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Steve Gillmor
TechCrunch.com
Thursday, August 7, 2008; 7:51 AM

The dog days of August lend themselves to kicking back and letting the world slide by. Since the advent of the Web 2.0 ecosystem, they?ve also been the province of a tech company version of the summer shows the networks play off - failed pilots, reality programming being tried out for the Big Show or another writer?s strike, and ratings stinkers that can be buried outside of Sweeps months.

But the DVR has changed everything, in the process eliminating the notion of special sweeps periods and the upfronts where the new season is hawked. Instead, every day is Premiere Month, with the quality of the audience becoming a function of its trackability. The more that you can see the gestures of the audience in real time, the less you need to attract their attention and the more you can market it to the advertisers. In that context, a show played back is no longer a second class citizen; instead the metadata about when you played it back and what was going on at that time form a more powerful indicator of intent, and the common signature of like-minded users a highly valued target.

By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 8, 2008; A03

Some long-term survivors of HIV infection produce rare and extremely potent antibodies that keep the disease from progressing to AIDS, and might point to a way to protect uninfected people from the virus, researchers reported yesterday in the closing hours of the 17th International AIDS Conference in Mexico City.

The antibodies, against a particular part of a much-studied HIV protein called gp120, might prove useful as a microbicide for blocking infection during sexual intercourse. If researchers could find a way to prompt the immune system to make its own supply of the antibodies before encountering the virus, they would have a vaccine.

Apple yields ultimate control over applications running on your iPhone. If it doesn't like an app it flips a "kill switch" that zaps an unpalatable iTunes App off your iPhone in a heart beat. At least that's the buzz today in the blogosphere about a line of code found inside Apple's iPhone 2.0 software by independent iPhone developer Jonathan Zdziarski.

By Jerry Markon and Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, August 8, 2008; A01

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba, Aug. 7 -- A former driver for Osama bin Laden was sentenced by a military jury Thursday to 5 1/2 years in prison for supporting terrorism, a far shorter term than demanded by government prosecutors. The judge gave Salim Ahmed Hamdan credit for five years and one month of his pretrial incarceration at Guantanamo Bay, making him eligible for release from custody in five months.

The sentence was a stunning rebuke to prosecutors who had insisted on a prison term of at least 30 years and portrayed Hamdan throughout the trial as a hardened al-Qaeda warrior. The jury of six military officers convicted him Wednesday of supporting al-Qaeda by driving and guarding bin Laden and ferrying weapons for the terror group, but he was acquitted of terror conspiracy.

By Amy Goldstein, Anne Hull and Julie Tate
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, August 7, 2008; A01

More than a year before the anthrax attacks that killed five people in 2001, Bruce E. Ivins told a counselor that he was interested in a young woman who lived out of town and that he had "mixed poison" that he took with him when he went to watch her play in a soccer match.

"If she lost, he was going to poison her," said the counselor, who treated Ivins at a Frederick clinic four or five times during the summer of 2000. She said Ivins emphasized that he was a skillful scientist who "knew how to do things without people finding out."

One of the things that worried public health leaders gathered at the international conference on AIDS in Mexico City is the fact that more cases of HIV infection still occur among “men who have sex with men.” HIV and AIDS are concentrated in Mexico particularly among men who have sex with men. While in the United States, 53 percent of new HIV infections in 2006 were in gay and bisexual men, in Mexico men who have sex with men are 109 times as likely as others to develop HIV, the washingtonpost.com noted.

The biggest percentage (46%) of HIV/AIDS infections in 2007 in US has been reported among men with homosexual orientation. Black Americans are seven times more likely to be infected than whites. Afro-Americans are the most exposed male human beings to HIV infection (annual rate of change 14.9 percent), followed by Caucasians (9.4 percent annual increase) and Hispanics (7.9 percent).

Reuters
Thursday, August 7, 2008; 5:42 AM

Packers trade Favre to Jets

Thursday, August 7, 2008; A20

Given rising medical costs, physicians are increasingly urged to practice "evidence-based" medicine. The recently updated guidelines for prostate-specific antigen, or PSA, screening for prostate cancer ["U.S. Panel Questions Prostate Screening," front page, Aug. 5] illustrate the promise but also the pitfalls of incomplete evidence as well as the importance of individual considerations.

I am a general internist, and, in the past three years, I have known two men (not my patients), one in his 80s, the other in his 90s, who were not screened and who developed florid prostate cancer with multiple painful metastases to their bones. The younger man had other health problems, but his cancer responded to hormone treatment that significantly improved the quality of his remaining years. The older man, otherwise perfectly healthy and in full possession of his faculties, died a painful and almost certainly premature death.

By Rob Pegoraro
Thursday, August 7, 2008; D01

If your computer annoys or amazes you, and you yell at it or congratulate it, you'll be met with silence. But if you direct your feedback to the company that made it, will you have any more of a dialogue?

Calls to tech support can enlighten or exasperate, but they shouldn't terminate a company's interaction with its customers. Over the last month, few tech firms could have received a clearer lesson in that idea than Apple.

Detection of Chemical Perchlorate Is 'a Positive,' Scientist Says

By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 6, 2008; A02

With reports circulating on the Internet that the Phoenix lander had found a chemical in the Martian soil that made past or present life there highly unlikely, NASA officials quickly organized a teleconference yesterday to announce that although they had made an unexpected discovery, it had little bearing on whether the planet ever supported life.

What the lander detected was perchlorate, a highly oxidizing and potentially toxic compound that is found on Earth in generally arid regions. The chemical, which is used in solid rocket fuels, air bags and fireworks, can harm the human thyroid gland by blocking the absorption of iodine.