The photographs of celebrities and models in fashion advertisements and magazines are routinely buffed with a helping of digital polish. The retouching can be slight - colors brightened, a stray hair put in place, a pimple healed.

By John P. Mello Jr., PCWorld Nov 25, 2011 9:06 AM For some mall shoppers, Black Friday has become Track Friday. Thanks to a snoopy piece of tech from a U.K. company called Path Intelligence, some malls in Europe, Australia, and the United States will be tracking shoppers' movements today through their cell phones.

Adding a new chapter to the research that cemented the phrase "six degrees of separation" into the language, scientists at and the University of Milan reported on Monday that the average number of acquaintances separating any two people in the world was not six but 4.74.

An editorial arguing that government should *not* have the authority to surveil private citizens via GPS. Also that it's important to draw a sharp line now, before gov't goes farther into facial-recognition and internet-based surveillance.

From informit, a slightly more technical source. Worth looking at in combination with the NBC piece.

From NBC, not a very technical source, but this article introduces some of the key terms and concepts.

Did the encrypted (and difficult to surveil) BB Messenger service allow recent riots in England to grow out of control? What role should government play in tracking communications technology, during normal or extraordinary times? To what extent should private companies assist in government investigations, and is it justifiable under the laws of one country, but not in another?

For later, when we do robotics: an opinion article connecting US President Obama to Masahiro Mori's idea of the "uncanny valley" dividing the real from the almost-real.

Players of The Sims on Facebook will now be able to buy, and give as gifts, coffee and donuts online.

Kind of a TOK topic: how do we know what we know? Wikipedia usually requires third-party citation in support of claims. But for traditional cultures, or for topics where no citation is available, Wikipedia is now considering allowing other kinds of support: audio, video, personal testimony.