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Microsoft this week is taking the wraps off Surface, a coffee-table shaped computer that responds to human touch and objects tagged with special bar codes.

For a video of Surface in action, visit wavLength.

Guest: Ina Fried of CNET News.com

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Finding an unused power outlet to charge your laptop, MP3 player and mobile phone in the country's airports can be quite the challenge. So a few companies have stepped in to provide fee-based charging stations.

Julio Ojeda-Zapata of the St. Paul Pioneer Press recently reviewed two kiosks in the Twin Cities International Airport: ChargeCarte and PowerPort.

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Mark Hurst, author of Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload, is the guest on Future Tense today. He shares tips on managing your e-mail.

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Today, part two of our report on medical records privacy.

Guests:

Janlori Goldman, Health Privacy Project
Susan McAndrew, HHS Office of Civil Rights

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As medical records are created and transmitted electronically more and more, the chance of private information falling into the wrong hands is growing. Sometimes records are stolen by hackers, other times just improperly secured. Compromised records can lead to a range of problems, from loss of employment to identity theft to plain old embarrassment.

Future Tense has discovered that detailed, personally identifiable medical records of thousands of Colorado residents were viewable on a publicly accessible Internet site for an uncertain period of time through at least last Friday, May 18. The data included patient records from at least 10 Colorado clinics and hospitals, and one hospital in Peoria, Illinois. It's unclear how many people may have seen the records.

Experts say the case likely runs afoul of federal health information privacy laws, even though there is no evidence that the records were misused.

The unsecured computer, which was accessible through a Web browser, was operated by Beacon Medical Services of Aurora, Colorado, which provides billing, coding and other services to emergency physicians at 17 facilities.

Beacon CEO Dennis Beck says he was shocked to learn about the breach and that the company took immediate steps to correct it.

"We've implemented a culture of compliance and data security and it just did not seem consistent with our culture, our practice and our experience," he said.

The medical records resided on an FTP server. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. It's a means by which users send and receive computer files over the Internet or private networks. In Beacon's case - and this is typical of the industry - health care providers sent encrypted data to the server for Beacon to access so it could bill patients and insurance companies. The data was unencrypted on Beacon's end, and the FTP server was not supposed to be accessible to the public. But in this case it was. No username or password was required to view the records.

The data included details of patients' visits to emergency rooms -- what ailments they complained of, diagnoses and treatments, and medical histories, along with the patients' names, occupations, addresses, phone numbers, insurance providers, and in some cases, Social Security numbers. Some of the records detailed sensitive cases, from sexually transmitted diseases to severe depression. The site also contained financial information, such as a list of low-income patients who received state aid to help pay their medical bills.

Beacon has employed two firms to help investigate what led to the security hole.

"It appears to us now at this point as if there was some back door that was opened to this server," said Beck. "We don't know when, but we believe it may have been done when a consultant did some work for us several years ago."

The company is trying to determine the exact number of patients affected, but Beck says the number looks to be fewer than 5,000.

Future Tense discovered the Beacon site after a tip from a source who stumbled upon it. We followed up on the tip, staying just long enough to confirm the existence of the records and get an idea what kind of data they contained. We notified several health care providers whose patient data was exposed. Those providers informed Beacon, which promptly shut the server down when it learned of the problem.

Bill Byron is spokesman for Banner Health Corporation, the parent company of McKee Medical Center of Loveland, Colorado, one of the providers whose data was included on the FTP site. Byron said McKee physicians won't transmit any more records to Beacon until they're satisfied the security problem is fixed.

"We're trying to understand what our obligations are going to be, in terms of disclosing to patients that this has occurred, so that's still in process, to determine what we have to do," he said.

The Colorado medical records incident appears to be a serious violation of federal law governing medical record privacy, according to Janlori Goldman, director of the Health Privacy Project at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons.

"Large-scale breaches like this are not uncommon," she said. "They may not happen every day but they happen enough that you have to wonder, why aren't people taking greater care with this information?"

About a year ago, for example, a data security breach exposed medical information and Social Security numbers of some 26 million veterans after data was stolen from the home of an employee of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Tomorrow on Future Tense, we'll explore the potential harm of compromised medical records, and at the federal law designed to protect patients. One critic of current law says patients have very little recourse when their most sensitive medical records become public.

Here is a list of physician groups, clinics and hospitals which had data of various kinds on the exposed site:

-McKee Medical Center of of Loveland, CO
-Big Thompson Emergency Physicians of Longmont, CO
-Presbyterian St. Luke's Hospital of Denver
-North Suburban Medical Center of Thornton, CO
-Carepoint Emergency Physicians of the greater Denver area
-Long's Peak Emergency Physicians
-Longmont United Hospital
-Boulder Community Hospital
-Emergency Medical Specialists PLC
-Memorial Hospital of Colorado Springs
-Proctor Hospital of Peoria, IL

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In a new book, Mark Hurst argues that Americans are chronically overloaded with bits -- the building blocks digital information. Hurst, a principal in the consulting firm Creative Good, says we're buried by e-mail, blogs, digital photos, and podcasts.

In the book Bit Literacy, Hurst provides a roadmap for better managing digital information.

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As the price of gas continues to rise to record levels in the real world, Internet users around the world are playing an alternate reality game in which they pretend the U.S. is facing an acute oil shortage that's driving gasoline prices to crisis levels.

The idea of World Without Oil is to tap collective intelligence to help us wade through a real crisis in the future - to generate conversation among bloggers, gamers, and other content creators to come up with creative ways to deal with oil dependency through play.

Guest: Jane McGonigal

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Two consumer advocacy groups are urging the Federal Trade Commission to investigate how food and beverage companies are using digital advertising to reach children. In a joint report, the Center for Digital Democracy and the Berkeley Media Studies Group say companies such as McDonalds and Coca-Cola are operating under the radar of parents and regulators in their marketing to children through new digital platforms, including instant messaging, SMS, ring tones, and viral video. The groups say this marketing could make the childhood obesity problem even worse.

Guest: Report co-author & American University professor Kathryn Montgomery

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As told in the June edition of Wired magazine, a 27 year-old woman from New Mexico stalked and harassed Chester Bennington and his wife over the Internet for a period of many months. The stalker was an obsessive fan of rap-rock band Linkin Park, of which Bennington is lead singer. The Bennington's hired an investigator, who tracked the cyberstalker to a surprising place: Sandia National Laboratories, a nuclear weapons research facility operated by the Department of Energy.

Guest: Wired contributing editor David Kushner

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Researchers at the Mayo Clinic outfitted standard treadmills with office desks, then asked 15 obese people to walk at about 1 mile per hour throughout the day as they tapped their keyboards and talked on the phone.

Mayo's James Levine says participants found it easy to work, and burned a lot of calories.

We first talked to Levine about walking while working 15 months ago. As part of that report, we also chatted with Thomas Niccum, president of Twin Cities-based Lancet Software. Niccum had just rigged his treadmill so he could run the company and get a little exercise at the same time.

It turns out that Niccum is still working from his treadmill. He's pleased with the results.

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It's a common complaint - iPod earbuds that fit poorly. They're either too big, too small or just the wrong shape for you ears. And when earbuds don't fit well, they don't sound good.

Guest: St. Paul Pioneer Press reporter/columnist Julio Ojeda-Zapata

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Three-dimensional printers - until now the province of design shops and laboratories - are moving closer to the consumer space. A company called Desktop Factory says it will begin selling home fabricators later this year, for about $5,000. The machines fashion 3D objects from a nylon powder.

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Cornell University researcher Evan Malone believes that one day, you'll own a machine that fabricates everything from toys to toothbrushes, watchbands to shoes, and even complicated electronics like cell phones -- right in your home.

Malone runs the Fab@Home project, which seeks to put 3D printers into the hands of hobbyists and influencers.

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The Washington Post reported recently that while AOL allows users to establish 16-character passwords, AOL's system doesn't read past the eighth character.

Security expert Bruce Schneier told the Post that AOL's password system is "sloppy and stupid."

CNET senior editor Rich DeMuro says the incident should get people thinking about their passwords. And he says most sites don't do enough to encourage strong passwords.

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In a move at least partially targeted at advertisers, the Newspaper Association of America released data from Nilesen/NetRatings this week showing the audience for newspaper web sites is growing almost twice as fast as the rate of the overall Internet audience.

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Harvard public policy professor Viktor Mayer-Shoenberger believes our digitally-fueled culture remembers too much for too long. He's suggesting that we learn how to forget again.

Schonberger has just published a paper called "Useful Void: The Art of Forgetting in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing."

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In a new survey, the Pew Internet and American Life Project finds that adult Americans are broadly divided into three groups: 31 percent are elite technology users, 20 percent are moderate users and the remainder have little or no usage of the Internet or cell phones.

Where do you fit in? Take the Pew quiz.

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Travel site HotelChatter.com has just released its annual survey of wireless Internet in the country's hotels.

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Wired News reports that the new U.S. Army regulations forbid soldiers from posting to blogs or other electronic forums unless a superior officer first clears the content. The new rules apparently clamp down on personal email as well. The Army says it's a security measure.

The blogging restriction is a public relations blunder that will make real news from Iraq harder to come by, said Matthew Burden, a retired paratrooper and editor of a soldier blogging anthology,
The Blog of War.

The Army official who wrote the new rule seems to be soft-peddling the story. He told the Associated Press that the Army is not trying to block soldiers blogging or posting comments to blogs.

Wired News reporter Noah Shachtman says the new rule probably won't stand.

Here is a longer version of my interview with Matthew Burden. And a longer version of my interview with Noah Shachtman.

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In a new study, technology research firm Gartner concludes that the information technology industry accounts for about two percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions. The estimate is based on the amount of energy that computers, monitors, printers, and phones use, plus the cooling that's required for buildings full of servers that run the Internet. Gartner researcher Simon Mingay says information technology
puts out about the same amount of CO2 emissions as the global aviation industry.