Secure optical data storage could soon literally be at your fingertips thanks to work being carried out in Japan. Yoshio Hayasaki and his colleagues have discovered that data can be written into a human fingernail by irradiating it with femtosecond laser pulses. Capacities are said to be up to 5 mega bits and the stored data lasts for 6 months – the length of time it takes a fingernail to be completely replaced.
Via Macintouch
Disneyworld is collecting fingerprints from season ticket buyers as a way to stop fraud.
Suppose you bought a TV set that included a component to track what you watched, and then reported that data back to a company that used or sold it for advertising purposes. Only nobody told you the tracking technology was there or asked your permission to use it.
You would likely be outraged at this violation of privacy. Yet that kind of Big Brother intrusion goes on every day on the Internet, affecting millions of people. Many Web sites, even from respectable companies, place a secret computer file called a “tracking cookie” on your hard disk. This file records where you go on the Web on behalf of Internet advertising companies that later use the information for their own business purposes. In almost all cases, the user isn’t notified of the download of the tracking cookie, let alone asked for permission to install it.
Wisconsin Public Radio’s Jean Feraca hosts a weekly program called Here on Earth. Driving around between events Saturday, I heard a bit of her program on Podcasting. A list of participants can be found here. However and unfortunately, WPR’s podcasts, like our dear Airport’s WiFi, is non-existent.
I did chuckle a bit as both Jean and the BBC’s Peter Day speculated about their job security as a result of Podcasting’s growth. Times are changing. I would agree that some radio stations have reasons to be concerned. Advertising overkill and the same old same old playlists have pushed more and more listeners away – to ipod’s attached to their car radios or ipods and short distance fm transmitters. Wikipedia on podcasting.
“Alternative Freedom” is their feature-length documentary about the invisible war on culture.
Quicktime
Nathan Cochrane on becoming an unperson. July 1, 2005 was the first day of the Real ID Act, supported by our good Senators Feingold and Kohl.
We seldom legislate new technologies into being. They emerge, and we plunge with them into whatever vortices of change they generate. We legislate after the fact, in a perpetual game of catch-up, as best we can, while our new technologies redefine us – as surely and perhaps as terribly as we’ve been redefined by broadcast television.“Who owns the words?” asked a disembodied but very persistent voice throughout much of Burroughs’ work. Who does own them now? Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do. All of us.
Though not all of us know it – yet.
Interesting story on the market for data in Moscow:
This Gorbushka vendor offers a hard drive with cash transfer records from Russia’s central bank for $1,500 (Canadian).
At the Gorbushka kiosk, sales are so brisk that the vendor excuses himself to help other customers while the foreigner considers his options: $43 for a mobile phone company’s list of subscribers? Or $100 for a database of vehicles registered in the Moscow region?
The vehicle database proves irresistible. It appears to contain names, birthdays, passport numbers, addresses, telephone numbers, descriptions of vehicles, and vehicle identification (VIN) numbers for every driver in Moscow.
The recent passage of the National ID Act, supported by our good Senators Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl means that it won’t be long before all of our data is available in this manner.
If the government’s plans stay on track, Britons will, within three years, begin to receive cards containing personal details, together with a digital photograph, fingerprints and an iris scan. A nation that has not possessed identity cards since 1952 will, in a step, acquire the world’s most complex system.
Doc Searls and Dave Winer (mp3) have some useful comments on the evils of DRM (Digital Restrictions Management). Craig Burton calls it EBWU (evil, wrong, bad and ugly).