Britain is quietly introducing RFID (Radio Frequency Identity) tags to rubbish bins (trash cans) in a bid to measure the individual waste of each household and charge them accordingly. Some Britons are up in arms about this, saying that households have not been informed and calling it an abuse of privacy. Is it? The UK’s… Read More »
Symantec, the anti-virus people, has recently bought TurnTide, the company behind the SpamSquelcher technology. SpamSquelcher was originally developed by the ePrivacy Group as anti-spam software that, in the words of CNET, “analyzes incoming mail and, in a technique known as ‘traffic shaping’, targets broadband connections serving as great riverbeds for spam.” This traffic shaping basically… Read More »
This week’s Loose Wire column is about Flash drives: I LEFT YOU last week in the capable hands of Ethel Girdle, the fictitious octogenarian who took her accusations of built-in obsolescence to the technology giants. One of her beefs was about so-called flash drives–small devices that store data, for example as memory cards for MP3… Read More »