Wednesday News: Blackberry 10 oversharing problem; GPS monitors easily foiled; Sperm as one of America’s hottest exports
BlackBerry 10 tells your friends when you’re watching porn – Do you have one of the new Blackberry devices? Blackberry wanted to be social so by default the videos you watch and the music you listen to is automatically shared with your friends. Pay a quick visit to the BBM settings screen by swiping down while in the app, toggle “show what I’m listening to,” and press back. That’ll save your new settings, and potentially a lot of embarrassment. Geek.com
Thousands of paroled CA sex offenders, felons easily disable GPS monitors – If you ever come across a character in a romance book who disables his GPS tracking monitor by wrapping tinfoil around it, don’t toss the book across the room because it is unbelievable. 3M manufactures ankle monitors that are designed to track parolees and sex offenders after their release. The monitors are often defective and easily circumvented with foil. Ars Technica
Come and get it: how sperm became one of America’s hottest exports – The issues raised in this article about sperm donation are ones I had never thought of such as limiting the number of children a donor could father; informing recipients of the other recipients. One man married and had three children with his wife before he discovered the two had the same sperm donor father. The US has high standards for disease testing and donor screening but it is anonymous. Sperm donation has declined in countries where anonymity is stripped away. In any event, despite the salacious title, this article has some meat to it. Pun kind of intended. The Verge
RE: Sperm donors, there’s a great film about that topic (guy fathers 533 kids before actually having a child of his own with his gf) that was released a couple of years ago in Quebec/Canada : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starbuck_(2011_film) . Was a pretty good film, too.
It would seem easy enough to provide an anonymous coded number to sperm donor recipients so that their offspring could at least compare that (obviously this would require national coordination in a data base of some kind and mom telling the kid how they came to be). But honestly, this could just as easily happen with half siblings without a medical sperm donor (think of the guy in England that has 14 or 16 kids [I’ve lost count] with almost as many different women; not implausible that some of those kids might grow up not knowing who their dad is, or might be told it was someone else).
Wow. The part about the sex offenders getting around their tracking anklets is really scary. If a lot of people know about this, wouldn’t you think the manufacturers of at least, the government would be doing something by now?