Google recently filed a patent for a system that identifies when and where a “mob” event takes place and sends multimedia alerts to relevant parties. The patents are actually titled “Mob Source Phone Video Collaboration” and “Inferring Events Based On Mob Sourced Video“.

iDair's primary customer is the military, but it's pushing into the commercial space. The device is about the size of a small flashlight, so now your employer can set one up at the front door of the office and within a few days have the prints of the entire company.

Legal spyware for government workers

The software is called Spector360, and its manufacturer says it's about stopping intellectual property theft and data breaches. But it caught the FDA scientists sending emails to lawmakers and others about medical devices they thought were dangerous, and the scientists are now suing.

Molecular scanners that can secretly scan you from 164 feet away

But as always, it's not so much the technology itself as how it can be used or misused. With Genia's tech, the Department of Homeland Security will be able to scan from up to 164 feet away for traces of drugs or explosives on your clothes,

'Pre-Crime' cameras are watching you

— BART is planning to use these

Software that will analyze and store millions of voices

These secret conversations and agreements between some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley were first exposed in a Department of Justice antitrust investigation launched by the Obama Administration in 2010. That DOJ suit became the basis of a class action lawsuit filed on behalf of over 100,000 tech employees whose wages were artificially lowered — an estimated $9 billion effectively stolen by the high-flying companies from their workers to pad company earnings — in the second half of the 2000s. Last week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals denied attempts by Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe to have the lawsuit tossed, and gave final approval for the class action suit to go forward. A jury trial date has been set for May 27 in San Jose, before US District Court judge Lucy Koh, who presided over the Samsung-Apple patent suit.

The W3C has been at the forefront of open standards and an open internet for many years, obviously. So it's somewhat distressing to see it announced this morning that .

There is a movement afoot in New York (and other places) to allow private companies to house and mine tons of information about children and how they learn. It’s being touted as a great way to tailor online learning tools to kids, but it also raises all sorts of potential creepy modeling problems, and one very bad sign is how secretive everything is in terms of privacy issues. Specifically, it’s all being done through school systems and without consulting parents. ...

...Who’s behind this? InBloom is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation and the operating system for inBloom is being developed by the Amplify division (formerly Wireless Generation) of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. More about the Murdoch connection here.