A report on the Pentagon’s proposed electronic surveillance system featured a new name and specific goals. The Terrorist Information Awareness (TIA) System, formerly known as the Total Information Awareness System, could identify people at great distances using optics, facial features or their gait, analyze travel plans and incorporate financial, medical, educational and biometric records “to try to predict terrorists’ acts or catch them in the planning stage.” Members of the Senate, who had raised specific questions related to the privacy of American citizens, were less than impressed with the report. “I don’t take a back seat to anybody in fighting the Mohamed Attas of the world, but before we send people on a virtual goose chase, the country needs to understand what’s at stake,” said Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore), who added that the system relied on too many theoretical possibilities to warrant the massive investment of public funds. The Department of Defense has budgeted $9.2 million dollars for the TIA system this year and another $45 million in the following two years.
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FCC Chairman Michael Powell has stated that the public record on the media ownership proceeding is “comprehensive,” containing more than 20,000 comments and obviating the need for postponement of the June 2nd ruling. Employing evidence from both academia and interest groups, the Benton Foundation finds that the FCC typically turns a deaf ear to the public in such proceedings. This is not a new phenomenon – the Commission has a long track record of minimizing public comments, despite the advent of its highly touted e-filing system. In fact, some observe that electronic comments may even receive less consideration than those filed on paper. The article suggests that the FCC will merely pay lip service to the public’s opinion on media consolidation. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) alluded to the piece in her questioning of witnesses in this morning’s Senate Commerce Committee hearing on media ownership. [SOURCE: Benton Foundation; AUTHORS: Norris Dickard and Charles E. Meisch, Jr.]
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Hewlett-Packard’s Bristol, England lab is developing a new consumer photography system that could “casually” snap a steady stream of images as a person goes about her daily life and store them in data centers, where they could be retrieved for printing. Ideally, the user would don a wearable camera mounted inside the bridge of a pair of glasses or somewhere else unobtrusive, and then forget about it. The camera would continuously record approximately what is in the wearer’s field of vision, and when something notable happens, the wearer would make an indication of some kind, either by speaking or by pressing a button. The camera would then take over, zooming in to select what appear to be the best shots and automatically adjusting and cropping them. “You say, ‘Something has happened, I’d like to remember that,’” says Phil Cheatle of HP Labs’ digital media department. “It allows you to take part in the event instead of hiding behind the technology. The challenge is selecting what’s interesting automatically.”
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WiFi, the new darling of the telecom crowd, is a bubble in danger of bursting, say some analysts who worry that euphoria over the technology could lead to the same kind of supply glut that proved the undoing of many telecom businesses in the last couple of years. One of the biggest worriers is Adventis analyst Andrew Cole: “WiFi is overrated and headed for a fall,” he says. One big question mark is the level of demand. The WiFi consumer market began as a movement of tech-savvy users who made a game of finding free nodes to sponge off of. Turning freeloaders into paying customers is a challenge the music industry has grappled with for several years without much success. In addition, using WiFi can be tricky — it requires setting up an antenna, reconfiguring the computer and signing up for a broadband service. Finally, with barriers to entry very low, competition in consumer WiFi could turn cutthroat, pitting rivals ranging from tiny boutique ISPs to powerhouses like Verizon against one another. Consolidation among WiFi gear makers has already started, with Cisco’s purchase of Linksys last December, and analysts predict the WiFi chip market is next. One bright spot on the horizon is the market for WiFi equipment for corporations. “We’re still in the early days of enterprise WiFi, which is the big opportunity,” says one wireless consultant. About 40% of U.S. companies currently have some kind of WiFi network and about a third of those plan to expand their networks in the next 18 months, according to wireless researcher ON World.
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While the battle against spam intensifies, the Direct Marketing Association has just released figures showing that commercial e-mail advertisements generated more than $7 billion in sales last year. The DMA’s study is intended to bolster its claim that commercial e-mail plays a significant role in the U.S. economy. According to the report, about 36% of e-mail users, or 21% of all adult Americans, have purchased a product or service as the result of receiving commercial e-mail over the past year, with purchases valued at an average of $168. About 9% of these e-mail users said they made their purchases as the result of unsolicited commercial e-mail.
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The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has approved a policy on patents that requires all those who participate in the development of a W3C recommendation must license essential claims on a royalty-free basis. It also requires W3C members to make disclosures on patents they own and requests that anyone else who sees technical drafts share their knowledge of patents which may be essential. At the same time, the policy suggests a process for handling unexpected patent claims that are inconsistent with the terms of the W3C Patent Policy. In that instance, the W3C will convene a Patent Advisory Group, which may then recommend: a legal analysis of the patent, the removal of the patented feature, or cessation of work in that area altogether. The W3C’s efforts to create a patent policy have been contentious since it first released its Patent Policy Framework Draft in 2001, says Daniel Weitzner, chair of the Patent Policy Working Group, who cautioned technology companies against trying to exploit the patent exception process. “Anyone who thinks that’s going to be an easy way to squeeze fees out of Web standards I think is mistaken,” says Weitzner.
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Juniper Networks is launching a low-priced networking gear package aimed at enabling businesses, such as hotels and restaurants, to set up their own WiFi hotspots at minimum cost. The Juniper bundle, priced at $800, costs less than half of similar systems sold by Cisco and other competitors. Telecom carriers spent about $500 million last year on WiFi equipment to add hotspots to their networks and that number is expected to grow significantly. “Big guys, like Verizon, are saying, ‘I’m not going to lose to these little ISPs,’” says Jim Ciociolo, VP of Colubris Networks, which is partnering with Juniper to market the system.
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SBC has begun shopping around for the wireless networking gear it will need to establish public WiFi hotspots, building on an existing service that sells WiFi access points to corporate customers and subscribers of its SBC Yahoo DSL service. The telecom firm recently appointed a vice president of WiFi, Brooks McCorlce, who describes SBC’s WiFi strategy as “aggressive.” Telecommunications companies increasingly are seeing WiFi deployment as a means to stave off competition by cable companies, which have managed to grab 20%-30% of local telephone market share in some areas.
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Intuit says that future versions of its TurboTax tax preparation software will be sold without the controversial “product activation” feature that angered many Intuit customers. The feature, first installed in TurboTax for the 2002 tax year, locks a specific piece of software to a specific PC, preventing the use of that software on any PC other than the original machine on which it was first activated. Customers have been complaining about the activation software since it was first introduced, and attorney Stanbury Fishelman says he will continue his lawsuit against Intuit despite the company’s decision to stop installing it; he promised to “obtain full and fair compensation and relief for purchasers and users of the 2002 TurboTax products.”
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The U.S. Postal Service plans next week to expand the testing of a new
security system to detect bioterror agents, the direct result of the
anthrax attacks of October 2001.
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