The Times: Tech column - Tagging kids/Console price wars/Spam filters
By David Rowan
HAVE you tagged your children today? With parental anxiety at an understandable high over child abduction, it was inevitable that a high-tech solution would sooner or later be offered. Sure enough, this week a Berkshire couple, Wendy and Paul Duval, announced that their 11-year-old daughter Danielle is to have an operation to implant a microchip in her arm so that she can be tracked by satellite wherever she goes. It used to be just criminals and pet dogs that were tagged electronically, but today children are the latest target for location-tracking technology.
This summer a Florida company, Applied Digital Solutions, began selling a chip that is worn under the skin and uses Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) technology to locate its wearer. Another US firm is marketing a wristwatch-sized device, called the Wherify Personal Locator for Children, that lets parents track their child's movements via a website for £300, plus a monthly subscription. When the parents are otherwise engaged, the wristwatch-linked satellites will continue to "watch" the child.
The Duvals insist that it is "only sensible for any parent to use technology when it is available", and they plan to fit their youngest child, aged seven, with the chip as well. But even after a month of saturation coverage from Soham, their concern to protect their children represents a vast exaggeration of the actual risks, and merely adds to the hysteria that is causing parental anxiety. The Duvals are being helped in their mission by Professor Kevin Warwick, the Reading University academic, who claims to be "the world's first cyborg" - part man, part machine - and who has gained the nickname "Captain Cyborg" in the technical press for his headline-provoking experiments involving a microchip implanted into his own arm. Because of this work, he says that "several families" have contacted him to develop a tag that can be implanted in children, and he hopes that the first operation will take place within three months.
The publicity may help to generate further funds for Warwick's department. But to use "recent tragic events", as he does, to promote this still-unproven technology is dubious. By all means let us track hunting dogs using chip implants, but do we really want to extend this to children?
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What can explain the sudden cut in the price of games consoles? Last week Sony and Microsoft slashed a further 17 per cent from their retail prices, bringing PlayStation 2 down to £170 and the XBox to £160 - not quite as low as the GameCube at £129, but attractive enough to make them huge sellers this Christmas. The XBox cost £299 when launched here barely six months ago. But even before the latest cut, analysts estimated that Microsoft was losing almost £70 on each console sold - so has Bill Gates finally had an attack of generosity? Not quite. It is the business model first perfected by King Gillette, founder of the shaving firm, who realised that if the razors were loss leaders, the customer would come back for the blades. In this market, online gaming is what the box-makers hope will drive profits, and if only a fraction of their owners sign up, their monthly subscriptions will continue to bring in vast sums. Game over.
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Our thoughts go out to the Lutheran Council of Great Britain, the latest victim of the "spam" e-mail culture. Last week the council's website was suddenly taken offline (it has now been reinstated) after its internet service provider, Netcetera, decided that it had sent an e-mail too far. In fact, the offending e-mail was an innocent reply to somebody who wished to stay in the charity's hostel - yet the reply was deemed suspicious by SpamCop, a popular piece of filtering software. The software automatically alerted Netcetera, and it banned the "offending" website without any human intervention. "Any reasonable person would have concluded from the content of the message that this was not spam," the council's general secretary, the Rev Tom Bruch, said. Further proof, if it were needed, that humans have their uses.
(The Times, September 4 2002)
HAVE you tagged your children today? With parental anxiety at an understandable high over child abduction, it was inevitable that a high-tech solution would sooner or later be offered. Sure enough, this week a Berkshire couple, Wendy and Paul Duval, announced that their 11-year-old daughter Danielle is to have an operation to implant a microchip in her arm so that she can be tracked by satellite wherever she goes. It used to be just criminals and pet dogs that were tagged electronically, but today children are the latest target for location-tracking technology.
This summer a Florida company, Applied Digital Solutions, began selling a chip that is worn under the skin and uses Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) technology to locate its wearer. Another US firm is marketing a wristwatch-sized device, called the Wherify Personal Locator for Children, that lets parents track their child's movements via a website for £300, plus a monthly subscription. When the parents are otherwise engaged, the wristwatch-linked satellites will continue to "watch" the child.
The Duvals insist that it is "only sensible for any parent to use technology when it is available", and they plan to fit their youngest child, aged seven, with the chip as well. But even after a month of saturation coverage from Soham, their concern to protect their children represents a vast exaggeration of the actual risks, and merely adds to the hysteria that is causing parental anxiety. The Duvals are being helped in their mission by Professor Kevin Warwick, the Reading University academic, who claims to be "the world's first cyborg" - part man, part machine - and who has gained the nickname "Captain Cyborg" in the technical press for his headline-provoking experiments involving a microchip implanted into his own arm. Because of this work, he says that "several families" have contacted him to develop a tag that can be implanted in children, and he hopes that the first operation will take place within three months.
The publicity may help to generate further funds for Warwick's department. But to use "recent tragic events", as he does, to promote this still-unproven technology is dubious. By all means let us track hunting dogs using chip implants, but do we really want to extend this to children?
++++
What can explain the sudden cut in the price of games consoles? Last week Sony and Microsoft slashed a further 17 per cent from their retail prices, bringing PlayStation 2 down to £170 and the XBox to £160 - not quite as low as the GameCube at £129, but attractive enough to make them huge sellers this Christmas. The XBox cost £299 when launched here barely six months ago. But even before the latest cut, analysts estimated that Microsoft was losing almost £70 on each console sold - so has Bill Gates finally had an attack of generosity? Not quite. It is the business model first perfected by King Gillette, founder of the shaving firm, who realised that if the razors were loss leaders, the customer would come back for the blades. In this market, online gaming is what the box-makers hope will drive profits, and if only a fraction of their owners sign up, their monthly subscriptions will continue to bring in vast sums. Game over.
++++
Our thoughts go out to the Lutheran Council of Great Britain, the latest victim of the "spam" e-mail culture. Last week the council's website was suddenly taken offline (it has now been reinstated) after its internet service provider, Netcetera, decided that it had sent an e-mail too far. In fact, the offending e-mail was an innocent reply to somebody who wished to stay in the charity's hostel - yet the reply was deemed suspicious by SpamCop, a popular piece of filtering software. The software automatically alerted Netcetera, and it banned the "offending" website without any human intervention. "Any reasonable person would have concluded from the content of the message that this was not spam," the council's general secretary, the Rev Tom Bruch, said. Further proof, if it were needed, that humans have their uses.
(The Times, September 4 2002)
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