We're always coming up with new technologies that affect privacy and surveillance. We've seen court cases over infrared heat detectors seeing people move inside a house. We've seen parabolic microphones and lasers that can measure the vibration of the windows from the sound in a room. We've seen massive computers that can scan a billion emails in a short time, and estimates of speech recognition tools that can listen to millions of phone calls.

Last night I was thinking to myself that we would probably see a big political todo when the war military death toll reaches 2749 -- the number of people killed (not including the 10 suicide attackers) in the WTC on 9/11.

Here's an idea to try -- Scrabble played with Google as the base, rather than the dictionary. Ie. you can play any word you can find in Google (sort of.)

This obviously vastly expands the set of words, perhaps too vastly, and it brings in all foreign languages to boot. It includes vast numbers of joinedwords, and zillions of other things. As such you would want to consider the following limits:

Nothing bold here, but I couldn't help but notice if you Google for "GOOG" the stock symbol of Google, you may know you will get a stock chart on Google at the top.

But what's hilarious is to look at the adwords ads on the right side of the page, at least here in the bay area, some of them clearly aimed at Google employees!

Google is currently fighting a subpoena from the DoJ for their search logs. The DoJ experts in the COPA online porn case want to mine Google's logs, not for anybody's data in particular, but because they are such a great repository of statistics on internet activity. Google is fighting hard as they should. Apparently several Google competitors caved in.

How often does it happen? There's an important idea or action which is controversial. The bravest come out in support of it early, but others are wary. Will support for this idea hurt them in other circles? Is the idea against the "party line" of some group they belong to, even though a sizeable number of the group actually support it? How can you tell.

Of late there's been talk of ISPs somehow "charging" media-over-IP providers (such as Google video) for access to "their" pipes. This is hard to make sense of, since when I download a video from a site, I am doing it over my pipe, which I have bought from my ISP, subject to the contract that I have with it. Google is sending the data over their pipe, which they bought to connect to the central peering points and to my ISP. However, companies like BellSouth, afraid that voice and video will be delivered to their customers in competition with their own offerings, want to do something to stop it.

To get around rules about content neutrality on the network that ILEC based ISPs are subject to, they now propose this as a QOS issue. That there will be two tiers, one fast enough for premium video, and one not fast enough.

Today I've seen comments from Jeff Pulver and Ed Felten on possible consequences of such efforts. However, I think both directions miss something... (read on)

A really geeky idea: A fedora (common hat of the classic press photographer's uniform) or other hat with a built in remote controlled flash unit in it.

Here's an idea I had years ago and tried to promote to some of the earliest wireless companies, such as Metricom, without success. I just posted it on Dave Farber's IP list, so I should write it up again for my own blog...

Can giant companies, especially monopolies, ever get it right? Listen to this litany of the efforts to move my phone service, and get DSL.

Well, I am going to get a bluetooth cell phone shortly and so I got a headset and dongle to use on my laptop, where I also make VoIP calls.

I was shocked, flabbergasted to find that the bluetooth headset profile only transmits audio at telephone quality 8khz sampling rate. So even plugged into my laptop for hifi (didn't think I
would ever need to use that term again) recording, it sounds like a telephone, and likewise for
playback.

Why? Why? Why?

This week I will be doing some demos of Voxable, my system that combines VoIP, presence and all sorts of cool stuff I won't be writing about in the public blog to create a new user interface for the phone that is both as modern and internet as it can get while also being a reflection of the ancient interface for the phone that was lost.

Who could possibly imagine wanting spam? Well, I just read that in the USA, 100 million trees are felled every year for junk mail. 28 billion gallons of water used to process the paper. And 350 million dollars spent to throw it out. That doesn't include I presume the other costs, including postage and wasted time, this is just the paper part of it.

For many the guest bed has for years been the sofabed. But they are usually terrible beds, with too-thin mattresses that get lumpy. People are moving more towards inflatable beds they put on the floor or a stand. On the floor of course is not comfortable either.

I wrote earlier this week on the discovery that people were blacklisting sites with email autoresponders. More thought and debate on the issue has led to a number of thoughts over how to solve the issues around autoresponders, in particular the concern that they will respond to messages with forged From addresses.

We risked running low on fuel today, and saw the car sputter briefly while going up a hill. Made it to the gas station fine, in fact with a gallon to spare, it seems.

Today many universities are doing video of their lectures, and making it available on the campus LAN (or older campus cable TV.) In some cases students are not going to class, but many just find it a useful addition.

I suggest an application where students, while watching the lecture, could press keys on their computer synced in timestamp with the video. They don't need to be online, they just need a modestly good clock. Buttons like "This is important, review this for the final." Or even comments like "I already know this" and "I'm lost."

I learned a couple of days ago my mail server got blacklisted by spamcop.net. They don't reveal the reason for it, but it's likely that I was blacklisted for running an autoresponder, in this case my own custom challenge/response spam filter which is the oldest operating one I know of.

I've written before about the desire for a new universal dc power standard. Now I want to rethink our systems of household and office power.

These systems range from 100v to 240v, typically at 50 or 60hz. But very little that we plug in these days inherently wants that sort of power. Most of them quickly convert it to something else. DC devices use linear and switched mode power supplies to generate lower voltage DC. Flourescent lights convert to high voltage AC. Incandescent bulbs and heating elements use the voltage directly, but can be designed for any voltage and care little about the frequency. There are a dwindling number of direct 60hz AC motors in use in the home. In the old days clocks counted the cycles but that's very rare now.

On top of that, most of what we plug in uses only modest power. The most commonly plugged in things in my house are small power supplies using a few watts. Most consumer electronics are using in the 50-200w range. A few items, such as power tools, major appliances, cooking appliances, heatters, vacuum cleaners and hairdryers use the full 1000 to 1800 watts a plug can provide.

So with this in mind, how might we redesign household and office power...

One particularly interesting argument seen in the Underwatergate scandal is the one that the NYT, by revealing the existence of warrantless wiretaps on international communications lines, compromised national security.

Reporters asked how that can be. After all, surely the bad guys knew the U.S. had the ability to perform surveillance on them, and has a secret intelligence court, and was presumably getting lots of secret warrants to watch them, and was furthermore watching them overseas without being subject to the 4th amendment.