Items tagged with Big Brother
Big Brother is about to take a dive into Cleveland, OH's waste material, in a manner of speaking. High-tech garbage bins will make sure that Clevelanders are recycling, at least some of the time. The way it will work is as follows: the recycling and garbage bins will be fitted with RFID tags. If a recycling bin hasn't been taken out for weeks, the city will have someone go through your trash for recyclables. It's unclear why garbage cans are monitored as well. Unless, if the garbage hasn't been put out for some weeks, they send out the police to make sure you're still alive, or at least not a candidate for one of those reality TV shows about hoarding. Anyone concerned about privacy should remember...
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Amazon made news last week when it began deleting e-books—specifically 1984 and Animal Farm off the Kindle's of buyers who had previously purchased the titles. A few days later, the reason behind the deletions became clear. The books had been published erroneously and should never have been made for sale. The incident impacted only a small number of Kindle owners, but raise questions of personal privacy and the meaning of ownership that apply to all Kindle customers and even the e-book industry as a whole. Today, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos apologized to the community at large for the company's actions. Bezos characterizes the company's response as "stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with...
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Usually it's GPS doing the monitoring and tracking for the so-called "Big Brother," but lately Bluetooth has been lending a hand as well. The pervasive short-range communications protocol is found on nearly every mobile telephone available today, making it perfect for tracking thousands upon thousands of concert goers.In fact, around 80,000 or so festival attendees over in Belguim are expected to be tracked via Bluetooth, but those responsible for the initiative have assured the world that privacy is of the utmost concern. Reportedly, a team from the University of Ghent in Belgium is setting up 36 Bluetooth scanners across the music site in order to track those in attendance as part of a research...
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Dell has produced a 'tweener for their XPS line of high-end laptops. The 15" XPS 1530 fits rights between their 13" and 17" systems.While the M1530 is certainly larger than the M1330, it's not exactly a heavyweight at a mere 5.78 pounds.While the new M1530 doesn't come with an LED backlight screen option like the M1330, standard features include a high-definition 15.4-inch display, WiFi wireless networking, a slot-load optical drive, DirectX 10 capable graphics, touch-sensitive media buttons and HDMI support.Users can also choose from Intel Core 2 Duo processors ranging from 1.5 to 2.6 GHz, a 128 or 256 MB Nvidia GeForce graphics processor, and hard drives ranging from 64 GB for a solid...
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