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Produced and hosted by Jon Gordon, Future Tense brings you the latest technology topics in daily five-minute capsules. From electronic privacy and digital democracy to spam and computer worms, Future Tense keeps you up to date on the rapidly changing world of technology.
Future Tense is heard in the United States during broadcasts of the CBC's As It Happens.
Follow Jon Gordon's daily technology blog.
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Fantasy Congress is a Web site created by four students at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California about a month ago.
As in fantasy football or baseball, players draft teams. In Fantasy Congress, players choose four U.S. Senators and 12 House members. Players accumulate points based on how effectively their chosen elected officials push legislation through Congress.
A new study says you can listen to your digital music player at a reasonably high volume for a long time without sustaining damage to your ears.
Study co-author Brian Fligor of Children's Hospital Boston says you probably won't sustain hearing loss if you keep the volume under 80 percent of maximum, even if you listen for long periods. You're in the danger zone if you listen at more than 80 percent for more than 90 minutes, but you have to be rockin' at that level for 10 years before you notice any hearing loss, says Fligor.
BONUS: Longer version of our interview
"News At Seven" uses human-like virtual news anchors to deliver personalized news to your desktop on a daily, hourly, or whenever-you-want-it basis. It is a completely automatic, autonomous system that recreates and remakes existing stories based on personal preferences. The News At Seven creators at Northwestern University's Infolab say what sets their newscast apart from traditional television news is its personalization and its ability to bring the news you want to you, instead of making you go out and find it.
Internet users have a new choice to make: IE7 or Firefox 2.0?
Microsoft has finally updated its dominant Internet Explorer browser after five years of neglect. Internet Explorer 7 looks very different from its predecessor, IE6, and is designed with security in mind.
Leading competitor Mozilla has just released a major update to the Firefox browser. Which is the right browser for you?
Future Tense tech expert Dwight Silverman says you can't go wrong with either one.
Venture capitalists pumped $6.4 billion into American companies in the third quarter of this year, according to a report from Dow Jones VentureOne. That's up 10 percent from the third quarter of 2005. Information technology and alternative energy companies attracted a big chunk of the money. VentureOne says communications and networking companies attracted 23 percent more venture money than the same quarter last year.
The handheld computer that famously flubbed handwriting recognition. A bizarre operating system named Bob. These are among the biggest computer industry failures of all time, according to Winnipeg software developer Miguel Carrasco.
Microsoft says it cannot allay the concerns of security software makers over its next operating system, Vista, until it issues an update to Vista. Microsoft is not providing a timetable for that update. The first version of Vista is schedule to be sent to corporate users next month, and sold to the public in January. Security companies including Symantec and McAfee say they need access to the core, or "kernel," of Windows Vista to protect customers fully, but Microsoft is not allowing it. Microsoft has put up a wall called "PatchGuard" to protect the operating system from hackers. Security software firms say that keeps them out, too.
Microsoft last week promised the European Commission that it would change the Vista operating system to meet concerns of security software makers.
Microsoft security expert Kristin Johnsen says Vista will be safer than previous versions of Windows, even with the current dispute.
A new study from Stanford University School of Medicine finds more than one in eight U.S. adults finds it hard to stay away from the Internet for several days at a time, and about one in 11 tries to hide his or her online habit. The study involved a nationwide telephone survey of almost 2,600 people.
Lead author Elias Aboujaoude says he undertook the study after seeing an increase in the number of people coming into his Stanford Clinic reporting problems stemming from Internet overuse.
Police in Long Island, New York recently nabbed a registered sex offender who was trying to use the social networking site MySpace to arrange meetings with underage boys. The arrest comes after Wired News senior editor Kevin Poulsen identified the man, Andrew Lubrano, and more than 700 other sex offenders on MySpace.
MySpace has come under fire for not doing enough to protect children. The site recently announced a new safety campaign designed to educate children about online predators.
Poulsen wrote a few lines of computer code that scanned MySpace for predators. He used data from the Web site of the National Sex Offender Registry. Poulsen says 497 of the offenders he found are registered for sex crimes against children.
MySpace declined an interview request, but provided the following written statement:
"We are committed to keeping sex offenders off MySpace and are evaluating all functional and scalable solutions. In the meantime, we will delete profiles of any convicted sex offender we find on MySpace. Long term, we are working on tools to identify and report to law enforcement all inappropriate use of MySpace and we support legislation that forces sex offenders to use registered email addresses so we can keep them off social networking sites."
In a nod to the surging popularity of virtual worlds, news agency Reuters is opening a bureau inside the simulation game Second Life.
Adam Pasick will write stories under the byline of a digital avatar about the online world. His stories are meant for Second Life participants, but they will also be available on a public Web site.
Reuters will also be delivering news about the non-virtual world inside Second Life, which is a kind of parallel universe on the Internet. It's a 3-D world where users create and dress up characters, buy property and interact with other players.
Players buy and sell goods and services using a virtual currency. An online marketplace allows users to convert the currency into real U.S. dollars, enabling users to earn real money from their activities.
In Second Life, Pasick is known as the animated character "Adam Reuters."
You go to dinner with five friends. You pay the bill with your credit card and everyone agrees to settle up later. The next day you go to a movie with two of those same friends and they pay for your ticket and popcorn and tell you to take it out of what they already owe you. It turns out two others at the dinner are roommates and you owe them for last month's cable bill. At this rate, you'll need a spreadsheet to keep track of the money flow.
Or you can use the free, online service BillMonk. The site, now in its tenth month of operation, lets users keep a virtual running tally of who in your circle of friends owes what. Users who subscribe to the service can use their home computers to keep track of their account, but they can also add items on the go with a cell phone.
Chuck Groom and partner Gaurav Oberoi quit their jobs at Amazon.com to start the business.
The site currently doesn't generate any money. The partners decided against charging a fee for premium services. The name, BillMonk, is partly based on the pub the two creators were in when they were trying to come up with a name.
USA Today reported this week on a massive $11.3-million jury decision against a woman who posted critical comments about someone else on an internet site. Carey Bock called the operator of a referral service for troubled teens a "con artist", "crook" and "fraud". The comments stemmed from an ongoing dispute and were posted on a site used by other parents. A Florida jury awarded the damages to Sue Scheff, the target of the criticism.
The jury did not make a decision weighing the complex arguments of defamation. The defendant did not show up for the trial so the plaintiff won by default. She said she never received notice of the trial because she left her Louisiana home after it was flooded during Hurricane Katrina. She told USA Today she doesn't have money to appeal the decision or to pay the $11-million dollar judgement.
David Hudson, Nashville School of Law instructor and research attorney for the First Amendment Center said, even though lower court rulings rarely set Constitutional precedent, the jury is making a statement about the harm thoughtless comments on the internet can cause.
Eric Goldman, director of the High Technology Law Center at Santa Clara University, said such judgements open the door to suppressing speech on a much broader scale than originally envisioned.
The money says Democrats will take over the U.S. House and Republicans will keep the Senate in November. The projection isn't from a political poll but the current prediction by the Iowa Electronic Markets. The system allows traders from around the world to buy futures online based on possible political outcomes.
The Iowa Electronics Markets started at the University of Iowa in 1988 allowing futures trades on the presidential race. The enterprise expanded to include other political races including the balance of power in midterm elections. Now the system is gauging the possible spread of flu outbreaks. Organizers of the effort say the markets have a 76 percent accuracy rate.
Joyce Berg is one of four University of Iowa faculty who run the electronic markets. She says organizers are watching another political issue: this month's passage by Congress of a bill banning online gambling. Those running prediction market sites, like the Iowa Electronic Markets, are worried they'll be lumped in with other gambling sites when it comes time to enforce the ban.
North Korea's nuclear test this week prompted worldwide scrutiny and analysis of the secretive nation's motives. But North Koreans themselves may know little, if anything, about their country's audacious entry onto the nuclear power stage. The country's grip on information is so tight only a few thousand people have any internet access at all. And those people are permitted to see only information that is meticulously filtered by the government--such as a bombastic propaganda video boosting the country's military might.
The threat of punishment to someone viewing, much less generating non-sanctioned information is so complete much of what happens in North Korea goes undocumented. There are more web logs originating from Antarctica, which has no permanent residents, than from among North Korea's population of 22-million people.
Tala Dowlatshahi, New York director of the group Reporters without Borders, calls North Korea the world's worst violator of press freedom.
Disney's newly released Desperate Housewives computer game is the first branded with ABC-TV name. The company hopes to use the weight of its massively popular weekly show to propel the game into the hands of women between ages 18 and 49. It's a bold move since teenage boys are the traditional demographic starting point for computer games. But success of The Sims and another TV show based game, CSI, found an emerging female market.
Jane Pinckard, a 31-year-old gamer who runs the web log GameGirlAdvance, says Desperate Housewives seems to have all the ingredients--including a heavyweight brand--to appeal to the "casual" player. But she also worries the industry's definition of "casual" has become an inadequate euphemism for "female".
Buena Vista Games developed the Desperate Housewives game. The company's marketing vice president, Barbara Gleason, acknowledges males are still the prime game demographic, but that doesn't mean women can't have a piece of the pie.
Most people by now are aware email is not the best place to discuss intimate details or company secrets. It's too easy to forward them or send them to the wrong address and the message frequently leaves an easily traced trail of electronic footprints as it bounces from the sender to the receiver.
Florida congressman Mark Foley's alleged indiscretions with teenage interns is an uncomfortable reminder that the same applies for the relatively fleeting instant message. Typically occupying tiny pop-up windows in the corner of the computer screen, instant messages are easy to dismiss as nothing more than ephemeral flashes. Once you turn off the computer, the conversation is gone, right?
Kristin Nimsger with Kroll Ontrack says instant messages offer little more secure privacy than emails. Kroll Ontrack provides computer forensics and data recover for large corporations, government agencies and other clients. Nimsger says instant messages fit into a continuum of communications--none of which is entirely water tight.
It's a buzzword used by Internet companies, venture capitalists, and the Silicon Valley vanguard to describe Internet applications that allow users to create content. "Web 2.0" might mean very little to YOU, but the chances are good you're using Web 2.0 programs, or will be in the near future. Mary Madden with the Pew Internet and American Life Project says don't be ashamed if you've heard the term but haven't the faintest idea what it's all about.
Google has created a new search site, but you'd never know it comes from the leading Internet search company.
SearchMash has a simple user interface, in blue and white colors. Searches produces Web site results on the left, and images on the right side of the screen. Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch, says Google created SearchMash to test new features.
The Hewlett-Packard spying scandal is drawing attention to the growing corporate practice of snooping on employees.
The Silicon Valley computer company obtained phone records of employees, board members and journalists by deception, and tried to plant snooping software on a reporter’s PC. Although it's making headlines now, workplace spying is quite common and generally legal.
It’s on a lesser scale than the HP tactics, but electronic monitoring of employees is increasing as snooping technology gets simpler and cheaper.
Corporations are snooping on employees, but it's usually on routine matters like how much time they spend on surfing the Web. A survey by the American Management Association finds more than three quarters of companies track employees' Web surfing, and read e-mail and computer files. Companies are trying to prevent employees from wasting time, consuming too much bandwidth, disclosing trade secrets, importing computer viruses and watching internet porn.
Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute, says too often employee monitoring drifts into voyeurism.
Here's another version of this story.
It took the AOL privacy scandal for most Americans to realize that Internet search tools from Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL are acquainted with many intimate details about their lives.
In August, AOL released the search terms of more than 600,000 customers, some who were later identified personally. If you log onto Yahoo or Google, the companies know who you are, what web sites you visit, what you search for, and lots of other personal data.
There is one search engine that doesn't want to know a lick about you. Ixquick is a Dutch search engine that serves the U.S. and Canadian markets primarily. Ixquick announced in June that it would not store information on what users search for and what web sites they visit. And Ixquick said it would not use cookies or store IP addresses.
