Big Brother Is Driving Your Car
Posted by Big Gav in big brother
The SMH reports the NSW state government is licking its lips over an in-car GPS unit that not only tells you if you are speeding (which can be quite handy) but also slows your car down if you are - Big brother satellites to put brakes on speeders.
The next step is to have it report in on all your traffic violations and automatically issue fines. Which would be one way of solving Sydney's traffic problems...
A NEW speed detection system that acts like a police officer inside your car is being tested in NSW in the hope it will help cut the number of road fatalities.
One hundred cars in the Illawarra have been fitted with global positioning system devices that are programmed with the speed limit of every section of road in the region. By taking bearings from as many as two dozen satellites, the devices are able to determine whether the vehicles are travelling faster than the signposted limit. A warning sound alerts the drivers if they are speeding.
Forty of the trial vehicles have been equipped with a function that gradually slows the car down if it is going too fast. The trial is part of a $1 million Intelligent Speed Adaptation project run by the NSW Centre for Road Safety, which was established last year.
Technology Review has an article on "the future of the web" which includes some good comments from Bjarne Stroustrup and Richard Stallman.
Richard Stallman - Main developer of the GNU/Linux system and founder of the Free Software Movement; Cambridge, MA
"No one can see the future, because it depends on you. But I see a danger in the Web today: doing your computing on servers running software you can't change or study, and entrusting your data to U.S. companies required to give it to Big Brother without even a search warrant. Don't risk this practice!"
Bjarne Stroustrup - Professor at Texas A&M University and designer of the C++ programming language; College Station, TX
"The total end of privacy. Governments, politicians, criminals, and friends will trawl through years of accumulated data (ours and what others collected) with unbelievably sophisticated tools. Obscurity and time passed will no longer be covers."
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