RIM Toys With Blackberry Addicts Again; Cuts Off Users For 3.5 Hours

from the want-to-stay-connected? dept

Last April, RIM woke many Blackberry users up to the idea that they might be Crackberry addicts by having the system go offline for a few hours overnight. It's amazing how people recognize just how dependent they are on a service once it goes away. The eventual excuse given by RIM (a botched software upgrade) was unconvincing. However, there hadn't been any more outages, so questions about the service died down. However, with widespread Blackberry outages Monday afternoon, lasting about three and a half hours, impacting all mobile operators, some of those questions are going to be raised again. The Blackberry system involves all traffic going through RIM machines, and a cascading problem across those machines can certainly cause quite a bit of trouble. At some point, people are going to start asking if there isn't a more robust, distributed way of offering a Blackberry (or Blackberry-like) service that would be more immune to these types of issues.

Filed Under: addiction, blackberry, centralized services, mobile email, outage
Companies: rim

If You Could Vaccinate Your Kids Against Drugs, Would You?

from the just-say-no dept

Researchers are working on a cocaine vaccine that uses the immune system to attack cocaine molecules, rendering them ineffective. The vaccine, which is currently in clinical trials, could be a boon to recovering cocaine addicts -- approximately half of which relapse within a year of detoxification. With the vaccine, the biochemical pathways through which cocaine works are blocked, so, taking cocaine does not come with an associated high so addicts do not become re-addicted. Of course, the vaccine is in no way meant as a replacement for drug treatment, since it does nothing to treat the underlying psychological factors of the addiction. It is not mentioned if the vaccine can be used before addiction occurs -- or even before cocaine is ever taken. Granted, the current trials do not include that use, nor do they include children, but, if it were available, would parents flock to their doctors and have their kids vaccinated? And, what other maladies could be treated in such a manner? Reports from the 1900s indicate attempts to create an alcohol vaccine. More recently, Celtic Pharma's nicotine vaccine works on a similar mechanism to the cocaine vaccine, but for nicotine. Sure, you'd be hard pressed to find detractors against a cocaine vaccine, but if a nicotine vaccine became available would the tobacco lobby be worried?

Filed Under: addiction, cocaine, vaccines

Korea's Internet Addiction Bootcamps Mistargeted

from the the-symptom-rather-than-the-disease dept

For years, we've pointed out how ridiculous it is for people to be blaming internet addictions for things, when almost every case of "internet addiction" that's demonstrated that the actual problem was something else, and the internet usage was just a way of "escaping" from those other problems. It didn't help that many of the big supporters of "internet addiction" happen to be the people (i.e., doctors) who are most likely to profit from such a thing existing. On top of that, reports have shown that so-called "internet addictions" tend not to be particularly harmful, and it makes you wonder what the big deal is. However, more recently, we're seeing some governments take the "threat" seriously. The NY Times is running an article about a "boot camp" in Korea to help cure kids of internet addiction, incorrectly suggesting it's the first such camp in the world. Earlier this year, we pointed out that China was opening a summer camp for internet addicts, which followed Chinese attempts to cure internet addiction with electric acupuncture, shock therapy and special halfway houses.

Still, as you read the NY Times piece about the Korean boot camp, you see that the folks running the camp are marking the same assumption: that it's the internet or computers to blame, and therefore, the solution must be to remove kids from the internet and computers entirely. This is fighting the symptom, not the disease. There's a reason why people started spending so much time online, and simply taking away access probably won't change that. The one kid that the article discusses in any detail started spending more time online because he wasn't very popular in school. Taking away the internet isn't going to fix that. There's no doubt that some people can spend way too much time at their computers, and it can potentially damage other parts of their lives -- but simply blaming the internet and pulling it away completely seems like a cure that's not likely to help very much. If the real problems that lead the person to spend so much time online aren't dealt with, then they will simply manifest themselves in some other manner soon enough. Calling something an internet addiction seems easy enough (and it's catchy, so it gets headlines), but if people are treating the internet part, rather than the real problems, it's not doing anyone any good.

Filed Under: addiction, internet addiction, korea