Technology Notebook
Published 9:00 pm Saturday, November 22, 2003
411 service for cell phones may be stymied: The wireless phone industry’s plans to launch a 411 service for cell phone numbers would be restricted under a bill being introduced in Congress this week by a Republican congressman.
Rep. Joseph Pitts of Pennsylvania wants to require wireless carriers to get clear authorization from subscribers before their cell numbers could be listed. And although landline phone providers charge customers to remain unlisted, wireless carriers could not impose such fees on their users.
“I think most people who have a cell phone consider that private,” Pitts said. “They don’t want the world to know what their number is.”
Cell phone numbers are not available from standard 411 directories. However, The Associated Press reported in March that wireless carriers were planning a directory service. It is now expected to emerge within a year.
Look, Ma, no TV: Imagine television, but no television set.
A tiny start-up founded by Chad Dyner, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, is working on a device that projects a two-dimensional video image into thin air. The picture simply floats in front of the viewer, and doesn’t require special lenses to see.
The company, IO2 Technology of Lake Forest, Ill., isn’t saying exactly how it works. Bob Ely, an investor and one of three part-time employees, says the “secret sauce” in the device sucks a block of air out of the surrounding environment, modifies its properties, then blows the air out the top so that it reflects protons projected onto it.
Is it a chemical reaction? Electrical? Ely would say only that nothing is added to or subtracted from the air, and that it’s safe to breathe.
Robodog?: A new invention can sniff like a dog, find drugs like a dog and help police catch criminals like a dog. But can the so-called “Dog on a Chip” replace the police officer’s best friend?
Georgia Tech researchers have developed a machine that can instantly sniff out cocaine and other illegal drugs without the hassle of feeding, training and interpreting a police dog.
“This works the same way as the dogs,” said Bill Hunt, the electrical engineering professor heading the project. “They’re picking up on the vapors coming off the cocaine.”
From a few feet away, the device can “smell” microscopic amounts of a particular substance – as little as one-trillionth of a gram. So far it’s only programmed to detect cocaine. But Hunt says it could be developed to sniff out other drugs, anthrax, bombs, chemical agents and even cancerous cells.
The machine is a rectangular plastic box slightly smaller than a phone book attached to a cube with a chip inside it that detects substances. Two antenna-like tubes protrude from the cube – one sucks in air, the other spits it out.
Brazil wants to take the bite out of spam: You can send an e-mail to the Brazilian Anti-Spam Committee, but they’ll only send one back if you ask.
This month the group – made up of Brazilian Internet and direct-advertising companies – launched an anti-spam crusade they claim is unprecedented in scope anywhere in the world. It’s based on a strict code of ethics for advertisers and the principle that the industry can regulate itself.
The code obliges e-mail advertisers to tell consumers who they are, to observe truth-in-advertising norms and to let recipients opt out of future mailings.
Consumers can complain online about nuisance advertisers, and the worst offenders will be listed on the anti-spam squad’s Web site. But violators won’t face fines.
If Brazil is getting aggressive against spam, it’s because the country is also a champion at generating it. According to the Brazilian Internet Service Providers Association, one of the nine groups that fought for the code, spam accounts for almost 35 percent of all e-mail circulating among Brazil’s 20 million Internet users. Globally, says the U.S. spam-filtering company Brightmail Inc., more than 50 percent of e-mails now sent are spam.
Associated Press
