George Orwell warned about Big Brother, but some who glide through Bay Area toll booths to the "beepbeep" of FasTrak risk an even more haunting specter: Big Angry Soon-to-be-Ex Spouse.

As the number of cash-free bridge commuters rises, so do the ranks of divorce lawyers and other civil attorneys who have subpoenaed, and received, personal driving records from the agency that oversees the regional e-toll system.

"You just kind of wonder if people would as happily use this system if there was a big red thing on the transponder saying, 'All data collected by this device could be used in any court for anything,' " said Lauren Weinstein.

Lawyers dig into FasTrak data

Research reported this week by three different groups shows that normal skin cells can be reprogrammed to an embryonic state in mice. The race is now on to apply the surprisingly straightforward procedure to human cells.

If researchers succeed, it will make it relatively easy to produce cells that seem indistinguishable from embryonic stem cells, and that are genetically matched to individual patients.

Simple switch turns cells embryonic, removes need for eggs or embryos

We present Hubble, a system designed to identify and diagnose reachability problems on the Internet in real-time. Using Hubble, we are able to evaluate the extent to which global reachability is violated: how many prefixes are reachable from some vantages and not others, and how long do these problems persist?

Whereas previous work focused on either reachability within a single AS or simple passive monitoring of BGP updates, we have designed Hubble to unify RouteViews and distributed vantage points into a system that can perform active probe monitoring and diagnosis of reachability problems to about 90% of the Internet's edge prefixes. Our results show that 10% of prefixes experience reachability problems on a given day.

Beyond identifying problems, Hubble gathers data and can trigger measurements to help troubleshoot and categorize commonly occuring reachability problems in real-time. Is a prefix currently unreachable from portions of the Internet? Is the problem due to issues with multi-homed failover? Is some AS dropping all traffic to the prefix? Hubble can provide answers to these questions.

See also, from last year, Towards IP Geolocation Using Delay and Topology Measurements.

Real-time Blackhole Analysis with Hubble

Eager buyers shopping for one of the new MacBook Pro laptops at Apple Inc.'s online store have noticed that opting for the fastest-possible hard drive extends the ship date from 1-3 days to 4-6 weeks.

Apple did not immediately reply to questions about why customers had to wait a month or more for a MacBook Pro equipped with the faster drive.

MacBook Pro fast disk option means slow shipping

We live in an age of anxiety.

People everywhere fear the next terrorist attack. Meanwhile, we slowly grow numb to Iraq’s endless string of kidnappings and suicide bombings. Between bird flu, tsunamis, and loose nukes, our list of fears is getting longer.

So, we asked 21 leading thinkers: What is one solution that would make the world a better place?

Here are their answers.

21 Solutions to Save the World

The more purely meritocratic the system — the more open, the more efficient, the fairer — the more anxiety it produces, because there is no haven from competition.

The Graduates

The Knowledge Web today is an activity rather than a web site — an expedition in time, space, and technology to map the interior landscape of human thought and experience. Thanks to the work of a team of dedicated volunteers, it will soon be an interactive space on the web where students, teachers, and other knowledge seekers can explore information in a highly interconnected, holistic way that allows for an almost infinite number of paths of exploration among people, places, things, and events.

The Knowledge Web

Lifelogging is the name of the activity that Bell is practicing.

...

“Do you ever think you’ll be done?” I asked.

“Reach an end point, you mean?”

“Get bored. Grow interested in something else.”

“Your aspirations go up with every new tool,” he said. “You’ve got all this content there and you want to use it, but there’s always this problem of wanting more.”

Remember This? | The New Yorker

Take a look at any college catalog.

The computer science departments all advertise the field in the same way: developing the skills of programming, working with abstractions, and covering a range of computing technologies.

Take a look at the body of knowledge in the ACM/IEEE curriculum recommendations: they portray the field as 14 main headings, mostly technologies, covering about 130 subheadings. The consensus view of our field emphasizes programming, abstraction, and technologies.

So you're saying that our failure to communicate comes from a habit of mind rather than a defective story?

Exactly.

I'm not saying that this way of expressing our body of knowledge is wrong. It communicates well when our primary audience is technology-minded people like ourselves.

But today computing affects many people in all walks of life. Our primary audiences listen for principles deeper than technologies.

We can't sell our field to others simply by hiring good journalists to tell our technology stories. We have to be willing to tell our stories in a different way.

We have to find ways to discuss computing so that our listeners can see their own struggles in the stories and then see how computing can help them.

The Great Principles of Computing | Peter Denning

Said Diffie, "The future will be a golden age for intelligence."

Whit Diffie at AT&T Cyber Security Conference