I'm sure you've all heard of the CIA entering the Venture Capital arena, forming the VC company In-Q-It.
I did read somewhere, that part of this was due to the CIA realizing that corporations had done a better job of collecting user information much easier than any of intelligence agency could, and therefore it would need to cooperate to extract information from these companies, and/or come up with software to process the millions of pieces of information and tie them together.
Quake3's breach of privacy was bad enough!
It's sometimes so frustrating to think there's a freakin' large percentage of people who don't know and don't care! Worse is that a lot of these people occupy government offices, and our the policy makers of this country. So come next election, and Microsoft+others+CIA/NSA, might just get a bozo up for president, and before you know it, customer data acquisition via embedded client-side code will be granted.
Or, maybe they'll sell this angle: Government cracks down on companies developing "crashable" software, in the name of consumer rights. Software companies insist that they require knowing the configuration of customer's machines. Which of the 90%+ of Internet newbies will not readily agree to give away personal info, just so he/she can run an auto-diagnosing-and-fixing version of Windows 2000!
But on the bright side, I do know for a fact when I have my own multi-billion dollar organization, the CIA will come knocking at my door, to share secrets on beating any international competitor on foreign contracts. Ofcourse, then my whole attitude would change, and kudos to the Echelon system.
Cyrix had a WebPad product ready for some time now, here's the link: http://www.cyrix.com/html/emerg ing/index.htm#webpad Ofcourse, I haven't heard much from it since, but if they could sell-off their WebPad technology to AMD, who in turn would replace the main processor, and form a partnership with major broadband ISPs, all the effort resulting in a low-cost, fast-access internet appliance!
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I did read somewhere, that part of this was due to the CIA realizing that corporations had done a better job of collecting user information much easier than any of intelligence agency could, and therefore it would need to cooperate to extract information from these companies, and/or come up with software to process the millions of pieces of information and tie them together.
Quake3's breach of privacy was bad enough!
It's sometimes so frustrating to think there's a freakin' large percentage of people who don't know and don't care! Worse is that a lot of these people occupy government offices, and our the policy makers of this country. So come next election, and Microsoft+others+CIA/NSA, might just get a bozo up for president, and before you know it, customer data acquisition via embedded client-side code will be granted.
Or, maybe they'll sell this angle: Government cracks down on companies developing "crashable" software, in the name of consumer rights. Software companies insist that they require knowing the configuration of customer's machines. Which of the 90%+ of Internet newbies will not readily agree to give away personal info, just so he/she can run an auto-diagnosing-and-fixing version of Windows 2000!
But on the bright side, I do know for a fact when I have my own multi-billion dollar organization, the CIA will come knocking at my door, to share secrets on beating any international competitor on foreign contracts. Ofcourse, then my whole attitude would change, and kudos to the Echelon system.
Cyrix had a WebPad product ready for some time now, here's the link: http://www.cyrix.com/html/emerg ing/index.htm#webpad Ofcourse, I haven't heard much from it since, but if they could sell-off their WebPad technology to AMD, who in turn would replace the main processor, and form a partnership with major broadband ISPs, all the effort resulting in a low-cost, fast-access internet appliance!