Privacy Digest

China's All-Seeing Eye - Via Slashdot:

krou writes "Naomi Klein writes in Rolling Stone Magazine about China's Panopticon-like experiment called 'Golden Shield' taking place in Shenzhen using technology supplied by companies such as IBM, Honeywell, and General Electric. Klein writes: 'Chinese citizens will be watched around the clock through networked CCTV cameras and remote monitoring of computers. They will be listened to on their phone calls, monitored by digital voice-recognition technologies. Their Internet access will be aggressively limited through the country's notorious system of online controls known as the "Great Firewall." Their movements will be tracked through national ID cards with scannable computer chips and photos that are instantly uploaded to police databases and linked to their holder's personal data.' According to Klein, this is more than just a Chinese experiment, it's also one that holds ramifications for America and elsewhere: '...the most efficient delivery system for capitalism is actually a communist-style police state... The global corporations currently earning superprofits from this social experiment are unlikely to be content if the lucrative new market remains confined to cities such as Shenzhen. Like everything else assembled in China with American parts, Police State 2.0 is ready for export to a neighborhood near you.'"

(Read Original Article - Via Slashdot.)

Slashdot | Extending SpamAssassin and Amavis - Via Slashdot | Developers :

An anonymous reader writes
"Spam filtering solutions are a necessary evil in today's e-mail climate. There are many different tools and systems available for the filtering and removal of spam e-mail. Tools like SpamAssassin and more detailed agents, such as Amavis use a variety of different methods to identify and capture spam. An IBM article shows how you can extend SpamAssassin and Amavis, providing additional filtering facilities to lower the amount of spam hitting e-mail boxes."

(Read Original Article - Via Slashdot | Developers.)

I.B.M. System to Scan Streets at Beijing Olympics - Via New York Times:

When the 2008 Olympic Games kick off in Beijing next year, organizers will be using a sophisticated computer system to scan video images of city streets looking for everything from troublemakers to terrorists.

The IBM system, called the Smart Surveillance System, or S3, uses analytic tools to index digital video recordings and then issue real-time alerts when certain patterns are detected. It can be used to warn security guards when someone has entered a secure area or keep track of cars coming in and out of a parking lot.

Beijing's S3 network is already being rolled out and is expected to be operational by the time the Games begin in August 2008, said Julie Donahue, vice president of security and privacy services with IBM.  read more »

IBM Smart Surveillance System (Previous PeopleVision Project) - Via IBM Research - PeopleVision:

The IBM Smart Surveillance system (S3) is developed by the Exploratory Computer Vision Group in IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. The system is a middleware offering for use in surveillance systems and provides video based behavioral analysis capabilities. Release 1 of the Smart Surveillance System provides two components  read more »

Empowering People and the Coming Identity Layer of Everything - IT Conversations: Kaliya Hamlin: "As citizens of the Internet, we manage our identity as a set of different login names on web sites, email addresses, a handful of phone numbers and our various IM handles. Kaliya Hamlin, the Identity Woman, presents a vision of a manageable number of identities per user, if not just one, that works well for citizens, applications, communities as well as operators.

OpenID, iNames and LID are implementations of this vision in the form of an interoperable, open standards service discovery protocol that defines endpoints between services. It is being widely adopted. AOL has given OpenIDs to over 75 million of their users.  read more »

IBM licenses clipped tag RFID technology to Marnlen RFID: "Issue date: 08 Nov 2006
Location: Hawthorne, NY & Markham, ON
IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it will license its acclaimed 'Clipped Tag' technology to Marnlen RFiD, who will begin production of the tags and offer availability immediately. The Clipped Tag, developed at IBM's Watson Research Center, allows consumers to tear off the majority of an RFID tag's antenna, reducing the tag's read range to just a few inches, ensuring consumer privacy while maintaining the benefits of the technology, such as product authentication or recalls.  read more »

PC World - IBM Buys Watchfire: "IBM Corp. liked Watchfire Corp.'s Web application security software so much it plans to buy the company for an undisclosed sum, it said Wednesday.

Watchfire develops software for identifying vulnerabilities in Web applications and for auditing sites for compliance with regulations on corporate governance, data privacy or accessibility.  read more »

Higgins Trust Framework Project Home: "Higgins is an open source software project that is developing an extensible, platform-independent, identity protocol-independent, software framework to support existing and new applications that give users more convenience, privacy and control over their identity information."

IBM and Higgins: "Age, shoe size: IBM thinks you should only disclose as much of your identity as you want

Although IBM was one of the original backers when the Higgins identity project started up last year, the company is only now contributing its first code, something it’s been working on since early 2000.  read more »