It was all Tom Cruise's Idea!
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/03/2235250&from=rss
State of Ohio Establishes "Pre-Crime" Registry
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Sunday September 03, @09:44PM from the just-in-case-you-want-to-ruin-someone dept.
I*Love*Green*Olives writes to tell us the Toledo Blade is reporting that State officials have rubber-stamped a "civil-registry" that would allow accused sex offenders to be tracked with the sex offender registry even if they have never been convicted of a crime. From the article: "A recently enacted law allows county prosecutors, the state attorney general, or, as a last resort, alleged victims to ask judges to civilly declare someone to be a sex offender even when there has been no criminal verdict or successful lawsuit. The rules spell out how the untried process would work. It would largely treat a person placed on the civil registry the same way a convicted sex offender is treated under Ohio's so-called Megan's Law."
Ditto? The dumber the inspectors the more likely you are to appear guilty? Suspicious is a crime?
http://cbs5.com/localwire/localfsnews/bcn/2006/09/02/n/HeadlineNews/AIRPORT-SCARE/resources_bcn_html
FLASHLIGHT DEVICE PROMPTS BRIEF EVACUATION AT MINETA AIRPORT
09/02/06 9:35 PDT SAN JOSE (BCN)
Around 100 passengers and staff at Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport were evacuated for 30 minutes this morning after Transportation Security Administration officials noticed a suspicious article in a passenger's carry-on baggage, airport spokesman Rich Dressler said.
An outbound passenger passing through the security checkpoint in Terminal C around 8 a.m. had rigged together and stored in his bag two flashlights that were "an odd shape that caused the TSA to be somewhat suspicious," Dressler said.
... But authorities believed that because of the way the device was rigged, it was "somewhat suspicious" and the man was cited, Dressler said.
"I don't know what his actual motivation was. But it was enough that they did cite him," he said.
Perhaps if you offer to pay for the information?
http://digg.com/apple/Apple_Knows_Who_Stole_Your_iPod
Apple Knows Who Stole Your iPod
JoeLeo submitted by JoeLeo 17 hours 49 minutes ago (via http://www.sdreader.com/php/cityshow.php?id=1453 )
Apple maintains records of stolen iPod serial numbers. Apple's iTunes software records the serial number of the last connected iPod. Apple sells songs to people that enter their billing information into the iTunes software. So why isn't Apple doing anything to prevent the sale of songs to the person with your stolen iPod?
Not exactly early adopters, but it looks like they get it...
http://www.technewsworld.com/rsstory/52794.html
'Godcasts' Take Religion on the Road
By Frances Grandy Taylor The Hartford Courant 09/03/06 4:00 AM PT
A sampling of the wide-ranging content on Godcast1000 includes "Hardcore Christianity," which features a preacher who wears dark glasses and a backward baseball cap, "Jesus Geek," the spiritual musings of a Christian home-schooling father, and offerings from dozens of Catholic, Episcopal, Lutheran and nondenominational Christian churches across the country.
There was a time when you had to attend a church to listen to the weekly sermon, or become a regular member to hear a choir whose music you really love. These days, however, thanks to the iPod, you don't have to actually be there to enjoy.
A Web site called Godcast1000.com has just been launched with the intent of helping users "put God on your iPod." It bills itself as the largest free directory of Christian music, sermons, video and Bible study on the Internet. It lists more than 500 digital audio files that can be downloaded from the Web site to a computer or iPod.
Downloadable God
On the Internet, the smallest city storefront and the biggest suburban megachurch can compete equally for viewers and listeners. In fact, the church doesn't even have to be in the United States.
"One the most popular sites on the directory is preachtheword.com, which lists sermons by Pastor David Legge delivered at his church in Northern Ireland," says Lee Raney, president of Christian.com, a Web portal that links to Godcast1000.com
"Thirty years ago, a pastor like [Legge] would have to be as big as Pat Robertson to reach people through television and radio," Raney says. "Now any church can start a podcast and reach people anywhere in the world."
A sampling of the wide-ranging content on Godcast1000 includes "Hardcore Christianity," which features a preacher who wears dark glasses and a backward baseball cap; "Jesus Geek," the spiritual musings of a Christian home-schooling father; "Pod Bible," a daily reading of the Bible by people of all ages; as well as offerings from dozens of Catholic, Episcopal, Lutheran and nondenominational Christian churches across the country.
Deliverance On the Road
The Rev. Shaun Olsen of the Family Worship Center in McKinney, Texas, an Assemblies of God church in suburban Dallas, says he turned to "godcasting" for the first time last year to reach members of his congregation who travel often for business.
"The benefit of Godcast1000 is that it puts you in front of the audience that you are trying to reach," Olsen says.
The church's podcast includes the entire Sunday service.
"We also have hundreds of missionaries attached to this church who are serving around the world in India, Pakistan and South Africa, and that enables them to listen to the service back home. We've gotten a great response, especially from the business community."
Churches are also using podcasts to reach regular worshipers in new ways, says Raney, who adds that churches that aren't technologically savvy can get help through the Web site's "Sermoncast" program, where sermon tapes and CDs can be converted for a fee to a format that can be downloaded.
Raney, 35, who has both a master's degree in business administration and a theology degree, said he once considered entering the ministry himself but has decided instead that helping churches spread the word online will be his path.
"Godcasting is growing very fast right now," he says. "It's a business with an emphasis on telling people about Jesus Christ in a variety of ways."
I can see this as a medical or legal research site. I can't see limiting the answers to Internet sites. I also worry about getting the answer you want vs. the right answer...
http://news.com.com/2100-1038_3-6109782.html?part=rss&tag=6109782&subj=news
Start-up pays people to answer questions online
By Elinor Mills Story last modified Sun Sep 03 21:05:01 PDT 2006
A new social search site that pays people to answer questions from visitors will become publicly available on Monday.
ChaCha.com will pay "guides" up to $10 per hour spent searching for Web sites that contain answers to user questions. Guides invite other guides to the site and can then earn 10 percent of what the invited guides earn, said Brad Bostic, ChaCha.com president and co-founder.
There are four levels of guides: apprentice, pro, master and elite. They will be able to earn reputations based on user ratings and how the system rates their performance, Bostic said.
The Web site also indexes the responses to questions and makes them available if they are pertinent to future queries.
When a user asks a question, a guide will respond in a live chat window, providing a link that will contain the answer to the user's question, as well as a snippet from the Web page referenced.
The free site has about 2,500 guides, Bostic said. Targeted ads appear next to results.
Social search sites have been cropping up as an alternative to algorithmic-based search engines that provide results of links based on keywords. Experts say that while traditional Web search is best for providing answers to factual questions, people can often get better answers to subjective questions.
Rather than a user asking a question and getting answers from any random person in the community, which happens at Yahoo Answers, only one person answers a question on ChaCha.com. Another service, Google Answers, pays "researchers" 75 percent of the amount a user agrees to pay to get a question answered.
Paying the answerers ensures better-quality results than other question-and-answer sites, Bostic said.
Couple this with a license verification algorithm and you can eliminate DRM
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/012336.html
September 01, 2006
Registry of Digital Masters
CLIR: "A joint project of the Digital Library Federation (DLF) and OCLC, the registry provides a trusted service for the communication, coordination, and discovery of information about digital masters, their production, and the availability of use copies. The registry includes both digitally reformatted and born-digital objects. Hosted by OCLC and developed on the basis of recommendations from the DLF Registry of Digital Masters Working Group, the Registry of Digital Masters is a union catalog that uses MARC records to describe digital resources and provide details about their digitization and the preservation intentions of the institutions that are responsible for them."
Connect a few of these niche databases and you can create quite a dossier on your congressman.
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/012332.html
September 01, 2006
Group Documents Free Travel Accepted by Members of Congress
Press release: "Members of Congress and their aides accepted more than $600,000 in free travel from pharmaceutical interests and their allies during a 5½-year period in which drug company profits climbed, in part due to federal legislation favorable to the industry, according to a new study by the Center for Public Integrity."
"The "Power Trips" database of 25,000 public documents detailing nearly 23,000 privately funded trips can be accessed here."
Ditto
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/012337.html
September 01, 2006
Launch of CampaignNetwork.org
CQPolitics.com announced the launch of a joint venture with C-SPAN, called CampaignNetwork.org. "The new site features video of C-SPAN’s election coverage and is home to the network's voluminous library of debates in key races that are broadcast by television stations across the nation."
Very interesting. Another industry attempting to slow adoption of technology. They are doomed but don't want to consider how to make money using the technology...
http://digg.com/business_finance/The_end_of_the_housing_realtor
The end of the housing realtor?
parislemon submitted by parislemon 15 hours 38 minutes ago (via http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/03/business/yourmoney/03real.html?ei=5088&en=0be493bd5738880e&ex=1314936000&adxnnl=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1157374913-uuKrqWHVgSxNPL1lUmuWEQ )
The real estate market has largely resisted the Internet (on purpose) but that may be changing and it could spell big trouble for traditional realtors. Online housing brokers such as Redfin can save both buyers and sellers thousands of dollars since they take significantly less commision then traditional realtors.
What constitutional rights?
http://news.com.com/2061-10802_3-6112063.html?part=rss&tag=6112063&subj=news
Video blogger Josh Wolf is free
September 3, 2006 11:19 AM PDT
As expected, Josh Wolf, the video blogger who was jailed after refusing to turn over a film of political protests to a federal grand jury, was released on Friday morning from a federal prison in Dublin, Calif.
"It feels great to be a free man again," he told a crowd at a press conference in San Francisco following his release.
Wolf was jailed on Aug. 1 and denied bail after a judge found him in contempt of court for refusing to testify before a U.S. grand jury and hand over the unpublished video footage he shot during a clash between San Francisco police and anti-G8 protesters in July 2005. But a panel of Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals judges on Thursday granted him bail while his appeal in the case is being considered, which could take months.
"I hope that the 9th circuit's decision to grant me bail is indicative of the court's outlook that that I should not be held in contempt for asserting my constitutional rights as a journalist before the federal grand jury," he said, according to a copy of his speech posted on his blog. "They've concluded that my appeal is not frivolous or simply for delay, so that's a positive sign, and I have confidence that these vital rights that are, at the core, essential to the practice of journalism will eventually be recognized at the federal level; if not through the courts than at least through Congress."
The case ended up in the feds' hands because federal prosecutors--who among other things want to see if Wolf's footage shows a San Francisco police car being set on fire at the protest--say they have jurisdiction over the case because the car was paid for in part by federal dollars.
Wolf used his blog to thank all his supporters, from his mom and close friends, to those who donated to his defense fund, to his fellow inmates-turned-friends, "and of course, the Academy?all right just kidding on that last one," Wolf wrote.
Wolf said his time behind bars "was actually quite positive" and he "observed a community which is actually one of the healthiest that I have ever lived in." In order to get the inmates' stories out, he plans to start a not-for-profit organization that for now he's calling prisonblogs.net.
Towards ubiquitous surveillance (Does this summarize all email issues? Not even close.)
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2006/09/03/software_may_let_boss_spot_your_e_mail_abuse/
Software may let boss spot your e-mail abuse
By Jason Schwartz, Globe Correspondent CAMBRIDGE September 3, 2006
Big Brother is moving into the e-mail business. But could it be a good thing?
Xobni Analytics, a Cambridge-based software firm started by two recent college graduates, has developed a program that will provide businesses with detailed information on their employees' e-mailing habits.
While the cofounders of the firm -- Matt Brezina, 25, and Adam Smith, 21 -- say their software will equip companies with a tool to enhance productivity, some critics say it could also take a major chunk out of workers' ever-dwindling reserve of Internet privacy.
The Xobni software, which should be available for individual use Sept. 20 and is expected to be rolled out to businesses starting this winter, works by measuring the amount of time people spend reading and writing e-mails. From there, Xobni (that's inbox spelled backward) can chart when people send and receive e-mails, as well as how long it takes them to reply to messages (woe to the desk jockey who replies instantly to co-workers but takes hours to get back to the boss).
“We can tell you how quickly you're responding to your customers and how much attention you're giving them, in terms of time," Brezina says. “We can tell you the cost of a single e-mail, in terms of company man-hours." [Unlikely Bob]
The result, Brezina and Smith believe, will be the ability to identify and eliminate wasted time. One business has already come to them complaining that too many of their employees drain their colleagues' time by copying long lists of unnecessary people on their e-mails. That, Brezina and Smith say, is a problem that could be remedied by tracking e-mail habits.
“What we can start to do is predict," Brezina says. If an employee wanted to send an e-mail with numerous people copied on it, for example, before that person hits send, a box would pop up saying how many hours that e-mail would cost the company and questioning whether the worker still wanted to send it.
“Essentially what we can do is allow people to start to change behaviors," Brezina says.
Long, drawn-out e-mail threads, which Brezina and Smith say could frequently be reduced to brief in-person conversations, are another area of focus for the software. Xobni, which is designed as an add-in for Microsoft Outlook, will be able to quantify how much time was used by that long e-mail thread and eventually help develop a standard for what type of issues should be dealt with by e-mail and what type should be handled over the phone or in person.
By tracking e-mail , the software would also be able to recognize patterns in e-mail coming in from the outside. For instance, if data showed that Company A tended to receive e-mail from a major client at a certain time, then the employees at Company A would know that if they sent their e-mail to the client at that time, chances are the client would be sitting at his computer and have the new message come in at the top of his inbox.
As useful an efficiency tool as it seems, Xobni also has the potential to be a threat to the privacy of employees, some say. According to Stephen Goldstein, who has more than 20 years of experience in the communications and information technology industry and is the managing partner of the local firm, Growth Advisors, many companies already track e-mail for security and data-mining purposes, but no software other than Xobni has the capability to break down exactly when employees are sending e-mail and how much time they're spending doing it.
Brezina and Smith's program, therefore, could just as easily be used to crack down on employees spending too much time sending messages to family and friends as it could on overzealous office CCers.
The two insist that they are uninterested in “identifying Bill sending an e-mail to his girlfriend," but acknowledge that the software could be used that way.
To address the privacy issue, Brezina and Smith have built several privacy settings into their program. Filters would give administrators the option of allowing workers to create lists of personal e-mail addresses they want blocked from the software and the compiled statistics, Smith says.
Whether to use the filters would still be up to the business, though, and despite their opposition to monitoring personal messages, Brezina says that ultimately they'll listen to their customers and “give them what they want."
If used responsibly, Xobni could represent an advance in protecting workers' e-mail privacy, according to Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute, a nonprofit organization focused on human rights in the workplace.
The current problem, he says, is that most e-mail analysis software doesn't have any way to exempt personal e-mail , so companies end up trolling through their workers' personal matters in the process of monitoring work-related messages. “Incredibly personal information gets spilled on the boss's desk or read by the company computer jocks," Maltby says.
Though he believes Xobni “certainly isn't the perfect system," Maltby says that if its privacy filters can prevent companies from needlessly plowing through the text of personal messages, then it is at least ``a step forward."
As for the privacy issues of companies scrutinizing employees' personal e-mailing habits, Maltby is unconcerned. He says that most bosses are aware that people send the occasional personal message and accept it.
“It could become oppressive if it's carried to an extreme, but there's nothing inherently wrong with monitoring e-mail to see if people are using their time effectively," he says.
Even with the upcoming planned release of their software, Goldstein notes that Brezina and Smith are only at the beginning of the long start-up journey.
The $12,000 they've burned through so far seems small in comparison to the $150,000 they're attempting to raise from private investors and venture capital firms. They haven't determined yet how much they'll charge businesses to use Xobni. (The individual-use version will be available free.)
Goldstein says that he is somewhat skeptical about Xobni's chances for success. The data could be useful, he says, but not vital.
“That's all interesting stuff to know, but who's going to pay for it?" he says.
Still, the idea is novel, Goldstein says, and he wouldn't write Xobni off yet.
“Two guys in a garage -- the right two guys can do wonderful things," he says. “Apple, Google, you know the list. Perhaps there is a piece here that they have discovered."
Towards ubiquitous surveillance
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/03/google_eavesdropping_software/?
Google developing eavesdropping software
By Faultline Published Sunday 3rd September 2006 08:02 GMT
Comment The first thing that came out of our mouths when we heard that Google is working on a system that listens to what's on your TV playing in the background, and then serves you relevant adverts, was "that's cool, but dangerous".
The idea appeared in Technology Review citing Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, who says these ideas will show up eventually in real Google products - sooner rather than later.
The idea is to use the existing PC microphone to listen to whatever is heard in the background, [Sure, that VOIP phone conversation with your lawyer is of no interest. Bob] be it music, your phone going off or the TV turned down. The PC then identifies it, using fingerprinting, and then shows you relevant content, whether that's adverts or search results, or a chat room on the subject.
And, of course, we wouldn’t put it past Google to store that information away, along with the search terms it keeps that you've used, and the web pages you have visited, to help it create a personalised profile that feeds you just the right kind of adverts/content. And given that it is trying to develop alternative approaches to TV advertising, it could go the extra step and help send "content relevant" advertising to your TV as well.
We suspect that such a world would be rather eerie, with a constant feeling of déjà vu every time anyone watched TV.
Technology Review said Google talked about this software in Europe last June, and that it breaks sound into a five-second snippets to pick out audio from a TV, reducing the snippet to a digital "fingerprint", which it matches on an internet server.
Given the furore caused when AOL released searches on the internet, there might be more than a few civil liberties activists less than happy for Google to put this idea into practice. Also, given that Google provides the software link between its search software and the microphone, it's a small step to making the same link to any webcams attached to the PC.
Pretty soon the security industry is going to find a way to hijack the Google feed and use it for full on espionage.
Google says that its fingerprinting technology makes it impossible for the company (or anyone else) to eavesdrop on other sounds in the room, such as personal conversations, because the conversion to a fingerprint is made on the PC, and a fingerprint can't be reversed, as it's only an identity.
But we should think that "spyware" might take on an extra meaning if someone less scrupulous decided on a similar piece of software.
The Google program converts sound into graphs, weeds out background noise, and reduces the graphs to key features that can then be translated into just four bytes of information, so that the fingerprints for an entire year of television programming would add up to no more than a few gigabytes, the company said.
Towards ubiquitous surveillance No downside here!
http://edition.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/08/31/memory.sensecam/index.html
Tech boost for memory power
... Already many people carry camera phones enabling them to capture moments in video and pictures that previously would have been lost forever.
But that could only be the tip of the iceberg as the miniaturization of image sensor and digital recording technology and ever-expanding capacities for data storage make possible the development of personal "Black Box"-style recorders capable of chronicling entire lives.
One prototype that already goes some way towards that eventuality is Microsoft's SenseCam, picked out by Bill Gates in a recent Time magazine interview as one of the software giant's most exciting projects.
... With advances in "pervasive computing" -- technology built into the environment around us -- future generations of SenseCam could be incorporated into our clothes or possessions, Wood said.
... Meanwhile another Microsoft team based in California is conducting a unique experiment to develop ways of sorting and ordering the huge quantities of raw data produced by SenseCam-style technology into a useable format.
For the past eight years researcher Gordon Bell has been digitally documenting every photograph, note, e-mail and document relevant to his life. More recently, he has started using a SenseCam to automatically record details of his daily movements. All that material is then uploaded to a searchable database called "MyLifeBits."
... Beyond therapeutic uses, both Wood and Bell predicted that people would chose to record more and more of their lives as the technology became available -- and that privacy issues raised by that trend would need to be addressed, particularly as miniaturization made the technology more discrete and pervasive. [So start thinking about a world where everything (define) is recorded, stored, and available for recall (subpoena) Bob]
"Once a technology is out there it does tend to get used so I have a feeling it will probably end up being the case that people will end up capturing more and more things," said Wood. "If SenseCams or their equivalents turn out to be useful there will have to be social norms that emerge around them." [How about a visible “off switch” for those intimate moments? Bob]
Not the “Cost cutting” answer I would choose.
http://google.blognewschannel.com/index.php/archives/2006/09/03/aol-shuts-down-aol-research/
By Nathan Weinberg
Greg Linden reports that AOL has shut down their research department, following the big search privacy scandal that emanated from that department. Now, one commenter says on of the people they fired after the scandal basically was the whole department, but if AOL was serious about trying some research efforts, it is still disheartening to see them give up on it. AOL has so much customer data that could be a wealth of knowledge in the hands of the right researchers. Maybe they could outsource all their customer data to Google, which owns 5% of AOL anyway, as long as Google remains as tight-lipped as we all know them to be.
By the by, if you want to talk about some interesting data, Greg’s been writing about a paper Google released about Bigtable, Google’s massive and robust distributed database system. In his latest post, he notes that the paper cites Google’s web crawl as containing 850 terabytes of data, [Imagine that as a reply to your subpoena. Bob] while Google Analytics has 250 terabytes. Is it just me, or does that seem like a big waste given that (a) Google search earns billions of dollars and (b) Google Analytics loses money. Hmm…
Another example of inadequate testing?
http://maba.wordpress.com/2006/09/01/macbook-shutdown-solved-at-last-hopefully/
Random Macbook Shutdowns. Solved. At Last. Hopefully.
Some friends of mine have this nasty issue with their Macbook; it’s shutting down spontanously. Apple’s support forum is full of postings from users seeking solutions, and a web site is just dedicated to this problem. Now, a German news site has posted an article about an IT engineer from Munich, Germany (my hometown! Prost!). It is stated that he has located the problem which is a result of pure physics. The phenomenon seems to be caused by the cable between the heat sensor and the CPU’s heat sink being too short.
The heat sink expands during operation and gets into contact with the sensor cable and melts the cable’s isolation. [No one has noticed this before? Bob] This in turn causes a short circuit and, thus, the immediate shutdown of the Macbook. As the heat sink is cooling down, the heat sink contracts to the point that it looses its contact with the cable and breaks up the short circuit. You can now boot again. Just until the processor heats up and the heat sink and the cable have contact again…
If this proves to be the reason then there might be a quick fix, specifically you would not have to exchange your mainboard or RAM.
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