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Big Brother Down Under

/ Big Brother

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Jane, from Coogee, was surprised to find three police on her bus asking to inspect mobile phones. Each took a phone at random and scrolled through messages for five or ten minutes. Everyone obeyed. “The people were perfectly friendly about it,” she said. “I thought it was a bit weird and a breach of privacy. But I didn’t say anything. Nobody did.”

No, it’s not about terrorism, it’s about potential racial violence, but it’s still that nasty abuse-of-rights-in-the-name-of-safety-from-unknown-boogeymen vibe. Of course, such flagrant violations of our rights without a court order could never happen in the US. In the US, we’d never even know they’d read our text messages without a court order until we read about it in the New York Times.

(Thanks to Omri for the link.)

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Bowing to pressure, retailers agree to take Lord’s name in vain

/ Culture

Docbug Exclusive — Faced with a potential boycott from right-wing Christian groups, retailers Target and Lowes have agreed to reinstate their long-standing policy of using Christ’s name for cheap commercial gain. The companies were targeted by the American Family Association because they refer to the word “holiday” instead of Christmas in their advertisements and storewide decorations.

Conservative pundits were quick to call the move a victory for those who recognize Christ as an inherent part of the end-of-year buying season. Spokesmen for both companies say they intended no disrespect, and that they plan to institute policies to insure that religion will be more prominently exploited in the future.

(Update 12/15/05: fixed typo)

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No need to outrun the bear…

/ Uncategorized

From Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-gram:

Two years ago, if someone asked me about protecting against identity theft, I would tell them to shred their trash and be careful giving information over the Internet. Today, that advice is obsolete. Criminals are not stealing identity information in ones and twos; they’re stealing identity information in blocks of hundreds of thousands and even millions.

On the plus side, he says so many identities are being stolen now that the thieves don’t have time to use more than a small percentage of them for fraud…

No need to outrun the bear… Read More »

GMail “Web Clips” are still context blind…

/ Media Technology

GMail has added Web Clips at the top of their page, showing RSS and Atom feeds plus “relevant sponsored links” to the top of your messages. Unfortunately, it looks like only the sponsored links are actually relevant (which I read to mean “related to the message you’re reading”). Clips from your own RSS feeds are still just random.

Hopefully they’re busy working on fixing that — I still think automatic annotation of email (and blog entries) with other related entries form a largish set of favorite RSS feeds is a seriously useful application that needs to be exploited. Honestly, I’ve been expecting it to be just around the corner for about three years now, and I’m not sure why I’m still waiting. (I know, I know… if I really want it done I’d sit down and write one myself…)

GMail “Web Clips” are still context blind… Read More »

Let’s hear it for flexibility…

/ Media Technology

Two interesting technologies have just been announced in the flexible-computing arena. First (via engadget) is NEC’s announcement of their Organic Radical Battery, a 300-micron thick flexible battery with an energy density of about 1 mWh/cm2 and recharge time of just 30 seconds. Then throw in Plastic Logic‘s announcement of a 10″ diagonal SVGA E-Ink display (4-level greyscale) that’s both flexible and less than 0.4mm thick. (Thanks to Kurt for the links!)

nec-orb-flexible-battery.jpg plastic-logic-eink-display.jpg
NEC’s ORB battery Plastic Logic’s E-Ink based display

Let’s hear it for flexibility… Read More »