Every new BMW sold in Australia since September is marked with the polyester adhesive dots, which each carry the car's unique manufacturer identification number. BMW is considering using the dots in all of its cars sold worldwide. Australian police and motoring organizations want the dots on all new cars sold in the country, and Ford, Holden and Mitsubishi are scrambling to follow BMW's example.

The dots are as small as grains of sand, and the information on them can only be viewed with a magnifying glass. They're sprayed all over a car's engine parts, air ducts and other automotive nooks and crannies. The dots are visible with black light because Allen wants thieves to know they are there.

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Dell Computer has signed up to spray the dots on the 250,000 computers it sells annually in Australia. Each dot will carry the computer's serial number.

Technology News from Wired News - 'Smart' ID Card Worries Hong Kong.

Hong Kong residents are being issued "smart" ID cards -- mandatory cards that are largely aimed at controlling Chinese immigration.

Political News from Wired News - Spying: The American Way of Life?

Last month's revelation that President Bush wants hundreds of millions of dollars to invent innovative ways to spy on Americans was greeted not with suspicion, but shoulder-shrugging indifference.

Save for a few battle-weary civil libertarians, not many people have been fretting about how cameras now monitor all downtown areas in Washington, or the unchecked spread of face-recognition cameras that spy on travelers in airports and sports fans in arenas.

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But Bush's war on terror is not a traditional military conflict with a clear end that can be met after, say, U.S. soldiers capture a city, eliminate a Taliban command post -- or even snare Osama bin Laden himself. Bush and other top administration officials repeatedly have warned that the attempt to exterminate al-Qaida dens may continue for years, even decades. It conceivably could succeed the Cold War as the most important political struggle of the 21st century.

If that happens, new surveillance powers that police receive today likely will become permanent.

That's why some members of the In Defense of Freedom alliance that sprang up after Sept. 11 -- and includes libertarian, conservative, and liberal groups -- are alarmed.

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Included in that figure is: $5.6 million to expand an unnamed FBI "data collection facility," $32 million and 194 positions devoted to intelligence and information gathering, $10.9 million for expanded electronic surveillance, $11.3 million for an "Electronic Surveillance Data Management System," and $2 million for the Special Operations Group's intelligence and surveillance operations. In addition, the FBI would receive $157.6 million to upgrade and enhance its computer systems.

EE Times - Group to form content-protection specs for audio players.

A group of consumer electronics manufacturers and technology suppliers have formed the Digital Media Device Association (DMDA) and created a working group to draft specifications related to the use and exchange of digital audio content on portable and networked players.

The group intends to address interoperability and content-protection issues for digital audio devices that were left unresolved when the Secure Digital Music Initiative ceased activities last year.

Slashdot | Your Rights Online - SDMI Gets a New Name.

Slashdot | Telco Networks Open to Attack?

Europemedia.net: Users trade privacy for convenience with ID services.

In the world of online commerce and services, several of the industry's key players are banking on all-in-one identity services to inspire customer loyalty.

Research group Gartner expects that there will be about 40m people in the US using identity services by the end of next year.

But as E-Commerce Times reports, the convenience of a single ID and password to control all a user's web transactions is complicated by a lack of standards and concerns over what happens to all that personal information.

"The bottom line is that people care more about privacy than they do about convenience, and that ultimately the question will be which companies the public grows to trust the most with their personal information," Avivah Litan, a Gartner vice-president, told E-Commerce Times.