Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Tuesday, February 4, 2003

Implementing surveillance in our lives -- Comment()
JD's New Media Musings points to Universal Transparency: "Surveillance will play an increasingly important part in our lives and can be implemented in many different ways. All of us are very concerned about Orwellian outcomes, so we are taking a proactive approach and proposing variations on Universal Transparency as a way to prevent an Orwellian outcome. Universal Transparency means allowing everyone to see most everything, no one group holds the power of surveillance - it is distributed in a democratic way!"

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t e c h n o c u l t u r e: "The Boston Globe has a great cover story on Google entitled A Nation of Voyeurs: How the Internet search engine Google is changing what we can find out about one another - and raising questions about whether we should."

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DPReview writes: "SMaL Camera Technologies have today announced their new Ultra-Pocket 1.3-Megapixel digital camera, this builds upon the award-winning 6mm thin Ultra-Pocket® VGA digital still camera. It has the same credit card size of its predecessor, with only a slight increase in thickness due to higher resolution optics, plus a strobe flash and an SD card for expanded memory storage. " [Matt Croydon::postneo < Sample the Web]

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Total Information Delusion:

The Pentagon's Total Information Awareness (TIA) project may have stalled due to opposition in Congress, but even if the effort goes forward, many computer scientists doubt the effectiveness of the technology. [...] TIA leader John Poindexter underestimates the complexity of understanding human behavior, especially since computers today still do not fully grasp language. The Information Awareness Office Poindexter runs contains 12 other programs besides TIA [...] Palo Alto Research Center computer scientist Francine Chen says that even a relatively accurate technology would produce too many false positives to be useful when applied to a population of approximately 300 million people. [...] Lunt concedes that no technology can provide 100 percent privacy protection.

For information about ACM's U.S. Public Policy Committee, visit http://www.acm.org/usacm

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EU backs poor farmers' seed use: "The European Union is proposing two far-reaching curbs on the power of the biotechnology industry. It says companies seeking patents should have to say where they found any natural product they are appropriating." [Google Technology News]

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What Python Can Do for the Enterprise: "With all the attention focused on Java and C#, companies may be missing out on a programming language that might be better suited to their needs. It is called Python, and it is known for its simplicity -- no small feat for a programming language. But can it crack the enterprise market?" [osOpinion]