Threat to privacy worse, group says
LONDON -- Individual privacy is under threat around the world as governments continue introducing surveillance and information-gathering measures, according to an international rights group.
"The general trend is that privacy is being extinguished in country after country," said Simon Davies, director of London-based Privacy International, which was expected to release a study on the issue yesterday. "Even those countries where we expected ongoing strong privacy protection, like Germany and Canada, are sinking into the mire."
Although privacy was improving in the former communist states of eastern Europe, it is worsening across Western Europe, the report says. Concerns about terrorism, immigration and border security were driving the spread of identity and fingerprinting systems, according to the report.
Greece, Romania and Canada had the best records of 47 countries Privacy International surveyed.
Malaysia, Russia and China ranked worst, but Great Britain and the U.S. also fell into the lowest-performing group of "endemic surveillance societies."
The survey considered such factors as legal protections, enforcement, data sharing, the use of biometrics and prevalence of closed-circuit cameras.
Hitachi to debut 500GB laptop drive
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Notebook computers can be as powerful as desktops these days, especially as hard-disk makers like Hitachi Ltd. grab industry bragging rights by unveiling a 500-gigabyte drive for laptops.
The 500 GB drive is the beefiest one yet for laptops: enough to hold up to 500 hours of digital video; 178 standard-definition, feature-length movies; 250 games; or 125,000 four-minute songs, Hitachi said. Currently, the largest laptop drive on the market is a 320 GB model by Western Digital Corp.
Hitachi said Thursday its 500 GB drive would be available to computer manufacturers in February. AsusTek Computer, based in Taiwan, said it would use two of the drives to create the world's first laptops with a monster capacity of 1 terabyte.
The Asus M50 and M70 laptops will be available in February and March, respectively. Prices were not immediately available.
Wikipedia search to open next week
NEW YORK -- The founder of Wikipedia says taking the online encyclopedia's collaborative approach into the field of search won't dethrone Google Inc. or another major search engine -- at least not soon.
After months of talk and a few weeks of invitation-only testing, Wikia Search is to open to the general public next week.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says his goal is to let volunteers improve search technology collectively, the way Wikipedia lets anyone add or change entries, regardless of expertise.
"That reduces the sort of bottleneck of two or three firms really controlling the flow of search traffic," said Wales, chairman of Wikia Inc., the for-profit venture behind the search project.
Engineers at Google and other search companies continually tweak their complex software algorithms to improve results and fight spammers -- those who try to artificially boost the rankings of their own sites. Search companies have not disclosed many details to avoid tipping off competitors and spammers.
Wales' approach would open that process. Initially, participants will help make such decisions as whether a site on "Paris Hilton" refers to the celebrity or a French hotel.
Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of the industry Web site Search Engine Land, has his doubts. Finding all the Web sites to index and staying ahead of spammers are huge undertakings, Sullivan said.
"I think he doesn't really understand the scale of what Google has to handle in terms of the queries from around the world, and the amount of traffic that flows to it, and the attempts that are made to try to manipulate it," Sullivan said.
Wales said the project would launch with about 50 million to 100 million Web pages indexed -- a fraction of the billions available with major search engines.