Current btw.net

October 28, 2002

Australians log off the web

Internet use in Australia, one of the most connected countries in the world, has fallen for the first time accompanied by a warning that demand might have levelled.

Market research firm Market Intelligence Strategy Centre's (MISC) index of internet usage fell three percent in the quarter ending June....

Technology to change face of ID-card process System will scan applicants to prevent fraud
By Julia C. Martinez, Denver Post Capitol Bureau, Monday, June 03, 2002

If you thought the depth of your eye sockets, the flare of your nostrils or the cleft in your chin had little to do with your identity, think again.

Those peaks and valleys make you unique to a new facial-recognition system that will begin mapping faces this fall of anyone with a Colorado driver's license.

Starting in September or October, the face-verification software will scan the face of everyone applying for a driver's license, measuring all those bumps and ridges and creating a facial template that will be stored in a database and be used to help the state attack identity fraud and theft.

Face-recognition technology will become a central security feature of Colorado's Division of Motor Vehicles, which will compare the high-tech face prints against 3.9 million photographs now in the database to prevent the same person from getting more than one license or ID card using someone else's name....

The Expanding Surveillance State: Why Colorado Should Scrap Facial Recognition in Public Places

Issue Paper Number 8-2001; October 2001
Executive Summary

“To be governed…is to be watched, inspected, directed, indoctrinated, numbered, estimated, regulated, commanded, controlled, law-driven, preached at, spied upon, censured, checked, valued, enrolled by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so.”

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

As a whole, we citizens routinely hand over large amounts of personal and intrusive information to the state as a matter of law. Whether to obtain a license, to comply with the police officer who has just pulled you over, or to tell the tax man how much money we make, it seems that we are always handing over another bit of information about ourselves.

The Colorado legislature last year introduced us to the next generation of surveillance technology, facial recognition, in a nation already under intense scrutiny.

October 27, 2002

Quote of the Day

"In this economy, customers aren't buying the latest in innovative technology. Instead, they're buying only what's necessary to remain competitive without breaking the bank."

daniel acker -- bloomberg news

by Sam Diaz, Mercury News
(article is about Dell cleaning everyone's clock lately)

Creating Applications with Mozilla

"This project hosts the ongoing development for O'Reilly's Creating Applications with Mozillabook. In order to keep all of the information updated and current with the latest developments in the Mozilla community, the contents of the book have been made freely available under the Open Publication License."

"Mozilla is not just a browser. Mozilla is also a framework that allows developers to create cross-platform applications. Creating Applications with Mozilla provides step-by-step information about how you can create your own programs using Mozilla's framework. After installing Mozilla, you quickly learn to create simple applications. After the initial satisfaction of developing your own portable applications, the book branches into topics on modular development and packaging your application. In order to build more complex applications, coverage of XUL, JavaScript, and CSS allow you to discover how to customize and build out your application shell."

Commentary

It is more important than ever to improve how we spend our technology dollars. I think, however, it is more important to look at how we improve our spending to deliver services. And sometimes that may mean blending high technology considerations with low technology considerations to find the most economical and effective path over time. The technology is always a part of a larger picture, be it the Bioterrorism Reporting system we heard about today or the Smart Highways that we've heard about in the past. Some things may have "IT" in them but the purchase decision isn't an IT decision - new cars comes to mind as an example. It might be useful for us to explore where that boundary is, to ask ourselves: "What makes an expenditure an IT expenditure?"

the shift from "personalization" to individualization - build it yourself, transform it to your taste
the chasm - in the U.S.A.: 40% with no PC, 20-25% with pre-Internet era PC, 20-25% Internet era PC, 10% with broadband, always on, always connected devices.

October 24, 2002

"Even where security spending is increasing, it is from a very low base. Meta Group's survey found that most companies spend less than 3% of their technology budgets on security. Technology budgets, in turn, are typically set at around 3% of revenues. Since 3% of 3% is 0.09%, most firms spend more on coffee than on computer security, according to a popular industry statistic. The purse strings loosen only when companies suffer a serious security breach themselves, see one of their rivals come under attack or are told by auditors that lax security could mean they are compromising due diligence."

Securing the cloud

Digital security, once the province of geeks, is now everyone's concern.
But there is much more to the problem—or the solution—than mere technology, says Tom Standage

Oct 24th 2002, From The Economist print edition