligence, said Brian Hare, an assistant professor of anthropology at Duke University.
He noted that the same phenomenon can be observed in domestic animals compared to their wild counterparts.
So while huskies may have smaller brains than wolves, they are smarter and more sophisticated because they can understand human communicative gestures, behaving similarly to human children.
"Even though the chimps have a larger brain (than the bonobo, the closest extant relative to humans), and even though a wolf has a much larger brain than dogs, dogs are far more sophisticated, intelligent and flexible, so intelligence is not very well linked to brain size," Hare explained.
He said humans have characteristics from both the bonobo and chimpanzee, which is more aggressive and domineering.
"The chimpanzees are violent because they want power, they try to have control and power over others while bonobos are using violence to prevent one for dominating them," Hare continued.
"Humans are both chimps and bobos in their nature and the question is how can we release more bonobo and less chimp.
"I hope bonobos win... it will be better for everyone," he added.
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DNA engine observed in real-time traveling along base pair track

DNA engine observed in real-time traveling along base pair track
In a complex feat of nanoengineering, a team of scientists at Kyoto University and the University of Oxford have succeeded in creating a programable molecular transport system, the workings of which can be observed in real time. The results, appearing in the latest issue of Nature Nanotechnology, open the door to the development of advanced drug delivery methods and molecular manufacturing systems.
Resembling a monorail train, the system relies on the self-assembly properties of DNA origami and consists of a 100 nm track together with a motor and fuel. Using atomic force microscopy (AFM), the research team was able to observe in real time as this motor traveled the full length of the track at a constant average speed of around 0.1 nm/s.
"The track and motor interact to generate forward motion in the motor," explained Dr. Masayuki Endo of Kyoto University's Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (ICeMS). "By varying the distance between the rail 'ties,' for example, we can adjust the speed of this motion."
The research team, including lead author Dr. Shelley Wickham at Oxford, anticipates that these results will have broad implications for future development of programable molecular assembly lines leading to the creation of synthetic ribosomes.
"DNA origami techniques allow us to build nano- and meso-sized structures with great precision," elaborated ICeMS Prof. Hiroshi Sugiyama. "We already envision more complex track geometries of greater length and even including junctions. Autonomous, molecular manufacturing robots are a possible outcome."
More information: The article, "Direct observation of stepwise movement of a synthetic molecular transporter" by Shelley F. J. Wickham, Masayuki Endo, Yousuke Katsuda, Kumi Hidaka, Jonathan Bath, Hiroshi Sugiyama, and Andrew J. Turberfield, was published online in the February 6, 2011 issue of Nature Nanotechnology.
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Nasdaq hackers target service for corporate boards

The sign outside the NASDAQ Market site is seen in this Aug. 19, 2004 file photo taken in New York. The Wall Street Journal reported on its website late Friday Feb. 4, 2011 that federal investigators are trying to identify the hackers that penetrated the market's computer network multiple times during the past year. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens, File)

(AP) -- Hackers broke into a Nasdaq service that handles confidential communications for some 300 corporations, the company said Saturday - the latest vulnerability exposed in the computer systems Wall Street depends on.
The intrusions did not affect Nasdaq's stock trading systems and no customer data was compromised, Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. said. Nasdaq is the largest electronic securities trading market in the U.S., with more than 2,800 listed companies.
A federal official told The Associated Press that the hackers broke into the service repeatedly over more than a year. Investigators are trying to identify the hackers, the official said. The motive is unknown. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the inquiry by the FBI and Secret Service is continuing.
The targeted service, Directors Desk, helps companies share documents with directors between scheduled board meetings. It also allows online discussions and Web conferencing within a board. Since board directors have access to information at the highest level of a company, penetrating the service could be of great value for insider trading.
Nasdaq OMX spokesman Frank DeMaria said the Justice Department had requested that the company keep silent about the intrusion until at least Feb. 14. However, The Wall Street Journal reported the investigation on its website late Friday, prompting Nasdaq to issue a statement and notify its customers.
DeMaria said Nasdaq OMX detected "suspicious files" during a regular security scan on U.S. servers unrelated to its trading systems and determined that Directors Desk was potentially affected. It pulled in forensic firms and federal law enforcement for an investigation. They found no evidence that customer information was accessed by hackers.
Rich Mogull, an analyst and CEO with the security research firm Securosis, said Web-accessible services like Directors Desk are a prime target for hackers, and have sometimes been a back door for systems that aren't directly connected to the Web. The presence of files on the Directors Desk system and the claim that no customer information was compromised could indicate that hackers were able to get in but not complete their attack, he said.
Computer security experts have long warned that many companies aren't doing enough to protect sensitive data, and recent events have underlined the point. The secret-spilling organization WikiLeaks has published confidential documents from banks in Switzerland and Iceland and claims to have incriminating documents from a major U.S. bank, possibly Bank of America.
In 1999, hackers infiltrated the websites of Nasdaq and the American Stock Exchange leaving taunting messages, but Nasdaq officials said then that there was no evidence the break-ins affected financial data.
Nasdaq OMX CEO Bob Greifeld said in a statement that cyber attacks against corporations and government are constant and the company is vigilant in maintaining security.
"We continue to evaluate and enhance our advanced security controls to respond to the ever increasing global cyber threat and continue to devote extensive resources to further secure our systems," he said.
Some of the Wall Street's technological scares have been unrelated to hackers. In June 2009, a computer glitch knocked out trading in 242 stocks on the New York Stock Exchange for several hours.
More recently, high-speed trading software precipitated a "flash crash" on May 6. One trade worth $4.1 billion touched off a chain of events that ended with 30 stocks listed in the S&P 500 index falling at least 10 percent within five minutes. The drop briefly wiped out $1 trillion in market value as some stocks traded as low as a penny.
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