An anonymous reader writes "Apple has done it again. All threads about Consumer Report's iPhone4 non-recommendation are removed or deleted. If it happened once, maybe you'd say it was a glitch. But what if it happened twice? Three times? Four times, five, six?"

crimeandpunishment writes "Not only are Germany and Facebook not friends, they might end up opponents in a courtroom. Germany has begun legal action over privacy. A German data protection official accuses Facebook of illegally saving personal data of people who don't use the site and haven't given permission to access their private information. Germany, which has also launched an investigation into Google over its Street View mapping program, has some of the strictest privacy laws in the world."

GMGruman writes "The BBC has stirred up quite a row in Britain about a shocking use of taxpayer funds: creating iPhone apps to provide citizens services. As InfoWorld blogger Galen Gruman notes, it's apparently bad in Britain for the government to use modern technology during a recession, a mentality he likens as a shift from 'cool Britannia' to 'fool Britannia.'"

blackbeak writes "The BBC today characterized those who avoid GM foods as overly fussy, the very same day that the Wall Street Journal announced that picky eating may be recognized in the 2013 DSM as a psychiatric disorder. The DSM item refers to something completely different, though I'm sure many will confuse the two. Of course, this was not done without subterfuge; the BBC's author, Professor Jonathan Jones, in no way indicates his close ties to Monsanto. Point by point Jones regurgitates the same pro-GM arguments debunked numerous times all over the net for years, while serving up some stale half facts too."

benoliver writes to let us know that the FBI has failed to decrypt files of a Brazilian banker accused of financial crimes by Brazilian law enforcement, after a year of attempts. Five hard drives were seized by federal police at the apartment of banker Daniel Dantas, in Rio de Janeiro, during Operation Satyagraha in July 2008. (The link is to a Google translation of the original article in Portuguese.) The article in English mentions two encryption programs, one Truecrypt and the other unnamed. 256-bit AES was used, and apparently both the Brazilian police and the FBI tried dictionary attacks against it. No Brazilian law exists to force Dantas to produce the password(s).

Jamie found an interesting site that has many charts and graphs about the strange May 6 stock market plunge and rebound. There's a lot of information to consume over there, but it does a pretty good job of showing high-frequency trading is getting to be a real problem.

We have a slew of iPhone 4-related stories this morning, so I'm lumping them together for easier consumption/ignoring, depending on your personal feelings on the subject. Here is a blog entry proclaiming that iOS 4 multitasking sucks and why. Here is a sketchy summary of privacy violations by Apple and AT&T — apparently they are reporting back jailbroken phones. Skunkpost has a story about the lines and sales of the new phone. But the big news of the morning is the reception problems that apparently only affect people who hold the phone in their left hands.

kthreadd writes "The LLVM project is now working on a debugger called LLDB that's already faster than GDB and could be a possible alternative in the future for C, C++, and Objective-C developers. With the ongoing success of Clang and other LLVM subprojects, are the days of GNU as the mainstream free and open development toolchain passé?" LLVM stands for Low Level Virtual Machine; Wikipedia as usual has a good explanation of the parent project.

Ponca City, We love you writes "When Google started, it would only update its index every four months. Then, around 2000, it started indexing every month in a process called the 'Google dance' that took a week to 10 days and would provide different results when searching for the same term from different Google data centers. Now PC World reports that Google has introduced a new web indexing system called Caffeine, which delivers results that are closer to 'live' by analyzing the web in small portions and updating the index on a continuous basis. 'Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale,' writes Carrie Grimes on the official Google Blog. 'Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day.' Now not only does Caffeine provide results that are 50% fresher than Google's last index, adds Grimes, but the new search index provides a robust foundation that will make it possible for Google to build a faster and more comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online."

UgLyPuNk writes "A group of inmates at the Huai'an Internet Addiction Treatment Centre decided they'd had enough of the 'monotonous work and intensive training.' Working together, they tied their duty supervisor to his bed and made a run for it. The 14 patients, aged from 15 to 22, hailed a taxi to take them to a nearby town — but were uncovered when the driver took them to the police station instead, suspicious of the identically dressed young men who were unable to pay the fare."

Hugh Pickens writes "The New York Times has an interesting article about the thousands of analysts based in the United States for the Central Intelligence Agency and the US military who are showing how the Facebook generation's skills are being exploited — and paying dividends — in America's wars. Analysts monitor enemy communications and scan still images from drones in Afghanistan, then log the information into chatrooms, carrying on a running dialogue with drone crews and commanders and intelligence specialists in the field, who receive the information on computers and then radio the most urgent bits to troops on patrol. Marine intelligence officers say that during an offensive in February, the analysts managed to stay a step ahead of the advance, sending alerts about 300 or so possible roadside bombs, paving the way for soldiers to roll into Marja in southern Afghanistan with minimal casualties. 'To be that tapped into the tactical fight from 7,000 to 8,000 miles away was pretty much unheard of before,' said Gunnery Sgt. Sean N. Smothers, a Marine who stationed as a liaison to the analysts. New analysts, who were practically weaned on computers and interactive video games, have been crucial to hunting insurgents and saving American lives in Afghanistan. The Air Force, which has 4,000 analysts, is hiring 2,100 more. For the most part, the networking has been so productive that senior commanders are sidestepping some of the traditional military hierarchy and giving the analysts leeway in deciding how to use some spy planes."

Pickens writes "USNWR is reporting that the needle pricks involved in acupuncture may help relieve pain by triggering the natural painkilling chemical adenosine. There are also indications that acupuncture's effectiveness can be enhanced by coupling the process with a well-known cancer drug — deoxycoformycin — that maintains adenosine levels longer than usual. Dr. Maiken Nedergaard of the University of Rochester Medical Center and her colleagues administered half-hour acupuncture treatments to a group of mice with paw discomfort. The investigators found adenosine levels in tissue near the needle insertion points was 24 times greater after treatment, and those mice with normal adenosine function experienced a two-thirds drop in paw pain. By contrast, mice that were genetically engineered to have no adenosine function gained no benefit from the treatment." Read below for some acupuncture skepticism engendered by other recent studies.