News about what is happening in technology today!

The street writes: Vonage Holdings, moved to become the first major Internet telephony player to go public by filing Wednesday to raise up to $250 million via an initial offering of stock and named a Tyco International executive as CEO. Our revenues were $18.7million in 2003, $79.7million in 2004, and $174.0 million for the nine months ended Sept. 30, 2005,” the company’s prospectus says.”While our revenues have grown rapidly, we have experienced increasing net losses, primarily driven by our increase in marketing expenses. From the period of inception through Sept.30, 2005, our cumulative net loss was $310 million. Our net loss for the nine months ended Sept.30, 2005, was $189.6million. During the same nine-month period, our marketing expenses were $176.3million.

Google Copies Your Hard Drive - Government Smiles in Anticipation

San Francisco - Google today announced a new “feature” of its Google Desktop software that greatly increases the risk to consumer privacy. If a consumer chooses to use it, the new “Search Across Computers” feature will store copies of the user’s Word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets and other text-based documents on Google’s own servers, to enable searching from any one of the user’s computers. EFF urges consumers not to use this feature, because it will make their personal data more vulnerable to subpoenas from the government and possibly private litigants, while providing a convenient one-stop-shop for hackers who’ve obtained a user’s Google password.

“Coming on the heels of serious consumer concern about government snooping into Google’s search logs, it’s shocking that Google expects its users to now trust it with the contents of their personal computers,” said EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. “Unless you configure Google Desktop very carefully, and few people will, Google will have copies of your tax returns, love letters, business records, financial and medical files, and whatever other text-based documents the Desktop software can index. The government could then demand these personal files with only a subpoena rather than the search warrant it would need to seize the same things from your home or business, and in many cases you wouldn’t even be notified in time to challenge it. Other litigants—your spouse, your business partners or rivals, whoever—could also try to cut out the middleman (you) and subpoena Google for your files.”

The privacy problem arises because the Electronic Communication Privacy Act of 1986, or ECPA, gives only limited privacy protection to emails and other files that are stored with online service providers—much less privacy than the legal protections for the same information when it’s on your computer at home. And even that lower level of legal protection could disappear if Google uses your data for marketing purposes. Google says it is not yet scanning the files it copies from your hard drive in order to serve targeted advertising, but it hasn’t ruled out the possibility, and Google’s current privacy policy appears to allow it.

“This Google product highlights a key privacy problem in the digital age,” said Cindy Cohn, EFF’s Legal Director. “Many Internet innovations involve storing personal files on a service provider’s computer, but under outdated laws, consumers who want to use these new technologies have to surrender their privacy rights. If Google wants consumers to trust it to store copies of personal computer files, emails, search histories and chat logs, and still ‘not be evil,’ it should stand with EFF and demand that Congress update the privacy laws to better reflect life in the wired world.”

For more on Google’s data collection:
http://news.com.com/FAQ+When+Google+is+not+your+friend/2100-1025_3-6034666.html?tag=nl
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/01/21/google_subpoena_roils_the_web
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/01/20/EDGEPGPHA61.DTL
http://news.com.com/%20Bill+would+force+Web+sites+to+delete+personal+info/2100-1028_3-6036951.html

The US government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity.

The system - parts of which are operational, parts of which are still under development - is already credited with helping to foil some plots. It is the federal government’s latest attempt to use broad data-collection and powerful analysis in the fight against terrorism. But by delving deeply into the digital minutiae of American life, the program is also raising concerns that the government is intruding too deeply into citizens’ privacy.

“We don’t realize that, as we live our lives and make little choices, like buying groceries, buying on Amazon, Googling, we’re leaving traces everywhere,” says Lee Tien, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “We have an attitude that no one will connect all those dots. But these programs are about connecting those dots - analyzing and aggregating them - in a way that we haven’t thought about. It’s one of the underlying fundamental issues we have yet to come to grips with.”

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Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has a great article about one potentially nasty aspect of Google’s newest desktop search software–it caches copies of your file on Google’s server, where it could potentially be subject to theft, subpoena, and any number of other privacy assaults. With all the recent talk about regulating VoIP for wiretapping, the Google issue is prescient. We know Google is getting further into VoIP; we know their unique value proposition for IP telephony apps will be search.

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A group of 20 scientists at the University of Wisconsin at Madison have spent the past five years developing this project. The 8-foot-tall camera can take images at less than two-billionths of a second. The project, called the Regional Calorimeter Trigger, is used to take pictures of colliding particles. This $6 million digicam will finally be put to the test later this year when it is shipped to the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. Good luck, Swiss-Wisconsinites.

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