The pilot will involve transferring the health information of between 1,500 and 10,000 patients who have records at the Cleveland Clinic, which already has over 100,000 records stored in its own digital database. Patients will then be able to have access to their own records online, wherever they go (with an Internet connection), which Google thinks will help reduce conflicts in diagnoses and prescriptions between doctors.

Clarkson published details of his Barclays account in the Sun newspaper, including his account number and sort code. He even told people how to find out his address.

“All you’ll be able to do with them is put money into my account. Not take it out. Honestly, I’ve never known such a palaver about nothing,” he told readers.

Something tells me he won’t be doing that again…

“I opened my bank statement this morning to find out that someone has set up a direct debit which automatically takes £500 from my account,” he said.

I need to work from my hotel room, and I can’t stand laptop keyboards or pointing devices, so I’m taking a full-size keyword and trackball in my carry-on. So, in the luggage that will go through the x-ray machine, I will have two mechanical-looking devices with wires coming out of them.

Anyone want to lay bets on whether or not this gets a second look from security? I’ll report on actual events when I get to my hotel late tonight.

Adulterers, beware: Your cheatin’ heart might be exposed by E-ZPass.

E-ZPass and other electronic toll collection systems are emerging as a powerful means of proving infidelity. That’s because when your spouse doesn’t know where you’ve been, E-ZPass does.

E-ZPass has been used in court cases all the time. Tough to complain about the privacy implications, however, since it’s all voluntary. You give up privacy for convenience.

In a decision reported late Friday by CNET News.com, a federal judge in Los Angeles found that a computer server’s RAM, or random-access memory, is a tangible document that can be stored and must be turned over in a lawsuit.

If allowed to stand, the groundbreaking ruling may mean that anyone defending themselves in a civil suit could be required to turn over information in their computer’s RAM hardware, which could force companies and individuals to store vast amounts of data, say technology experts.

How would you even do this? RAM is ephemeral. Do you write it to disk every X number of minutes or something? When someone comes to you with a subpoena for your RAM, do they specify a time? And if that time is three weeks ago, how are you supposed to get that data unless you continually log all the contents in your RAM to persistent storage?

Ms. Kalin-Casey, who manages an apartment building here with her husband, John Casey, was a bit shaken when she tried a new feature in Google’s map service called Street View. She typed in her address and the screen showed a street-level view of her building. As she zoomed in, she could see Monty, her cat, sitting on a perch in the living room window of her second-floor apartment.

What’s Street View, you say? It’s pretty cool.

Members pay $25/month to obtain 25 contacts from the site, or agree to put in 25 contacts a month to get 25 others out. Users maintain the data, but unlike Wikipedia, they don't do it for love here -- they do it to score points, so they can download more contacts.

An antiterror law makes Internet cafe managers check their clients' IDs and track the websites they visit.

...Maurizio Savoni says he's closing his Internet cafe because he doesn't want to be a "cop" anymore.

[...]

...Savoni had to obtain a new public communications business license, and purchase tracking software that costs up to $1,600.

The software saves a list of all sites visited by clients, and Internet cafe operators must periodically turn this list into their local police headquarters.

Sounds from typing on computer keyboards are distinctive enough to be decoded, allowing security breaches caused by "acoustic snooping," University of California researchers said on Wednesday.

Your traffic is safer when you use Tor, because communications are bounced around a distributed network of servers, called onion routers. Instead of taking a direct route from source to destination, data packets on the Tor network take a random pathway through several servers that cover your tracks so no observer at any single point can tell where the data came from or where it's going.

Found via this Wired article.

Couldn't it just check for updates when it's run? Why does every company program feel like they're so important that they need to take up memory on machine?

A February decision by the US Department of Commerce requires new registrants of .US domains to submit their phone numbers and addresses for listing in publicly searchable databases.

More on that decision.

Here’s some of the letter. He went ballistic — it was way, way more impassioned than anything you expect to get from your domain registrar:

Today I have the unfortunate responsibility of informing you that there has been a decision made by bureaucrats of a Federal agency that takes away your right to privacy as guaranteed by the United States Constitution. […]

I personally find it ironic that our right to .US privacy was stripped away, without due process […] For the NTIA to choose the .US extension is the ultimate slap in your face.

Here’s his personal blog and a Web site devoted to the cause.

The updated report from the Better Business Bureau study shows that fear has unrealistically worsened. "Our numbers show that fears about online identity fraud may be out of proportion to the relative risk, causing consumers to ignore the most glaring issues," Javelin's founder and chief analyst, James Van Dyke, said.

Despite the rising perception among consumers that online transactions are very risky, this latest study shows results to the contrary. It concludes that identity fraud problems are not worsening. In fact, the total number of victims is declining.

I'm not sure I believe this last bit, though:

The average time to resolve an identity fraud crime dropped by 15 percent from 33 hours in 2003 to 28 hours in 2004.

A year or two ago, my friend's debit card was compromised. Later, he found out that he'd purchased a bunch of stuff from Digital Blasphemy. That took several weeks to clear up! (I think the red tape at his bank was responsible for the length of time involved, though.)

Personally, I have no problem logging into my accounts online. I've even convinced my parents that its safe to do so -- no easy task.

Yahoo is using something called "Web beacons" or a "super cookie" that tracks not only where its users go on the Yahoo network but also tracks where they go outside of the Yahoo network using a persistent file on the hard drive. Note that you have to have a Yahoo account to be tracked.

The article goes on to explain how to disable this in your Yahoo! preferences.