kc123 writes "David Davis MP, a former shadow home secretary, has told the Guardian that police would be able to access the new central NHS database without a warrant as critics warn of catastrophic breach of trust. The database that will store all of England's health records has a series of 'backdoors' that will allow police and government bodies to access people's medical data. In the past police would need to track down the GP who held a suspect's records and go to court for a disclosure order. Now, they would be able to simply approach the new arms-length NHS information centre, which will hold the records. The idea that police will be able to request information from a central database without a warrant totally undermines a long-held belief in the confidentiality of the doctor-patient relationship."

compumike writes "What geek among us has never thought about how cool it would be if you could call your computer and have it do stuff? Josh Davis put together a quick video demo and source code of his Voice Controlled LED Marquee, powered by Google Voice speech recognition and a DIY LED Array Kit. Imagine using the same display for monitoring server uptime, or RSS feeds!"

lcreech writes with an excerpt from the Daily Mail's description of a new Segway-style one-person vehicle being shown off by Honda: "The vehicle looks like a very modern unicycle and to ride it you simply lean your weight in the direction you want to go, whether that's forward, backwards or even sideways. It maintains its own balance travelling up to 3.7MPH. Not very fast."

griffjon writes "The new hardware release (you can read about the upgrade here) also comes with a dual-boot option. Start rejoicing now; it's not XP or Sugar (the native, education-centric OS) — it's Sugar or Gnome. And of course there are other homebrew distributions like Xtra Ordinary, built off of Debian."

James-NSC writes "My employer is changing its policy towards employee use of social networks. I've been asked to give a 40-minute presentation to the entire company, with attendance mandatory, on the security and privacy concerns relating to social networking. While I was putting it together, I ended up with some miscellaneous information that pertains to security/privacy in general, for example: the emerging ATM skimming (mainly for our European employees), a reminder that email is not private, malware/drive-by in popular search results, etc. Since these topics don't directly relate to the subject I've been asked to address, I've ended up with a section titled 'While I have you...' I'm going to have the mandatory attention of every employee and I thought it would be a great opportunity to give advice on security/privacy issues across the board. As it's an opportunity that one seldom gets, I certainly want to utilize it fullly. If you had the attention of an entire company with employees in the US, UK, Asia, and Australia, what security / privacy advice would you give?"