Tuesday October 21

Our discussion last Tuesday lead by Mack Talcott and Blake Thomson revolved around the topics of the Mozilla Geode to Join Google and the Yahoo for Geolocation Web Services. As an add on for Firefox, Geode takes advantage of the Skyhook Wireless' Loki technology that map the Wi-Fi signals in your area to your location. During our discussion of Geode we marked the positives of being able to find local locations fast, easy and automatic. Which lead to the negatives of privacy and security. We also learned about the Yahoo's FireEagle services which lead to a surprise presentation of Whirl.

Geode and FireEagle were interesting products which brought up much debate between the class. Exact locations being sent back to Mozilla or Yahoo to be stored in databases with confident levels made some question the integrity of the companies and the implied trust we have for big companies. Right now there are security checks where we are prompted by the products for how much personal information, like exact location, we would like to give up. What if it comes to the point where products like Geode can get your information without that notification? Questions like those came up often in our discussion. However there were also arguments supporting these technologies. Ideas such as personal banking and select locations just to name one was brought up only to be challenged by the idea of a stranger with a laptop coming to the front of your house and hack into your bank account.

Like the previous week we as a class discussed the legal ramifications of these technologies. How would it be regulated and how can we keep it secure? At one point it was brought up that the law makers who make these laws sometimes don't even know the technology itself. How can a product that is legalized by someone who is not familiar with it be possibly fool proof?

As we moved on we were given a surprise presentation of a start up companies called Whirl. It was a very interesting online social environment that was similar to Geode and FireEagle in that it logs your location and gives notifications of friends who are near. Again the familiar question of security came up, how does the program share its information? Also who is going to see it? We ended our day's discussion to with facebook and myspace. We came to the conclusion that people should generally be more careful when using such social online services. Somethings like pictures that other people post of you can later come back and hurt you.