Prof. Farber For IP maybe. Where is George Orwell when we need him? Bob Arizona Republic Britons angry over trash bin tracking http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/ 0225britainBins0225.html# Liz Ruskin McClatchy Newspapers Feb. 25, 2007 12:00 AM LONDON - The British tolerate millions of surveillance cameras watching their every public move. They agreed to let roadside cameras record their vehicular movements and store the information for two years. But when they discovered that their garbage is being bugged, they howled that Big Brother had gone too far. Local governments have attached microchips to some 500,000 "wheelie bins," the trashcans that residents wheel to the curb for collection. The aim, they say, is to help monitor collections and boost the national recycling rate, now among the lowest in Europe. The public has reacted with suspicion and fury. advertisement "Germans Plant Bugs in Our Wheelie Bins," a Daily Mail headline announced in August. Two of the bin manufacturers are German. Newspaper letter writers have taken to calling it "Bin Brother." A member of Parliament from London's Croydon neighborhood denounced the chip as "the spy in your bin." Small-scale revolts have erupted across the United Kingdom for months, as different localities adopt the technology. Some towns failed to mention the new feature, which is concealed under coin- sized plugs under the rims of their garbage cans. In the coastal city of Bournemouth, 72-year-old Cyril Baker ripped the chip off his new bin the day he discovered it, then went on national television to show how he did it. Thousands of his neighbors followed his example. "It was a very emotional issue. The whole town was in an uproar," he said. The microchips - radio frequency identification transmitters known as RFID tags - can't actually spy on the contents of a bin. They're more like tiny digital nametags, but they hold lots of information and can be scanned from yards away. In parts of Germany and Belgium, garbage trucks equipped with scales and scanners lift the tagged bins. The bins are weighed as they're emptied, and residents are charged for each pound they send to the landfill. Bournemouth administrators swear that they intend only to monitor trash trends and return lost bins to their assigned homes. Copyright ) 2007, azcentral.com. All rights reserved. ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/@now Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]