NewsScan Daily, 21 October 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 21 October 2004 ("Above The Fold")
***********************************************************
NewsScan Daily is underwritten by RLG, a world-class organization
making significant and sustained contributions to the effective
management and appropriate use of information technology. NSD is
written by John Gehl and Suzanne Douglas, [email protected].
***********************************************************

"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        U.S. Passports Get Chipped
        Robot Use to Surge by 2007
        TiVo Users Are Thinking Bigger
        NEC Regains Lead in Supercomputer Rivalry
        Google Search Helps Set Kidnapped Journalist Free

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Worth Thinking About: The Technification of Life

 U.S. PASSPORTS GET CHIPPED
      Beginning in January, diplomats and U.S. State Department employees 
will be issued passports containing embedded RFID chips that will contain 
the individual's name, address, date and place of birth, and a digital 
photo. Ordinary citizens applying for new passports will get the high-tech 
version starting in the spring. Civil liberties advocates have called the 
new passports a "privacy horror," and point out that even if the data were 
encrypted (and it's not), it would still be very easy to steal. "If 180 
countries have access to the technology for reading this thing, whether or 
not it is encrypted, from a security standpoint, that is a very leaky 
system," says Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Lee Tien. "Strictly 
from a technology standpoint, any reader system, even with security, that 
was so widely deployed and accessible to so many people worldwide will be 
subject to some very interesting compromises." Meanwhile, a travel privacy 
expert says that in addition to identity thieves, commercial travel 
companies, including hotels, will capture the data when people check in or 
exchange currency. Intel RFID expert Roy Want says those fears are 
overblown, but acknowledges some theft is possible: "In principle someone 
could rig up a reader, perhaps in a doorway you are forcing people to go 
through. You could read some of these tags some of the time." (Wired.com 21 
Oct 2004)
<http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,65412,00.html>

ROBOT USE TO SURGE BY 2007
      The use of robots to perform household tasks such as lawn-mowing, 
vacuuming, guard duty and other chores is slated to increase sevenfold by 
2007, according to the U.N.'s latest World Robotics Survey. The report says 
607,000 automated domestic helpers are in use now, two thirds of them 
purchased last year. Most of them -- 570,000 -- are robot vacuum cleaners, 
and 37,000 of them are robotic lawn-mowers. While the report predicts that 
vacuum cleaners will continue to hold the lead, sales of window-washing and 
pool-cleaning robots are expected to take off. Meanwhile, sales of robotic 
companions, like Sony's Aibo dog, are also expanding, with some 692,000 
"entertainment robots" around the world. Japan remains home to about half 
of the current 800,000 industrial robots, which are used primarily on 
automobile assembly lines, but Europe and North America are catching up. 
And "service robots" are branching out, performing such tasks as milking 
cows, handling toxic waste, transporting medicine around hospitals and 
assisting surgeons. By the end of this decade, robots will "also assist old 
and handicapped people with sophisticated interactive equipment, carry out 
surgery, inspect pipes and sites that are hazardous to people, fight fire 
and bombs," says the report. (AP 21 Oct 2004)
<http://apnews.excite.com/article/20041021/D85RQCJ82.html>

TIVO USERS ARE THINKING BIGGER
      A growing number of TiVo owners are hacking their machines, 
installing humongous hard drives that can hold up to 700 hours of 
programming. One online retailer who sells TiVo upgrades estimates that by 
now at least 10% of TiVo subscribers have hacked their devices, pointing to 
a notable jump over the summer when the Olympic Games were on. The thirst 
for more storage reflects a change in the way consumers are using TiVo. 
Originally, it was used for time-shifting, so that owners could watch their 
favorite TV shows and movies at their own convenience. But now it's turning 
into a massive long-term storage device, where kids' favorite movies reside 
side-by-side with family video collections and parents' TV shows. "We view 
our TiVo as a catalog," says one enthusiast who's spent nearly $1,000 
upgrading his machine. (Wall Street Journal 21 Oct 2004)
<http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109830998447051149,00.html> (sub req'd)

NEC REGAINS LEAD IN SUPERCOMPUTER RIVALRY
      IBM's supremacy in supercomputing speed was short-lived -- three 
weeks after its September 29 announcement that its "Blue Gene" computer 
outperformed NEC's Earth Simulator, NEC has launched a new line of SX-8 
"nodes" that NEC estimates, when laced together in a group of 512, would be 
capable of running at 65 teraflops -- 80% faster than the Blue Gene. 
However, some scientists say NEC's announcement is premature. "If it hasn't 
actually been demonstrated, it sort of becomes something of a guessing 
game," says David Bailey, chief technology at the Lawrence Berkeley 
National Lab's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center. "Each 
time you double the size of the system, you expose another layer of 
hardware and software bugs." (New Scientist 21 Oct 2004)
<http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996562>

GOOGLE SEARCH HELPS SET KIDNAPPED JOURNALIST FREE
      Iraqi militants who kidnapped and threatened to kill an Australian 
journalist did a Google search for his name on the Internet to check his 
work before releasing him unharmed. John Martinkus, a veteran freelancer 
who has covered conflicts from East Timor to Iraq, was released Tuesday, a 
day after he was taken hostage by Sunni militants and ex-Iraqi army 
officers. Martinkus was filming a report for SBS's Dateline program and was 
preparing to leave Iraq when he was grabbed outside a hotel popular with 
foreign correspondents. SBS executive producer Mike Carey today said the 
journalist's captors had investigated his background online and saw he was 
harmless. "They Googled him, they checked him out on a popular search 
engine and got onto his own website or his publisher's website and saw he 
was a writer and journalist," Carey said. "They had thought he was working 
for the Americans as an informer." In this case, modern technology probably 
saved his life, he said. "It certainly did help," Carey said. (The Age 20 
Oct 2004) rec'd from John Lamp
<http://theage.com.au/articles/2004/10/20/1097951730538.html>

*****

FLASH CARD
      "Complaint is the largest tribute Heaven receives." (Jonathan Swift)

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: THE TECHNIFICATION OF LIFE
      In his new book "Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography," pundit and 
novelist Wm.F. Buckley writes:
      "I think the observable reluctance of the majority of Americans to 
assert themselves in minor matters is related to our increased sense of 
helplessness in an age of technology and centralized political and economic 
power. For generations, Americans who were too hot, or too cold, got up and 
did something about it. Now we call the plumber, or the electrician, or the 
furnace man. The habit of looking after our own needs obviously had 
something to do with the assertiveness that characterized the American 
family familiar to readers of American literature. With the technification 
of life goes our direct responsibility for our material environment, and we 
are conditioned to adopt a position of helplessness not only as regards the 
broken air conditioner, but as regards the overheated train. It takes an 
expert to fix the former, but not the latter; yet these distinctions, as we 
withdraw into helplessness, tend to fade away...
      "When our voices are finally mute, when we have finally suppressed 
the natural instinct to complain, whether the vexation is trivial or grave, 
we shall have become automatons, incapable of feeling."
               ***
[To find a library copy of Buckley's spy novel "God Save the Queen" (or 
anything else he's written), visit RLG's RedLightGreen.com: 
<http://www.redlightgreen.com/ucwprod/servlet/ucw.servlets.UCWController?ACTION=EDITION&WORKID=9446251&/>. 
To purchase a copy of "Miles Gone By" go to: 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0895260891/newsscancom/ref=nosim>. 
Note: We donate all revenue from our recommendations to adult literacy 
programs.]

SUBSCRIPTION INFO FOR NEWSSCAN DAILY:
       To subscribe or unsubscribe to the text, html, or handheld versions 
of NewsScan Daily, send the appropriate subscribe or unsubscribe messages 
(i.e., with the word 'subscribe' or 'unsubscribe' in the subject line) to 
the addresses shown below:
       Text version: Send message to [email protected]
       HTML version: Send mail to [email protected]
       NewsScan-To-Go: <http://www.newsscan.com/handheld/current.html>

TELL YOUR FRIENDS ABOUT NEWSSCAN DAILY! Send them our little frog: 
<http://www.newsscan.com/newsscan/newscup.html>

***********************************************************
Please visit the site of RLG, the great organization that makes NewsScan 
Daily possible. (RLG has no influence over, nor any responsibility for, our 
editorial content.) Created in 1974 as the Research Libraries Group, RLG is 
a not-for-profit membership corporation of more than 160 universities, 
national libraries, archives, museums -- and other institutions with 
remarkable collections for research and learning. Its major initiatives are 
long-term retention of digital materials, resource sharing among member 
institutions, and improvement of researcher access to primary source 
material. RLG supplies online research resources worldwide. Visit RLG at 
http://www.rlg.org.

*********

To subscribe or unsubscribe to the TEXT version of NewsScan Daily, send an 
e-mail message to [email protected] with 'subscribe' or 'unsubscribe' 
in the subject line. To subscribe or unsubscribe to the HTML version of 
NewsScan Daily, send mail to [email protected], with the word 
'subscribe' or 'unsubscribe' as the subject. (Subscribing to the HTML 
version won't automatically unsubscribe you from the text version; please 
unsubscribe yourself as explained above.) PLEASE NOTE: To unsubscribe from 
an account to which you no longer have access, send mail to at 
[email protected].

*********

We call our news section "Above The Fold" to honor the tradition of the 
great "broadsheet" newspapers in which editors must decide which news 
stories are of such importance that they should be placed "above the fold" 
on the front page. The NewsScan Credo: Be informative, have fun, and get to 
the point! See http://www.newsscan.com/, and send us mail: John Gehl 
([email protected]) and Suzanne Douglas ([email protected]), or call 
770-704-7517.

*********

Get a free 6-week trial subscription to Innovation Weekly, an executive 
summary of trends, strategies and innovations in business and technology. 
Send mail to [email protected] with the word 'subscribe' in the 
subject line.

What customized news and information services do you need for your company? 
Get in touch with us at [email protected] or call 770-704-7517 to talk 
over the possibilities.

Copyright 2004. NewsScan Daily (R) is a publication of NewsScan Inc.
***********************************************************