IT

U.S. soldiers must now be fearful of invasion, even when back in the comfort of their own homes. Unlike the fears of physical invasion experienced on the battlefield, soldiers must now be weary of an invasion of privacy coming from the very same ... military they represent during times of war. A Virginia-based military surveillance company, Army Web Risk Assessment Cell, is monitoring all soldier blogs and Internet posts to avoid the leaking of vital information that may jeopardize the security of the U.S. military. Among the most detrimental items being pursued are official military documents, ... (view more)

Recent research conducted at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California suggests that you can be accurately distinguished by your "clickprint" while surfing the web. So... What is a Clickprint? Professor Balaji Padmanabhan, a ... clickprint researcher, defines a clickprint as a "unique pattern of web surfing behavior based on actions such as the number of pages viewed per session, the number of minutes spent on each page, the time or day of the week the page is visited, and so on." Like a fingerprint, a clickprint is unique to you and only you. (Source: technology.guardian.co ... (view more)

Announced earlier this week, a group of technology companies are planning to provide a vast wireless network that will give the entire Silicon Valley free high-speed Internet access. The free WiFi service will be available as early as next year and ... will be provided by Silicon Valley Metro Connect: a group that is comprised of IBM, Cisco, SeaKay, and Azulstar. (Source: abcnews.com ) Silicon Valley Metro Connect will provide the service for 38 cities in California's San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda, and Santa Cruz counties -- an area covering roughly 1,500 square miles. This move takes advantage ... (view more)

Evidently, crime doesn't pay, even in the tech world. Although it seems that in the land of Microsoft, PDAs, and Google criminals routinely get away with their crimes (even as corporate entities in various industries, like music, begin to get ... tough), there is evidence that the courts are fighting back. In the last week two major sentences have been handed down, including a three year jail term for a botnet attacker and a six year lockup for a software pirate. Christopher Maxwell, 21, pleaded guilty in May of launching a computer attack that affected tens of thousands of systems. Last Friday, ... (view more)

Stepping outside the bounds of its usual focus on security and operating systems, Microsoft has recently licensed touch-screen technology. Dubbed "Touchlight", the technology is one of twenty projects being offered to venture capitalists for ... development in cooperation with Microsoft. Signing on for Touchlight is EON Reality, who will use the technology for exhibitions, technical demonstrations, and training exercises. EON hopes to begin commercialization of the Touchlight and other similar projects before the year ends. (Source: microsoft-watch.com ) Touchlight: How It Works Microsoft's ... (view more)

Only days after the announcement that Ricoh Technologies has developed a device able to play both HD DVD and Blu-Ray discs, rumors quickly surfaced that an Israeli firm (Matteris Limited) is working on a disc that will use holographic technologies ... to hold a whopping 1 TB (or 1000 Gigabytes) of data. (Source: teamxbox.com ) By using the nano-technology at its disposal, Matteris hopes to fit literally millions of bits -- grouped into holograms -- into the volume (instead of the surface) of the medium at hand. Every individual hologram is formed into 1000 x 1000 bits, a process that is allowing ... (view more)

As North America becomes increasingly dependent on the Internet, WiFi is becoming a household term across the continent. City planners are building WiFi into future plans, and in many U.S. cities wireless Internet can be reached from the average ... cafe. What is WiFi, exactly? The name WiFi was originally coined by the company WiFi Alliance as a descriptor of its Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN). However, as wireless technology and the name itself have become so popular, WiFi is no longer a licensed term, and it even appears in recent versions of Webster's dictionary. By engaging anything ... (view more)

A new service is available that helps you to keep track of online information as it changes. It sends you an instant message whenever any RSS or Atom feed you want to monitor changes. The URL is http://immedi.at . Get it? Immedi.at? Immediate? Cool ... domain name, huh? (".at" is Austria's country code extension). Great idea, I must say. The immedi.at website itself is a little boring. I expected something a little more web 2.0-ish, but that's okay. I don't need all that fancy AJAX stuff ... Anyway, back to the service itself. It's really easy to use - all you have to do is add a "monitor this" ... (view more)

You know, we all make fun of those "Computer Help Desk" emails that get passed around? Well -- try working at a real Computer Help Desk for a living! But, seriously. It is a real problem trying to help someone over the phone (especially having them ... type in a DOS command)! Remember the old "cup holder" email joke that got passed around where the guy on the other line thought that the CD ROM tray was a cup holder? Well -- have you ever tried to give good advice? Good advice always starts with the typical "beginning steps." Why? Because the person asking may or may not understand what is meant ... (view more)