What if technology that could track your every move was embedded in your cell phone, your smart card and your laptop?
And what if that information were tied to a database that stored personal information about you?
We're not there yet, but as we move toward an increasingly networked world, marketers are salivating over the possibility of linking that data--for example, tying your route home to your penchant for pizza, or your presence at a ball game to your work schedule.
At a panel of the Computers Freedom & Privacy conference here Thursday, representatives from companies building such networks faced off against privacy advocates in a discussion about the future of databases.
Jason Catlett, president of privacy advocacy group Junkbusters, compared services such as Passport, Microsoft's online identification service, to a transnational identification card. Catlett warned that such systems could turn into a deep database of information that could be controlled by the government or an oligarchy of companies.
"With these databases, you can be targeted. People don't want to be targeted," he said.
Catlett and other privacy experts already have filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, saying Passport deceives and coerces consumers into parting with their data. Catlett said it will only get worse when such information can be tied to people's whereabouts.
However, Microsoft executive Brian Arbogast defended Passport, one of several technologies the U.S. government is considering testing for use in a national ID system, according to Mark Forman, associate director of IT and e-government at the Office of Management and Budget. Arbogast, Microsoft's vice president of the .Net Core Services Platform, said technology can actually enhance privacy and security by letting consumers decide how much personal information they want to give up in exchange for services.
"I think there's an opportunity for technology to help people be in control of the data they have, how it gets used," he said.
News source: Yahoo! News
And what if that information were tied to a database that stored personal information about you?
We're not there yet, but as we move toward an increasingly networked world, marketers are salivating over the possibility of linking that data--for example, tying your route home to your penchant for pizza, or your presence at a ball game to your work schedule.
At a panel of the Computers Freedom & Privacy conference here Thursday, representatives from companies building such networks faced off against privacy advocates in a discussion about the future of databases.
Jason Catlett, president of privacy advocacy group Junkbusters, compared services such as Passport, Microsoft's online identification service, to a transnational identification card. Catlett warned that such systems could turn into a deep database of information that could be controlled by the government or an oligarchy of companies.
"With these databases, you can be targeted. People don't want to be targeted," he said.
Catlett and other privacy experts already have filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, saying Passport deceives and coerces consumers into parting with their data. Catlett said it will only get worse when such information can be tied to people's whereabouts.
However, Microsoft executive Brian Arbogast defended Passport, one of several technologies the U.S. government is considering testing for use in a national ID system, according to Mark Forman, associate director of IT and e-government at the Office of Management and Budget. Arbogast, Microsoft's vice president of the .Net Core Services Platform, said technology can actually enhance privacy and security by letting consumers decide how much personal information they want to give up in exchange for services.
"I think there's an opportunity for technology to help people be in control of the data they have, how it gets used," he said.
News source: Yahoo! News
"What we have is a simple resistor" that is much faster to access than RAM and can be applied in a thin film that is only a few hundred atomic layers thick, Ignatiev said. He said that when it is produced in volume, thin film memory would be cost-competitive with RAM, and the chip size would be comparable to today's semiconductors. Ignatiev said the thin film technology would likely first be employed to replace the flash memory used in digital cameras and PDAs. (Flash memory is also nonvolatile but is more expensive than RAM and has a more limited number of write cycles.)
The University of Houston is far from alone in trying to develop memory that doesn't require PCs to reboot, according to MIT research scientist Jagedeesh Moodera. He said that Motorola, Siemens, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, NASA and others are all anxious to develop nonvolatile memory, because "you can take it to the Moon, and the same information will be there."
Unlike UH, however, these other groups have been using thin film elements with magnetic properties that can be altered to store the ones and zeros, Moodera said.
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