Officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have told Northwest Airlines security specialists that the agency is developing brain-monitoring devices in cooperation with a commercial firm, which it did not identify."

Determining whether a pilot has "spaced out" is standard ELF radio stuff. Your brain emits a feild at one of three frequencies depending on whether you are in a tranced, lucid, or sleep state. I wanted to use this stuff to build an automatic DJ which would do track selection based on readings like this from the dance floor. If more people are lucid the music is bad and needs to change.

As for getting a clean EEG without flesh contact, its not bloody likely, but I wish them luck. However, I imagine there are some assorted readings that COULD be taken which would ID someone who was nervous or high on adrenalin. The implication of that IS disconcerting.

The article mentions being able to tell what areas of your brain are stimulated and using this information to determine what sort of thinking you are doing. I haven't read anything on that. If anyone can point me to papers I would be interested.

NASA plans to read terrorist's minds at airports -- The Washington Times

"The next step is an automatic vacuum cleaner."

The story isn't very good, but the meme is. Cnet and CNN have both picked this up. Now, I've been talking about this for years. Simple innovations that free people's time up have tremendous impacts on the economy. There are lawn mowers available on the market. There are vacuums in the lab. The biggest barrier to making this stuff really work is the limitations of battery power. I don't think this kind of thing will be widespread until you see lots of portable fuel cells, which may not be too long from now.

Robot Grass Cutter Cuts Through Tedium of Mowing

"The steel-encased camera, designed to withstand a bullet, plays a recorded warning that police hope will act as a deterrent: "Stop! This is the LAPD," the recording says. "We have just taken your photograph. We will use this photograph to prosecute you. Leave now."

Eventually they'll install the guns.

The Sacramento Bee -- sacbee.com -- Cameras to help keep south Los Angeles alleys clean

"Amazon is one of the best on-site search capabilities we've ever
seen. But surprisingly, the reason why it works so well is likely to
be the same reason why Search *won't* work well on your site."

User Interface Engineering -- How people use search

And computers are big, too. You can buy a 1000MHz machine with 2 gigabytes of RAM and an 1000Mbit/sec Ethernet card for $1500 or so. Let's see - at 20000 clients, that's 500KHz, 100Kbytes, and 50Kbits/sec per client. It shouldn't take any more horsepower than that to take four kilobytes from the disk and send them to the network once a second for each of twenty thousand clients."

DNM mentioned this site to me at Defcon. Its a deep technical look at doing scalable network IO. The ideas apply in lots of different contexts.

The C10K problem

This is a hacker con in Atlanta September 27th - 29th 2002... Didn't hear about this until I got to Defcon. Its not well known that this is going down.

Welcome to Interz0ne

"Given that there is a ferocious triple dominance of Microsoft on operating systems, Intel in chips and Dell in hardware, the computer industry is finally getting boring. Almost as boring as my own business, the book business. It's still pretending to innovate, but its glamour routine has gotten all ritualized. The machines are slow, the programs are bloated, the changes are cosmetic, just like the heyday of Detroit's Big Three carmakers, so many years ago. "

Sterling spins out some juicy metaphors. Good conversational ammo.

Viridian Note 00325: Open Source Speech

"When we started shipping IIS (Internet Information Server) 6 in beta with things locked down, customers would say, "You broke my applications." We said, "That's because everything's closed. You really need to go in and decide what should be open." So they said, "Oh, here's what we want. Why don't you put in a button that turns everything on?" Well, that just defeats the whole purpose."

Interview with MS info-security czar.

"A presidential advisor encouraged the nation's top computer security professionals and hackers Wednesday to try to break computer programs, but said they might need protection from the legal wrath of software makers."

Some very encouraging words from the Bush administration at this year's Black Hat Briefings.

AP Wire | 07/31/2002 | Bush adviser encourages hacking

Invoking both the controversial 1998 DMCA and computer crime laws, HP has threatened to sue a team of researchers who publicized a vulnerability in the company's Tru64 Unix operating system.

Yow! If this solidifies into a court battle it could present the first amendment question that the Felton case nearly presented. However, I think there are a number of technicalities here that will prevent this case from making it into a courtroom.

Security warning draws DMCA threat - Tech News - CNET.com