WASHINGTON – American travelers’ personal data would for the first time be exported to all European Union states by airline carriers flying to Europe under a proposal to be announced this week………Under the proposal, no personal data that could reveal race, ethnicity, political opinions, religion, trade union membership or health or sex-life information could be transmitted. Any such data that was shared would have to be deleted immediately by the data-analyzing units, the proposal says……. yeah sure says me 😉
Read more here…
Month: November 2007
What about a synthetic identity for a change?
What about something new? Synthetic identity theft, although I would call it just an evolution on the original ‘identity theft’ scam. I still can’t convince myself that it should be called ‘identity theft’ at all. After all to steal something is never to give it back (at least in British legislation), with identity theft your identity is just borrowed, isn’t it? Identity fraud as coined by Jim Harper (i think ;-)) is much more accurate.
Marry a robot?
An artificial intelligence researcher predicts that robotics will make such dramatic advances in the coming years that humans will be marrying robots by the year 2050. Robots will become so human-like — having intelligent conversations, displaying emotions and responding to human emotions — that they’ll be very much like a new race of people, said David Levy, a British artificial intelligence researcher whose book, “Love and Sex with Robots,” will be released on Nov. 6. Read more..
Makes me think about Alan Turing and the AI test – test for machine intelligence. There is a good website maintained by the author (Andrew Hodges) who wrote Alan Turing: The Enigma. For those of my blog readers that don’t have a computer science background, it is really interesting reading! This guy was quite brilliant!
MySpace, Bebo and SixApart To Join Google OpenSocial
Exciting or what!! Almost war against Facebook!
“MySpace and Six Apart will announce that they are joining Google’s OpenSocial initiative. Silicon Alley Insider reported
the MySpace rumor earlier today. We’ve confirmed that from an independent source, as well as the fact that Six Apart is joining. Per the update below, Google has also confirmed Bebo is joining. Google will be making an announcement today. MySpace and Six Apart join Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle as announced Google partners.” Read more….
And what is OpenSocial? Zen has given a nice description in her blog. I have taken an extract… “OpenSocial is a set of APIs that handle three different kinds of user data: profiles, social graph (who your friends are) and activities (the stuff of the Facebook news feeds.) And the language of these APIs are standard HTML and Javascript. Any application written for OpenSocial will work on any partner social network – any OpenSocial “container”. That means developers need only write an app once, and it can get used on any of the networks involved, like Orkut and LinkedIn. Basically, if the more social network sites that adopt OpenSocial, the more open the whole thing gets.”
Plaxo
An old work colleague of mine from Novell in Sweden sent me a ‘connect to Plaxo‘. Well I’d never heard of them before, seemed something similar to Linked-in, but in fact was much more than this. Their product connects up address books, links into your social networks too. I haven’t tested it yet, but found this video advertising their methods that is quite fun… take a look.
Linden tightening up on registration process
Interesting, Linden Labs have made some changes to the registration process…….I didn’t notice this before, have any of my readers that are SL residents notice this clause before?
2.4 Account registrations are limited per unique person. Transfers of accounts are generally not permitted. Linden Lab may require you to submit an indication of unique identity in the account registration process; e.g. credit card or other payment information, or SMS message code…..etc…
Facebook: More Popular Than Porn
I like this article in Time. Pretty much to the mark I think, and maybe in its own way gives us some insight into the future; that is not so bad as is made out by all those articles that speculate on the negative consequences of social networking.
“Currently, for web users over the age of 25, Adult Entertainment still ranks high in popularity, coming in second, after search engines. Not so for 18- to 24-year-olds, for whom social networks rank first, followed by search engines, then web-based e-mail — with porn sites lagging behind in fourth. If you chart the rate of visits to social-networking sites against those to adult sites over the last two years, there appears to be a strong negative correlation (i.e., visits to social networks go up as visits to adult sites go down). It’s a leap to say there’s a real correlation there, but if there is one, then I’d bet it has everything to do with Gen Y’s changing habits: they’re too busy chatting with friends to look at online skin.” Read more….
Identity theft compensation in the US
wow, look at this……”Identity theft victims would be allowed to request monetary compensation for the time they spent getting their lives back in order under a bill approved by a U.S. Senate panel.” Read more….
I wonder how long this will take to reach the U.K. and other countries? Anyone got any facts on this?
The Day the Routers Died
The Day the Routers Died, all about IPv4 > IPv6, it is really funny for all you fellow techies out there that were cabling networks 10+ years ago. You just have to listen to this, it almost makes me feel nostalgic for the good old days 😉