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Interesting Article.

"WE LIVE IN AN AGE of increasingly smart machines. In recent years, engineers have pushed into areas, from voice recognition to robotics to search engines, that once seemed to be the preserve of humans. But I.B.M. has a particular knack for pitting man against machine. In 1997, the company's supercomputer Deep Blue famously beat the grandmaster Garry Kasparov at chess, a feat that generated enormous publicity for I.B.M. It did not, however, produce a marketable product; the technical accomplishment - playing chess really well - didn't translate to real-world business problems and so produced little direct profit for I.B.M. In the mid '00s, the company's top executives were looking for another high-profile project that would provide a similar flood of global publicity. But this time, they wanted a "grand challenge" (as they call it internally), that would meet a real-world need. "

Senior Chinese figures were behind the hacking of Google earlier this year which forced the search engine to quit the country, leaked US cables suggest.

New York Times article about the infamous AOL search data release. From the "anonymized" numbered search results of AOL users, NYTimes journalists were able to piece together enough about Thelma Arnold to track her down and knock on her front door. A frightening example of how lots of small pieces of data can build up a clear picture about you.

"BEHIND Google's dramatic decision to close its China-based search engine this week was co-founder Sergey Brin's change of heart about the compromises required to do business in a land that was increasingly reminding him of his native Soviet Union. "

"A survey of Chinese scientists who use Google much more than local search engines. China's roughly 380 million internet users. 78% of the scientists who responded to Nature's survey say that international collaborations would be affected to the same degree. Scientists in the 25-34 year age range were most likely to say that losing Google would significantly hamper their research."

"Browse by subject or dateFor a text-only version of the browse by subject or date feature, please follow this link. News search Web feature Share and bookmark Researchers enable a robot to fold towels More than just a household convenience, the project is a step forward in the robotic manipulation of non-rigid objects"

World drowning in data Issues link to Semantic web, search engine efficiency etc, new web Science for Comp Sci

"Google Earth, the Chrome browser and photo service Picasa will be available for download in Iran for the first time, the search giant has announced."

concerns have developed about invasions of privacy, for the most complete records on the travelers may be the ones they are carrying: their laptop computers full of professional and personal e-mail messages, photographs, diaries, legal documents, tax returns, browsing histories and other windows into their lives far beyond anything that could be, or would be, stuffed into a suitcase for a trip abroad. Those revealing digital portraits can be immensely useful to inspectors, who now hunt for criminal activity and security threats by searching and copying people's hard drives, cellphones and other electronic devices, which are sometimes held for weeks of analysis

"Stanford Hospital discovered last month that a contractor had posted a private database containing medical records of 20,000 patients to a public homework assistance Website in search of help on how to create bar graphs."

A number of issues are raised here: lack of policies, privacy, security. Also combines technologies: use of databases to create examples of charts in spreadsheets; medical records. It's a great article to build on some terms/technologies and introducing more.

"A key feature of several of the intrusions was the use of wardriving, a technique in which hackers mount a high-strength Wi-Fi receiver inside a vehicle and search for networks that can be penetrated. Once a Wi-Fi network is located through wardriving, hackers can remotely watch for information that may reveal the network's security setup and vulnerabilities."

Interesting term 'wardriving'