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The Register has been following the story of a massive archive of "dirty tricks" that Microsoft performed during a lawsuit. Recently, the archive disappeared from the Internet, but now it's back in the form of torrents.

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So now they're using smart cameras to analyze you based on your not just appearance, but the way you walk, and your actions.

A student walked into the middle of the room, dropped a laptop case, then walked away. On the laptop screen, a green box popped up around him as he moved into view, then a second focused on the case when it was dropped. After a few seconds, the box around the case went red, signaling an alert.

In another video, a car pulled into a parking lot and the driver got out, a box springing up around him. It moved with the driver as he went from car to car, looking in the windows instead of heading into the building.

In both cases, the camera knew what was normal – the layout of the room with the suspicious bag and the location of the office door and parking spots in the parking lot. Alerts were triggered when the unknown bag was added and when the driver didn't go directly into the building after parking his car.

Yes technology has a lot of potentially legitimate uses, but total surveillance has far more potential for abuse.

And the cameras can only see so much - they can't stop some threats, like a bomber with explosives in a backpack. They can't see what you are wearing under your jacket - yet.

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In an independent study, Ponemon (not to be confused with Pokemon) conducted a survey of over 7000 people accross the nation as to what their trust level was for various government agencies. Specifically, do we trust the government to safeguard our personal information?

Not surprisingly, once you're out of the top 5, the trust level is in the 60% range or lower. Considering that there are a lot more than 5 government agencies, it seems there's not a lot of trust in government. Anyway, the report is very short so give it a quick read.

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Ars Technica has an article about the IRS wanting eBay to turn over information on its users' earnings. This pretty much sums up the issue:

With so many people making part or all of their living through eBay, the government wants its cut. This isn't an issue of any new taxes, but an attempt to collect the income tax that is already required. Because eBay does not report information about its sellers to the government, income reporting is left up to individuals, and the temptation not to list eBay revenue as income can be a strong one—and in some cases, it's not always clear when one has to do so.

eBay isn't the only Internet business that has been feeling the heat in recent months. The government is also considering how to apply tax laws to virtual worlds and goods, and it faces some of the same problems that it does with eBay. While some sellers can make a good living out of hawking such items, few report the profits as taxable income, and Uncle Sam wants its cut.

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Schneier writes about a recent attack against home routers that takes advantage of the fact that most people never change the default passwords on their equipment.

One of his commenters said it best:

It has long been standard security practice that when logging in to a new system with a default password, the first required step is to have the user create a new password. If routers did this and refused to function until a customized password was set, none of these problems would occur.

Or more simply put, it's a problem that would never exist and would disappear tomorrow if router manufacturers would bother to make a simple and practically free programming change before shipping them out.

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In an analysis of studies done showing violent video games leading to real world violence, Dr. Christopher Ferguson explains that current work doesn't take into account real-world situations and other violence factors such as family life.

The overall conclusion is that there does appear to be a connection between violent games and violent thoughts in a laboratory setting. But the connections between such thoughts and violent behavior in the lab or elsewhere are tenuous at best. The studies that try to address those questions currently suffer from a lack of a standardized measure of violent behavior and a lack of sufficient background on other potential influences on the test subjects' tendencies towards violence, such as family environment.

So… what if people who are violent already are drawn to violent video games?

Privacy.org points to an article explaining that the backscatter x-ray will be fielded in Phoenix. This X-ray device can penetrate clothes, but not skin making a pornographic video of them. Yes this allows the TSA to see if you're carrying bombs or guns, but it also removes your clothing.

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When XP came out, I noticed that the cheapies (the really skanky brands) had 256MB of RAM while all the others came with 512. This is because 256 was the minimum recommended RAM size from Microsoft so it was technically "acceptable". The fact is, just because it runs doesn't mean it runs well. Well Vista is the same, only worse. The minimum recommended RAM size is a laughable 512 MB. I just recently upgraded to 1GB in my home XP machine and have been very seriously considering at least another 1GB for performance.

This Computerworld article recommends 4GB for Vista and explains why. From the article:

For instance, Dell offers a Windows Vista Capable configuration that isn't capable of much, according to what Dell says about it on its Web site: "Great for ... Booting the Operating System, without running applications or games."

To coin a phrase: lol.

Goofy software error drops in-flight entertainment system

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Here's another case of fielding a new product without fully evaluating it first. A computer programmer played with a "in-flight game system" finding out that due to common programming mistakes, he was able to crash the system. Every seat has a small screen that can be used to play games or watch movies and every screen went blank when he did this.

Most interestingly, he says that he's glad the crash didn't affect the flight system to which a commentor posted:

as an airplane avionics technician, i can tell you that any and all navigation and control electronics are totally isolated into themselves. anything that can work on it's own, does, and anything that needs to share info does it through solid hard-wiring. There are common data busses to reduce weight from too much wiring, but again, totally isolated. Airlines know better than to link everything together in a network.

Companies just can't seem to mind their own business

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This is a damn funny article explaining who is the worst of the worst and why:

America Online

America Online's privacy intrusion efforts are so aggressive and offensive, that the only explanation seems to be that AOL thought its clientele was so naïve they would never catch on to the company's privacy invasions.

Amazon.com

Amazon.com is currently among the world leaders in distributing information about its users to advertisers, and if they continue this practice the recent advancements in data mining by Amazon threaten to make shopping online with any form of anonymity a thing of the past.

Microsoft

Perhaps the most insidious method of privacy invasion Microsoft employs is the “Windows Live ID ? (formerly Microsoft .NET Passport). The Windows Live ID collects data from the majority of Microsoft networks including MSN, Hotmail, and Xbox Live, and stores them in a central database.

Most of the others were data-brokering companies like ChoicePoint and Acxiom which have already been in the news for the way they treat consumer information. Some that I didn't expect, but am not surprised about are Yahoo and Google.