New research indicates that sending text-messages with your phone is not only dangerous, but also possibly damaging to your brain. According to the Sydney Morning Herald and the BBC, researchers in the UK have discovered that a particular region of the brain, ratio communis, flickers and goes dark when patients use gadgets like GPS and cell phones.

The American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) has gone as far as issuing a warning not to text or use a cell phone when doing any sort of activity. Don't text and drive, bike, skate, walk, or sleep. In fact, it seems that the ACEP would like us to ditch out texting plans altogether.

We'll be honest, we're a little skeptical here. While we'll buy the BBC's assertion that texting and driving is worse than drinking and driving (after all it isn't the first time we've heard as much), we can't really believe that text messaging literally shuts down a portion of your brain (especially not a portion of your brain Wikipedia has never even heard of). We haven't seen the research or the brain scans, but nothing we can think of would logically explain such an occurrence.

We still don't recommend texting while doing anything that might require any attention (including driving), but we're taking this flickering brain activity thing with a grain of salt.
link:http://www.switched.com/2008/09/18/does-text-messaging-cause-brain-damage/

You’ve got to hand it to Facebook. They certainly know how to do security — not.

Today I was tipped off that there is a major security flaw in the social networking site that, with just a few mouse clicks, enables any user to view the live chats of their ‘friends’. Using what sounds like a simple trick, a user can also access their friends’ latest pending friend-requests and which friends they share in common. That’s a lot of potentially sensitive information.

Unbelievable I thought, until I just tested the exploit for myself.

And guess what? It works.

The irony is that the exploit is enabled by they way that Facebook lets you preview your own privacy settings. In other words, a privacy feature contains a flaw that lets others view private information if they are aware of the exploit.

I know Facebook wants us to share more information and open up, but I’m not sure that this is quite what they had in mind.

Because this has major implications for user privacy we’ve informed Facebook about this exploit.

Here is the video of the exploit in action.

Update: After a few hours Facebook sent us this statement.

“For a limited period of time, a bug permitted some users’ chat messages and pending friend requests to be made visible to their friends by manipulating the “preview my profile” feature of Facebook privacy settings. When we received reports of the problem, our engineers promptly diagnosed it and temporarily disabled the chat function. We also pushed out a fix to take care of the visible friend requests which is now complete. Chat will be turned back on across the site shortly. We worked quickly to resolve this matter, ensuring that once the bug was reported to us, a solution was quickly found and implemented.”