Augmented Reality Playboy

Now if only Playboy hopped on the Augmented Reality bandwagon . . . aahh . . . the possibilities.

The December’s edition of Esquire magazine is a special “Augmented Reality” edition. A colleague bought it only because of the specialty and he wasted no time in getting me to check it out. It allows the reader to use custom-designed software and a webcam to access 3D animated and video content and to interact with the pages being viewed. Of course, my initial response was simply wishing I was holding a Playboy magazine with the augmented reality instead.

The augmented reality features are the 3D cover with Robert Downey Jr presenting weather-changing fashion portfolio, a pretty lady presenting time-sensitive funny jokes, a photo slideshow and a Lexus ad. To experience the augmented reality, you need to download the software for Esquire’s website. When the software is activated, it translates a black and white marker on the printed page into a video sequence enhanced by 3D animation on the PC screen. Tilting and turning the page produces different scenarios on the screen.

My immediate feeling about this is that I felt like a toddler with a new fancy toy. Esquire’s market must be toddlers. No doubt Esquire’s design team did some really great work here, but I don’t think it’s a good representation of a promising technology. Video content such as these can be and are already being delivered without having to download a software and waving a magazine in front of your PC’s webcam.

If you're curious and have RM26.00 to spare for the magazine, check out the video here and download the software here.

Transparency with Maximum Sexual Appeal

Here’s how to maximize the sexual appeal of anything related to the functioning of the government. Do most Malaysians care about functions of the government?

Observing the comments on the Prime Minister’s 1Malaysia blog, there’s a good indication that we care most about those which directly impact us personally. If we go to any magazine stand, there’s almost nothing offered that’s related to the workings of the government. At any display, most of the glossy magazines offer maximum sexual appeal. That’s what people people are attracted to and perhaps care about.

How can maximum sexual appeal be given to MACC’s report that 60% of government allocations for vital infrastructure projects in Sarawak have been misappropriated and diverted elsewhere? The fact that billions of ringgits of taxpayer money have been siphoned off has no appeal, except perhaps to anti-establishment species.

Do we care about why the Minister in-charge, Dr. George Chan, have not owned up and resigned? Do we ask why the minister needs to investigate the MACC report and to find out who is responsible when obviously he is the only one responsible? Many would care if the report was about how many young girls from China the minister is keeping, given that Sarawak is now a haven for China girls.

But it does not have to be sexual to be appealing. The sexual appeal of things related to the functions of the government can be maximized by using augmented reality. A company called Sunlight Labs, has done this by opening up the US government. The US government provides a portal, www.recovery.gov, for anyone to track where government money is being spent, who receives how much. The portal allows for reporting of potential fraud, waste, and abuse.

Sunlight Labs published the marked-up recovery.gov contract data and the results are fascinatingly appealing. You can point your iPhone 3Gs or Android phone in any direction and see the closest recipients to where you are. Some are surprised to see that an auto shop and a Bible college in their neighborhood received a lot more money than the technical college, eco-car company and Native American youth program down the road.

This is a great and sexy example of how government functions can be presented to improve transparency.

The Government’s official data set is published on the Layar Augmented Reality platform. Layar, is an application that overlays your view of the real world with waypoints representing your favorite coffee place, the cinema you're trying to find, or in this case, where some of that $787 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is going.

This is the kind of sexual appeal, similar to recovery.gov, that the new Sarawak state government must adapt. But while the recovery.gov website is beautifully designed, it does not provide raw or bulk data that would allow for open-ended analysis by the community at large. Until a government opens up access to the bulk data for other people to analyze, reporting its own data on its own websites does not equate to transparency.

Source:
Sunlight Labs
The Star

Minister Dr George Chan Must Take Full Responsibility

For the billions of taxpayer money siphoned off, Deputy Chief Minister Tan Sri Dr George Chan can only have himself to blame, take full responsibility and resign immediately. Who else is responsible for the misappropriation of more than 60 percent of Government allocations for vital infrastructure projects between 2002 and 2008? Any person with a gram of intelligence knows that answer.

As reported in The Star, the Deputy Minister now wants to find out who was responsible and take appropriate action against them. Dr Chan, who is also State Industrial Development Minister and State Minister for Agriculture Modernisation must own up instead of ordering another internal investigation into the findings by the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC). An investigation will be another waste of taxpayer money and undermine the work and independence of the MACC.

MACC Deputy Commissioner Datuk Zakaria Jaffar had earlier issued a statement that the MACC had uncovered cases in Sarawak where up to 60 percent of Government allocations had been ''diverted'' away from the projects for which the funds were meant. Zakaria claimed that such misappropriation of funds had happened between 2002 and last year and that MACC investigations had shown that only 40 percent of the money given by the Government for the projects was spent on the projects proper while the other 60 percent were leaked to elsewhere.

No wonder Sarawak’s rural population continue to live below the poverty line.

One question we need to ask now is, why is that MACC have not prosecuted any party?

New Drug Halts Cancer Regrowth

A new class of anti-cancer drugs have been developed, bringing new hope to humanity. More so for those with advanced or spreading lung and pancreatic cancer.

As reported in Science Alert, cancer biologist Dr Adam Patterson said, "Our experiments show that this new prodrug is much more active than the current gold-standard drug treatment for advanced or spreading lung and pancreatic cancer. It’s very common for tumours to start re-growing after you stop administering this type of cancer drug. But after we stopped doses of this prodrug, the tumours still hadn’t re-grown 30 days later. The prodrug appears to act like slow-release chemotherapy.”

Dr Adam Patterson and medicinal chemist Dr Jeffrey Smaill, investigators with the Maurice Wilkins Centre for Molecular Biodiscovery, made the discovery after a decade of work on the prodrug.

Read more here.

Threesome, still no choice in Swingers Club

While many join the swingers club, some stick to one. While some prefer to do it slowly, others tell us to cut the bull and get on with it. Before you make the cut, consider a sexier option, if there is one. Coming ahead of P1’s shout to cut to WiMax will be 4G wireless broadband called LTE.

While many carriers around the world are planning 4G networks, for our only 3 wireless operators, having built their networks using the global standard GSM, the current 3G wireless technology called HSPA still has some legs left. If a lot of Malaysians make the same choice as I do to ignore the shout to cut to WiMax, by end of 2010, WiMax could be dead.

Celcom, Maxis and Digi have not stopped shouting about being the fastest and widest wireless broadband as they all continue to provide mediocre speed and while many of us swing from one to the other. They may likely upgrade existing infrastructure with the latest 3G wireless technology, HSPA Plus, to increase speed. HSPA Plus will match the speeds of current 4G such as WiMax. Current 3G HSPA offers download speeds less than 700 Kbps, but typically I get less than 100 Kbps.

4G WiMax download speed is between 4 Mbps and 6 Mbps, about the same as HSPA Plus’ speed. WiMax’s slow rollout and lack of mobile devices such as WiMax embedded phones will eventually kill it. Nokia, one of the initial backers of WiMax, cancelled its N810 WiMax Edition tablet and no one is likely to develop such devices until WiMax network is more extensive.

Because there is little difference in speed between WiMax and HSPA Plus, many operators worldwide are opting to invest in upgrading to HSPA Plus while planning to eventually migrate to LTE. This means that we’ll be getting a lot of 3G HSPA Plus mobile devices in 2010, but probably not too soon in Malaysia as our operators are typically slow in rolling out advanced technology.

Assessing the 4G landscape, LTE or Long Term Evolution, is likely to dominate over WiMax. Some experts say initial speed will exceed 4 Mbps and expected to be within 15 Mbps to 20 Mbps. Elsewhere, AT & T, Verizon and T-Mobile will be launching their LTE networks in 2010 and 2011. It's OK if you've made the cut. Expect MCMC to put their act together about LTE in a decade from now.

While we Malaysians, will continue to be contented with whatever slow networks the 3 telcos provide us. And we really don't have a choice, even with 3 operators, they're all the same.

Playboy on Sarawak Civil Service Innovation Portal

Innovation Portal!!! My foot!

Chief Minister Tan Sri Abdul Taib Mahmud recently launched the Sarawak Civil Service Innovative Ideas Portal (SCS-ii). The portal hopes to transform the state civil service into a more resourceful, creative and innovative organization. State secretary Datuk Morshidi Abdul Ghani said the SCS-ii aims to encourage officers, teams or agencies to propose new and innovative ideas that could make positiv difference to the civil service.

Here's my smart ass idea that would definitely serve all the above purposes - REMOVE Tan Sri Abdul Taib Mahmud and REPLACE him with Mr. Baru Bian.

After accessing the portal, I have a fair idea of the kind of innovation that Sarawakians will continue to be getting if Taib Mahmud remains as Chief Minister for another month.

The portal takes a while to load. When it has been loaded on your browser, you get a full blank screen. You'll need to scroll down one full page before you get to the content.

Ahhhh . . . so much for innovation.

Who ever designed and developed the website can learn a lot from Playboy. And it's free.

Sexual Correlationship

Is this reality? “Women with bigger breasts found to be smarter.” – this report published by The Star can be found quoted all over the Internet. But it seems that the study that the paper referred to never existed. If the study did exist, it must have been conducted by a woman with big breasts. How is that none of the world’s 50 most influential women in technology today are not busty?

The real reality could be that for a woman to afford RM16,000 to augment her real bust, she could be a smart woman; successful in her business or career. At the recent two-day inaugural Asian Breast Aesthetic Symposium (ABAS), it was noted that smart Malaysians could one day prove that they are one of the most aesthetically blessed people in the world, joining the ranks of their Brazilian and Swedish counterparts, if the number of patients seeking consultation for cosmetic surgery is anything to go by. A consultant plastic, reconstructive and cosmetic surgeon at Penang’s Loh Guan Lye Specialist Centre, Dr Lee Kim Siea, receives up to 20 new appointments for consultation per week.

Augmenting and shaping up the breast may cost between RM10,000 and RM16,000, and most of the patients being Chinese. Dr Charles Randquist, a world-renowned plastic surgeon from Sweden and the man behind ABAS, said that breast augmentation done with implants is a good way in improving the quality of life.

Here’s a correlation to augmented reality – sex life and quality of life. Two out of three Malaysian men and three out of four women are not satisfied with their sex lives. This was found by the Asia-Pacific Sexual Health and Overall Wellness survey conducted by Pfizer. Malaysians are ranked sixth among 13 countries but, if it’s any consolation, Singaporeans fared worse. They are in eighth spot.

According to Dr Rosie King, who led the Pfizer study in the Asia Pacific region, greater sexual satisfaction is strongly associated with greater satisfaction with life overall. Generally, men and women who are highly satisfied with their sex life have a more positive outlook on their relationships and life.

Breast augmentation and sexual satisfaction, seemingly disparate elements, apparently both improves quality of life.

Here’s an alternative method of augmenting reality: Leading lingerie firm Ultimo has unveiled the Mega Boost ‘Day to Night Bra’ that promises women a double lift to their cleavage in seconds. Office workers preparing for a night on the town can boost their bra size two cup sizes - from a 34B to a 34D - in an instant with the removable silicon pouches. The UK lingerie giant made its mark 10 years ago with the patented silicon technology behind the Ultimo Fixed Gel Bra.

Watch the reality here:

How Journalists In Sarawak Have Better Sex

As of October 2008, the Christian Science Monitor, http://www.csmonitor.com/, century-old newspaper and winner of 7 Pulitzer Prizes, switched its daily to entirely Web.

Read more here http://www.tinyurl.com/scimonitor. Several other great old newspapers have gone Web-only as well.

We continue to witness the rise and fall of species as evolution presents a different playground for newspapers and journalists. Are we witnessing that soon, there may be no need, not only for newspapers, but also no need for organizations of journalists?

The pressure from the suppressed Malaysians has hastened this process of evolution. Can we have a guided pathway to evolve?

The investigative piece, published by the Los Angeles Times on July 12, highlights a pathway to the evolution of alternative news sources and journalism in Malaysia. The piece is about the failure of a nursing board that oversees 350,000 registered nurses to remove nurses with histories of misconduct, drug abuse, negligence, violence against patients and incompetence. If these nurses were fired from one hospital for such misdeeds, they simply took their licenses down the street to another hospital, often to begin a new cycle of mistreatment and endangerment.

Read more here http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-nurse12 2009jul12,0,2185588.story.

One thing that stands out from the report is that it was written and reported by two reporters, Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber, who do not work for the Los Angeles Times. They work at ProPublica, http://www.propublica.org/ , a New York–based non-profit and nonpartisan team of investigative journalists founded in 2008 and funded by philanthropy.

Certainly no blogger would have the luxury of such time for the many painstaking months to assemble the evidence necessary to demonstrate that it was taking the nursing board unconscionable lengths of time to dig into these cases. Reporters risked being sued for libel or slander if they misidentified any of the miscreant nurses or mischaracterized their behavior. No bloggers can afford to lose - or even to defend - a RM10-million libel case. Databases needed to be built, analyzed, and made Web-friendly. Few bloggers have the quantitative or technical skills to do this.

Perhaps then, that’s the reason Malaysian bloggers prefer to blog about biased opinions, hearsay, rumours, gossips and half-truths.

The LA Times’ piece amply demonstrates the importance of journalism and of journalistic organizations like the LA Times and ProPublica. Without such people and institutions, there is no way such a report would have emerged on the Web.

Malaysians need an institution like ProPublica to extend the practice of investigative or “accountability” journalism. The institution can empower citizens by creating a database enabling anyone to review budget and federal stimulus spending down to the kampong level. Bloggers can dig into the database to produce stories on the impact of the spending in their communities. At least, with that institution, we can minimize the threat to accountability and thus to our democracy.

The process of finding and communicating news may no longer require newspapers. But the process will still require journalism and journalists, to smoke out the most difficult-to-report situations, to test glib assertions against the facts, to probe for the carefully contrived hoax. These are reporting activities that take a great deal of time, money, and skill.

Today, newspapers like The Star, The Borneo Post, The Eastern Times and the New Straits Times publish only crappy work of inexperienced reporters and the usual political spins. Now, these newspapers have become robbers of the important bulwark of our democracy.

We need the kind of journalism that is intended to shine a spotlight on abuse of power and failure to uphold the public interest, and by so doing to give the public the information needed to produce positive change.

Guess how many investigative journalists are on the payroll of Borneo Post, NST and The Star, compared to total staff?

Mainstream media have no reporters digging into possible domains of corruption. This means that not only is there corruption that won’t be reported, but also that politicians, cronies, and others who might have toed the line before will now be tempted to cross it, because nobody will be watching. Who will be watching over to ensure that abuses highlighted in the Auditor General’s report do not get repeated year after year and that the culprits do not continue to stay in their positions?

Institutions like ProPublica can save our democracy and provides the pathway to evolve the Malaysian blog sphere.

Three Out Of Ten Prefer Mobile Phones Over Sex

Since the past several weeks, a few of my office colleagues have been talking ecstatically about getting company-issued smart phones. We have probably come to the time when finally, mobile phones are better than sex or nasi dagang ( a Terengganu staple diet). Just a few months ago I came across a survey conducted amongst 1,000 people in Britain which found that 85 per cent of people would rather give up chocolate, sex or alcohol for a month than their mobile phone handset.

An annual survey commissioned by Samsung Mobile to determine just how much of a priority people give to their cell phones found that three out of ten people said they’d give up sex for a year rather than giving up their mobile phones. Asked which they'd prefer -- sex or keeping their cell phone -- 36 percent of women interviewed and 15 percent of the men selected the phone. (Does this explains why 3 out of every 10 new marriages in Terengganu ends up in divorce in 3 to 5 years?).

OK girls, here’s the mobile phone, now gimme the sex!

You’d have thought that only people having affairs would never let go of their mobile phones (which would always be on vibrate mode). So that seems to unveil a new truth – tantric sex is in the mobile phone. Or have 36% of women arrived at the age of phone sex?

With Gartner’s report that 269.1 million mobile phones were sold worldwide in Q1 2009 ( a 8.5% decrease from Q1 2008), does it look like mobile phones is now replacing sex as a fundamental part of our being? Or is it going to be smartphones?

According to Gartner, worldwide smartphone sales in Q1 2009 surpassed 36.4 million units, a 12.7% increase from Q1 2008. Smartphone sales represented 13.5% of all mobile device sales in Q1 2009, compared with 11% in Q1 2008.


AdMob’s Mobile Metrics Report indicates that mobile web is on for explosive growth. The smartphone, iPhone and its non-smartphone counterpart, the iPod Touch, is powering the growth of mobile web. According to AdMob, these two devices accounts for 43% of all mobile web data traffic worldwide. According to Gartner, the Android smartphones sales will grow dramatically to be the iPhone’s contender and overtaking Symbian, Windows Mobile and Blackberry smartphones.

Could the smartphones be the thing that replace sex as our fundamental being? Or could it be the iPhone?

Trust

Naked on Facebook, Orgy in Pulau Perhentian

News of wild, naked teenage parties on beautiful Pulau Perhentian, Terengganu, brings to mind our narcissistic tendency to enjoy sharing as much as possible.

The fact that the 200 teenagers who attended the sex orgy on the island were invited via Facebook highlights how social networks have gotten us in touch with our inner exhibitionist.

Many of us now get up in the morning and immediately update our Facebook or Twitter account. We have pictures of ourselves tagged by others on Facebook and these are pictures we may actually want to hide.

Some Facebook users talk about their antidepressants or post pictures of themselves violating the law or upload videos of themselves in compromising positions. Two Domino’s employees were fired for such a stunt and another company fired an employee who was actively on Facebook while on medical leave. There are others sending naked or semi-naked pictures of themselves via their cell phones.

There was the “Quiet” project run by Internet entrepreneur Josh Harris. Harris asked 100 people to live under constant surveillance in an underground bunker for 30 days, broadcasting all their actions to everyone else in the space. The project demonstrated that we would sacrifice privacy for public recognition.

As we continue to display our lives to the eyes of the World Wide Web, are we trumping our very notion of and right to privacy? Are we over-sharing personal information on Facebook? Are we inviting voyeurism into our lives as we frantically update our Twitter accounts from our Blackberrys and celebrating when we gain a new follower?

According to a study of Internet users 18 and older, a full 60% don’t worry about the amount of information that is available about them online, and only 38% have taken measures to limit such information.

If you care about privacy, the World Wide Web is a scary place. If you understand the implications of where and how your Facebook postings, Youtube videos or Gmail and Yahoo emails are stored, you might be more careful or not use these everyday tools as often.

Not only could those in employment get fired for those regrettable postings, but those looking for jobs could also find difficulty getting jobs as more employers turn to social networks to screen potential employees. The many Sarawakian teenagers and students who flaunt their pub romps and drinking sprees on Facebook may need to tone down on such postings. If there are pictures of a company manager or CEO at a beer bash 20 years ago, it could change things. JPA may withdraw your scholarship for an anti-establishment comment that your college mate didn’t like.

The uproar over CTOS, the credit tip-off service that banks in Malaysia use, has not generated enough concern for our own privacy, even though CTOS helped make our lives really miserable by aggregating our personal information and providing them to banks without our consent. What would it take for us to be really concerned about our privacy on social networks and other channels? It would need a big enough and a costly enough unfortunate incident. The following incidences give us hindsight and a glimpse of what could be the future.

1. Persistent Cookies Enforcement.

A new precedent may be set soon for governments around the world to follow as the US government is proposing that government agencies use single-session and multi-session cookies, including persistent cookies, to track users – as long as security and privacy standards governing the collection and tracking of information are met. The broad use of Web cookies on government sites could allow the mass collection of personal information. It won’t be long before the Malaysian government follow suit.

2. Deep Packet Inspection.

Webwise, a behavioural advertising technology from Phorm, a London-based startup has created a privacy controversy. Webwise uses “deep packet inspection”, which lets it see the content of Web traffic so that it may better track consumer behaviour and creates profiles that let it serve up more targeted ads. Several British ISPs say they would use Webwise to serve up ads more effectively. The US government has begun deliberations on permitting deep-packet inspection.

Already the Malaysian government has the capability to eavesdrop our cell phone conversations. The government could already have an arsenal of profiling data that could be used to influence voters and the public.

3. IP Address.

The German courts are in the process of considering whether an IP address is personally identifiable information that needs to be protected. No matter what the courts decide, citizens and consumers must regard their IP address as akin to their IC number.

4. Tidbits That Marketers Drool Over.

When Facebook implemented its Beacon application, tens of thousands of users revolted. The application is a targeted advertising tool that broadcast what Facebook users were buying (at Beacon’s partner sites) by posting ”stories” about it on their status feeds. While there are plenty of Facebook users who wanted to know what their friends were buying, there were also those who didn’t want that information public. One guy bought a nice ring as a surprise for his wife, who subsequently saw it on his Facebook page and asked him who it was for.

5. Online Prowlers.

We’ve seen postings of people harassing each other on Facebook. Soon, companies will have to deal with employees harassing each other in public via Facebook. Especially when there is a sense of anonymity for people when they sit in front of a computer. They say things to a computer they wouldn’t to a real person.

6. Location Aware.

You may have used Google Maps and experienced the way Google Maps’ Street View exposes location information. Angry activists have mashed up Google Maps with a public donations database and revealed home addresses of people who contributed money to defeat their cause.

Can the majority remain unconcerned with the repercussions that sharing personal information online might bring?

Watch for status update that says, "On the way to Pulau Perhentian".

The Sexy Spy Is Your Cell Phone

Your cell phone’s battery suddenly runs out faster than usual even when you have not been talking more? Your cell phone is unusually warmer even in between calls? An unusual annoying pulse buzzing while you’re on a call or between calls? You seem to have trouble shutting it off, or it stays lit up after you’ve powered down? The phone sometimes lights up when you aren’t making or receiving a call, or using any other function?

Your cell phone could be transmitting every word you say, every text message you send or receive (even if you’ve deleted them) and your exact location.

Even when your cell phone is turned off, it could still be used to listen to you and what goes on around you.

Most governments get their countries’ telcos to acquire and install systems that allow them to listen to any citizen’s calls or to track their location. It would be naive to think that Malaysian government does not eavesdrop. But I believe the government does not listen to you, unless you’re a gangster boss, or someone considered a threat. Or an opposition politican???

Your cell phone connects you to the world, but it could also be giving anyone from your boss to your wife a window into your every move. The same technology that lets you stay in touch on-the-go can now let others tap into your private world — without you ever even suspecting something is awry.

As an individual you can easily, in about 2 to 10 minutes, bug someone’s cell phone, enabling you to eavesdrop on every conversation, text message, website visit, and track every where the person goes. When the cell phone is turned off, you can turn on its microphone and remotely listen to what the person is doing.

How To Spy Using Cell Phone

Do you want to secretly spy on SMS text messages, calls, GPS locations and other confidential info of your child’s, spouse’s, girlfriend’s, competitor’s, boss’ or staff’s cell phone?

Before you can spy on a cell phone you need to know the following facts.

To spy on a given cell phone you should make sure that the target cell phone is compatible with the cell phone spy software. Cell phone spy softwares are compatible with the following type of phones (operating systems).

1. Symbian OS (Most Nokia Phones)
2. Apple iphone
3. Windows Mobile

Today most of the modern cell phones are loaded with one of the above three operating systems and hence compatibility doesn’t pose a major problem. There exists many cell phone spy softwares on the market to accomplish this job and hence people often get confused about which cell phone spy software to go for. Top rated cell phone spy software include Mobile Spy and FlexiSpy.

These are hybrid spy software/service which allows you to spy on your target cell phone in real time. This unique system records the activities of anyone who uses the cell phone. For this you need to install a small application onto the cell phone. This application starts at every boot of the phone but remains stealth and does not show up in the running process list. It runs in the background and will spy on every activity that takes place on the phone, including logging:

1. Calls Log – Each incoming and outgoing number on the phone is logged along with duration and time stamp.
2. Every text message/MMS is logged even if the phone’s logs are deleted. Includes full text.
3. The phones’s current location is frequently logged using GPS when signal is available.
4. Each address entered into Internet Explorer (or any browser) is logged.

· These cell phone spy software works in total stealth mode. The person using the phone can never come to know about the presence of this software.

Simple surveillance

You don’t have to plant a James Bond-style bug to conduct surveillance any more. A service called World Tracker (available on in UK) lets you use data from cell phone towers and GPS systems to pinpoint anyone’s exact whereabouts, any time — as long as they’ve got their phone on them.

All you have to do is log on to the web site and enter the target phone number. The site sends a single text message to the phone that requires one response for confirmation. Once the response is sent, you are locked in to their location and can track them step-by-step. The response is only required the first time the phone is contacted, so you can imagine how easily it could be handled without the phone’s owner even knowing.

Cell phone apps like Loopt and the new Google Latitude also allow you to track your friends' physical locations, and be tracked in return.

Advanced Eavesdropping

Once connected, the service shows you the exact location of the phone by the minute, conveniently pinpointed on a Google Map. The company has indicated plans to expand its service to other countries soon.

So you’ve figured out where someone is, but now you want to know what they’re actually doing. With software like FlexiSpy and Mobile Spy, you can listen in, even if they aren’t talking on their phone. Dozens of other programs are available that’ll turn any cell phone into a high-tech, long-range listening device. They run virtually undetectable to the average eye.

FlexiSpy, for example, promises to let you “catch cheating wives or cheating husbands” and even “bug meeting rooms.” Its tools use a phone’s microphone to let you hear essentially any conversations within earshot. Once the program is installed, all you have to do is dial a number to tap into the phone’s mic and hear everything going on. The phone won’t even ring, and its owner will have no idea you are virtually there at his side.

It’s Totally Illegal

You might be asking how this could possibly be legal. Turns out, it isn’t – at least, not in the ways I’ve just described. Much like those fancy smoking devices designed “for tobacco use only,” the software itself gets by because of a disclaimer saying it doesn’t endorse any illegal use.

Can the government use your cell phone records to track your physical location without first obtaining a warrant based on probable cause? My opinion on the matter is “no”. Any government applications for cell site location tracking information made without showing sufficient need for this kind of sensitive information should not be granted by authorities or the courts of law.

Even for our government to eavesdrop on you – it’s illegal.

Surveillance intensive future is inevitable.

A surveillance intensive future is inevitable. And cell phone tracking will be a common law enforcement investigative technique.

On the commercial side, the uses of location tracking are endless. And many of them may well turn out to be things people like. But a key principle of privacy, accepted around the world as part of the core fair information principles, is that information collected for one purpose shouldn’t be used for other purposes without people’s affirmative permission. If someone wants to sign up for a friend-finding service and understands fully what this means for their privacy (and hopefully has the ability to turn it on and off), that’s one thing. But people who are just using their mobile phones for texting and calling friends and family do not expect that companies will exploit the side effects of how cell phones work for other, unrelated purposes that invade their privacy.

Protecting Your Cell Phone

Unfortunately, there isn’t much you can do to safeguard your cell phone just yet. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time until we see Kaspersky or McAfee-style programs to firewall your phone and keep intruders out. For now, though, the only sure-fire form of protection is to keep a close guard on your phone. Don’t accept Bluetooth connections unless you know what they are. Most important, make sure no one has access to install something when you aren’t watching. Otherwise, they may soon be watching you when you least expect it.

Watch a video here