RUMOR: CHINESE BOY SELLS KIDNEY TO BUY iPAD2

A 17-year-old Chinese boy living in the Anhui province in China sold his kidney for 22,000 yuan, or about $3,400, just so he could purchase an iPad 2. “I wanted to buy an iPad 2 but could not afford it,” the unnamed boy told Shanghai Daily. “A broker contacted me on the Internet and said he could help me sell one kidney for 20,000 yuan.” The child and broker arranged the procedure without his parents knowing, and he underwent surgery at a Chenzhou hospital. When his parents found out, they notified the police immediately but they have been unable to locate the broker, according to the report.

What’s more, the hospital at which the surgery took place was not qualified to perform the procedure, but the administration claims it was not aware of what was happening because the department that performed the surgery was contracted to a Fujian businessman. The child now says he regrets his decision.

FACEBOOK USING YOUR LIKES AND CHECK-INS TO CREATE ADS

Facebook just figured out a new way to make money off of your status updates and likes, and it’s a doozy: they’re now using your likes and postings about products and services to display to friends in advertisement form.

Showing up quietly on Wednesday morning without any mention from Facebook, you can see the new ads at worked in the right-hand ad column. If you friends check in at business or like other websites or products, and if Facebook has an advertisement deal with that company, you’ll start seeing their status updates as a “Sponsored Story.”

“Currently, marketers don’t have the ability to know or plan word-of-mouth endorsements as part of their campaigns,” Facebook’s product marketing lead Jim Squires told the Wall Street Journal. “This gives a way for marketers to increase the visibility of stories about their organization… this is word-of-mouth marketing at scale.”

Sound familiar? It should: back in 2007, Facebook tried more or less the same thing with Facebook Beacon, which turned into a huge class-action privacy lawsuit last time around because of the way it allowed marketers to publish off-Facebook purchases directly to users’ walls.

The current system isn’t likely to spark any class-action lawsuits, but it’s still got some privacy concerns associated with it: although Facebook will respect your privacy settings when it comes to sharing your content with strangers, there’s no way to stop Facebook from turning your wall status updates into a billboard to annoy your friend list.

RUMOR: GOOGLE BUILDING ITS OWN NFC PAYMENT SYSTEM

Can't say we're surprised to hear this at all, but Bloomberg BusinessWeek says Google's working on its own NFC-based mobile payments system. That makes perfect sense, given that Eric Schmidt has been enthusiastically extolling the virtues of NFC since just before Google launched the Nexus S -- which, of course, features an NFC chip. BusinessWeek says the system might launch as early as this year, although we think Google's got plenty of infrastructure work to do first -- and it's facing plenty of competition from the likes of Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T, who are launching their own Isis payment system, as well as direct device competition from RIM and Apple. Should get interesting -- we'll see if we hear anything at CES this week. [Engadget]

GOOGLE TO PAY CASH REWARDS FOR BUGS

Google has decided to start offering more cash rewards for all the bug hunters out there.

Although a reward program has been in place for the Chromium open source project since January, Google has now decided to expand the scheme to include its other web properties. Those properties include:

*.google.com
*.youtube.com
*.blogger.com
*.orkut.com
If you’re wondering what bugs are worthy of a reward Google is keeping things very open by stating:

Any serious bug which directly affects the confidentiality or integrity of user data may be in scope.

You won’t earn cash for any of the following, though:

attacks against Google’s corporate infrastructure
social engineering and physical attacks
denial of service bugs
non-web application vulnerabilities, including vulnerabilities in client applications
SEO blackhat techniques
vulnerabilities in Google-branded websites hosted by third parties
bugs in technologies recently acquired by Google
As to how much you can earn, the rewards are substantial if you report regularly or hit a goldmine of bugs Google will payout multiple times for. The guidelines are as follows:

The base reward for qualifying bugs is $500. If the rewards panel finds a particular bug to be severe or unusually clever, rewards of up to $3,133.7 may be issued. The panel may also decide a single report actually constitutes multiple bugs requiring reward, or that multiple reports constitute only a single reward.

Anyone deciding to give their reward to charity will see the amount matched by Google. [Geek]

GOLD DISPENSING ATMS COMING TO U.S.

Ever been out and found yourself a few grams of gold short?  Now all your troubles are solved.  Gold to Go vending machines are now coming to the U.S.  These ATM style machines will take your old nasty dirty paper money (or credit card) and spit out fresh 1, 5, 10 or 28 gram 24-carat gold bars.  You can opt to receive international coins from South Africa, Australia or Canada as well.  The machine will call back to the German headquaters to check gold prices six times per hour.  Hundreds have been slated for introduction to the U.S. with Las Vegas and Florida being the test areas. [Engadget]