Security holes in smartphone apps

Apr. 17, 2013 ? Popular texting, messaging and microblog apps developed for the Android smartphone have security flaws that could expose private information or allow forged fraudulent messages to be posted, according to researchers at the University of California, Davis.

Zhendong Su, professor of computer science, said that his team has notified the app developers of the problems, although it has not yet had a response.

The security flaws were identified by graduate student Dennis (Liang) Xu, who collected about 120,000 free apps from the Android marketplace. The researchers focused initially on the Android platform, which has about a half-billion users worldwide. Android is quite different from Apple's iOS platform, but there may well be similar problems with iPhone apps, Xu said.

The victim would first have to download a piece of malicious code onto their phone. This could be disguised as or hidden in a useful app, or attached to a "phishing" e-mail or Web link. The malicious code would then invade the vulnerable programs.

The programs were left vulnerable because their developers inadvertently left parts of the code public that should have been locked up, Xu said.

"It's a developer error," Xu said. "This code was intended to be private but they left it public."

Su and Xu, with UC Davis graduate student Fangqi Sun and visiting scholar Linfeng Liu, Xi'an Jiatong University, China, found that many of the apps they surveyed had potential vulnerabilities. They looked closely at a handful of major applications that turned out to have serious security flaws.

Handcent SMS, for example, is a popular text-messaging app that allows users to place some text messages in a private, password-protected inbox. Xu found that it is possible for an attacker to access and read personal information from the app, including "private" messages.

WeChat is an instant messaging service popular in China and similar to the Yahoo and AOL instant messengers. The service normally runs in the background on a user's phone and sends notifications when messages are received. Xu discovered a way for malicious code to turn off the WeChat background service, so a user would think the service is still working when it is not.

Weibo is a hugely popular microblog service that has been described as the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. But its Android client is vulnerable, and it is possible for malicious code to forge and post fraudulent messages, Xu said.

The researchers have submitted a paper on the work to the Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH) 2013 conference to be held in Indianapolis this October.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of California Davis (UCD).

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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_technology/~3/4cK3BZU1FQs/130417091917.htm

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Top Dem sees 'train wreck' for Obama health law

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A top Democrat who helped write President Barack Obama's health care law says he fears it is headed for a "huge train wreck."

Democratic Sen. Max Baucus of Montana confronted Obama's health secretary Wednesday during a routine budget hearing that turned tense.

Baucus, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, said he is "very concerned" that new health insurance marketplaces going live next year in every state will be a flop. Consumers and small business owners are not getting enough information, and the administration has not been forthcoming with lawmakers, he said.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius blamed Congress for blocking implementation funding for the law, which is supposed to bring coverage to nearly 30 million uninsured Americans.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/top-dem-sees-train-wreck-165302491.html

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Parents can help their children avoid alcohol pitfalls during transition from high school to college

Apr. 16, 2013 ? Prior research has shown that the transition from high school to college is a particularly vulnerable time, associated with increased alcohol use and risk of negative alcohol-related consequences. While studies have examined the effectiveness of prevention programs to address this problem, few have examined which students may benefit the most. A study of student characteristics has found that parent-based interventions (PBIs) can be effective even among those students feeling high peer pressure to drink alcohol.

Results will be published in the September 2013 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research and are currently available at Early View.

"College matriculation is a vulnerable transition for many youth for many reasons," said Michael J. Cleveland, research assistant professor at the Prevention Research Center at The Pennsylvania State University and corresponding author for the study. "Increased freedoms and autonomy -- from parental control and from the structure of high school -- as well as instability -- as new friendships and romantic relationships form -- may lead to increased opportunities, and social pressures, for young people to experiment with alcohol and other substances."

Rose Marie Ward, associate professor of health promotion at Miami University, Ohio, agreed. "The transition from high school to college is constantly marked as a crucial time for alcohol interventions," she said. "PBIs stress that during this crucial transition period, communication between the parent and teen ? is highly important."

"The PBI we examined is designed to encourage parents to maintain communication with their son or daughter, consisting of an informational handbook that is distributed to parents of incoming students during the summer before matriculation," said Cleveland. "The handbook is fairly short -- about 22 pages -- and includes an overview of college student drinking, strategies and techniques for communicating effectively with teens, and tips on discussing ways to help teens develop assertiveness and resist peer pressure. The last section of the handbook is an in-depth discussion of the major reasons teens drink alcohol, including information about how alcohol affects the body. This section also addresses the issues of parent norms and permissibility with respect to alcohol use in their teens."

The researchers used data from a randomized control trial delivered to 1,900 incoming college students (988 females, 912 males) divided into four groups: non-drinkers, weekend light drinkers, weekend heavy episodic drinkers, and heavy drinkers. Student characteristics were: injunctive peer norms, which measured participants' perceptions of their friends' approval or disapproval of four specific drinking activities; descriptive peer norms, which asked participants to write how many drinks they thought were typically consumed on each day of the week by their close friends; and personal attitudes toward alcohol use.

"We examined these particular student characteristics because there is strong evidence that links these characteristics to increased risk of alcohol use," said Cleveland. "We wanted to see if these characteristics could help explain why the intervention works better for some students compared to others."

Results showed that injunctive peer norms were key, as was the timing of the PBI.

"Our study found the effectiveness of the PBI at preventing escalation to risky drinking was different for certain groups of students, and that these effects depended on when the PBI was delivered and whether or not parents were given a 'booster,'" said Cleveland. "We found that the strongest effects of the PBI were among students who -- although they themselves reported light to moderate use of alcohol -- reported very high levels of their friends' approval for drinking alcohol."

"These results demonstrate that during the transition into college, parents can still influence their teens' alcohol consumption patterns," added Ward. "Specifically, peer approval interacted with, or combined with, the PBI to predict drinking transitions. However, this study indicates that a PBI prior to the enrollment of college, and some times with booster information provided during the first year of college, is more effective than one provided after the teen starts college. PBIs are effective. This study emphasizes that their effectiveness may be determined by the beliefs of the teen."

"Our findings should be placed in the context of other evaluations of the PBI, all of which show that this intervention is a low-cost but effective tool that prevents escalation of drinking during this transition," said Cleveland. "The materials covered in the handbook are all strategies that parents can do. Both parents and peer groups are among the strongest influences on young adults transitioning to college; both continue to have influence even as young people transition from adolescence to young adulthood."

"Parents should remember that their opinion still influences their teen," said Ward. "Even if the teen has an established drinking pattern, the parent's communication concerning drinking can impact or alter the teen's alcohol consumption. At the same time, clinicians should remember that teens are still listening to their parents. When guiding a teen about their alcohol use, the clinician might encourage the teen to share materials with their parent and to have discussions concerning alcohol use, driving under the influence, drinking enough to pass out, or frequent heavy drinking. In short, the clinician might elicit the help of the parent."

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. Michael J. Cleveland, Brittney Hultgren, Lindsey Varvil-Weld, Kimberly A. Mallett, Rob Turrisi, Caitlin C. Abar. Moderation of a Parent-Based Intervention on Transitions in Drinking: Examining the Role of Normative Perceptions and Attitudes Among High- and Low-Risk First-Year College Students. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 2013; DOI: 10.1111/acer.12126

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/bbmtRVY9jH8/130416161825.htm

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Beijing reports its first case of the new bird flu virus

BEIJING (AP) ? A 7-year-old girl has become Beijing's first confirmed case of a new strain of the bird flu virus that has killed 11 people and sickened 37 others in eastern China, officials said Saturday.

The girl, whose parents are in the live poultry trade, was admitted to a hospital Thursday with symptoms of fever, sore throat, coughing and headache, the Beijing Health Bureau said. She was confirmed to be infected with the H7N9 virus on Saturday after tests by disease control and prevention centers, the bureau said.

The case in China's capital is the first one reported outside eastern China, where the virus was first spotted in late March, prompting massive slaughtering of live fowl and bans on the poultry trade in several cities, including the financial hub of Shanghai. Shanghai, the center of the outbreak, has reported 21 cases, including seven fatalities. One person was discharged after recovering, the local government has said.

The Beijing Health Bureau said the girl was recovering in a hospital and was in stable condition.

Shanghai authorities said Saturday that a 56-year-old man, the husband of a woman hospitalized with the virus earlier this month, became the city's latest case after testing positive for H7N9, but that it was inconclusive as to whether he had been infected by his wife.

Health officials believe people are contracting the H7N9 virus through direct contact with infected fowl and say there is no evidence the virus is spreading easily among people.

Neighboring Jiangsu province on Saturday confirmed two more cases ? a 77-year-old woman and a 72-year-old man, both in critical condition. The province has reported 14 cases, including one fatality.

Zhejiang province has reported 11 cases, including two reported Saturday by state media, and Anhui province has had two.

China has been more open in its response to the new virus than it was a decade ago with an outbreak of SARS, when authorities were highly criticized for not releasing information.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/beijing-reports-1st-case-bird-flu-virus-110736344.html

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Bacterial security agents go rogue

Apr. 14, 2013 ? CRISPR, a system of genes that bacteria use to defend themselves against viruses, has been found to be involved in helping some bacteria evade the mammalian immune system.

The results are scheduled for publication Sunday, April 14 in Nature.

CRISPR is itself a sort of immune system for bacteria. Its function was discovered by dairy industry researchers seeking to prevent phages, the viruses that infect bacteria, from ruining the cultures used to make cheese and yogurt. Bacteria incorporate small bits of DNA from phages into their CRISPR region and use that information to fight off the phages by chewing up their DNA.

Now scientists at the Division of Infectious Diseases of the Emory University School of Medicine and the Emory Vaccine Center have shown that Francisella novicida, a close relative of the bacterium that causes tularemia, and another bacterium that causes meningitis, need parts of the CRISPR system to stay infectious. F. novicida, which grows inside mammalian cells, employs parts of CRISPR to shut off a bacterial gene that would otherwise trigger detection and destruction of the bacteria by its host.

Because disabling CRISPR creates a weakened bacterial strain that is easily recognized by the immune system, the finding could accelerate vaccine development. But it is also a broader reminder that in biology, defensive tools can be co-opted for purposes of stealth.

"CRISPR systems are bacterial defenses, but we've found that bacteria can use them offensively to hide from the host immune system and cause disease," says David Weiss, PhD, assistant professor of medicine (infectious diseases) at Emory University School of Medicine and Yerkes National Primate Research Center.

The CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) system has attracted recent attention among scientists for its potential uses in genetic engineering and biotechnology, but its roles in gene regulation and evading host immunity have remained relatively unexplored, Weiss says.

Weiss first isolated strains of F. novicida that had defects in their CRISPR systems while working as a postdoc with Denise Monack at Stanford. F. novicida infects rodents and only rarely infects humans. It is a model for studying the more dangerous F. tularensis, a potential biological weapon. Weiss was looking for F. novicida genes that are important for virulence: causing disease in a live animal.

Intriguingly, he found a DNA sequence that has recently been shown to encode a protein of the CRISPR system. What they were doing in F. novicida during infection was a puzzle.

"The mutations have a strong effect in the bacteria," Weiss says. "The wild type will kill mice, while the mutants are eradicated after a couple days. But why would the bacteria need to defend against foreign DNA to cause disease in a mouse? It didn't make sense."

The researchers discovered that the bacteria require one of the CRISPR genes to turn off production of a lipoprotein -- part of the bacterial cell membrane -- when the bacteria infect mammalian cells. For immune cells, lipoprotein is like blood in the water for a shark. A little whiff excites them. So for the bacteria to survive undetected, they have to silence lipoprotein production.

Working with Weiss, graduate student Tim Sampson -- who is first author of the Nature paper -dissected which parts of the CRISPR system were needed to turn off the lipoprotein. The CRISPR system consists of genes encoding several proteins and also incorporates small bits of DNA from phages as "repeats" into the bacterial DNA. RNA produced from the repeats guides an enzyme called Cas9 to slice up the phage DNA.

Sampson and Weiss found that part of the F. novicida CRISPR system makes an RNA that directs Cas9 against the lipoprotein gene. Weiss says the Cas9 regulatory system allows F. novicida to tune down the lipoprotein efficiently at the times when detection could be harmful, while still keeping it around for its function -- still unclear -- when the bacteria are outside the host.

"The finding that Cas9 is regulating a bacterial gene rather than slicing up a phage gene appears to be new, although there were already some hints that CRISPRs had broader functions in other bacteria," Sampson says.

To show that their results were not peculiar to F. novicida, the researchers collaborated with the laboratory of Yih-Ling Tzeng, PhD, assistant professor of medicine (infectious diseases) at Emory. They generated a strain of Neisseria meningitidis -- a cause of meningitis infections in humans -- with a deletion in Cas9. The mutated strain displayed defects in its ability to adhere to, invade and replicate in human cells. This suggests that similar functions for Cas9 and CRISPR may be found in other bacteria.

"Most of the bacteria that encode Cas9 are either pathogenic, or can commonly be found in the human body," Sampson says. "I think our findings will encourage other scientists to re-examine the functions of Cas9 and CRISPR in other bacteria, to look at interactions with the host."

For example, some Streptococcus bacteria and Listeria have similar CRISPR systems, but any potential function in causing disease in humans has not been revealed. Weiss and Sampson plan to investigate further how Cas9 functions to shut off the lipoprotein gene in F. novicida and how Cas9 becomes activated.

Sampson is a student in Emory's Microbiology and Molecular Genetics graduate program.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Emory Health Sciences, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. Timothy R. Sampson, Sunil D. Saroj, Anna C. Llewellyn, Yih-Ling Tzeng, David S. Weiss. A CRISPR/Cas system mediates bacterial innate immune evasion and virulence. Nature, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/nature12048

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_health/~3/MgaAl8Y_Cgg/130414193439.htm

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5 killed in Idaho home fire after electrical short

BOISE, Idaho (AP) ? An extension cord hooked to an electric grill on a porch shorted out and started a house fire that killed five people Saturday morning, a northern Idaho fire official says.

Orofino Fire Chief Mike Lee said the house was fully engulfed in flames when firefighters arrived after a neighbor reported the fire at 1:38 a.m.

He said smoke inhalation likely killed the two adults and three teens whose bodies were also badly burned in the blaze. He said the dead were a family of four plus a teenage friend who was sleeping over to help celebrate a birthday. He said he didn't know the genders of the teens who died.

Lee said two of the teens attended the local school that houses 7th through 12th grade, and that one was home schooled. He declined to release names.

Autopsies are planned Monday, but he said there was no sign of foul play.

"It was an extension cord," the chief said. "They had it plugged into an appliance and it wasn't heavy enough to pack the load of the appliance and the cord shorted out."

He said the house, a rental, didn't have smoke alarms. He said three of the victims were found in bed.

He said neighbors reported the family using the electric grill at about 10 p.m. Friday, and that the family appears to have gone to bed by the time the fire started. He said he wasn't sure if the electric grill was the type that had an off switch or heated up just by being plugged in.

"I would unplug it regardless," he said.

Orofino is a town of just more than 3,000 people next to the Clearwater River in a mountainous part of the state known for its rugged beauty. The house where the fire took place is just a few blocks from the river.

Lee said the fire department has been in existence since 1911 and the only fire fatalities he could find in all that time occurred in 2007 in separate fires, so the five deaths are a big shock to the community.

"It's sad," he said. "I was just at the scene. There are already some teddy bears and flowers and things, a memorial put up there by some of the townspeople."

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2013-04-13-US-House-Fire-Five-Dead/id-88cff5b250154137bfc260c29e251716

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Scientist at Work Blog: In Search of Slow Lorises

Mary E. Blair is a postdoctoral researcher in the American Museum of Natural History?s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, where she coordinates the Enhancing Diversity in Conservation Science Initiative.

March 12, 2013

When I left New York City this morning, it was a rainy, dreary day full of traffic and cars and concrete. What awaits me may be similarly soggy, but the traffic will be in the trees and on the forest floor as I explore the jungles of Vietnam at night.

I am at the beginning of my first expedition to Vietnam as a part of my postdoctoral research for the American Museum of Natural History. This expedition is jointly organized by the museum and the Center for Natural Resources and Environmental Studies at Vietnam National University, Hanoi.

I study primates. And this time, I am searching for the pygmy and Bengal slow lorises.

Slow lorises are small nocturnal primates found in South and Southeast Asia. Little is known about their status or ecology in Vietnam. We do know the pygmy and Bengal species can be found here. We also know they are very hard to find, let alone study. These animals? lives are very cryptic, and their numbers are spread thinly throughout dense, intimidating terrain. But where they can be found, they are hunted. Slow lorises are showing up in local, regional and international trade as pets and for traditional medicine. Their appearance, dead and alive, on the black market is one unfortunate way we know their natural populations are declining.

So I am well aware that our expedition may be quite difficult. It will be especially challenging for me, as it will be my first time surveying for animals at night. I have a lot of experience conducting daytime surveys from my past fieldwork on squirrel monkeys in Costa Rica. If lorises are the near hermits of the jungle, squirrel monkeys are like teenagers at the foliage mall. They travel in groups of up to 60, and they are constantly chattering with one another, making it relatively easy to find them in a forest.

Surveying for slow lorises at night will be a very different and unique experience for me. I suppose as a New Yorker I am a bit nocturnal ? but walking around in a forest in Vietnam at night is going to be very different from walking around the Lower East Side. ?Luckily, my postdoctoral adviser, Eleanor Sterling, happens to have considerable experience searching for primates at night: She is considered one of the world?s experts on the aye-aye, a nocturnal lemur found only in Madagascar. She will be joining me and sharing her wisdom for the first of my three survey trips to nature reserves across Vietnam.

The main objective of our expedition will be to gather essential population data. Essentially, we will count slow lorises. More precisely, we will keep track of how often we encounter them while walking on trails or transects at night (more on that later). This work will help conservation managers to more effectively protect these species from further population decline.

I have never seen a slow loris in the wild, and as I write this post during my layover in Seoul, South Korea, I am trying to imagine what it will be like to see my first one. I can?t wait to tell you all about it.

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This expedition is financed by the Margot Marsh Biodiversity Foundation and the Eppley Foundation for Research.

Source: http://scientistatwork.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/12/in-search-of-slow-lorises/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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