Your Face Is Not a Bar Code Human Justice 'Face recognition systems in public places, however, are a matter for serious concern. The issue recently came to broad public attention when it emerged that fans attending the Super Bowl had unknowingly been matched against a database of alleged criminals, and when the city of Tampa deployed a face-recognition system in the nightlife district of Ybor City. But current and proposed uses of face recognition are much more widespread, as the resources at the end of this article demonstrate in detail.

Fuel cell system could help nab drunk drivers Human Justice 'Developed by engineering students working under Kolesar, the technique is totally unobtrusive and does not require drivers to blow into a tube or respond to visual prompts. Instead, it uses a tiny ethyl alcohol fuel cell sensor manufactured by PAS Systems International (Fredericksburg, Va.) to monitor air in the vehicle cabin for the presence of ethanol vapor concentrations. 'Working with a sampling pump that draws in cabin air, the fuel cell chemically converts ethanol vapors to acetic acid, then produces an electrical voltage output signal proportional to the gas concentration.

Quicken.com - News 'EBay Inc. won what it called a precedent-setting court victory Thursday when a federal judge ruled that the Internet auction company was not liable for copyright infringement because bootleg copies of a Charles Manson documentary were sold on the site.' 'The judge in the eBay case said it was the first to test whether a Web site has a "safe harbor" if people use the site to sell items that infringe on copyrights.

The Simpsons get toasted Personal Commentary Any illusions you may have that copyright is about profit should be dispensed with. The control freak stuff is really starting to torque me, and it is ever so slowly, but ever so surely, starting to encroach on my actual, every day life, rather then me looking for it like I normally do. What prompted this? Well, on my local cable channel 15, broadcast channel 50, from 6:00pm through 6:30pm, all there is is a scrolling white message on a blue screen babbling about how some other channel has exclusive rights to the show (which happens to be the Simpsons).

Do Search Engines Expedite the Theft of Digital Images? Misc. 'But to make such gawking possible, search engines are taking a controversial step. Their technology, which uses Web searching tools called spiders, now makes copies of every image they come across, whether the search engines have permission to do so or not. Those images, many of which are reduced to thumbnail size, are then displayed in the search engine's results listings, again without explicit approval from the artists who created the images in the first place.

Lost Personal Commentary I'm watch ''Lost'' with my reality-TV addicted wife. So far, the players have completely failed to impress me. Bear in mind I'm not an outdoors person by any means. This is what I would study if I was expected to compete. None of the six players seems to have taken the time to study the stars. By the first night, they should have known at a minimum which hemisphere they were in, for both North/South and East/West hemispheres.

Big Brother To Watch Judges? Misc. Lots of good linkage on the Judge's workplace monitoring on Slashdot. Looks like the issue's heating up.  

No free speech for animal rights Web sites DMCA 'On Thursday, EnviroLink Network, a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit Internet service provider, took offline two Web sites belonging to the animal-rights activist group Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty. The action came in response to a letter sent to the ISP earlier in the week by Huntingdon Life Sciences, a British medical research firm. Citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Huntingdon accused the activists of violating its copyright.

Ooops... Personal Commentary My wife has learned of the perils of living with a computer nutcase. In her particular case, the perils manifest themselves as a periodic cleansing of her e-mail archives. Oops. I was trying to move the contents of one laptop drive to another laptop drive, and could only hook up one at a time. Of course I tell my wife that this won't affect her e-mail, since that's on the computer's permenent drive, and I'll only be affecting the two laptop drives.

US Copyright Office Releases DMCA Advisory Report DMCA From Slashdot: snogwozzle writes: "The US Copyright Office's congressionally-mandated advisory report on the effect of the DMCA is in, and at first glance it doesn't look too good. They're against undoing the definition of temporary RAM buffer copies as possibly infringing (which Jessica Litman in Digital Copyright pegged as perhaps the central dirty trick in the DMCA as it opens the door to technical access control by publishers) is turned down, so is a first sale doctrine for digitally distributed works, and the DMCA's effect on fair use is called out of scope for the report.