Ontario's privacy commissioner to geeks: design for privacy!
Here's a one-hour video of a magnificent lecture from
Cavoukian argues that privacy and security are not zero-sum, that privacy is just as important in the "post-9/11 world" as it was before, and that you don't need to give up one to get the other. She addresses specific privacy-protection computer science techniques, and cites Kim Cameron's wonderful Seven Laws of Identity (I wish Kim would approach trusted computing with the same skepticism that he brought to identity issues, but that doesn't take away from his excellent work there).
There's something incredibly refreshing about hearing a high-ranking government official say things like, "Privacy is integral to freedom. You cannot have a free and democratic society without privacy. When a state morphs from a democracy into a totalitarian regime, the first thread to unravel is privacy." Link (via /.)
To fight off the evil empire that is MySpace, tiny entities Facebook and iTunes may be teaming up to bring a musical component to Facebook's offerings (while offering Apple another venue to sell their music). 
Recently at CEATEC in Japan Shinoda Plasma Corp unveiled a plasma screen that tops out an an extraordinary 1mm in thickness. Plasma tubes aligned between film-form electrodes not only make the screen thin enough to be bent (as the image above demonstrates), they also make it extremely light. In fact, the 43-inch screen prototype weighed in at only 800g. This could set the stage for truly gigantic displays--79 x 118-inches or more created by seamlessly combining screens during the manufacturing process. Naturally, I would love to hook an Xbox up to something like this right now, but chances are it will take the better part of a decade before we can get our hands on it. [
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