Cody Taylor

Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs recently offered a vision of future mobile applications that included enhanced reality where mobile phones can use location data and cameras to identify people and places. While Jacobs did not give a time frame for his vision’s realization, it may be much sooner than he thinks.

Just as some cities’ newspapers sputter, a handful of Web sites emerge to cull local content from government data, blogs and news media.

blackbearnh writes “Yahoo! has been working for a while to promote a unified system for referring to places, through their Where On Earth IDs. Using a WOEID, you can query Yahoo’s publicly available APIs to find out things like what cities are in a county, or what counties border each other. In an interview for O’Reilly Radar, Tyler Bell, the product lead for the Yahoo Geo Technology Group, talks about their Open Location program (not to be confused with openlocation.org, a different group altogether.) He also talks about how privacy concerns interact with the increasing use of personal geotracking, and the troublesome problem of what to call places. ‘I’m not even going to tell you about the problems we had when we accidentally called Constantinople Byzantium, just slipping back about 800 years there accidentally. That’s a very sensitive issue. Any company dealing with geography is going to have to address it somehow. So I’ll be very candid in how Yahoo addresses this. I mean first, our stated goal is to capture the world’s geography as it is used by the world’s people. We don’t see ourselves as the definitive authority on how a place should be called.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Afforess writes “‘Proxy servers are an everyday part of Internet surfing. But using one in a crime could soon lead to more time in the clink,’ reports the Associated Press. The new federal rules would make the use of proxy servers count as ‘sophistication’ in a crime, leading to 25% longer jail sentences. Privacy advocates complain this will disincentivize privacy and anonymity online. ‘[The government is telling people] … if you take normal steps to protect your privacy, we’re going to view you as a more sophisticated criminal,’ writes the Center for Democracy and Technology. Others fear this may lead to ‘cruel and unusual punishments’ as Internet and cell phone providers often use proxies without users’ knowledge to reroute Internet traffic. This may also ultimately harm corporations when employees abuse VPN’s, as they too are counted as a ‘proxy’ in the new legislation. TOR, a common Internet anonymizer, is also targeted in the new legislation. Some analysts believe this legislation is an effort to stop leaked US Government information from reaching outside sources, such as Wikileaks. The legislation (PDF, the proposed amendment is on pages 5-15) will be voted on by the United States Sentencing Commission on April 15, and is set to take effect on November 1st. The EFF has already urged the Commission to reject the amendment.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You need to take the time to read the warrant available via PDF. Insanity. Someone’s computer crashes and suspects it’s a CS student’s fault because he does things like “‘jail breaks’ cell phones” and he is sometimes seen with a “[computer with] a black screen with white font which he uses prompt commands on.” Yikes.

Time Warner Cable plans to test its controversial, new scheme to have users pay by the gigabyte in Rochester, New York, but the area’s freshman congressman calls usage caps greedy and plans to introduce legislation to stop it. Support this, and let these ISPs know what’s in store for them if they try this in your area.

A new academic paper argues that statutory damages have spiraled out of control, especially in P2P cases, and that reform or abolition is necessary.