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’.

Google is now “personalizing” results even when users have not logged into its web-dominating search site. And SEO types aren’t too happy about it.

Personalization is a euphemism for a Google-controlled practice that involves tweaking your search results according to your past web history. Mountain View was already doing this with users who had signed in to a Google account so they could use non-search services like Gmail and Google Calendar. But now it’s targeting results for all users - whether they’re logged in or not.

Webmasters fume as Google profiles signed-out searchers • The Register.

When it began it was just a computer game. Now it is seen as a cultural force that sparks love affairs, breaks marriages and creates “sweat shops” to satisfy a black market in virtual goods.

World of Warcraft marks its fifth birthday today as something more than just an online role-playing game where users become wizards, warriors, orcs and elfs.

“It has had an enormous cultural impact,” said Tom Chatfield, author of Fun. Inc, a book about the growth of the games industry. “It has proved that online gaming can make huge profits, making a billion in revenue a year. It has proved that gaming could be for a truly global audience.”

Analysts say that its popularity has paved the way for other blockbuster games. This month Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, made a record-breaking $500 million (£303 million) within 24 hours of its release.

Virtual quests lead to real love and death for World of Warcraft fans - Times Online.

Much has been made in recent years of the so-called Facebook generation, which supposedly consists of 20-somethings who like to go online and spill their guts without regard for privacy. The reality is more complex.

Yes, social network users post a lot of personal information. But they’re sharing it within a circle of online “friends.” And they fiercely resist outsiders’ attempts to get a peek.

Last summer, city administrators in Bozeman, Mont., began requiring job applicants to provide usernames and passwords to their social networking accounts, as part of the background check. The new requirement caused such an uproar, the city manager held a press conference to apologize.

Is Your Facebook Profile As Private As You Think? : NPR.

Citizen spies will be given the chance to win up to £1,000 by watching CCTV cameras on the internet and reporting people they suspect of committing crimes.

The new scheme, called Internet Eyes, involves web users scouring CCTV cameras installed in shops, businesses and town centres across Britain looking for offenders.

The cameras’ owners will be charged a fee for putting live footage from their cameras online, while members of the public who help catch criminals can win cash prizes.

The project will be trialled in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warks, next month, but the consortium behind the idea hopes that it will eventually attract a global audience of viewers monitoring Britain’s 4.2 million security cameras.

However, it has already provoked criticism from civil liberties campaigners, who claim that it will create a “snoopers paradise” and erode people’s privacy. Read the rest of this entry »

From FireEagle to iPhone apps that use your current location, everyone it seems is racing to get on the geo-aware software bandwagon. So far most geo-aware features have been opt-in and offer reasonable privacy controls (FireEagle is a good example of this), but Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 7 plans to offer developers location tools at the operating system level and the company doesn’t seem to think users care about control or privacy.

Before you freak out at the thought that Redmond will soon be tracking your every move, keep in mind that the new features will be disabled by default. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that if you turn the geo features on, there are very few controls available and, yes, Microsoft could easily track your every move. Now you can freak out.

Windows 7 Will Let Microsoft Track Your Every Move - Webmonkey.

The worst Microsoft ads of all time

A cringe-inducing Microsoft advert has been doing the rounds this week - but there are plenty of other skeletons in the company’s closet

Read the rest of this entry »

Back in 2002, science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer wrote an essay about the trade-off between privacy and security, and came out in favor of less privacy. I disagree with most of what he said, and have written pretty much the opposite essay — and others on the value of privacy and the future of privacy — several times since then.

The point of this blog entry isn’t really to debate the topic, though. It’s to reprint the opening paragraph of Sawyer’s essay, which I’ve never forgotten:

Whenever I visit a tourist attraction that has a guest register, I always sign it. After all, you never know when you’ll need an alibi.

Since I read that, whenever I see a tourist attraction with a guest register, I do the same thing. I sign “Robert J. Sawyer, Toronto, ON” — because you never know when he’ll need an alibi.

Schneier on Security: Robert Sawyer’s Alibis.

Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display until Sept 09 at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab (Please contact us if you want to show it next!). It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile. Read the rest of this entry »

WHEN Elaine Cioni found out her married boyfriend had other girlfriends she turned to YourHackerz.com.

For $US100, the website provided Cioni, then living in northern Virginia, with the password to her boyfriend’s AOL email account. For another $100, she got her boyfriend’s wife’s password. And then the password of another girlfriend and the boyfriend’s children.

Cioni began making harassing phone calls to her boyfriend and his family, using a ‘’spoofing” service to disguise her voice as a man’s. This attracted the attention of federal authorities, who prosecuted Cioni, 53, last year for unauthorised access to computers, among other crimes. She was convicted and is serving a 15-month sentence. Read the rest of this entry »