Web guru targets malaria with social network site

The British entrepreneur who sold a football Web site at the age of 17 for $40 million (20 million pounds) has switched his attention to help launch a social networking site on Sunday designed to fight malaria. Tom Hadfield set up Soccer.net in his bedroom before selling it to U.S. sports network ESPN, but now hopes the power of sites such as Facebook can curb a disease that kills an estimated one million people a year, many of them in Africa.
Source: John Joseph, Reuters, April 20, 2008

Google gives Brazil Senate panel user information regarding pedophilia

Google’s Brazilian subsidiary on Wednesday handed over information on more than 3,000 of its users to a Brazilian Senate panel investigating pedophilia. Felix Ximenes, Google’s communications director in Brazil, delivered a set of DVDs containing information on 3,261 users of the company’s popular Orkut social-networking service for an investigation into the spread of child pornography on the site.
Source: The Associated Press, April 24, 2008 (Free registration)

FBI wants widespread monitoring of ‘illegal’ Internet activity

The FBI on Wednesday called for new legislation that would allow federal police to monitor the Internet for “illegal activity.” The suggestion from FBI Director Robert Mueller, which came during a House of Representatives Judiciary Committee hearing, appears to go beyond a current plan to monitor traffic on federal-government networks. Mueller seemed to suggest that the bureau should have a broad “omnibus” authority to conduct monitoring and surveillance of private-sector networks as well.
Source: Anne Broache, CNET’s News Blog, April 23, 2008

IBM’s Webbie World

In some ways, IBM’s employees are already out-Webbing even Web-based companies like Google and Facebook. IBM’s spokespeople claim it has 24,000 Facebook users and 155,000 LinkedIn users, giving it one of the biggest corporate representations on both sites. IBM also boasts that its 350,000-plus employees maintain around 10,000 internal blogs and 15,000 wikis, discussing everything from collaborative software development to idle water-cooler chat.
Source: Andy Greenberg, Forbes.com, April 22, 2008

Spike Lee and Nokia team up for film

Who says cellphones are good only for talking? Today they are bringing together two unlikely brand names: Nokia and Spike Lee. Lee, the director, is teaming up with Nokia, the cellphone maker, to direct a short film comprising YouTube-style videos created by teenagers and adults using their mobile phones. By hiring Lee for the project, Nokia is seeking to combine the populist appeal of user-generated content with the power of a famous director’s pedigree. The film will have three acts, each three to five minutes long, with the theme loosely based on the concept of humanity.
Source: Laura M. Holson, The International Herald Tribune, April 24, 2008

Banning genetic discrimination

The US Senate has voted unanimously to outlaw genetic discrimination. The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act bans US employers from using genetic information in hiring, firing, promotion and compensation decisions, and from collecting genetic information from employees. Similarly, the bill prevents health plans and insurers from denying coverage or boosting premium prices based on a person’s genetic information, such as whether they have gene variants known to increase disease risk. It also forbids them from requesting or requiring people to take genetic tests.
Source: Meredith Wadman, Nature News, April 25, 2008

FBI releases details of expansive data-sharing program

The FBI released details this week about a little-known information-sharing initiative known as N-DEx, or the Law Enforcement National Data Exchange. [...] When fully operational in 2010, N-DEx will let investigators conduct nationwide criminal searches by “modus operandi” and for clothing, tattoos, associates, cars and other identifying factors from a single access point. The software will identify criminal activity hotspots and crime trends; offer virtualization and mapping; and conduct threat level assessments of individuals and addresses, the agency said in a briefing document.

Source: Andrew Noyes, CongressDaily, April 23, 2008

RFID-Based Robots Come to the Rescue

German researchers have developed a system enabling robots and humans to use passive RFID tags to map out a disaster area and send information to a command center. [...] Last year, [Alexander Kleiner, a researcher at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg in Breisgau] and his colleagues tested the system with robots and humans on the university campus using passive RFID tags. And in early 2008, the researchers conducted a test with robots only, using active tags.
Source: Rhea Wessel, RFID Journal, April 22, 2008

Web guru targets malaria with social network site
The British entrepreneur who sold a football Web site at the age of 17 for $40 million (20 million pounds) has switched his attention to help launch a social networking site on Sunday designed to fight malaria. Tom Hadfield set up Soccer.net in his bedroom before selling it [...]