Science, Technology & Health: May 2005 Archives
Cecilia Barnes is suing Yahoo over fake profiles that her ex-boyfriend set up to harass her.
A woman sued Yahoo Inc. for $3 million, alleging the Internet site failed to fulfill a promise to remove nude pictures of her from the Web.Cecilia Barnes, 48, in a lawsuit filed Tuesday in Multnomah County, claims an ex-boyfriend began posting unauthorized personal profiles of her containing the photos in December. The profiles included her e-mail address and work phone number.
The former boyfriend also engaged in online discussions in Yahoo chat rooms while posing as Barnes and directing men to the profiles, the lawsuit claims."Due to these profiles and online chats, unknown men would arrive without warning at plaintiff's work expecting to engage in sexual relations with her," the lawsuit claims.
The key seems to be that Yahoo didn't remove the profiles when they were asked to. The ex-boyfriend could cause as much havoc by posting the same information on street poles and the electric company shouldn't be responsible for the misuse of their poles, but in this case the woman was not able to remove the postings herself and had no choice but to rely on Yahoo to help her out. Does that create a responsibility for them to do so? The ex should be criminally liable for harassment, but I doubt he has deep pockets, which is why Yahoo is being sued. Should the woman win money, or just an order from a judge for the profiles to be removed?
Update:
The Blog News Channel says that the woman sent letters to Yahoo in January, February, and March. Actual physical letters? I wonder if emails would have worked better or worse?
Clayton Cramer poses an interesting question, asking "Where Do Your Web Pages Go When You Die?"
As I was pondering this depressing thought today, I remembered something that I learned in Ancient Near East class (and may even remember correctly). Old Kingdom Egyptians may not have had a notion of an individual afterlife for anyone but the pharoah, his family, and a few lucky retainers who were killed to join him. Apparently by the Middle Kingdom, enough mid-level bureaucrats were beginning to have similar hopes for a life eternal, and so they start doing the mummification thing, too. To make sure that their tombs were cared for, and that someone would make appropriate offerings on their behalf, they set up what were effectively eternal charitable foundations with some of their wealth to keep someone doing the right thing--and I guess that at least for a few generations, this actually worked.
And so eternal web hosting is the pyramid of the 21st century, without all the messy body parts. I like the idea, and I hope my family keeps my site up after I die... though I'm sure all my brilliant thoughts will be engraved in marble before then, anyway.
A new species of monkey has been discovered in Tanzania, proving the law of evolution once and for all. Evidence indicates that the "highland mangabey" or "Lophocebus kipunji" monkey is actually descended from humans, thus completing the so-called "circle of life" that scientists claim "moves us all". The article makes no mention of the national security implications of humans that spontaneously evolve into deadly monkeys, but the Pentagon is holding press conference this afternoon and promising to help the monkeys "find their place on the path unwinding".
You should go to http://www.google.com/ig and customize your Google homepage. Everyone's doing it.
A new study from France indicates that having an abortion puts the next baby at risk for premature birth.
Having an abortion almost doubles a woman's risk of giving birth dangerously early in a later pregnancy, according to research that will provoke fresh debate over the most controversial of all medical procedures.A French study of 2,837 births - the first to investigate the link between terminations and extremely premature births - found that mothers who had previously had an abortion were 1.7 times more likely to give birth to a baby at less than 28 weeks' gestation. Many babies born this early die soon after birth, and a large number who survive suffer serious disability.
Well gosh, this seems so intuitive. I'm sure that abortion providers warn their patients though, right?
A spokesman for Marie Stopes International, which is the largest provider of abortions outside the NHS, said that women seeking terminations were not told of increased risks of premature births "because so far, they have not been established".
Oh ok, well maybe they've been established now, huh? Not that I want to interfere with your billion dollar industry.
It appears that the new contraceptive "morning-after" pill called Plan B cannot cause an abortion, due to the fact that when it prevents a pregnancy it does so by suppressing ovulation. (Thus, it's not effective if you have sex after ovulation has already occurred. This method of operation makes Plan B morally superior to RU-486, which can act as an abortive.
Several articles published in the scientific journals Contraception and Human Reproduction have found in rats, monkeys and humans that Plan B, or levonorgestrel (the active ingredient in levonorgestrel is progestin), prevents ovulation without interfering with fertilized eggs.In contrast, mifepristone, known as Mifeprex or RU-486, is a drug that will induce abortion in the first 49 days of gestation. FDA regulations require that women take the drug only under a doctor’s supervision. Another drug, methotrexate, was originally developed to treat cancer and is also sometimes used to induce abortion.
I've written about RU-486 morning-after pills before and argued that if a woman uses the drug to prevent an implantation it shouldn't be considered as equivalent to abortion; ending a pregnancy after implantation is the real problem. Zygotes fail to implant naturally all the time, and regular birth control pills (also progestin, the same drug as Plan B) can occasionally fail to stop conception but then successfully prevent implantation (possibly, though the evidence is slim). So it goes. Even if human life "begins at conception", it is part of the natural process for zygotes to frequently fail to implant in the uterus, often because they are malformed or unhealthy in some way.
Google has come out with a new technology to complement Adsense that addresses the main difficulty webmasters face who are trying to make a buck off internet advertising: all that pesky, distracting content. Enter Google Content Blocker.
California: where cloning cats is unethical but harvesting babies is funded by the state.
Cloning hurts animals, exploits grieving pet owners and is unnecessary in a state that kills more than a million unwanted dogs and cats each year, said Assemblyman Lloyd Levine (D-Van Nuys), whose bill, AB 1428, would make it illegal to sell cloned pets in California. ...Animals, he said, "are not toys to be played with at our amusement."
"I'm concerned that once we start down this road, that's where we're heading," Levine said. " 'Oh gee, the cat got hit by a car, we'll just clone another one.' "
But creating human babies just to kill them and take their stem cells isn't concerning at all!
