We all have thought, hear or read at length the possible idea that the government or some hidden company would eventually be overlooking everything we do and know more about us than what we would like them to. The protection of law is the illustration that we do not want this to happen and have a firm opinion on what the establishment (private or public) should and shouldn’t know about us. However I have recently discovered that it is very difficult to judge what is and isn’t already publicly available with or without our consent.

I am of course referring to the biggest information network that has, in the recent years, been gathering data in the form of blogs, social networks, messaging systems that have been slowly introduced into our daily life. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for the improvements of communication flow, even if it is not always for the best. But there are some hidden aspects of this electronic distribution that I would like to share with you. I will try to split them is sections that I thought were appropriate.

For those of you who have no clue about torrents and all the piracy issues that has been the subject of some reports in the media lately, you should read the next paragraphs; for those of us already in the knowing, just skip them.

Since the very beginning of the internet, people have been using it to distribute illegal material. It was much handier and cheaper than copying and distributing disks with application, pictures or any documents. But unless you were a tech savvy geeky student, you wouldn’t even know that this was happening right under your nose.

Google has installed and managed to make a great service available for free on the net. Google apps as they call it, is a set of the usual collection of applications that they already provided (calendar, mail, contact, docs) and adding a new one called “site” which I haven’t used yet.

I am not a big fan of Microsoft for various reasons and even more since Bill stepped down and was replace by the biggest corporate dinosaur this company had in its board of directors.

But has I expected, the little time that Mr Gates spend in the R&D department has spilled some nice inventions. Among those is this technology that I would love to see in action very soon :-)

Xbox.com | Project Natal

I can inmagine it beeing used in so many places for so many reason. The introduction of this facial and movement recognition system will of course be in direct competition with the previous big hit in the gaming world made by Nintendo with the wii. But this could also bring something new to normal everyday computer. As you may have noticed, nearly all new laptops are equipped with a web-cam nowadays and they could be used for facial recognition or movement detection. Replacing complex mouse movements, or simply to put it in sleep mode when there is no one in front of the screen.