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Why Are There So Many Porn Ads on Britney Spears’ Facebook Page?

Britney Spears' official Facebook page, which has over four million fans, is rife with links to escort services.

Apologies for the link-bait, but it’s true: Britney Spears’ Facebook page is overrun with erotic pictures, many of them linking to pornographic websites. Either Spears’ “social media expert” is asleep at the switch or this is part of some sort of misguided marketing campaign to sex up the pop star’s apparently-still-too-staid image.

Regardless, when her fans click the Photos link on her Facebook page, they’re confronted with the images like the ones above, many leading directly to hard-core ads for remarkably forward young women advertising their services for free.

We’re hardly ones to proselytize, but this does seem to be a bit much for the singing star, who this week is Tweeting up a storm about her appearance on the mostly squeaky clean Fox show, Glee.

The occasional photo of an actual Britney Spears fan or Spears herself does appear in her list of over 10,000 “Photos from Others,” but the majority or at least the most recent are advertisements for people like “Hilary Portman,” whose message reveals that she is “seeking an above-average guy who is willing to keep up with a 21 years old, fit, drug, disease and drama free chick. It’s gonna be a whole night of ‘pleasing’ and discovering all our erogenous zones.” Her link, like the others, leads to an adult personals site where payment for sex in the style of Craigslist is implied.

It might seem like a lot to ask for Spears’ people to remove the offending “fan photos from Britney Spears” from her Facebook page. (We’ve asked her camp for a response and have yet to hear back). On the other hand, large media presences like her regularly hire social media experts and interns to handle monotonous tasks like accepting friend requests, and it’s easy enough for the regular user to un-tag themselves from unwanted photos.

Why can’t one of Spears’ people get on this? By our rough estimation, based on the fact that the 20th-most-recent photo in the section was added yesterday, it would only take about five minutes per day to keep Britney Spears’ page free of ads for escort services.

We don’t want to waste too much time on this, but it seems worth mentioning that the regularly-updated, Britney Spears-controlled official Facebook page, which presumably attracts lots of her young fan base, is only a couple of clicks away from hardcore advertisements for erotic services (NSFW).

Follow us for disruptive tech news: Eliot Van Buskirk and Epicenter on Twitter.

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Intel Hedges Bets With $8 Billion Acquisition Of McAfee

Intel designs and manufactures processor chips at plants such as this one, in Hillsboro, Oregon.

Chipmaker Intel Thursday announced a $7.68 billion bid to buy computer security company McAfee, a huge bid to secure the “internet of things” — the billions of chips in connected devices beyond computers.

Intel is the dominant player in traditional computers but the action is moving far away from the desktop, and even from computers in the traditional sense. Now the opportunities are not only in smartphones and tablets but in cars, TVs, ATMs, sensor networks, and medical devices: places and devices where we are just as exposed but have less personal control.

This is a huge growth industry for chip makers, and providing an integrated security layer could make Intel more competitive and trusted among enterprise customers deploying these systems en masse in the next few years.

Intel’s not the only hardware company to start snapping up security companies. Only two days ago HP said it would acquire Fortify, an enterprise security firm. As reported by Computerworld, EMC purchased RSA in 2006, and IBM has bought from Rational, Ounce Labs and WatchFire in recent years.

“With the rapid expansion of growth across a vast array of internet-connected devices, more and more of the elements of our lives have moved online,” said Intel president and CEO Paul Otellini during the announcement. Today’s security software for cellphones, televisions and other connected devices leaves much to be desired, he said.

Otellini also said that “in the past, energy-efficient performance and connectivity have defined computing requirements. Looking forward, security will join those as a third pillar of what people demand from all computing experiences.”

“We have lots of activities going on in growing connected devices … from connected television to mobile devices,” Intel software and services chief Renee James told Reuters. “As we look at the businesses we’re in, we see that security is the No. 1 purchase consideration. We believe that we can enhance security with hardware and come up with a better solution.”

Not everyone sees this quite this way, which may explain why Intel’s stock declined slightly on the news.

“I’m baffled,” Peter Firstbrook, an analyst with Gartner in Stamford, Conn., told Computerworld. “I don’t see any synergy at all between McAfee and Intel.”

The boards of both companies will likely approve the acquisition, according to Intel, and regardless of its reasons, Intel wants McAfee very badly indeed. The company offered 60 percent more than McAfee stock cost when the stock market closed on Wednesday, causing McAfee shares to rise 58 percent in early morning Thursday trading in anticipation of the deal.

Photo courtesy of Flickr/Brad Friedman

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“Shit I Say” By Me, Myself and I

Think your Tweets are comparable to the pithy wisdom of Rumi or Nietzsche? Do you rage in your nightmares at the indignities of your Tweets’ ephemeral online existence?

Or do you simply want to make it easier for the world to have your 140-character nuggets of wisdom available on night stands, even if the tubes are tied or net neutrality fails?

Twournal has the solution for you. With very little effort, you can use the service to turn your stream of Tweets into a paperback that you can sell online or share with the world as a PDF, at no cost to you. Twournal prints your book in chronological order and you include your photos in color (for a steep premium) or in gray-scale (for a mere $5 more), You can choose to include replies, if you like. Twournal supports the most popular photo-Tweeting services.

Twournal isn’t the only book-from-Twitter service on the net, a category that includes TweetBookz. But TweetBookz is limited to 200 tweets and doesn’t include photos.

The service is in beta, but Twournal co-founder Avaz Mano promises to send invite codes to the first 300 people who re-tweet this story.

Twournal prices range from $15 to $135, depending on how many tweets you choose (you can choose all, or a range). We created an @Wired book for the most recent 3000 of our Tweets — chose the option for black-and-white photos, and you can get your copy for a mere $36. Twournal also automatically makes a PDF version, which it will e-mail to you within 24 hours.

Unfortunately, to buy the book now, you have to be a beta user, something we assume will change shortly.

To make a book, you must have the password to the Twitter account, and allow Twournal access.

Sellers get to choose their commission. Wired.com choose a dollar commission on each book, the proceeds of which will go to re-filling Wired.com’s beer robot (who incidentally is on Twitter and could have its own book soon!).

The service is especially helpful as an archive — oddly, paper often lasts longer than digital formats.

And since, as everyone now knows, the Web is Dead and no one will visit that wasteland to read your Tweets anyway, you better make the move to print pronto.

Follow us for disruptive tech news: Ryan Singel and Epicenter on Twitter.

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Facebook Launches ‘Check-In’ Service to Connect People in Real Space

Facebook announced a new Places product Wednesday evening that will let users check-in from a mobile device, see who is around them, let friends or the public know where they are, and find interesting, new places.

The announcement extends, yet again, the reach of the immensely popular social network, in hopes that the new service will convince its 500 million users to feed more information as they move around in the physical world.

The product is not unlike the popular Foursquare location-based service, and lets you “check-in” at a place and send a notification to your friends who are nearby. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Places has been in testing for a few months, and will be available to U.S. Facebook users starting Thursday.

Zuckerberg said he knew the product was ready when he was showing it off to his girlfriend at a restaurant in a town he didn’t usually go to. She noticed that some friends of theirs she hadn’t seen in a while were at a restaurant next door, and suggested they go say hello.

“It was when that moment happened, that serendipitous moment, that we knew we were ready to go,” Zuckerberg said.

The feature works through a mobile app or browser, where a user wanting to “check-in” can search for a place nearby or add a place to “check-in” to. A user can then write about they are doing, who they are with, what they think of the place and upload a photo.

Each location gets it own newsfeed, where you can see a list of your friends who have been at a place, even if their visit was months earlier.

The point isn’t to make your location totally public, according to Michael Eyal Sharon, Facebook’s lead developer for Places.

“Places is not about broadcasting your location to the world,” Sharon said.

Facebook VP Chris Cox took to the stage to give an emotional speech about the service, imagining Places as a way to get people to go out and connect more, and as a way for people to create stories, saved for posterity, that are tied to a place.

“Technology does not need to estrange us from one another,” Cox said, imagining a scenario of a person going to a bar and being able to see anecdotes from friends’ earlier visits. “The physical reality comes alive with the human stories we have told there.”

“Stories are going to be pinned to a physical location so that in 20 years our children will go to Ocean Beach and their phone will tell them this is the place their parents had their first kiss, and here’s the picture they took afterward, and here’s what their friends had to say,” Cox said.

With Place, you can tag photos and even check your own friends in, by tagging them in a photo or status update. For privacy reasons, if you don’t allow your friends to check you in, then the update won’t show up on your stream. Check-ins also default to being visible to friends-only, though users can change this to wider settings, including to being visible to the entire web.

Users can also remove these tags, just as they can with photos, and users can decide not to allow check-in tagging at all.

The service will be available on the web tomorrow, rolling out to all U.S. users over the next few days.

Outside the United States, users will be able to see check-ins, but won’t be able to check-in themselves immediately. The iPhone app will be updated soon, while Blackberry and Android users will need to wait or use Facebook in a browser.

Facebook is also partnering with a number of companies for the service, including the net’s leading location check-in services Foursquare and Gowalla, as well as Yelp, which also offers check-ins. The companies will use Places beta API to read and write to and from Facebook.

The inclusion of three of the most popular check-in services comes as some surprise, given that many in the tech press had assumed the Facebook check-in service would directly compete with them.

“This is a great thing for smaller location services,” said Foursquare’s Holger Luedorf. “We will continue innovating and have a number of things and want to create a better tips and to-dos service. We will build upon this location check-in and we are looking forward to exploring how we will leverage the Places API.”

With Yelp, every time you check in using the mobile app, you can share to no one, to only your Yelp friends or to Facebook.

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Beat Censorship By Hiding Secret Messages In Flickr Photos

There may be a message hidden in this picture. Or not. Flickr photo by John C Abell

Georgia Tech researchers have developed a tool called Collage that will allow Internet dissidents to insert hidden messages into Twitter posts and Flickr images in order to circumvent the censorship measures imposed by oppressive governments.

‘This project offers a possible next step in the censorship arms race’

The tool, which is implemented in Python and uses the OutGuess framework, relies on a technique known as steganography to weave hidden messages into an image file. It uses an automated testing tool called Selenium to facilitate the deployment of the messages. The researchers believe that hiding subversive messages inside content that is indistinguishable from legitimate social network activity will reduce the chances of detection.

“This project offers a possible next step in the censorship arms race: rather than relying on a single system or set of proxies to circumvent censorship firewalls, we explore whether the vast deployment of sites that host user-generated content can breach these firewalls,” the project’s website explains. “We have developed Collage, which allows users to exchange messages through hidden channels in sites that host user-generated content.”

It’s worth noting that steganography is one method that was used by the Russian spy ring that was recently detected operating within the United States. As we noted last month, a lot of government surveillance is driven by automated keyword-matching and pattern analysis methods that do broad sweeps, but are blind to simple tricks like steganography. Obscuring the substance of a message in an image and deploying it in a nonthreatening and high-volume medium like a social network would make it harder to find.

The Collage software will be released soon and will be published on the Georgia Tech Network Operations and Internet Security (GTNoise) website.

Further reading

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Foxconn Rallies Workers, Leaves Suicide Nets in Place (Updated)

Foxconn Technology Group — the Taiwanese company that manufactures hardware for Apple, Dell, HP, Nokia and Sony and has been hit by a dozen suicides at its plants this year — is holding rallies at all of its factories to raise morale. The theme? “Treasure Your Life, Love Your Family, Care for Each Other to Build a Wonderful Future.” The impact so far? Check out the picture above.

‘No matter how hard we try, such things will continue to happen’

At the rallies, which are slated to be held at all Foxconn factories, the company announced that it would raise the wages of its troubled workforce, more than doubling pay of its factory workers to $293 per month in the case of the company’s Shenzhen compound where a rally was held yesterday, according to Reuters, where its employees had developed a pronounced habit of killing themselves — ostensibly due to the brutal working conditions and low pay.

In case the rallies, slogans and pay increases don’t raise morale enough to stem the tide of suicides, Foxconn left suicide nets in place at its facilities that are designed to catch workers before they hit the ground, although it removed them from one facility (see update below).

“No matter how hard we try, such things will continue to happen,” is how Louis Woo, assistant to the founder of Foxconn’s parent company Hon Hai Precision Industry explained the situation at its factories, in a statement.

According to the company, “success” is the root of the morale problems it’s trying to excise from its workforce.

“For a long period of time, I think we were kind of blinded by our success,” Woo said. “We were kind of caught by surprise.”

Due to the continued success of its manufacturing business — which helps the world’s top electronics brands inexpensively produce high-end tech products which must typically be replaced every 2-3 years anyway — Foxconn plans to expand its workforce 40 percent, while reducing the number of workers in its Shenzhen industrial park from 470,000 to 300,000 or so over the next five years, perhaps to take pressure off of workers at that plant.

So far this year, 12 Foxconn employees have committed suicide, with the latest occurring on Aug. 4, when a 22-year-old female employee leapt to her death from her company-provided dormitory.

Apple, believed to be Foxconn’s biggest customer, said conditions at Foxconn’s Shenzhen plant were “not a sweatshop” and along with Dell and HP, investigated conditions at its manufacturer’s factories, leading to an earlier pay raise. This latest raise precisely mirrors the recommendation of the China Labor Union Bulletin, which asked Foxconn to pay Shenzhen factory workers at least 2,000 yuan per month (the equivalent of $293), up from 900 yuan.

Regardless, China Labor Bulletin spokesman Geoffrey Crothall was not convinced that the raise and accompanying morale rallies will solve all of the problems of these workers, whose cheap wages and long hours are responsible for much of the electronics used by the rest of the world.

“I don’t think today’s event is going to achieve anything except provide a bit of theater,” said Crothall in a statement. “Basically, what Foxconn needs to do is treat its workers like decent human beings and pay them a decent wage. It’s not rocket science.”

Update: AP Shenzhen reported on the Taipei Times today that these nets had been put in place, but they were installed earlier this year. After the rallies, Foxconn left them up at all of its factories except for its Taiyuan Campus location, said Woo in his phone statement, because more employees there have the support of their friends and family. The nets remain in place at the other facilities.

Photo courtesy of the Associated Press

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Networks Proving A Tough Sell for Google TV (Surprise!)

Google has partnered with manufacturers including Logitech for Android-based Google TV set-top boxes it hopes to release this fall, but television networks are reportedly not so eager to see Google edge in on their turf.

Google TV would combine video cable, satellite, web pages and possibly one’s own home network into a single, searchable interface —  with contextual Google ads, of course.

Makes perfect sense for Google, a big company which is seeing its bread-and-butter search business flatten out. And without a doubt, television’s ancient, byzantine menu systems are long overdue for a major makeover.

The television networks, however, are understandably reticent about welcoming Google into the television distribution ecosystem, according to a Wall Street Journal report. Their resistance represents a roadblock to Google, which has already lined up hardware partners including Intel, Sony and Logitech and hopes to release set-top boxes as soon as this fall. According to that article, Google met with executives from ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC in recent weeks, but the talks did not go as smoothly as Google had hoped.

If television networks are worried about people downloading shows to their computers over P2P and watching them on their televisions using a Google TV set-top box, they would have attacked Microsoft the same way for its Media Center devices, or the makers of any number of other set-top boxes that already allow one to do the same, for that matter.

Television networks are actually scared of themselves, not P2P. They control where their shows appear first, and have found some degree of success distributing their shows both online (Amazon, Hulu, iTunes, Netflix, YouTube) and through the traditional television cable and satellite pipes.

Google’s “one box” search solution would allow users to see all of the free stuff that both the networks and web-only producers are putting on the web, while Amazon, Netflix and other on-demand playback sites let users pick and choose as needed from premium fare. At some point, for some viewers, it could become worth it to stop paying for premium cable and satellite subscriptions.

If that happens, cable/satellite providers’ profitable bundling model, which television studios insist is responsible for the breadth of programming available on cable and satellite because it forces all subscribers to pay for niche programming only watched by some, goes out the window — the other reason Google TV scares the networks.

Active Facebook Users More Likely to Stick With College: Study

Those obnoxious Facebook users who collect friends like stamps and post a status update every other minute are more likely to stick it through college than less active users, a recent study suggests.

A study led by Abilene Christian University followed the Facebook profiles of 375 first-semester freshman students for nine months to examine how Facebook activity can be used as a predictor for a student’s likelihood to stay in school. The research found that students who returned to school after freshman year had significantly more Facebook friends and wall posts than those who didn’t return.

Rather than being an escape from reality, social media may mirror real life: More actively connected students on Facebook were most likely also connectors in the real world.

“The study was able to show that these students who are more active on Facebook are also out there getting involved, making new friends and taking part of activities that the university provides for them,” said Jason Morris, an assistant professor of education and director of higher education at Abilene Christian, who authored the research article.

The study, only recently published by the Journal of College Student Retention, focused on students from fall of 2006 to summer of 2007. Students who opted to continue on to their sophomore year had, on average, 27 more friends and 59 more wall posts than those who dropped out, according to the study.

For other variables, Abilene Christian measured the number of Facebook groups joined and photo albums posted by the students, but the statistical differences were negligible. Researchers determined that wall posts and the number of Facebook friends were the most significant predictors for determining a user’s Facebook activeness, which in turn reflected their enthusiasm in the academic world surrounding them.

Abilene Christian’s study emerges at an interesting time when researchers and technologists are debating over whether technologies such as social networking sites and smartphones are bringing people together or isolating them. In another recent study, University of Michigan researchers found that today’s college students are significantly less empathetic than college students of the 1980s and 1990s, based on surveys measuring empathy among almost 14,000 college students over the last 30 years.

The University of Michigan researchers theorized that the drop in empathy might be due to students’ excessive exposure of media, such as violent videogames, which “numbs people to the pain of others.” They also suggested that perhaps connecting with friends online makes it easier to shut out real-world issues.

“The ease of having ‘friends’ online might make people more likely to just tune out when they don’t feel like responding to others’ problems, a behavior that could carry over offline,” said Edward O’Brien, a University of Michigan graduate student who helped with the study.

However, Abilene Christian’s Facebook study led researchers to different interpretations. They believe that rather than sites like Facebook being an escape from reality, it’s actually a mirror for their real-life interactions. The students who were more actively connecting with people on Facebook were most likely already connectors in the real world.

“At the time we did this study, the big debate was whether or not the Facebook world was a virtual pseudo social world or whether or not it actually reflected real world relationships,” said Richard Beck, associate professor and chair of psychology at Abilene Christian, who came up with the idea of the Facebook study. “[The study] all seemed to indicate that what was going on Facebook was paralleling their social experience on campus. Rather than replacing it, it was mirroring it.”

Abilene Christian’s study is also an example of how social networking sites — as invasive to our privacy as they may be — can potentially serve as a window into human behavior more objective than surveys,  Morris said.

“Instead of using [students'] perceptions, we remeasured … with actual behaviors, which makes that a little more powerful as a study,” Morris said.

Brian X. Chen is author of an upcoming book about the always-connected mobile future titled Always On, due for publication Spring 2011. To keep up with his coverage on Wired.com, follow @bxchen or @gadgetlab.

Photo: giuliomenna/Flickr

Dell CEO Gets Fewest Investor Votes In Board Election

Dell CEO Michael Dell delivers the keynote at Oracle Open World in San Francisco, 10/13/09. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell was re-elected to his company’s board this month with more than a quarter of the votes withholding support for his election, reflecting investor displeasure with his tenure as chief executive.

Dell disclosed in a regulatory filing Tuesday that 25.1 percent of the votes, or 377.8 million of 1.5 billion votes, withheld their support for the chief executive and chairman in a company annual meeting on Aug 12.

Dell received the lowest number of votes in favor of his election of all 11 directors reelected.

Dell, once the world’s largest personal computer vendor, ranks No. 3 behind Hewlett-Packard and Acer. The company has ceded market share rather than engage in price wars that would further pinch margins.

Its shares have fallen more than 13 percent in the last year while the Nasdaq has risen more than 14 percent in that period.

The company has made a mix of major and small acquisitions in the last year as it tries to diversify beyond personal computers. This week it said it had agreed to pay $1.15 billion to buy 3PAR, a data storage company.

(Reporting by Yinka Adegoke; Editing by Richard Chang)

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Yahoo Wants to Blind the Competition With Science

Prabhakar Raghavan

Imagine a world where your favorite webpage doesn’t even exist until you go there, and then it’s exactly what you hoped it would be, and it makes you viscerally happy. Prabhakar Raghavan is thinking about just that, and as the chief scientist for Yahoo he’s actually in a position to make it possible.

“In principle, everything on a webpage is fungible and we can change the layout to maximize happiness,” Raghavan said. “We all have proxies for happiness.”

While Yahoo’s stock remains in the doldrums and can never seem to win with the tech press or investors, Yahoo remains a powerhouse on the net, with a huge number of loyal and repeat users. And while it may have lost the search war to Google and the social networking battle to Facebook, Yahoo’s got plans to stay vital. A big part of that involves science.

Research is considered so vital to Yahoo’s future prospects — which many consider dim, that Raghavan, who heads Yahoo Labs, was recently promoted to being a senior vice president who reports directly to CEO Carol Bartz.

In fact, Prabhaker Raghavan is quietly adamant that Yahoo is more than just a homepage augmented by a search box, webmail and sites dedicated to sports, finance and celebrity gossip. Slim and tall, Raghavan manages to explain detailed scientific concepts with ease and confidence, making his interlocutors smarter, while at the same time, leaving them painfully aware afterward, they were just in the presence of someone who’s so smart that if you’d been much smarter to start, you’d still have walked smarter after talking with him.

Raghavan says Yahoo has more than just technology — it’s got research scientists, drawing on disciplines ranging from sociology to micro-economics. They comb through data for patterns and insights — what Raghavan calls “internet social scientists”. Their job is to “blend large-scale data analysis with social analysis,” Raghavan says, a combination rarely found in academia.

“A classic social scientist wouldn’t do this,” Raghavan said.

For instance, there’s been much written about how the internet allows for the proliferation of more niche interests — the so-called Long Tail — which is in opposition to hits and blockbusters, where a few popular items make up the big head and which used to dominate, including an influential Wired magazine article from Chris Anderson.

But there’s a misconception, according to Raghavan, that the world is divided into BoingBoing viewers — the freaks — and Justin Bieber fans — the normals.

The data say otherwise.

“The truth is everyone is partially weird,” Raghavan said. “We all have head interests and make forays into something weird.”

“So we are trying to foster niches because it keeps people coming back to the head,” Raghavan said. “That is something we are trying to experiment with.”

Yahoo has research labs around the world. Its pure research scientists are running the tables at data conferences with award-winning papers. Meanwhile, applied research scientists are assigned to individual Yahoo products with the goal of having each make more money.

As for users, the science, like much internet magic, isn’t always apparent. For instance, Yahoo’s front page box news is created through a combination of human editors and algorithms, which help choose stories and are constantly testing what stories are popular and even which are popular and meaty. The composition of the news box — made up of about 5 stories — runs through 32,000 variations every five minutes in order to find the right mix.

It’s a take on a problem known as the “bandit problem,” where a gambler faces a very long row of slot machines, all of which have different odds, and the gambler’s goal is to make as much money as he can from the best ones, while still exploring other ones to find the new hot machine.

Yahoo’s solution to the problem increased click-through rates by an astounding 150 percent, according to Raghavan.

But the algorithm is about more than just figuring out which stories get the most clicks — otherwise, it’d quickly turn into the National Enquirer, according to Raghavan. Instead, it seeks to balance the meat and the candy, creating what Raghavan calls a man-machine hybrid.

Science research is a rich area for Yahoo to invest in, according to Raghavan, since it’s historically worked in the past — when AT&T was king of the phone network, it had Bell Labs; Xerox had PARC back when it dominated photocopiers; and IBM had an impressive pure research effort when it ruled the business computing market. And even more competitive, lucrative industries in a growth phase, such as Detroit’s auto industry years ago, have benefited greatly from researchers coming up with new inventions.

That’s the stage the net is at now, Raghavan says, where there’s much still to be learned, especially about what people do online and what they consider to be fun. Continue Reading “Yahoo Wants to Blind the Competition With Science” »