DuckDuckGo

I'm making more use of DDG. Put it in your Firefox search bar if you use Firefox.
https://duckduckgo.com/

DuckDuckGo is a search engine based in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania that uses information from crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia) with the aim of augmenting traditional results and improving relevance. The search engine philosophy emphasizes privacy and does not record user information.

DDG is coded in Perl and JavaScript with help of YUI, served via nginx, FastCGI and memcached, running on FreeBSD and Ubuntu via daemontools. We both run our own servers and have servers on EC2. We use PostgreSQL+bucardo, CDB, Solr, BerkelyDB, S3 and flat files for data.

Google may be a victim of its own success. Yahoo, Altavista, AskJeeves, Google, and nothing much else has come along to challenge Google other than Wolfram Alpha and Bing.

This explains it textually and graphically with good links as examples.
http://dontbubble.us/

Watch Eli Pariser's TED talk if you haven't already heard his spiel:
http://www.thefilterbubble.com/ted-talk

As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there's a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a "filter bubble" and don't get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser….

This is also worth reading -- altho I'm not sure they can say they've solved this problem, if I understand their explanation correctly.
http://donttrack.us/

The Book of Faces

Profile pics on social media sites pose privacy risk, researcher warns
Imagine walking down a street and having a total stranger being able to instantly pull up your name, date of birth, Social Security number, your last blog item and other data on their smart phone.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9218903/Profile_pics_on_social_media_sites_pose_privacy_risk_researcher_warns
It's getting easier for strangers to identify people and infer detailed information about them from their publicly available pictures on sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, a researcher said at Black Hat.

Feishal rekagnishan (feisbuk)

Facebook rolls out facial recognition for all
http://www.tgdaily.com/security-features/56459-facebook-rolls-out-facial-recognition-for-all
Last year Facebook rolled out its facial recognition feature, which allows users to tag their friends in photos based on facial features. When the feature was first announced, it was limited...

Skynet NEEDS facial recognition in order for its terminators to function correctly. That's why it sent "Mark Zuckerberg" back to create it.

Post-human Cyber-remains

The New York Times has a lengthy and interesting article by Rob Walker discussing digital immortality (or whatever you want to call it). Much of the article revolves around the late Mac Tonnies and his Posthuman Blues blog. Maybe you should download the article to your computer; you never know when The New York Times will suddenly disappear completely. The article include links to tribute sites Mac-Bots and Post-Mac Blues. According to one item in the article, the possibility of a real Mac-Bot is getting closer:

Something called Lifenaut.com has a product called a MindFile, “a database of personal reflections captured in video, image, audio and documents about yourself that can be saved, searched, downloaded and shared with friends.” This information is meant to be filtered through an “interactive avatar,” modeled on you, “that becomes more intelligent as you add more information.” The site welcomes you with a sweeping, ominous tone; the company’s tag line is “Eternalize.” VirtualEternity.com, from a company called Intellitar, also claims to convert the personal data you provide into an avatar — sort of like one of those chatbots that some online companies use for automated but more humanish customer service. “We want to give users the gift of immortality,” an Intellitar founder has said.

Legalize Arizona

A check of the relevant papers has determined that Arizona entered the United States illegally. The state has been returned to Mexico.

¿(¡Viva la immigración!)?

Could wearing a sombrero and bandana (and growing a bushy mustache) be a viable way for Arizonans to protest state law SB1070?

Better Living Through Electronic Monitoring Bracelets

The increased use of electronic monitoring bracelets provides a hi-tech solution for law enforcement personnel who seek alternatives to the traditional American answers of incarceration, taser, and the British third way of continuous CCTV surveillance. Here are three stories involving the use of electronic monitoring bracelets I've read in the last day or so:

1. for illegal immigrant mothers in Mississippi
Catch, tag, and release IS more humane than catch, detain, torture, deport.

2. for sex offenders in Korea
Hey, who's gonna complain!

3. for kids who don't attend school in Texas
As if you couldn't track them by their twitter or cellphone.

Harvest Vehicle

Next time an ambulance drives by or comes to pick you up, it may not be to save your life; it may only be there to harvest your organs. Do you honestly think that if some big shot like Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, or some unknown über-riche were in the local hospital in desperate need of a heart, that your records wouldn't be faked to make it appear that you had died moments before the vehicle arrived and your heart was removed? This isn't too far-fetched (or even fetched) either; how often have you read of people who were believed to be dead being found barely alive and revived at the morgue? Mistakes would be much more likely in the rush to harvest organs. You'd be much less likely to be found with a barely discernible heartbeat if your heart had already been removed and given to someone who was able to afford health care.

My gut feeling is that this idea will never get off the ground due to the creep-out factor registered not just by me but by legions of many other undead.

NY considers creating 'organ-removal' ambulance
By DAVID B. CARUSO, Associated Press Writer
Thu Jun 5, 3:14 PM ET
NEW YORK - Saving the living has always been the No. 1 priority for a New York City ambulance crew. But a select group of paramedics may soon have a different task altogether: saving the dead. The city is considering creating a special ambulance whose crew would rush to collect the newly deceased and preserve the body so that the organs might be taken for transplant.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080605/ap_on_he_me/organ_wagon

Organ-Wagon? OK, who at AP decides the web-page URL?

Mind-reading computer

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,146510-c,artificialintelligence/article.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSN2939892820080529

It was bad enough back in the future "2001" when HAL could read lips. Now he's reading minds. MRI is not a practical input method, however. Retrofitting the acronym : Magnetic Resonance Imaging >> Mind Reading Interface. Remember the good old days of the noughties when computers couldn't read your mind and hackers and spooks couldn't hack into your thoughts and didn't know when you were thinking negative thoughts about the Dear Leader? --or negative thoughts about the computer?

Of course, there is a bright side, it's just that that's all you ever read about. Look on the dark side, and all five sides of the issue. Linguistically and cognitively, it is very interestingThe positive applications for Universal Access are pretty obvious, but beyond that it is easy to imagine an almost complete end to privacy in its last refuge, the mind.