Technology Impacts

A South Korean couple who were addicted to the internet let their three-month-old baby starve to death while raising a virtual daughter online, police said.

The pair fed their own premature baby just once a day in between 12-hour stretches at an internet cafe, the official Yonhap news agency reported.

Police officer Chung Jin-won told Yonhap they “lost their will to live a normal life” after losing their jobs.

He said they “indulged themselves online” to escape from reality.

BBC News - S Korea child ’starves as parents raise virtual baby’.

Somebody’s fibbing in the case of a Pennsylvania school that using Webcams in loaned laptops, and now the FBI may have to sort out the truth.

CNN reports that federal authorities are investigating the case of 15-year-old Blake Robbins v. the Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania, a class action lawsuit uncovered by BoingBoing last week. The FBI hasn’t confirmed the investigation; CNN’s report comes from an anonymous police official, who says the feds will look into whether federal wiretap or computer intrusion laws were violated.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/022210-school-spycam-case-raises-fbi.html

It sounds like something from a sci-fi film, but one in four Germans would be happy to have a microchip implanted in their body if they derived concrete benefits from it, a poll Monday showed.

The survey, by German IT industry lobby group BITKOM, was intended to show how the division between real life and the virtual world is increasingly coming down, one of the main themes of the CeBIT trade fair that kicks off Tuesday.

In all, 23 percent of around 1,000 respondents in the survey said they would be prepared to have a chip inserted under their skin “for certain benefits.”
http://rawstory.com/2010/03/germans-microchip-skin-poll/

Every police force in England and Wales will be equipped with mobile fingerprint scanners to check the identity of suspects in the street.

Up to 3,000 devices, the size of a mobile phone, will enable officers on patrol to cross-reference prints with national records.

Senior officers claimed the scheme would speed up criminal inquiries, bring more people to justice and save thousands of hours of police time.

But fears have arisen the technology could contribute to the so-called “surveillance state” and encourage random searches.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/police-to-be-equipped-with-mobile-fingerprint-scanners-1916123.html

London - Monitored by millions of cameras and spied on by a secretive domestic intelligence network, Britons could be forgiven for feeling up in arms over the latest threat to their privacy: Intelligent garbage bins that can monitor how much they throw out.

Although the technology is already nearly a decade old, a U.K. privacy rights group says the number of local authorities fitting their trash bins with sensors of some kind has risen dramatically in the past year - affecting at least 2.6 million British households.

Big Brother Watch says the practice could lead to Britons being charged for how much they throw out - and effectively allow the government to go through their garbage.

“Placing microchips in bins capable of monitoring the content of weight of household refuse produces yet another piece of data for the state on an individual’s private life it has no right to have,” the group said in a report published Friday.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/sns-ap-eu-britain-waste-watchers,0,3791290.story