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Reuters

SAN FRANCISCO –  The scientific journal that published a study by Facebook and two U.S. universities examining people's online mood swings regrets how the social experiment was handled.
In a note of contrition, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that the decision to manipulate the content appearing on the Facebook pages of about 700,000 people without their prior consent may have violated some principles of academic research.
The journal also pointed out that, as a for-profit company governed by its own terms of service, Facebook had no obligation to adhere to those scientific principles.
"It is nevertheless a matter of concern that the collection of the data by Facebook may have involved practices that were not fully consistent with the principles of obtaining informed consent and allowing participants to opt out," wrote Inder Verma, the Washington, D.C.-based journal's editor in chief.
The unusual "editorial expression of concern" surfaced Thursday, a day after Facebook Inc. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg apologized, acknowledging that the world's largest social network should have done a better job communicating about the experiment.
Facebook allowed researchers to manipulate the content that appeared in the main section, or "news feed," of small fraction of the social network's nearly 1.3 billion users.
The data-scientists conducted the study during one week in January 2012. They were trying to collect evidence to prove their thesis that people's moods could spread like an "emotional contagion" depending on what they were reading.
Although their findings were published a month ago, the experiment didn't trigger outrage until the past few days, after blogs and essays in The New York Times and The Atlantic raised red flags about the ethics of treating people like laboratory rats without their permission.
Privacy regulators in the U.K. and France opened inquiries into whether Facebook may have violated any laws.
Facebook's data-use policy says the Menlo Park, California, company can deploy user information for "internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement."

By: Bajram Hysa                                                                            Facebook        Twitter        Google +

CES' Best Gems May Take Years to Materialize

 Curved televisions and 3D printers aside, a majority of the new super-tech products being unveiled at Las Vegas’ Consumer Electronics Show this week won’t hit store shelves this year.

The show is a great way to spark a conversation about the future of electronics, but the reality is it may take years for some of the most innovative products, such as driverless cars and intelligent eye contacts, to make it into regular consumers’ hands, if they ever do.

Data gatherer IHS (IHS) says that delay may play a part in stymieing the recovery of the consumer electronics market for another few years.

“Until these products enter the mainstream, traditional CE revenue will continue to dwindle,” said Jordan Selburn, senior principal analyst of IHS’s consumer devices division.

The analytics company on Wednesday predicted that the traditional consumer electronics market, which includes digital cameras, televisions and video game consoles, will face its fourth straight annual decline in 2014.

Worldwide consumer electronics manufacturing revenue is forecast to fall 2% to $250 billion this year from $255.7 billion in 2013, according to one of IHS’s industry trackers.

The decline is a testament to the fact that new innovations such as mobile devices are replacing traditional technologies, but also that new tech such as Samsung’s 8K TVs, which have twice the pixels of today’s 4K ultra-high-def televisions, will take some time to reach the market.

“While exciting new technologies such as UHD and wearable devices are being shown at CES, it will take a few years until these products attain enough of a volume to drive the growth of the overall CE market,” Selburn said.

Of course, that shouldn’t diminish the wild success mobile devices have had over the last few years, or the expected surge in 4K TVs, which are still pretty new despite Samsung’s surprise 8K TV unveiling at CES.
The smartphone and tablet market surpassed traditional consumer electronic devices for the first time ever in 2013, with shipments topping 1 billion. And IHS predicts that shipments of ultra-high-def televisions will skyrocket by 500% in 2014 from 1.5 million last year and reach 38.5 million in 2018.

At the same time, Samsung, Sony (SNE) and Google (GOOG) are among the tech giants trying to revolutionize the wearables market -- another hot topic at CES 2014 -- by connecting souped-up glasses and watches to mobile devices.

While IHS sees global market shipments of wearable devices climbing by 155% to 130.7 million units through 2018, it may take at least another few years until you see droves of consumers talking to their wrists or taking pictures with their eyelids.

Just look at Google, which first confirmed its Google Glass project in April 2012.
The company has released the device to developers and media but has yet to confirm when the highly-anticipated device will be available to regular people, though recent reports have put the potential launch in April 2014.

TCL Roku TV

Your TV is about to become more like your tablet or your smartphone. A company named Roku showed off their new TV at the consumer electronics show in Las Vegas.

The Roku TV aims to merge online TV with cable TV. Roku is known for making affordable set top boxes that bring online streaming content to your television. Now they want to take the technology from their boxes and put it straight inside your television.

Roku announced the news at The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The show officially kicks off this week but this announcement makes it clear that battle for control of your television is going to be front and center in Sin City.

I've long been a fan of Roku's set top boxes. When they burst on the scene in 2008 they were one of the only ways to bring Netflix streaming to your living room. Over time, Roku added a slew of apps to the boxes like FOX News but the problem with that model is that there are so many other ways to do that. Think about how smart TV's, video game consoles, and Apple TV can all do the same or similar functions. In this competitive market Roku must have known that a little box that sits next to the TV wouldn't cut it anymore; they had to go inside the TV.

At launch Roku TV will partner with Hisense and TCL. The company says it will be available this Fall in screen sizes ranging from 32" to 55".

Clayton Morris joined FOX News Channel (FNC) in 2008 and is the co-host of FOX & Friends Weekend. Clayton covers technology for FOX News Channel and FOX Business Network. He’s also the creator of ReadQuick a speed reading app for iOS.

Let's be honest: Most of us prefer not to think about who watches what we do on the Internet. What's the harm, some may think, if someone's looking at my family pictures on Facebook?
Well, there may be a lot of harm. Do you want everyone in the world to see pictures of your kids? That you're on a family camping trip and not at home? Do you want advertisers vacuuming up details from your family's social-media accounts? How about a potential cyberthief cobbling together enough of your personal information to steal your identity?
And that's not to mention the other snoops, from the NSA on down, who might decide one of your Tweets or Facebook postings is "interesting."
Scammers, hackers, marketers, spies and identity thieves - together they could make anyone want to surf the Web privately. Here are a few ways to live in our digital world without staying up at night.
First of all, you need to keep your computer free of viruses - programs you inadvertently download that could share your information with hackers. AVG or avast! are good places to start for free antivirus protection. AdAware and Spybot Search & Destroy target adware and spyware.
Next, note that every major browser has an "incognito" or "private browsing" mode. That's one line of defense against advertisers that track where you go, or snoops who get on your computer. In most browsers, Control + Shift + P will bring up a private browsing window. (In Chrome browsers, Control + Shift + N brings up the "incognito" window.)
Another tip: No matter what you do, you leave a lot of information behind on your computer. Your browser has a record of what you've been looking at and what you've downloaded. It also keeps those "cookies" you've heard about.
Some cookies are useful, and some are troubling. A program like CCleaner, a well-reviewed cleaning program, will keep unwanted cookies and other junk off your computer.
Are you worried about someone snooping in your email? Not only does the technology exist, some companies already do it. Gmail users, for example, are used to seeing, say, dog-related ads next to their email window if they've been discussing pooches with a friend. That's done automatically and, to be fair, that's the price you pay for using Google's powerful email service for free.
To be as secure as possible against other prying eyes, try using a program called PGP – that's short for Pretty Good Privacy. (The name is modest – if used correctly, the program should keep your email private from everything but government-level decryption.) It does require some effort and the cooperation of friends and family.
For more information, and detailed setup info, go to the PGP site here.
Next step is to keep your Web browsing private. I told you earlier how to keep it safe from advertisers and snoops with private browsing, but that won't stop your Internet provider and dedicated hackers.
The best way to keep it safe from them is to use what is called a Web "proxy." Tor is the most famous of these. With Tor, each site you visit is sent though a relay of volunteer servers. No one on either end of the connection can see what Web sites you're visiting.
But you can also go with a private company that offers a so-called "VPN," or virtual private network. These can run you $40 or $50 a year, and require a bit of setup, as well, but can be useful in a lot of ways.
Besides keeping your Web surfing private, a VPN lets you watch TV broadcasts in the U.S. while you're traveling in other countries. But they are also very valuable for those of us who travel and are at the mercy of sometimes-unsecure local Wi-Fi networks; they will keep your email and chats private with encrypted communication.
Now, as we've seen from the recent revelations about the National Security Agency's spying, a determined government agency can break many of these defenses. So, don't think you can get away with anything illegal. But against many of the usual suspects - marketers, identity thieves and the like - these tips will make the Internet a much more secure place for you.