Google handcuffed for violating privacy laws

Vancouver: Internet Giant, Google is handcuffed for violating the rights of thousands of Canadians by inappropriately collecting their personal information in building its Street View service.

Canada's privacy watchdog buzzed the siren when investigations showed Google had captured personal information and in some cases, including a list of names of people suffering from certain medical conditions, and telephone numbers and addresses, was collected.

The blunder was done by the fleet of Street view cars which was used to take images of Street view, was also collecting personal information from unsecured home wireless networks as they drove by. Investigations further, blurted out that the incident was the result of "an engineer's careless error". A Google engineer took advantage of the search giant's policy of allowing its engineers to use 20 percent of their time to work on projects of their interest.The engineer developed a rogue code in 2006 which was accidentally added to the Street view software.

The rogue code collected thousands of e-mail addresses and other personal information from unsecured wireless networks. The Canadian investigation found that the engineer developed the code to sample all categories of publicly broadcast wi-fi. The code was incorporated in the Google Street View cars when the firm decided to collect information about the location of public wi-fi spots in order to feed this information into its location-based services database.When the decision to use the code was taken the engineer said it created "superficial privacy implications", but these were never assessed by other Google officials. Google said on Tuesday it was "profoundly sorry for having mistakenly collected payload data." "We have been working with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner in its investigation and will continue to answer the commissioner's questions and concerns," the company said in a statement.

"We're upset briefly and then life goes on," said Queen's University law professor Art Cockfield. "As long as there is no real sanction to the goodwill of the company that is reflected in loss of future profits they won't change their behavior." Google must tighten its privacy protection systems to prevent a repeat of the incident, blamed on a careless software engineer, and should get rid of the data it accidentally collected, Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said.

Stoddart set a Feb. 1, 2011, deadline for Google to show it has followed her recommendations. She does not have the authority to fine the company, but can take her complaints to Federal Court. Already Google is in fix with allegations about the social network site Facebook not to protect user's personal data from being transferred to third parties, such as game developers.

Looks like Google is stuck in the cross-hairs of privacy officials and will take some time to untangle from all obligations.

Free Live cricket score on internet

Country's first floating disaster response base inaugurated

The country's first floating disaster response base of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), anchored on the banks of the Brahmaputra, was inaugurated by the NDRF Director-General Rajeev here on Monday.

The base of the NDRF's 1st Battalion has 45 trained personnel, including three deep divers, a fleet of 12 Fibre Reinforced Plastic (FRP) speedboats, four rubberised speedboats and equipment such as earthquake collapse structure search and rescue equipment and life detecting equipment.

Mr. Rajeev told journalists that the base, set up in coordination with State Disaster Management Authority and Inland Water Transport Authority, would help reduce the response time for any rescue mission from the existing one-and-half hours to less than five minutes. Till now, the response teams were required to move from their headquarters at Patgaon on the outskirts of the city.

Such a base was a long felt need as there were a lot of drowning incidents along the Brahmaputra. In the past nearly two years, as many as 34 incidents of drowning in the river in and around the city bank line were reported. The 1{+s}{+t} Battalion NDRF has so far rescued 10,786 persons in operations in the northeast and Bihar, he said.Battalion Commandant C.P. Saxena said that from the disaster point of view the Brahmaputra had to be watched round-the-clock. The battalion was chalking out a coordination plan with all the stakeholders such as the Inland Water Transport, River Police, 108 emergency ambulance service district administration and the police to rush victims to hospital in time.Mr. Rajeev said that of the eight battalions of the force, four were trained and equipped with equipment to detect hazardous Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) material and the other four battalions, including the 1{+s}{+t} Battalion NDRF, which has operational jurisdiction in the northeast, would also be gradually trained and equipped to handle CBRN emergencies.

Altogether 1,260 NDRF personnel were deployed in all the venues of the just concluded Commonwealth Games, he noted.

Indian American sworn in as America's top science official

Washington: IIT Madras alumnus, Subra Suresh, has been sworn in as the Director of America's National Science Foundation (NSF), the top US science body with a $7.4 billion budget to support scientific institutions.

"We are very grateful to have Subra taking this new task," said President Barack Obama at the White House Science Fair Monday after Suresh was sworn in as the 13th NSF director by John Holdren, Obama's science advisor. "He has been at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and has been leading one of the top engineering programmes in the country, and for him now to be able to apply that to the National Science Foundation is just going to be outstanding," he said. "So we're very grateful for your service."

Suresh, 54, was confirmed by the US Senate Sep 30, for a six-year term.He has served as dean of the engineering school and as Vannevar Bush Professor of Engineering at MIT.

A mechanical engineer, who later became interested in materials science and biology, Suresh has done pioneering work studying the biomechanics of blood cells under the influence of diseases such as malaria.From 2000 to 2006, Suresh served as the head of the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He joined MIT in 1993 as the R.P. Simmons Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and held joint faculty appointments in the departments of mechanical engineering and biological engineering, as well as the division of health sciences and technology.Suresh holds a bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras and a master's degree from Iowa State University.Suresh was nominated by President Obama to become the new NSF director June 8, in place of Arden L. Bement Jr, who led the agency from 2004 until he resigned in May this year.NSF's current budget is $6.9 billion. For 2011 it has requested $7.4 billion, an eight percent increase over 2010, in support of Obama's goal of increasing the nation's total public and private investment in research and development to at least 3 percent of the gross domestic product.

Engineering bacteria to make anti-cancer drug

Placitaxel, better known by the brand name Taxol, is a compound found in the bark of the Pacific yew tree, Taxus brevifolia, that has proved effective against a variety of cancers.

In the early 1990s, when the drug was just coming into use, the bark from over three trees was needed in order to extract just one gramme of Taxol.

These days, however, it is produced from plant cells grown in culture or by chemically processing a molecule found in the needles of the European yew tree.Scientists are looking at another challenging option. Would it be possible to genetically engineer microbes to produce the drug? If so, production could be greatly increased and the cost of the medicine reduced.Three decades back, scientists successfully engineered a bacterium to churn out insulin. This was achieved by introducing a gene for human insulin into the organism.

Instead of having to rely on insulin extracted and purified from animal tissue, large quantities of human insulin could be safely produced by simply growing the genetically altered bacterium.

To produce Taxol, however, a complicated chemical pathway has to be configured into a microbe. Many different genes are needed to make enzymes, each of which catalyse one step and must work like a factory assembly line to synthesise this complex molecule.

Recently in a paper published in the journal Science, a team led by Gregory Stephanopoulos of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) reported efforts to produce precursors of Taxol using the bacterium Escherichia coli (E. coli).It was not simply a matter of introducing new genes into the microbe. Getting the organism to produce large quantities of the precursor molecules required careful optimisation of the entire pipeline.

First, the output from an endogenous pathway in the bacterium had to be increased, explained Parayil Kumaran Ajikumar, a post-doc in Prof. Stephanopoulos' laboratory and first author of the paper. For that, production of enzymes from four of eight genes in the pathway needed to be boosted. In addition, the output of this pathway had to be balanced with a new pathway with two plant-derived genes that then synthesised taxadiene, a precursor of Taxol.

For reasons that are not clear, if the two pathways were not balanced, the cell triggered the synthesis of indole, he told this correspondent. When indole accumulated inside the bacterium, it inhibited the production of taxadiene.

By balancing the two pathways, the scientists were able to create a strain of E. coli that produced 1,000 times more taxadiene than any other engineered microbial strain.

Then, by coaxing a plant gene to work in the bacterium, taxadiene was turned into taxadiene-5-alpha-ol. Their engineered strain proved capable of producing 2,400 times more of the latter molecule than had been possible with genetically modified yeast. Many more steps are needed before the bacterium is able to synthesise Taxol. The most realistic scenario, however, would be to get E. coli to synthesise the intermediate baccatin III and then use existing chemical methods, which are very efficient, to produce Taxol, observed Prof. Stephanopoulos in an emailBut, as the scientists noted in their paper, making E. coli that can synthesise baccatin III will be “a daunting task.” Several more steps, including some that have not been identified, would have to be effectively engineered into the bacterium.

“By mimicking nature, we can now begin to produce these intermediates that the plant makes, so people can look at them and see if they have any therapeutic properties,” said Dr. Stephanopoulos in a press release issued by the MIT.Moreover, they can synthesise variants of these intermediates that may have therapeutic properties for other diseases.