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(credit: UNICEF)

Children as young as seven years old are working for up to $2 daily mining in dangerous conditions to gather cobalt used in lithium batteries for 16 multinational corporations like Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, Sony, and others, according to Amnesty International.

If true, a report by the human rights group about mining conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo counters claims by gadget producers that child labor is not involved in their production stream. The report said at least 80 miners have died in the past year in the DRC, which produces about half the world's cobalt. Unicef estimates that there are as many as 40,000 child miners in the region. Amnesty International interviewed dozens of workers, who usually wear no protective clothing while toiling long hours.

A 14-year-old orphan named Paul said he works so long underground that "I had to relieve myself down in the tunnels," according to the report. "I would spend 24 hours down in the tunnels. I arrived in the morning and would leave the following morning," the boy told Amnesty International.

The Samsung Galaxy S III, released in mid-2012, is the newest phone involved in yesterday's injunction. (credit: SamsungTomorrow)

One month from now, Samsung will be banned from selling certain smartphones in the US. The phones involved are so old, however, that the legal order will not affect the marketplace in a meaningful way.

The injunction by US District Judge Lucy Koh is part of the long-running Apple v. Samsung lawsuits, which began nearly five years ago. In the second lawsuit, a jury awarded Apple $120 million, but Koh didn't grant an injunction against Samsung's infringing phones. Last September, she was overturned by the Federal Circuit.

Yesterday, Koh entered the injunction order (PDF) as the higher court mandated. Still, the banned phones and features are fairly irrelevant to the Samsung of today.

With Netflix saying it intends to disable video when customers use VPN services, VPN providers are criticizing the online video company and vowing to evade any measures designed to prevent their use.

Under pressure from content owners, Netflix said last week that it will step up enforcement against subscribers who use VPNs, proxies, and unblocking services to view content not available in their countries. But even Netflix acknowledges that it's "trivial" for VPN providers to avoid blocks by switching IP addresses, and VPN providers say they're ready.

“Unfortunately, many legitimate paid subscribers will be left in the dark as an unavoidable outcome of overreaching IP blocks," TorGuard's Ben van der Pelt told TorrentFreak in an article yesterday. “TorGuard is monitoring the situation closely and we have recently implemented new measures that can bypass any proposed IP blockade on our network. VPN users who encounter Netflix access problems are encouraged to contact us for a working solution."

A Tuesday announcement from Univision sent copyeditors and fact-checkers scrambling to secure confirmation that, no, this was not a satirical headline ripped from the pages of satirical news site The Onion: "Spanish-language television network buys controlling stake in The Onion."

Turns out, the news checks out, by way of the network becoming a "minority investor" of the combined entity known as Onion Inc—which includes The Onion, its sister publication AV Club, the dedicated Buzzfeed and listicle-site spoof Clickhole, and other Onion-branded content. An NPR report published before the announcement pegged the purchase at 40 percent of Onion Inc, which allegedly also includes "the right to buy the humor company outright" in the future.

Univision's announcement made no bones about the company's desire to reach younger, English-speaking audiences by way of this acquisition, complete with five uses of the word "millennial" (again, this is not a joke). However, the announcement didn't specify whether The Onion's content would become part of Univision's English-language, youth-targeting TV network Fusion; NPR's report contends that the network, which has recently hired Web-savvy hosts such as Alexis Madrigal, "appears to be a key element in the acquisition."

(credit: J. Rogers, University of Illinoi)

From the folds and crinkles of a living brain, a fleeting fleck of electronics smaller than a grain of rice can wirelessly relay critical health information and then gently fade away.

The transient sensors, which can measure pressure, temperature, pH, motion, flow, and potentially specific biomolecules, stand to permanently improve patient care, researchers said. With a wireless, dissolving sensor, doctors could ditch the old versions that require tethering patients to medical equipment and performing invasive surgery to remove, which adds risks of infections and complications to already vulnerable patients.

Though the first version, reported in Nature, was designed for the brain and tested in the noggins of living rats, the authors think the sensors could be used in many tissues and organs for a variety of patients—from car crash victims with brain injuries to people with diabetes. “Sensors are incredibly important,” chief resident of neurosurgery and study co-author Rory Murphy of Washington University School of Medicine told Ars. But they’ve been a hassle, too.