Network-Enabled Snooping In The Physical World

We’ve got OCR. We’ve got cameraphones. We’ve got web-based license plate lookup services. Amazon Japan has a fancy cameraphone-based product search feature. What’s more naive, imagining that somewhere somebody has a SMS/MMS-based license plate snooping and facial recognition services and fingerprint scanners, or imagining that they don’t?
cameraphone, civil liberties, facial recognition, license plate recognition, mms, [...]

Treo 650 For Me

I’ve been talking up the Pepper Pad and Nokia 770 a lot, and I’ve mentioned a moment of lust for the LifeDrive (despite my complaints against PDAs), but today I bought a Treo 650 (even though I had doubts).
My decision surprised me, but the following factors all weighed in its favor:

My cell phone contract expired. [...]

Slot Car Camera

I got a slot car set for Christmas when I was about eight years old. I ran the cars until the contact pads wore out, then I pretty much gave up on them.
But Simon Jansen is just getting into the action, and he’s doing it at a time when compact and cheap electronics afford (potentially) [...]