People who are born blind can become quite adept at identifying objects by touch alone, but scientists wanted to know if how they would fare if their sight was suddenly restored and their eyes became their primary sensory input. Simply put, could someone who has seen with their hands learn to see with their eyes? Thanks to modern medical science, this question is no longer an issue of navel-gazing and was recently investigated in a study published in Nature Neuroscience.

The researchers worked with five children, ages 8 to 17, that had their sight restored as part of Project Prakash, an organization that provides free medical care to curably blind children in rural India. Within 48 hours of undergoing surgery, the children were presented with an object and allowed to feel it with their hands and then asked to identify a similar object amongst a set of objects. As expected, the children handled the task easily.

Then the test subjects were given a different object to feel, and were then asked  to identify that object from a group of objects by sight alone.

Federal magistrate Joseph Spero has given permission for Sony to subpoena electronic payment provider PayPal as part of the consumer electronic’s lawsuit against George Hotz, the hacker who published the PlayStation 3 jailbreak program. The subpoena would cover all transactions made over PayPal between January 1, 2009 and February 1, 2011.

Sony is hoping that the information in Hotz’s PayPal account will show that he accepted money from northern California residents. Were they to find any, it would bolster their claim that the trial should be held in San Francisco and not Hotz’s home state of New Jersey. Readers will recall that this was the same intent behind Sony’s early subpoenas aimed at Google, Twitter, and the hosting service for Hotz’s website. Many internet privacy advocates have already registered their concerns about Sony’s subpoena of social networking services.

Of course, simply finding transactions will not be enough. Sony will have to prove that Hotz accepted money for his jailbreaking tool, a claim that Hotz denies.

Hotz faces charges under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the federal law which prohibits, among other things, posting tools that subvert copyright protection. The tool Hotz created gave PS3 users complete control over their systems, allowing them to do everything from playing pirated games to installing alternative operating systems.

This is only the latests salvo in the ongoing lawsuit, and surely not the last. Remember: The trial hasn’t even started yet. The real fun is yet to come.

A couple of days ago, we reported on a new service called Breakup Notifier that provided Facebook relationship status email alerts. Well, only two days after we mentioned the creepy-but-probably-useful-to-certain-people service, Facebook blocked it. Not too long ago, Breakup Notifier had over 3.6 million users in its database, vindicating the use of all those hyphens in the previous sentence. Creator of Breakup Notifier, Dan Loewenherz, received this message from Facebook this morning:

“To ensure positive user experiences on Platform, we run routine automated screens that take user feedback, machine learning and various algorithms into account and remove spammy applications. For example, if an application is making an inordinate number of stream.publish calls and receiving a large number of user reports, it may be removed by our automated systems to protect the user experience and the Platform ecosystem.”

It seems Facebook is saying their blocking of Breakup Notifier is because of something other than the app essentially being something representative of negative uses for Facebook. You know, like being creepy.

(via TechCrunch)