The ACM Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy

What's on the minds of privacy experts?

I'm in Montreal attending the annual Association Computer Machinery (ACM) conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy (CFP). Now in its 17th year, this conference was once the only venue where topics like cyber-rights, wiretaps, and cryptography policy were actually discussed. That's before Wired magazine and the birth of the commercial Internet as we know it, of course. But CFP is still one of the few places where technologists, policy wonks, government officials, and the cyber-libertarian fringe can get together and have open and honest, if not entirely friendly, conversations.

I gave a tutorial about computer forensics, then sat in on a talk about U.S. wiretap regulation. In the evening there was a 90-minute session called "Postings from the Edge," at which some of the wise old heads of the Internet gave their opinions about the leading technology and policy problems of our day.

Peter Neumann, from SRI International, opened the discussion. Neumann, for those who don't know, is the person who named Unix. He has also been following computer security and computer-related risks for years. After years of trying to build secure systems, he now spends most of his public life documenting how systems fail.

The conference opened on May 1--May Day. Neumann, who loves puns, pined that "mayday" is also an expression used by pilots who are sinking, and he said that we have a related problem today. We believe that computers can be trustworthy, he said--but they are not trustworthy. We have a belief that we can build simple systems--but secure systems are not simple. So we just can't build systems that are simple and trustworthy. This is a conflict.

What's more, Neumann said, a lot of problems we are trying to solve with computer security--things like privacy--are extrinsic to the computer system. We try to use secure computers to protect privacy, but privacy isn't being violated by the computer systems; it's being violated by the people who have legitimate access to the computer systems that are holding the private data. "Privacy cannot be protected with technology alone, and yet we have enormous belief in our computer systems and all of the people who have access to them," Neumann said.

We need to be aware of the risks that we are dealing with, addressing those that can be addressed with technology and restructuring our society and civilization to address the others.

Anita Allen, from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, stated that it only took 10 years to sequence the human genome, thanks to computers. Allen said that this week the House of Representatives passed the Genetic Nondiscrimination Act, which will help protect Americans from the "mischief that can be done" with our genetic information. "This is good news for American workers. Without this law, there is a lot of vulnerability that American workers face in the U.S."

Allen noted that a few years ago a railroad in the United States was surreptitiously testing its workers for the "carpel-tunnel gene," and that this information was disclosed and the company was sued by the Equal Opportunity Commission under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Allen pointed out that the new law will prohibit discrimination against people based on their DNA.

Bruce Schneier, from Counterpane Systems, spoke about the generation gap. This gap is bigger than rock and roll. He says that privacy is approached differently by the younger, hip generation that's using the social-networking websites. Schneier held up an article about how young employees can't be trusted because they put all the corporate secrets online. Your reputation might be ruined by blogging on the Net. "When you look at what's happening in the younger generation, there is a notion that these sites form communities," Schneier said. "People form friends all over the world. This is going to completely change the way that our society deals with privacy."

Schneier noted that some people have been fired for blogging and that college-admissions and HR people have Googled others to see what they did at last night's party. He mentioned a New York magazine article called "Say Everything." He said that the younger generation now believes that it has an audience and that everybody thinks they are watching and are onstage. They have archived their adolescence; their entire life is online, and they don't care. They are used to being dumped publicly on a social-networking site; they have thicker skin than we do.

If it is about control--building these sites to give people control--one way to do that is by limiting access. But kids just abandon sites when they want a new past; they just move on. Perhaps having data automatically delete itself after a while might be the right thing to do. Schneier pointed out that the older generation in the 1960s said that the social revolution--sex, drugs, and rock and roll--would be the end of marriage. They were right, Schneier said, and it's okay. "Talk to a teenager," he said. "We have a responsibility to build systems so that they can take maximum advantage of what the society has to answer."

Ed Vitz, from the Public Interest Registry, which manages the dot-org top-level domain, is now forming the Internet Consulting Coalition, which will be dedicated to helping organizations maximize their presence at the first and second domain level.

Vitz said that one of his primary concerns is the loss of an organization's domain name when the domain name expires. Many organizations will lose their dot-org and discover that it's been taken over by a porn site. This seems to hit nonprofits especially hard, perhaps because of their internal problems. "Domain-name monetization has interested Wall Street," said Vitz. "There are seminars on secondary domain markets."

The value of a domain name is based on the amount of traffic to the website and what it can command on the secondary market. "The unintended loss is not a new problem, but the situation is exacerbated because of the growing use of computer programs" that find expired domains and determine how valuable they are, according to Vitz. This is called "domain tasting," he said.

The poster-child example came up last year: a rape crisis center in Syracuse, NY, failed to reregister its domain name, Vitz said. It was picked up by an adult website. "You can imagine the results."

Whit Diffie, from Sun Microsystems--yes, that Whit Diffie: the one who invented public key cryptography--spoke about governmental surveillance. Government needs to do surveillance, Diffie said, so that it can know the needs of the citizenry.

This doesn't mean that surveillance is good or that it doesn't need to be regulated. "We find government surveillance threatening the whole structure of a free society," Diffie said.

Diffie stated that he has been fighting this battle for more than 14 years. It started out as a battle regarding the use of cryptography. All of a sudden, in the 1990s cryptography was good enough and computers were good enough to be used by small organizations, and all of a sudden, the government realized this and tried to reestablish control over cryptography. "After three rounds between 1980 and 2000, they lost," said Diffie. "And we now, in the U.S., have government-endorsed, very high-level cryptography."

"But part of the reason that the government retreated on that flank is that it was advancing on a flank that we didn't notice or didn't have time for," Diffie continued. "And we lost that battle in 1994, but we didn't notice. The government had noticed what some of us had also noticed: that all of the fine research in cryptography wasn't protecting traffic, and the cryptographic market wasn't succeeding hand over fist. Yes, SSL is one of the most widely used cryptographic markets in the world. But the penetration of secure phones is practically nil."

But while people in the cyber-rights movement were focusing on encryption, the government was focusing on having communications systems designed to be wiretap-friendly. The result was the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). "And now," said Diffie, "all telephone switches have to have wiretapping built into them, and they have to guarantee that very rapidly they can adjust the system to deliver all the communications of the subscriber to the government. And if they don't, they get fined $10,000 per day and per violation."

Originally, CALEA had a carve-out so that it didn't cover the Internet. But the law had a provision that if the Internet substantially replaced the conventional telephone system, it would be covered. "Beginning two to three years ago, the FBI began pushing the FCC to adopt regulations saying that CALEA applies to the Internet," Diffie said.

The problem is that the Internet does not lend itself to interceptions. Diffie explained that if two businesspeople are traveling in Europe and want to have a VoIP conversation, it's much more efficient to send the packets directly from point to point, rather than sending them through an intermediary so that the intermediary can do a wiretap. One solution around this problem is to equip every ISP with advanced remote-controllable wiretap equipment. Of course, another alternative is just to force all phone calls to go through monitoring points. My guess is that the latter is what's going to happen.

Following the speakers' introductions, they were asked what kind of information, hypothetically, they would give to various politicians. I don't remember anything that was said.

Then we had questions and comments. The one notable comment came from Chris Kelly, the chief privacy officer of Facebook. He explained last year's snafu involving Facebook and privacy issues: Facebook had created a news feed to tell people what their friends were doing, and many people didn't like missives going out to their friends--you know, missives like "Anna's relationship status has changed from 'going steady' to 'single.'" It felt like stalking. Kelly said that 750,000 Facebook users joined a protest group about the news feed. Facebook got the message.

Kelly also said that the lesson that Facebook learned from this experience was precisely the opposite of what is written in the media. "You get this when you have 22-year-olds running the company." He said that a lot of people think that information posted in Facebook is available to anybody. In fact, there is no way to post a message in Facebook that everybody can read. And Kelly said that a lot of people think that 22-year-olds have no sense of privacy. He noted that the experience taught him that 22-year-olds care a great deal about privacy. They just have ways of conceptualizing it that are different from the way most 40- and 50-year-olds do.

Another brief will appear tomorrow.

Social Networking for Dogs

Now, owners can meet each other by swapping information between chips mounted on Fido's collar.

If you're passing through a dog park in Boston in the coming months and happen to catch a glimpse of a funny little device hanging off a pooch's collar, don't be surprised. A startup called SNIF Labs is gearing up to beta test a technology designed to help dogs--and their owners--become better acquainted.

SNIF Labs--the company's name is short for Social Networking in Fur--is developing what its website calls "a custom radio communications protocol" that allows special tags dogs wear on their collars to swap dog and owner information with other SNIF-tag users. When two dogs wearing tags come within range of each other, the tags start to swap dog and even owner information.

Once owners are back home and using the company's social-networking service, they can trade information about their dogs and themselves online. You already have dog ownership in common, the thinking goes, so maybe you'd be willing to share advice, restaurant recommendations, a drink, or more.

The move appears to be the next step in the social-networking revolution. Already, dog owners can meet online through canine-centric websites. "When people go to the dog park, they share a lot, but hardly ever a first name," says Ted Rheingold, founder of Dogster.com, a social-networking site for people and their dogs. "The Internet gives people the freedom to share information. The dog becomes a kind of online avatar." SNIF, of course, dispenses with the avatar. Whereas with Dogster, owners themselves are responsible for uploading information to the site, SNIF's tags automate that process and make it happen in the real world.

SNIF goes beyond social-networking for dog-walkers: its technology allows for Internet-based monitoring of a pet's daily activities when he or she is home alone. As long as Fido is in range of a base station installed at the home, the system can record when he sleeps, eats, walks, and even relieves himself. An owner can monitor this activity via any Web browser, whether at home or on a mobile device. He or she could even set up e-mail or SMS alerts for when, say, there is a big drop in activity levels, which may indicate that the dog is sick.

SNIF, which grew out of research at MIT's Media Lab, says it is using proprietary radio technology to minimize privacy risk. While the company won't comment on technology specifics in the run-up to beta testing, the company's website says that the tags "continually change their IDs, making it impossible for our members to be tracked by strangers." It's not Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)--in which a tag "reader" sends out a signal that energizes a tag to send back data. The worry was that readable RFID tags might be both hackable and trackable, thus leaving a dog owner's private information vulnerable.

John Williams, who directs the Auto-ID Labs at MIT, a leading center of RFID research that is not connected to SNIF, says that the technical details are unclear but that "they seem to be using the 'handshake' idea that the cell-phone companies are using, so that cell phones know when other cell phones are nearby." But SNIF declined requests for interviews, and a representative said in an e-mail that it's instituting a "media blackout" until Federal Communications Commission testing of its product begins next month.

Whatever the details of the company's wireless methods, the larger question is whether dog owners will rush to adopt the concept. Valdis Krebs, the developer of software for social-network analysis, doubts that people will want to fork over money for a device that essentially only digitizes what they're already doing: meeting people while on walks with their dogs. "I don't need a device to tell me whether my dog is happy with other dogs," says Krebs, who happens to be a dog owner. "And just because I meet another dog owner doesn't necessarily mean we'll share the same tastes in movies or restaurants."

But Rheingold says that he's been amazed at what he calls the "passion-centric" nature of the pet market. Through Dogster, he's seen people form long-lasting friendships, all because they met online through their dogs. More than 280,000 dogs are currently listed on the Dogster site.

SNIF's website says that its tags are going on sale in boutique stores in Boston in November, and it gives an online form for preordering the tags. There's no word yet on what the service will cost.

Making Music out of Genes

A UCLA graduate student creates melodies out of genetic and protein sequences, allowing us to "listen" to DNA.

Listen to this.

It's the music created by the human protein thymidylate synthase A (ThyA). Really. At least, it's the notes created to "play" the music of this string of amino acids, with each amino acid assigned a chord.

Rie Takahashi, a graduate student at UCLA, dreamed up the idea of making music out of proteins when she read about a blind meteorology student at Cornell who converted the colors of a contoured weather map into tones corresponding to different hues.

Takahashi hopes her creation will help disabled geneticists "read" sequences using sound, she writes in a report in Genome Biology. "We wanted to be able to move away from a two-dimensional string of letters across a sheet of paper, and to see if adding another dimension--sound--would help," Takahashi told Nature.com.

Helping blind biologists "hear" DNA is laudable, but I'm also finding the notion of amino acids as chords strung together to be something eerie and wonderful, like putting my ear to a seashell and hearing the ocean. In addition, the idea makes sense, given that music is essentially digital--a series of precise calibrations of sound that the ancient Greeks thought of as a form of mathematics. For instance, the ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras developed "The Music of the Spheres" to describe the proportional movements of the planets, moon, and sun in what he believed to be whole-number ratios identical to musical intervals.

Checking out Takahashi's Gene2Music website, I discover that other musically inclined scientists have applied notes and sounds to biological activities, such as the functions of a cell. You really need to check out these strange, compelling tunes.

Takahashi's website also allows you to enter any amino-acid sequence and have it translated into music. Try it, and listen to the slightly dissonant but curiously soothing sounds of protein sequences that are in a sense singing.

Self-Assembly to Make Faster Chips

IBM has developed a process for making speedier and more energy-efficient chips.

Chips that make themselves: This microprocessor cross section shows empty space in between the chip’s copper wiring. Wires are usually insulated with a glasslike material, but IBM has used self-assembly techniques, which can be employed in chip-making facilities, to create air gaps that insulate the wires.

The self-assembly of nanoscale structures, in which molecules arrange themselves in precise ways according to fundamental laws of physics, has long been a dream of chip designers. That's because it could be far cheaper to make ultrasmall precise features with self-assembly than with existing chip-making techniques. Now IBM researchers have taken a step toward using self-assembly in making future microprocessors.

The company has announced a novel process that uses self-assembly techniques to create air gaps that insulate wires in microprocessors. Early results show that these air-gap insulators can increase the speed of a chip by 35 percent or allow it to consume 15 percent less power than chips without the air-gap insulator. The company expects that the new process will be implemented in semiconductor facilities by 2009.

The new self-assembly approach ushers in to chip making an era of nanotechnology, says Daniel Edelstein, IBM fellow and chief scientist for the self-assembly air-gap project. Importantly, Edelstein says, IBM's process is designed to be compatible with current manufacturing facilities and materials.

One of the bottlenecks in the development of today's chips is the copper wiring that passes data between transistors and out of the chip. As chips shrink, these wires, which are about 70 nanometers wide, need to be fabricated closer together. However, the closer the wires are to each other, the more likely their electrical currents are to interfere with each other, sapping energy and slowing data flow. Insulation can help, but today's insulating material--glass--won't be good enough for future generations of chips. Engineers know that air is a better insulator, and they have been working to develop ways to create air gaps small enough--about 35 nanometers in diameter--to work. But the current state-of-the-art manufacturing equipment can't reliably produce air gaps that small.

So instead, IBM researchers used a new type of polymer to help them create the air gaps. The polymer is poured onto copper wires that are embedded in an insulating material. When the polymer is heated, the molecules pull away from each other to form a regular array of nanoscale holes. These holes are used as a template to etch hollow columns into the insulating material that surrounds the wires. Engineers then pump plasma, an electrically charged gas, through the holes to blast away the remaining insulating material. A quick chemical rinse leaves behind clear gaps of air on either side of the copper wires.

"I think this particular demonstration is very heartening for other people who work on self-assembly because they see this getting more and more real and moving toward more industrial-type implementation," says Babak Amir Parviz, professor of electrical engineering at the University of Washington, in Seattle.

IBM's Edelstein says that because the new process adds manufacturing steps to the overall chip-making process, there will be a slight increase in cost. There are 10 layers of wiring in a chip, and he estimates that the cost will increase 1 percent per layer. Some chips, Edelstein says, would be built with a single layer of air gaps, while others might have four or more, depending on the need of the customer. IBM plans to license the technology to its research partners, which include Advanced Micro Devices, Sony, Toshiba, and Freescale Semiconductor.

Biorefinery turns trash into electricity for troops

The cow is a model power generator: Each day it expels enough methane to run your home furnace for 24 hours. At Purdue University, a team of nearly two dozen researchers has built a portable device that mimics this natural metabolic process to create electricity.

The "biorefinery," which is three years and $850,000 in the making, can digest ordinary kitchen scraps and other trash to produce ethanol and a composite gas and use them to fuel an electrical generator.

The device was designed for the U.S. Army, which solicited researchers for ways to slash the amount of fuel it uses to run diesel generators and to reduce the output of garbage from a typical 600-person field support unit. (An Army soldier produces an average of four pounds of trash a day.)

"We wanted a twofer," says Jerry Warner, founder of Defense Life Sciences, a private contractor that partnered with the Purdue scientists. "Get rid of the trash and conserve fuel at the same time."

The refinery works like a giant digestive tract. After a shredder chews up trash, enzymes digest it into simple sugars, which yeast metabolizes to produce ethanol. Any leftover waste (paper cups, plastic forks and so on) is packed into pellets and burned to produce a gas composed primarily of methane, propane, carbon dioxide and hydrogen. The refinery blends this gas with the ethanol and uses it to run a modified diesel generator.

About the size of a moving van, the biorefinery is entirely self-contained and self-powered. Feed it 2,500 pounds of trash a day, and it pumps out enough electricity (60 kilowatts) to run a large mess-tent operation or three homes.

The biorefinery could also be housed in a large office building or hospital, where excess thermal energy could be used to heat water. Or it could be dispatched to a disaster area and pull double duty, helping clean up the mess and lighting a city left in the dark.

Warner and the Purdue team demonstrated the machine for Army officials last November and are building a second prototype to test later this year.

How it works:

1. The shredder rips up waste and soaks it in water.
2. The sludge is pumped into the bioreactor, and enzymes break it down into carbohydrates and then into simple sugars, which yeast metabolizes into ethanol.
3. The pelletizer compresses undigested waste into pellets and feeds them into a gasification reactor that burns them to produce a composite gas.
4. The ethanol is combined with the composite gas and injected into a diesel generator, where it's mixed with 10 percent diesel fuel to generate electricity.

FreePulse headphones cut the cord

Story Highlights

• Logitech FreePulse Wireless Headphones light and flexible
• Headband's wire core an improvement on plastic in original
• FreePulse has better than average sound
• Headband is not adjustable, designed for big heads

We remember when Logitech released the first Bluetooth headphones for the iPod back in 2005. In fact, we still have those antiques here at our office.

Although the originals were innovative for the time, they were expensive at $150 and suffered from a fragile headband and heavy earphones.

Fortunately, the Logitech FreePulse Wireless Headphones have solved these problems and do so at a list price of $109 (current street price is less than $90). (Check prices)

Design

The design of the Logitech FreePulse Bluetooth Headphones is one of the better we've seen. In general, behind-the-neck headphone designs commonly suffer from placing an uncomfortable amount of weight or pressure on the ears.

The FreePulse model manages to skirt this problem by using a lightweight, flexible carbon spring-steel wire inside a silicone headband. This resilient wire core also eliminates the problem Logitech has faced in the past with breakable plastic headbands.

The FreePulse headphones uses adjustable silicon over-ear straps to secure the headphones in place, and although some people just can't stand to have straps on their ears, most users will be fine since there is very little weight involved.

We found the cushions on the headphone speakers comfortable, and the thickness of the cushioning is an improvement over the original iPod Bluetooth headphones.

By draping them over your ears instead of squeezing your head like a vice, the FreePulse headphones were easy to wear for an hour or more without discomfort.

If the FreePulse headphones suffer from a design flaw, it's that users cannot adjust the length of the headband. Logitech's designers seemed to err on the side of caution and provided enough room for those with large heads or lots of hair. The rest of us will need to use the adjustable ear straps to position the extra headband away from the head to avoid bumping against the neck.

The Bluetooth transmitter for the FreePulse headphones is nothing fancy. The square, black transmitter measures 1.5-inches across and 0.5-inches deep, with a power button and a connection indicator on one end and an adjustable stereo minijack on the other.

Unlike other iPod Bluetooth transmitters, the FreePulse doesn't use the iPod's proprietary connection port (leaving it free for devices like the Nike + iPod Sport Kit).

The upside of the FreePulse's simplified transmitter is it can be used on any audio source with a stereo headphone jack--including computers and home theater systems. Logitech also includes a handful of adapters that give the transmitter a snug fit for 4GB, 5GB, Mini, and Nano iPods.

Features

The features on the FreePulse headphones are wonderfully basic. Power buttons on both the headphones and Bluetooth transmitter turn red when activated, and then turn blue once they've established a Bluetooth connection.

The volume control located on the right headphone was simple to use. Behind the volume control, on the top edge of the right headphone, you'll find the headphone's power button, which doubles as a volume mute button when pressed momentarily.

Performance

The Logitech FreePulse Bluetooth headphones were not intended to hold up to audiophile scrutiny.

The ideal candidate for these headphones is someone looking for lightweight, unobtrusive headphones to use at the gym, or out on a jog--situations where wires are inconvenient and noise-blocking headphones could be hazardous.

While we thought the FreePulse headphones provided better than average sound quality with bass to spare, users looking for high-fidelity wireless headphones should look at products like the NaviPlay Bluetooth headphones for iPod or Pioneer SE-DIR800C for home theater use. (Popular headphones)

We tested the Bluetooth transmission range of the FreePulse headphones around the office and at home. In both scenarios, we were able to put about 30 feet between the headphones and the transmitter before hearing any hiccups--a useful distance, but not luxurious.

Most likely, the only distance the transmitter will need to reach is between your head and your gym bag.

Battery life held up to its claim of around 7 hours and recharging was quick and easy. Very brief (one second) audio dropouts would occur from time to time, but this is common with all Bluetooth headphones we've tested. Aside from these momentary dropouts, no audible interference from radio or cell phones could be heard.

Final word

Logitech has been refining its wireless Bluetooth behind-the-neck headphones for quite some time now and the design quality of the FreePulse is proof of that effort.

Users looking for an affordable, full-sounding pair of wireless headphones that can handle the abuse doled out by long jogs and cluttered gym bags need look no further.

'Monitor Queen' of Malaysia gives computers a new life

Mary Tiong's company saves aging computers from the scrap heap and sends them to developing countries.

Story Highlights

• Old U.S. computers sent to Malaysia for repair
• Refurbished computers then sold to developing countries
• Business saves computers from U.S. scrap heap

PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania (AP) -- In her native Malaysia, Mary Tiong developed a reputation for selling leftover computer monitors for a large manufacturer behind the industry's best-known brands. She earned a nickname: The Monitor Queen.

From her new base in Pittsburgh, Tiong continues to move large quantities of monitors. But now, she ships thousands of discarded models with computers back to Malaysia, where they are rebuilt and sold in poor countries, mostly in Southeast Asia.

Tiong, 41, says her company, Second Life Computer Remanufacturing, has environmental and philanthropic goals: It helps stem a rising tide of electronic waste in the United States and fulfills a need for basic computer equipment in the developing world.

But she hopes to expand her operations by establishing a training program to teach local students how to rebuild aging computers, which often can be used for office work, Web surfing and e-mail -- and saved from the scrap heap.

The program would create jobs and demonstrate that "somebody's junk is another person's treasure," Tiong said.

Her office is in a small warehouse jammed with monitors and PCs wrapped in plastic and stacked on wooden pallets. The computers and monitors, some plucked from U.S. classrooms, law offices or pharmacies, might have been donated to or purchased by Tiong for $10 or less a piece.

"But I know that if you can make it work and get somebody to use it, the value is much better than a few dollars," she said.

Since 2005, Tiong's firm has sent 35 shipping containers to remanufacturing facilities in Kuala Lumpur and Penang, Malaysia. One container holds as many as 2,000 computers, or between 800 and 1,000 monitors.

In Malaysia, workers test and repair the equipment, perhaps cracking open computers to replace parts or polishing monitor tubes and repainting their plastic cases in bright hues.

In many cases, the devices are returning to their country of origin -- Malaysia. Tiong, who was born in Malaysia's Sarawak state on Borneo Island, says that gives her a unique perspective on the discarded technology.

"Because I'm from Asia ... I know where they come from," she said.

After working as a distributor for the Taiwanese electronic parts maker Lite-On Technology Corp., Tiong began traveling on her own to the United States in 1998. She bought containers loaded with monitors and shipped them back to Malaysia, where she had a factory that rebuilt or refurbished them. She then sold the equipment to customers in Singapore, Russia and Papua New Guinea.

The following year, Tiong began dealing in computers as well, buying old PCs in Atlanta, Georgia, Boston, Massachusetts and San Francisco, California, among other cities. In 2000, she expanded to suppliers in Australia and, in 2004, to Canada.

She came to Pittsburgh in 2004 and formed Babylon Industries, the parent company of Second Life Computers. She said her company's revenue fluctuates, but that it probably averages about $500,000 annually.

The units are sent to schools and other customers in Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and Argentina; Tiong's distributors are hoping to tap into markets in Peru and South Africa. Some equipment is sold at minimal cost -- less than $100 -- to rural villagers, she said. Some have been refurbished in Pittsburgh and donated to local schools.

Jim Rapoza, chief technology analyst for the publication eWeek, said "getting rid of old equipment is a big issue" for many businesses.

"Usually, you can't find anyone interested in buying this stuff," though the pace of computer technology has slowed enough that slightly older machines are still useful for many tasks, including Web surfing and e-mail, he said.

Tiong tries to avoid recycling -- destroying the machines or breaking them down for parts -- saying her mission is to restore them so they can be used by people who are unable to afford the latest technology.

She is not alone. Many U.S.-based groups collect and refurbish computers and send them abroad, according to Rob Zopf, vice president of operations at the National Cristina Foundation, a Greenwich, Connecticut-based group that distributes donated computers to schools and charities across the country.

"The other side of the issue is there are people who collect equipment here in the U.S. (and) send it overseas in the name of reuse, although they're really sending it as a way of disposing of e-waste in a much less environmentally friendly way than one might like by taking components we might not want in our landfills and giving them to the Third World," he said.

Second Life says on its Web site that less than 1 percent of its refurbished equipment, 2 percent of its remanufactured equipment and 5 percent of its recycled equipment goes to the landfill. Tiong said little is wasted because even small parts, such as chips, can be reused.

For Dedicated BlackBerry Users, a Way to Stay Connected Abroad

Published: May 3, 2007

While there are some export restrictions on precious gems, users of the BlackBerry 8830 — with its shining pearl-like trackball — will have no problem getting through customs, let alone making calls from foreign lands.

The 8830, available on May 28 from Verizon Wireless, works on CDMA wireless networks, which Verizon uses in the United States, and on international GSM networks, allowing calls and e-mail to be received almost anywhere in the world.

The device has a full keyboard and comes in a fetching silver color scheme. To enhance the 8830’s globe-trotting abilities, Verizon is introducing Global BlackBerry service, allowing BlackBerry 8830 users to make calls in 150 countries and receive e-mail in 60 countries.

The 8830 also has Bluetooth short-range wireless abilities and can accept micro-SD cards for memory expansion. It supports instant messaging services like AIM and Yahoo Messenger.

The phone costs $300 with a two-year contract, and the Global BlackBerry service costs $65 a month on top of a standard voice plan, or $70 without a voice plan. The terminally BlackBerry-dependent may find that a small price to pay for global connectedness.

A Media PC That Can Stand Up Next to the Television

Published: May 3, 2007

Some PCs look great on an office desk, while others are more suited to a home study. The Shuttle X200M, an update to the X100 media PC, looks great next to the TV.

This PC, which starts at $1,149 in its most basic configuration, weighs six pounds and is about 12 inches wide, about as big as Apple’s Mac Mini.

In its most expensive configuration, about $1,833, the X200M includes a tuner for TV and FM, a remote control and software to record live television and burn DVDs.

The X200M, available at www.shuttle.com, has 2 gigabytes of memory and a maximum of 750 gigabytes of hard drive space. It uses a 2-gigahertz Intel processor and offers 7.1 HD surround-sound audio playback for more realistic Hollywood explosions.

Designed to act as a living-room media device, the X200M can run Windows Vista Ultimate as well as Microsoft’s Media Center software, which lets you record and play back video, select music for playback and create networks with PCs in the home wirelessly or over Ethernet.

Don’t be misled by its size. The Shuttle X200M offers Media Center performance in a PC the size of a personal pan pizza box.

A Dual-Screen DVD Player, Suited to Separating Feuding Children

Published: May 3, 2007

Nothing beats a portable DVD player for a long trip — except perhaps one with two screens. Designed for those with more than one child, the Disney Dual Screen Mobile DVD Player can simultaneously display a movie or video game on two 7-inch screens.

The screens are tethered by a single seven-foot audio-video and power cord, long enough to have one screen in the front seat attached to the beverage holder, and the second on a headrest for viewers in the far back. Each screen has an independent volume control and a headphone jack. Just one has the video controls and actually plays the DVD, though there is also a remote control.

The kit, available for $180 from www.disneyshopping.com, includes two power supplies for either car or house power, two pairs of headphones and an extra video cable that could be plugged into a TV at home. Missing are rechargeable batteries, so when your car’s ignition turns off at a rest area, so does your movie.

The screens are easy to move around the car, thanks to clever holding straps designed to stretch around the back of a seat, just in case one child needs some space. As anyone who travels with children knows, options are good.