The major credit bureaus have the right to sell your personal information to credit card and insurance companies, resulting in the deluge of junk mail. But you have the right to exclude your name from preapproval lists (either permanently or…
Author: Michael Zimmer
Autonomous Fighting Machines & Heidegger
George Johnson at the New York Times writes an interesting reflection on the questions raised by autonomous fighting machines. He comes to a key question:As the thinking machinery continues to evolve, the strategists will keep asking themselves the same question:…
Amazon Personal Search History
Slashdot reports on the recently disclosed patent application by Amazon.com for "Persistently storing and serving event data," which describes a9.com's personal search history feature. Admittedly, I need to spend more time studying the privacy implications of "personalized searching" - the…
Ellen Ullman on “Attentional User Interfaces”
(via Question Technology)Ellen Ullman has a great op-ed in the New York Times today about computers and attention:There are unused icons on your desktop": this message sometimes appears in a balloon on the lower right-hand corner of my computer screen.…
Safeway Shopper Card Leads to (false) Arson Arrest
(via A blog doesn't need a clever name)Richard Smith at ComputerBytesMan writes about how a frequent shopping card database led to a false arrest:Tukwila, Washington firefighter, Philip Scott Lyons found out the hard way that supermarket loyalty cards can come…
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mSpace: Semantic Web Interface
(via Slashdot)The University of Southampton has launched a new semantic web interface, called mSpace, that it says will make searching for information online, and learning about a subject, much easier. They state:mSpace is an interaction model to help explore relationships…
Update on ChoicePoint story & “Hackers”
More news outlets are finally covering this story (CNN, Reuters, ZDNet). Interesting, however, is that the AP story (picked up by the Washington Post, LA Times, and others) label the perpetrators as "hackers" who "penetrated the company's computer network." Nowhere…
Federal Judge: No Warrant Needed to Use GPS Tracker
(via Privacy.org) A very chilling precedent from an upstate New York federal judge who ruled that police can secretly attach Global Positioning System devices to a suspect's vehicle without a warrant, stating that suspects had "no expectation of privacy in…
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California wants GPS Tracking Devices in Every Car
Since many states use gasoline taxes to help fund highway projects and road repairs, the increased usage of gas/electric hybrids hit are causing cash-strapped states to warn of rough roads ahead. California & Oregon are reported to be considering a…
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Google and Wikipedia
There's been a lot of talk lately about Google's offer to donate bandwidth and servers to Wikipedia. John Dvorak at PC Magazine provides helpful commentary, warning that the "nice guy" attitude of Google might not last forever:...let's say that Google…
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