Congress yields to pass Bush spying bill

The Congress yielded to President Bush on Saturday and approved legislation to temporarily expand the government’s power to conduct electronic surveillance without a court order in tracking foreign suspects. Civil liberties groups charged the measure would create a broad net that would sweep up law-abiding U.S. citizens. But the House of Representatives gave its concurrence to the bill, 227-183, a day after it won Senate approval, 60-28.
Source: Reuters, August 5, 2007

Meraki’s Guerilla Wi-Fi to Put a Billion More People Online

Meraki Networks, Inc., is a three-year-old company headed by Sanjit Biswas, a polite and bespectacled Massachusetts Institute of Technology student-cum-CEO on permanent hiatus from the pursuit of a doctoral degree in computer science. No one at the company ever mentions this to me — there is such a thing as being too earnest — but I later discover that meraki is a Greek word that means putting a piece of yourself into something you create; in other words, doing it with love.[...] Biswas says his goal, and that of Meraki, is to “connect the next billion people.”
Source: Christopher Mims, Scientific American, August 6, 2007

Search engine revs up to look for billions of names

A US web firm is preparing to launch an ambitious Internet search engine that it hopes will eventually track down the names of the world’s six billion people. Spock.com says it has already indexed 100 million people and is adding a million names per day on the invitation-only, beta version of its website, which will be made available to the public in mid-August.
Source: Helene Labriet-Gross, AFP, August 7, 2007

Can you catch a killer before they commit a crime?

Imagine the scene. You arrive at New York’s JFK airport, tired after a long flight, and trudge into line at passport control. As you wait, a battery of lasers, cameras, eye trackers and microphones begin secretly compiling a dossier of information about your body. The computer that is processing the data from these hidden sensors is not searching for explosives, knives, guns or contraband. Instead, it is working on a much tougher problem: whether you are thinking about committing a terrorist act, either imminently, or at sometime during your stay in the US. If the computer decides that might be your intention, you will be led off for interview with security officers.
Source: Claire Bowles, New Scientist, August 8, 2007

Citywide Wi-Fi network put to test in Minneapolis

While public safety has often been touted as a major reason for cities to build their own Wi-Fi networks, until the tragedy in Minneapolis last week, such a network had never been truly tested. “Public safety is always part of the request for proposals for these networks,” said Joe Caldwell, CEO of USI Wireless, the company building and providing Wi-Fi service in Minneapolis. “So we had already been talking about what the network could do in theory. Then this happened, and the network did exactly what it was supposed to do. And it did it amazingly well.”
Source: Marguerite Reardon, CNET News.com, August 8, 2007

Britain begins ID card procurement process

Britain launched on Thursday the selection process to choose companies to run its multibillion-dollar national identity card program, the world’s most ambitious biometric project. Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government described the move as “another milestone” toward the controversial compulsory program, which is expected to cost more than $10 billion over the next decade.
Source: Reuters, August 10, 2007

Bloggers launch Sk*rt, a ‘Digg for women’

Three bloggers have launched a news-ranking site aimed at melding the concept of Digg.com with topics such as parenting, fashion and food targeted more at women. Sk*rt, which was launched this week, is the brainchild of Gabrielle Blair, a blogger who is a former art director for a New York advertising agency and a mother of five. Blair, of Westchester County, N.Y., liked the concept of Digg but found the site lacked news stories on some topics she was interested in. She contacted bloggers Laurie Smithwick, who runs a Web design firm in North Carolina, and Laura Mayes, who works for an advertising agency in Texas, and the three came up with the notion of Sk*rt.
Source: Heather Havenstein, Computerworld, August 10, 2007

China Enacting a High-Tech Plan to Track People

At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets here in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity. Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most citizens.
Source: Keith Bradsher, The New York Times, August 12, 2007 (Free registration, permanent link)

Congress yields to pass Bush spying bill
The Congress yielded to President Bush on Saturday and approved legislation to temporarily expand the government’s power to conduct electronic surveillance without a court order in tracking foreign suspects. Civil liberties groups charged the measure would create a broad net that would sweep up law-abiding U.S. citizens. But the [...]