spying on our own government

http://www.fcw.com/online/news/151657-1.html

National Security Presidential Directive 54/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23
allows the defense department and national security agency to perform surveillance on civilian agencies. This is a strange move at the end of a term, especially since these are new surveillance powers that would allow a single point of failure - if someone takes over the tap point, they have an overview of everything going on in the federal government.

China investing in Nano-Tech

Talk about technology that is difficult to clean up and control, nanotech is a broad ranging term that has been co-opted by marketing - speak to mean anything small. True nanotechnology that the Chinese government may be interested in is along the lines of dust particle sized remote sensors, things that can be cropdusted over an area and send back signals over an indefinite period of time, when that information is combined it can offer a good sense of movement, heat, radio waves etc. The Chinese have already invested $400 million, which goes further in China than it would here. I wonder how we're doing in comparison? Cutting science research funding for higher ed is the answer...

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/02/the-chinese-gov.html

UK ISPs to track surfing

Privacy is seen differently by different generations, and views often change as people have more to lose. Many college age kids are happy to give away their personal information in exchange for targeted ads. The problem is short-sightedness, since this information can follow them around for the rest of their life, and may be combined with other information collected on them which could ultimately uneccesarily limit choices later in life:

" Over in the UK three big ISPs, BT, Carphone Warehouse and Virgin Media have announced plans to use your clickstream data to insert relevant ads as you surf through a new startup called Phorm."

FBI gains unauthorized access to email

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2004186660_fbiemail17.html?syndication=rss

through a mistake made by a service provider, the FBI was granted access to all of the email pertaining to a particluar network provided by an ISP. This is another risk to surveillance, not only is there the potential for human error and abuse, but plenty of opportunities for technological "problems" to grant more access than intended.

hardware based openID

Tokens for OpenID would definitely solve some of the difficulties related to the deployment of one authentication system across multiple sites - the problem of someone sitting at your machine and logging into all of your accounts - as long as the account info isn't cached on your machine... Now all we need to do is watch the increased theft of thumb drives as people have their accounts stolen or lost.

Spy Satellites used on Americans

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gM4mwPQcU0j446qIew8P7ZmifwNgD8UP4GG03

Two interesting things - the quote that this will not be used to intercept written or verbal communications (how will we know?) and, if we can do it, so can other nations....

OpenID

Google, Microosft, Verisign, Yahoo join OpenID - a community developed standard that will allow for single sign-on, if the developers are using .net 3.0 to develop or an application to port earlier .net code to this version.

http://www.campustechnology.com/articles/58342

single sign-on has been replaced by the idea of consistent sign-on, limiting the chances of someone stealing or sitting down at your machine and having access to the keys to the kingdom. This scheme will definitely make it easier to pry money out of your wallet and perform surveillance, giving these corporations a 360 degree view of your life on the web, which more and more is becoming every aspect of your life....