Vine Has a Porn Problem Because Of Course It Does

It’s actually pretty surprising that it took everyone three days to figure out that Twitter’s new cell phone camera-powered video sharing app, Vine, is perfect for porn. Vine has it all. It can record reasonably high quality videos of anything you want, on-the-go, and post it publicly for all the Internet to see. You add hashtags so that people can easily find special interest content. There’s even a little comments section so that you can share your thoughts about the distinctively addictive six-second loops. Heck, we’d be surprised if people didn’t immediately start to post pictures of their genitals doing what genitals do. They probably did, actually. Everyone else was just too busy watching pictures of their friends pets and children to notice.

RELATED: The Chinese Want to Know Why Their News Is on Twitter and They Aren’t

But alas, by Sunday everyone had noticed. Although it had already been mentioned on smaller tech blogs, the Vine porn problem started to become widely known after New York Times reporter Nick Bilton tweeted, “Friend: ‘So are people using Vine for porn yet?’ Me: “‘Nah, I don’t think so.’ Friend: ‘Check the hashtag #porn.” Both: “Holy ****!’” And the thing is, he’s totally right. TechCrunch published a post on the NSFW trick — #NSFW works for porn seekers, too, by the way — broaching the topic of Apple‘s App Store coming down hard on the adult-only content. It’s against the rules, see, and Apple has a history of yanking apps that become magnets for all things naughty. The Verge followed up a few minutes later with the headline, “Apple has a porn problem, and it’s about the get worse.”

RELATED: How Not to Get Censored on Twitter

This got us thinking: These App Store restrictions on pornographic content have been around as long as the App Store. Surely in the past five or so years, the moderators know a porn magnet when they see one. Vine is hardly the first video-sharing app to make it through the approval process, not to mention the many photo-sharing apps. (And Apple’s certainly not afraid of enforcing those rules, as we learned when it yanked the 500px app after it started to become home to “pornographic images and material.”) It’s no anomaly that Vine made through, though. As virtually every new video- or photo-sharing service has shown us since the dawn of the Internet, from Flickr to ChatRoulette, it’s very difficult to keep these sites or apps G-rated. So the companies either learn how to police it well, like Flickr does, or they wither and die, as ChatRoulette did.

RELATED: Twitter’s New Hashtag Project Sounds Risky

So it’s hard to believe that the App Store didn’t consider the fact that people might upload pictures of their penises to Vine. It’s more likely that they did and decided to see how Twitter would deal with it, when it became a problem. After all, Vine is not going to be the last video-sharing app to be built and it certainly won’t be the last porn-friendly app to be built either. So Twitter gets to play guinea pig and navigate the tricky terrain of moderating user-generated content in real time. It’s a good thing they already have a boatload of experience doing that on Twitter! See, look how fast they came up with a solution. A company statement reads:

RELATED: The Good, the Bad, and the Fuzzy of Twitter’s New Censorship Rules

Users can report videos as inappropriate within the product if they believe the content to be sensitive or inappropriate (e.g. nudity, violence, or medical procedures). Videos that have been reported as inappropriate have a warning message that a viewer must click through before viewing the video.

Uploaded videos that are reported and determined to violate our guidelines will be removed from the site, and the user that posted the video may be terminated.

Twitter being Twitter — that is, big proponents of the free flow of information — they stop short of defining “inappropriate” in Vine’s terms and conditions. Unlike Twitter, which has been free to operate on the whole of the Internet, however, Vine lives in Apple’s house now. If Twitter’s hands off policy doesn’t do enough to keep smut off the iPhone, Apple will surely pull the plug, and then, well — then we’ll be back to where we were last week.

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'Argo,' Lawrence, Day-Lewis win at SAG

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The CIA thriller "Argo" continues to steamroll through awards season, winning the top honor for overall cast performance at the Screen Actors Guild Awards.

SAG's lead-acting honors Sunday went to Jennifer Lawrence for her role as a troubled widow in a shaky new relationship in the lost-souls romance "Silver Linings Playbook" and Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War epic "Lincoln."

Anne Hathaway of "Les Miserables" and Tommy Lee Jones of "Lincoln" won the supporting-acting honors.

"It occurred to me — it was an actor that murdered Abraham Lincoln," said Day-Lewis, a solid front-runner to join an exclusive list of three-time acting Oscar winners. "And therefore, somehow it is only so fitting that every now and then an actor tries to bring him back to life again."

It was a brisk, businesslike and fairly bland evening as the actors union handed out honors to a predictable lineup of winners who generally had triumphed at earlier Hollywood ceremonies or past SAG shows.

The SAG cast win came a day after "Argo" claimed the top honor from the Producers Guild of America, whose winner often goes on to claim best picture at the Academy Awards. "Argo" also was a surprise victor two weeks ago at the Golden Globes, where it won best drama and director for Ben Affleck.

The awards momentum positions "Argo" for a rare feat at the Feb. 24 Oscars, where it could become just the fourth film in 85 years to be named best picture without a nomination for its director.

"To me this has nothing to do with me, it has to do with the incredible people who were in this movie," said Affleck, who also stars in "Argo" and accepted the SAG prize alongside his cast.

A directing nomination at the Oscars usually goes hand in hand with a best-picture win. When Affleck was snubbed for a directing slot, awards analysts initially were counting "Argo" out for the best-picture Oscar, along with Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty" and Tom Hooper's "Les Miserables," which also missed out on directing nominations.

Only once in modern times has a film won best picture without a directing nomination, with 1989's "Driving Miss Daisy." The other two times came in the show's early years, at the first Oscars in 1929 with "Wings" and for 1932's "Grand Hotel."

But "Argo" has proven a resilient crowd-pleaser, dominating at awards shows since then over Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln," which leads the Oscars with 12 nominations.

The cast prize at SAG adds some weight to the Oscar prospects for "Argo," though the guild honor has a spotty record at forecasting eventual best-picture winners. Only eight of 17 times since the guild added the category has the cast winner gone on to take the best-picture Oscar. "The Help" won the guild's cast prize last year, while Oscar voters named "The Artist" as best picture.

The next playoff round before the Oscars is Saturday's Directors Guild of America Awards, where Affleck, Bigelow, Spielberg and Hooper all are nominated, along with Ang Lee for "Life of Pi." The winner there typically goes on to triumph with directing and best-picture Oscars, but only Spielberg and Lee are nominated for both the Directors Guild and Oscar prizes this time, throwing the awards picture into a muddle.

Sunday's acting prizes solidify those categories, though. "Silver Linings" star Lawrence won a Golden Globe and has become one of Hollywood's hottest talents, with part two of her blockbuster franchise, "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire," due out in November.

"Now I have this naked statue that means some of you even voted for me, and that is an indescribable feeling," Lawrence said after explaining she earned her SAG card at age 14 by filming a spot for MTV.

Hathaway won for her role as a doomed single mother forced into prostitution in the adaptation of the stage musical based on Victor Hugo's epic novel. Her win came over four past Oscar recipients — Sally Field, Helen Hunt, Nicole Kidman and Maggie Smith.

"I'm just thrilled I have dental," Hathaway said. "I got my SAG card when I was 14. It felt like the beginning of the world. I have loved every single minute of my life as an actor. ... Thank you for nominating me alongside incredible women and incredible performances."

Jones, who was not at the show, won for his turn as abolitionist firebrand Thaddeus Stevens in the Civil War epic. The win improves his odds to become a two-time Academy Award winner. He previously won a supporting-actor Oscar for "The Fugitive."

Day-Lewis, a two-time Oscar winner for "My Left Foot" and "There Will Be Blood," could become the fifth actor to earn three Oscars, along with Meryl Streep, Jack Nicholson, Ingrid Bergman and Walter Brennan. Katharine Hepburn has the acting record with four Oscars.

Backstage at SAG, Day-Lewis was hardly ready to predict a third Oscar win.

"There's a good chance I won't. I feel the same way at all these occasions. Mostly, we're traveling as a group, the fellow nominees, give or take one here or there," Day-Lewis said. "I would happily recognize any single one person whose name is called."

On SAG's television side, with "30 Rock" ending its run, its stars Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin won the SAG awards for best comedy performers. It was Baldwin's seventh-straight win, while Fey earned her fifth SAG prize.

"Oh, my God. It's ridiculous," Baldwin said. "It's the end of our show, which is sad. Everybody is sad about that. It was the greatest experience I've ever had."

Fey gave a plug for the show's finale airing Thursday, noting that it's up against "The Big Bang Theory."

"Just tape 'The Big Bang Theory' for once, for crying out loud," Fey said.

"Modern Family" won for best overall cast in a TV comedy show. Accepting for the cast, "Modern Family" co-star Jesse Tyler Ferguson offered thanks to the makers of "30 Rock" and another departing series, "The Office," saying "you all have set the comedy bar so high."

Ferguson joked that if the "30 Rock" or "The Office" stars need jobs, they should contact the "Modern Family" casting director.

The TV drama acting awards went to Claire Danes of "Homeland" and Bryan Cranston of "Breaking Bad."

"It is so good to be bad," Cranston said.

"Downton Abbey" won the TV drama cast award.

Julianne Moore's turn as Sarah Palin in "Game Change" earned her the TV prize for best actress in a movie or miniseries. Kevin Costner won for best actor in a movie or miniseries for "Hatfields & McCoys."

Fey, who memorably spoofed Palin herself in "Saturday Night Live" sketches, said backstage that Moore's performance was "incredible. She really disappeared into the character, she did a real film acting job. You wouldn't want a sketch acting job in that movie."

Earlier, the James Bond adventure "Skyfall" and the fantasy series "Game of Thrones" picked up prizes for best stunt work, honors announced on the red carpet before the official SAG Awards ceremony.

Receiving the guild's life-achievement award was Dick Van Dyke, who presented the same prize last year to his "The Dick Van Dyke Show" co-star, Mary Tyler Moore.

After waiting on stage for a prolonged standing ovation to end, Van Dyke said, "That does an old man a lot of good."

___

Associated Press writers Beth Harris, Christy Lemire and Anthony McCartney contributed to this report.

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Dave Purchase, Who Led Needle-Exchange Movement, Dies at 73

Dave Purchase, a bearded biker who 24 years ago began handing out sterile syringes to prevent AIDS among drug addicts on the streets of Tacoma, Wash., and went on to become a national leader of the needle-exchange movement, died on Jan. 21 in Tacoma. He was 73.

The cause was complications of pneumonia, said his son, Dylan.

With a borrowed television tray and a folding chair that he set up on a downtown street steps away from a heroin den, Mr. Purchase began handing out syringes, bottles of bleach, cotton swabs and condoms in the summer of 1988. Within five months he had exchanged 13,000 clean needles (most of them bought at his own expense) for dirty ones — and was gaining wide attention from the news media.

“How does this work?” a toothless addict asked him, The New York Times reported in January 1989.

“You give me an old one, I give you a sterile one, and it keeps your butt alive,” Mr. Purchase responded.

Mr. Purchase would trade as many as 10 needles at a time, while also handing out cookies and mittens.

By 1993 he had founded both the Point Defiance AIDS Project, with support from the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department, and the North American Syringe Exchange Network. The network, which buys syringes wholesale and sells them at cost to programs across the country, now distributes more than 15 million syringes annually.

Articles over the years have cited Mr. Purchase’s 1988 street-corner operation as the first exchange in the nation. Ethan Nadelmann, the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, which promotes alternatives to harsh legal treatment of drug users, could not confirm that.

“Whether or not he was literally the first to hand out syringes to stop AIDS, he was undoubtedly the godfather of needle exchange in America,” Mr. Nadelmann said in an interview. “He was a mentor and adviser to activists and public health workers around the world.”

In the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when many critics argued that needle exchanges encouraged drug use, Mr. Purchase “was able to get political acceptance in Tacoma and obtain public funding,” said Don Des Jarlais, the director of research for the Chemical Dependency Institute at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan.

When Mr. Purchase set up shop, he was without official government sanction or financial backing and, he said, was prepared to go to jail for 90 days for the misdemeanor offense of possessing drug paraphernalia. But he soon received support from the Tacoma police chief, Ray Fjetland, who suspended enforcement of the syringe law.

Mr. Purchase also worked closely with the county health department. The program became something of a model.

By 2011, according to a survey by Dr. Des Jarlais, there were 197 known needle-exchange programs in 36 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. That year, those exchanges distributed more than 36 million syringes.

“Given that over the course of the epidemic there have been several million people who injected drugs,” Dr. Des Jarlais said, “the efforts of Dave and people like him have literally saved hundreds of thousands of lives.”

In a way, David Joe Purchase found his calling on a Harley-Davidson. Born in Tacoma on Aug. 29, 1939, to Kenneth and Bernice Purchase, he was something of a rebel as a youngster. He worked at several jobs after dropping out of college.

“My dad was a biker, with the big beard, the black leather jacket,” Mr. Purchase’s son said. “Because of that look, he started assisting a friend who was a drug counselor who would send him around town when clients went missing — into bars, down an alley.”

Mr. Purchase was nearly killed in 1983 when a drunken driver crashed into his motorcycle. After a long rehabilitation, he returned to work as a drug counselor and soon realized that many of his clients were dying of AIDS. He used $3,000 from a settlement from the accident to buy syringes and set up his table.

Mr. Purchase’s marriages, to Sally Riewald and Sue Powers, ended in divorce. Beside his son, he is survived by a daughter from his first marriage, Rebecca Ford; two stepsons, Blake Barry and Kelly Powers; a stepdaughter, Krista Townsend; a sister, Karen Robinson; and three step-grandchildren.

In 2006, Mr. Purchase told The News Tribune in Tacoma that he would never consider giving up his work.

“I’d have to live with that,” he said. “This is life and death. There were unnecessary deaths, unnecessary and preventable deaths.”

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Rules to simplifying life come up short

Los Angeles-area author Matthew E. May has hit upon an attractive theme in his recent book, "The Law of Subtraction: 6 Simple Rules for Winning in the Age of Excess Everything" published by McGraw-Hill.

Who does not yearn for a guide to simplifying, synthesizing and subtracting some of the clutter, overload and demands of the "Age of Excess Everything"?

He has also cleverly subtracted from his own workload by inviting others, mostly authors and consultants like him, to contribute about a third of the material for his six laws for doing more with less in the form of summaries of their views.

Mind you, it took fellow author Daniel Pink to point out the appeal of the subject. "Subtraction is your meme. It's out there; it's growing," he told May just before he took the stage at a corporate conference, urging him to "own" it. "Best. Advice. Ever," writes May.

This exchange is itself a little guide to what the book is like. Not only is it full of people talking in a slightly artificial, visionary way about common sense objectives, it is also filled with contradictions. "Subtraction is growing" is only the first.

The book does contain good examples of the less-is-more theme, some well-known, some less so. May's opener (illustrating Law No. 1: "What isn't there can often trump what is") is the FedEx logo, featuring an arrow created by the blank space between the E and X. Lindon Leader, its designer, explains how he "didn't overplay it, didn't mention it" when pitching the idea. (He makes up for that here.)

May, who lives in Westlake Village, also provides a brief history of how Lockheed Corp. put a team of design engineers in a circus tent next to a foul-smelling plastics factory to design a jet fighter: the secret Skunk Works became a byword for how to foster innovation. (Law No. 5: "Break is the important part of breakthrough.")

He cites J.K. Rowling, who was inspired for the idea for Harry Potter on a long, boring train journey, in support of Law No. 6. ("Doing something isn't always better than doing nothing.").

My favorite came from contributor Bob Harrison, a retired police chief, who introduced an "unplan" to withdraw officers directing traffic after a July 4 fireworks display and discovered everyone got home more quickly. (Law No. 2: "The simplest rules create the most effective experience.")

But I find every subtractive success story has an additive counterweight, some of which are explicit in May's examples.

It is true that "creativity thrives under intelligent constraints" (Law No. 4), but Michelangelo — ordered to work on a fresco for the Sistine Chapel, not a sculpture, his preferred medium — then "expanded the job's scope," covering the walls as well as the ceiling.

Steve Jobs was a great simplifier, who "handed control to us" as users of Apple devices. But he was also a control freak when it came to designing the same artifacts, supervising fine detail, adding features and forcing his team to work all hours, rather than giving them time for "purposeful daydreaming," as May advocates elsewhere in his book.

"The Artist," the silent, black-and-white film that provides May with the book's coda, was a worthy Oscar winner — but so was 2008's "Slumdog Millionaire," with its cast of thousands and Bollywood-style excess.

May does not avoid these contradictions, but he does not really address them, either. He prefers to list examples of his six laws rather than explore how employers or their staff could reconcile the daily conflict between constraints and freedom, perspiration and inspiration.

In the interests of "owning" his Zen-inspired meme, May subtracts these complexities. Instead he offers tips, such as his invitation to take "long, languid showers" — No. 8 on a list of ways to relax the mind. This point "needs no explanation," May writes, "which is good, because I could find no research on the subject."

For most people at most companies, where the pressure to add customers, revenue and value is intense, it is as difficult to "subtract" as it is for most grown-ups to follow the advice of one of the book's contributors and live out of a suitcase in a near-empty apartment.

It is a pity, given the need to simplify many business processes, that May adds so little to the sum of knowledge about how to do it.

Hill is the management editor of the Financial Times of London, in which this review first appeared.

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L.A. mayoral candidates sound off on pot dispensaries

As Los Angeles voters face the possibility of as many as three medical marijuana initiatives on the May ballot, several mayoral candidates have begun to outline their own plans to deal with the proliferation of pot dispensaries — an issue that has ensnared the City Council in countless legal tangles.

At a mayoral forum sponsored by the League of Women Voters last week, four of the five leading candidates argued for paring back the hundreds of pot dispensaries around the city. But Councilman Eric Garcetti said his first goal would be to persuade the federal government to reclassify marijuana as a medicine: "I will advocate that as mayor," he said.

Garcetti, who presided over many of the battles on the issue as council president from 2006 to 2012, said he would also urge state lawmakers to set regulations governing the distribution of medical marijuana.

"The courts say wildly different things because there has not been clear guidance from the state or federal level," he said. At the city level, Garcetti said, he would try to "keep access" while limiting the number of dispensaries. "You charge a fee so you have an enforcement mechanism, and where possible collect taxes" — steps that, he said, would free up law enforcement officers to focus on more serious crime.

City Controller Wendy Greuel called for "compassion" but placed a greater emphasis than Garcetti on tightening regulations on the locations of pot shops in the city.

"I think when people voted in the state of California to allow medical marijuana, they thought they would go to their local CVS pharmacy and get it. They didn't think about the impact it would have on neighborhoods," said Greuel, who is targeting many of the more conservative San Fernando Valley voters. "The bottom line is we have a right to regulate where marijuana clinics are in the city of Los Angeles…. The public is demanding that the government actually do their job."

After the forum, aides to Greuel told The Times she also would support classifying marijuana as a medicine at the federal level.

The city has struggled for years to regulate the placement of pot shops. A loophole in the city's 2007 moratorium allowed hundreds of additional shops to open. The council's efforts to limit the proliferation led to more than 100 lawsuits against the city. In response to complaints from neighborhood activists, the council enacted a ban on storefront marijuana sales last July. But it retreated in October, repealing the ban after a well-organized coalition of marijuana activists mounted an effort to overturn it at the ballot box.

Kevin James, a former federal prosecutor and the sole Republican among the major contenders, said the confusion and legal wrangling illustrated the dysfunction of the council.

"More pot clinics than Starbucks? Unbelievable," James said at Thursday night's forum. "Only this City Council could put a moratorium on 180 or so pot clinics — and it skyrockets to over 1,000."

The five mayoral candidates were pressed to say how many dispensaries should be allowed across the city. James said he favored about 10 in each of the 15 council districts. Garcetti said the original number of dispensaries — approximately 100 — was "about right."

Greuel and Councilwoman Jan Perry said they were hesitant to name an exact number, with Perry adding that she would take her policy cues from the voters in May.

Candidate Emanuel Pleitez, a technology executive who read from notes throughout the forum, argued that "politicians shouldn't be in the business of setting numbers" and should "let the market decide."

Last week the City Council advanced a measure for the May ballot that would permit only the dispensaries that opened before the moratorium to operate; the measure would also raise taxes on marijuana sales. Garcetti backed the request by Councilman Paul Koretz and Council President Herb Wesson asking the city attorney to draw up language for a ballot measure. Perry was absent for the vote.

Two additional — and competing — medical marijuana initiatives have qualified for the May ballot.

One, which is largely backed by dispensaries that opened after the moratorium, would allow many pot shops to remain open, but it would set new requirements for their operations — such as limited hours and maintaining a certain distance from schools. It would raise taxes on medical marijuana by 20% to pay for city enforcement.

The other was created by a coalition of medical marijuana advocates and the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which began organizing dispensary workers last year. Like the City Council-sponsored proposal, it would allow only pot dispensaries that opened before 2007 to operate. Koretz and Wesson have criticized the measure for not mandating that the shops be located farther away from schools, churches and parks.

Some advocates for the union-backed measure now say they probably will support the council's proposal because it too would allow older dispensaries to remain open and has a better chance of passing.

maeve.reston@latimes.com

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Google reportedly ‘actively exploring’ the smartwatch market

In October, Google (GOOG) was granted a patent for a smartwatch with a flip-up display, however it was assumed that the concept, like most patents, would never move beyond the drawing board. A new report from Business Insider claims that the company is now “actively exploring” the idea of producing its own smartwatch and is even looking into ways it could market such a device. Information is slim and it is unclear what size the device would be or if it would even run the company’s Android operating system. Business Insider cautioned that the project is still in a “very early stage” and “it remains to be seen if Google will actually end up bringing a smart watch to market.” As the Pebble has shown, however, there is clearly a market for smartwatches.

[More from BGR: Unlocking your smartphone will be illegal starting next week]

This article was originally published on BGR.com

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Kutcher takes on tech idol Steve Jobs in 'jOBS'

PARK CITY, Utah (AP) — Ashton Kutcher says playing Steve Jobs on screen "was honestly one of the most terrifying things I've ever tried to do in my life."

The 34-year-old actor helped premiere the biopic "jOBS" Friday, which was the closing-night film at the Sundance Film Festival.

Kutcher plays the Apple Inc. founder from the company's humble origins in the 1970s until the launch of the first iPod in 2001. A digital entrepreneur himself, Kutcher said he considers Jobs a personal hero.

"He's a guy who failed and got back on the horse," Kutcher said. "I think we can all sort of relate to that at some point in life."

Kutcher even embodied the Jobs character as he pursued his own high-tech interests off-screen.

"What was nice was when I was preparing for the character, I could still work on product development for technology companies, and I would sort of stay in character, in the mode of the character," he said. "But I didn't feel like I was compromising the work on the film by working on technology stuff because it was pretty much in the same field."

But playing the real-life tech icon who died in 2011 still felt risky, he said, because "he's fresh in our minds."

"It was kind of like throwing myself into this gauntlet of, I know, massive amounts of criticism because somebody's going to go 'well, it wasn't exactly...,'" Kutcher said.

While the filmmakers say they tried to be as historically accurate as possible, there was also a disclaimer at the very end of the credits that said portions of the film might not be completely accurate.

Still, realism was always the focus for Kutcher, who watched "hundreds of hours of footage," listened to Jobs' past speeches and interviewed several of his friends to prepare for the role.

The actor even adopted the entrepreneur's "fruitarian diet," which he said "can lead to some serious issues."

"I ended up in the hospital two days before we started shooting the movie," he said. "I was like doubled over in pain, and my pancreas levels were completely out of whack, which was completely terrifying, considering everything."

Jobs died of complications from pancreatic cancer.

Still, Kutcher was up to the challenge of playing Jobs, in part because of his admiration for the man who created the Macintosh computer and the iPod.

"I admire this man so much and what he's done. I admire the way he built things," Kutcher said. "This guy created a tool that we use every day in our life, and he believed in it when nobody else did."

The film also shows Jobs' less appealing side, withholding stock options from some of the company's original employees and denying child support to the mother of his eldest child.

Kutcher still found the man inspiring. Jobs had a singular focus, Kutcher said, and felt like anyone could change the world.

"I don't know if there's ever been an entrepreneur who's had more compassion and care for his consumer than Steve Jobs," Kutcher said. "He wanted to put something in your hand that you could use and you could use it easily... and he really cared about that."

___

AP Entertainment Writer Sandy Cohen is on Twitter: www.twitter.com/APSandy.

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Well: Ask Well: Squats for Aging Knees

You are already doing many things right, in terms of taking care of your aging knees. In particular, it sounds as if you are keeping your weight under control. Carrying extra pounds undoubtedly strains knees and contributes to pain and eventually arthritis.

You mention weight training, too, which is also valuable. Sturdy leg muscles, particularly those at the front and back of the thighs, stabilize the knee, says Joseph Hart, an assistant professor of kinesiology and certified athletic trainer at the University of Virginia, who often works with patients with knee pain.

An easy exercise to target those muscles is the squat. Although many of us have heard that squats harm knees, the exercise is actually “quite good for the knees, if you do the squats correctly,” Dr. Hart says. Simply stand with your legs shoulder-width apart and bend your legs until your thighs are almost, but not completely, parallel to the ground. Keep your upper body straight. Don’t bend forward, he says, since that movement can strain the knees. Try to complete 20 squats, using no weight at first. When that becomes easy, Dr. Hart suggests, hold a barbell with weights attached. Or simply clutch a full milk carton, which is my cheapskate’s squats routine.

Straight leg lifts are also useful for knee health. Sit on the floor with your back straight and one leg extended and the other bent toward your chest. In this position, lift the straight leg slightly off the ground and hold for 10 seconds. Repeat 10 to 20 times and then switch legs.

You can also find other exercises that target the knees in this video, “Increasing Knee Stability.”

Of course, before starting any exercise program, consult a physician, especially, Dr. Hart says, if your knees often ache, feel stiff or emit a strange, clicking noise, which could be symptoms of arthritis.

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Hackers take over sentencing commission website

The hacker-activist group Anonymous says it hijacked the website of the U.S. Sentencing Commission to avenge the death of Aaron Swartz, an Internet activist who committed suicide. The FBI is investigating.

The website of the commission, an independent agency of the judicial branch, was taken over early Saturday and replaced with a message warning that when Swartz killed himself two weeks ago “a line was crossed.”

The hackers say they've infiltrated several government computer systems and copied secret information that they now threaten to make public.

Family and friends of Swartz, who helped create Reddit and RSS, say he killed himself after he was hounded by federal prosecutors. Officials say he helped post millions of court documents for free online and that he illegally downloaded millions of academic articles from an online clearinghouse.

The FBI's Richard McFeely, executive assistant director of the Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch, said in a statement that “we were aware as soon as it happened and are handling it as a criminal investigation. We are always concerned when someone illegally accesses another person's or government agency's network.”

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We change more than we think, scientists say

Glancing around his study on a recent afternoon, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert's eyes came to rest on his collection of thousands of music CDs, acquired over many years at considerable expense.

"I don't listen to a lot of them anymore," he said. "I was certain I'd listen to Miles Davis until the day I died."

According to his own research, Gilbert is hardly alone in having imagined that he'd always like the same music, or hobbies or friends.

Writing this month in the journal Science, he reported that people at all stages of life tend to believe they won't change much in the future — even as they recognize great shifts in their personalities, values and tastes in the past.

Calling it the "end of history illusion," he and his colleagues suggested that the phenomenon may help explain why people make decisions they later regret: marrying the wrong person or buying an expensive vacation home.

"We recognize it in teenagers," Gilbert said. "We say to them, 'You're not going to like that Megadeth tattoo in 10 years.' But no matter how old you are, you're making the same mistake."

Gilbert, who is 55, said he became interested in studying the end of history illusion based on his own experiences in middle age.

"I've had this sense that I was finished baking — that I'd still be me, but older," he said.

He decided to test that intuition through a series of experiments.

An obvious approach would have been to have subjects make predictions about their future selves, wait 10 years, and see if they were right, Gilbert said. But lacking that kind of lead time, he and his colleagues devised a way to get the same information from a single moment in time.

Recruiting viewers of a popular French documentary hosted by study coauthor Jordi Quoidbach, a postdoctoral researcher in Gilbert's lab, the scientists assigned some to answer questions designed to arrive at core aspects of their identity and to predict how those responses might differ 10 years in the future. Among other things, subjects were asked to list their favorite foods or hobbies, rank values such as success and security, or answer a standard questionnaire designed to home in on personality traits like conscientiousness and emotional stability.

Other volunteers were asked to consider the same traits, but report how they had changed in the past decade.

Pairing up future-focused predictors and backward-looking reporters — such that the predictions of 25-year-olds were compared to the recollections of 35-year-olds, for instance — the researchers found that people consistently acknowledged they had changed a lot in the past but underestimated how much they would change in the future. The results held true for each decade of life between ages 18 and 68.

In all, more than 19,000 people recruited from Quoidbach's show took part in the experiment. Although the effect was stronger in younger people than in older people, it did not disappear, Gilbert said.

Was this merely an interesting quirk, or did it have consequences? To find out, the team conducted another experiment to gauge whether people's unwillingness or inability to recognize how much they'll change in the future leads them to pay too much for things today.

Recruiting an additional 170 subjects online, they asked some to name their favorite music group and say how much they'd pay to see the band in concert 10 years from now. They asked others to recall their favorite band from 10 years ago and say how much they'd pay to see them today.

On average, those in the first group were willing to pay $129 to see their current favorite play in 10 years — 61% more than members of the second group, who would pay only $80, on average, to see their former favorite.

Psychologist Michael Ross, an expert in the study of autobiographical memory at the University of Waterloo in Canada, said it was "novel and audacious" that we tend to see ourselves as fully formed. But many questions about the end of history illusion remain, said Ross, who was not on the research team.

Ross said he'd be interested in further research explaining what causes people to think this way and whether the effect is limited to perceptions of ourselves or also applies to our perceptions of others. Cultural differences may also play a role; perhaps people in East Asian societies, who generally express less satisfaction than people in the West, might perceive change differently, he said.

Though our apparent blindness toward our own mutability might seem to doom us to a lifetime of bad decisions and regrets, Gilbert insisted all was not lost.

"If you want to know how you'll react to something in the future, look at someone who's reacting to it today," he said. "We're not as different from each other as we think."

Then again, he added, previous research has shown that most of us prefer to think we're unique.

eryn.brown@latimes.com

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