News from the Tech Front

The US Government is again making noises about regulating the Internet. This time, they are considering regulation in the name of “net neutrality,” rather than in the name of the “fairness doctrine,” but the result is likely to be the same—shutting down smaller minority opinions in favor of voices that are more acceptable to the Government’s goals. Heritage has one story on this new move to regulate the Internet, and Red State has another. Keep a careful eye on this movement.

RFID is almost always in the news. A grocery store in Utah has deployed a new shopping cart system that tracks shopper’s movements through the store, rewarding them with coupons, prizes, and promotional material as they pass through various sections in the store. The system, called “The Giving Cart,” a nice Orwellian name, in case you’re wondering.

Intel (the maker of microprocessors) now says computers may eventually match human intelligence. I certainly hope this doesn’t happen in my lifetime. I’m not certain if this is a good or bad thing, given the state and trajectory or human intelligence.

Google has released the list of finalists in their contest to develop ten projects that will “change the world.” The list itself is interesting, focusing on “feel good” projects based on human wisdom to “save the world.” Of course, many of them also play into Google’s plans to record everything about the world for commercial and political reasons, such as collecting and organizing the world’s urban data, and promote health monitoring and data analysis. The funniest one on the list, I think, is to drive positive images of engineers in media, to boost the number of people who are going into engineering disciplines. I don’t think they have the protagnist in my new murder mystery in mind. While he’s a good solid engineer, he’s a conservative Christian and a shooter. Google doesn’t like conservative Christians or shooters.

The Wall Street Journal has a story considering one problem with all this recording of data. Once you’ve written something online, you can’t ever erase it. A teenager who writes something really dumb on the Internet, it will be “out there” permanantly. This should give you pause before you even think about writing something in email, or on a blog, or anyplace else in a public space on the Internet.

Finally, also on the data recording front, ICT reports on some new research in organizing and understanding the data being poured onto the Internet each day.

European researchers are making an impressive effort to link up digital repositories to create a vast network of easy to search online data. The DRIVER project’ work – one of the largest efforts of its kind – aims to make some sense and better use of the growing online digital world, the ‘data-sphere’.

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