It even makes calls!

When does a cellphone have too many whizbang features? We’re about to find out.

The cellphone is fast becoming the Swiss Army knife of consumer electronics. Brace yourself for a wave of compact wireless devices that can do seemingly everything: Snap high-quality digital photos, browse the web, send e-mail messages, play MP3 music files, record short videoclips – and oh, yeah, let you make phone calls. The only thing missing is a corkscrew.

Consumers can credit technological advances for the proliferation of such turbo-charged handsets. Phone companies finally are rolling out high-speed networks that can support multimedia functions, such as downloading music. And speedier, smarter microchips are allowing cellphone makers to cram more features into a single device. Also helping stoke the trend: fierce competition between cellphone purveyors such as Motorola and Nokia and makers of other kinds of gadgets like PalmPilots and Gamcboys, which increasingly are adding voice service. One of today’s hottest products is PalmOne’s Treo 650, a PDA that happens to deliver really good voice calls.

These all-in-one devices aren’t for everyone. For starters, they cost way more than your typical camera phone. Sony Ericsson’s 910a, which boasts an MP3 player, digital camera, web access, and other business and entertainment features, retails for around $500. Skeptics wonder if anyone will ever use all that stuff anyway. (When was the last time you took a picture with your camera phone?). And with so many items on the menu of these handsets, might quality end up compromised?

John Maeda, a professor at MIT Media Lab, argues that in technology, more isn’t necessarily better. Consumers may think they’re getting good value when they buy a device that does 20 things, but often they just need a phone that makes calls. “If you were going to a deserted island, would you bring a Swiss Army knife or a cooking knife?” he asks. “You’d probably bring the Swiss Army knife and wish you’d brought the cooking knife.”

Analysts suspect the proliferation of high-end devices this year will lead to more niche marketing of phones and wireless services designed for every type of user: A heavy e-mail user may buy a handset designed for messaging that also happens to let him play interactive games. A music lover may go with an MP3 player that can also make calls and surf the web. The only users who may be disappointed are people who just want a plain old cellphone.

Stephanie N. Mehta, FORTUNE

Kiss privacy goodbye

Post-9/11 snooping technologies are evolving faster than laws to control their use.

We all know that the world can be a dangerous place, and we’re learning that the on Sline realm can be dangerous too. An in-creasingly popular strategy for warding off threats ranging from terrorism to identity theft is to gather information on and verify the identity of everyone, looking for signs that indicate a potential troublemaker. The conundrum is that to gain a little more security, citizens are being asked – or told – to give up a lot more privacy. Often people part with their personal information willingly, but in a growing number of cases technology is being used to gather information surreptitiously.

Surveillance devices aimed at humans are proliferating at an unprecedented rate, from lasers that can monitor members of a crowd for abnormal vital signs, to biometric scanners that pick out individual travelers at a distance and link them to vast commercial and government databases containing their detailed personal information. Although the exact figures are unknown because some surveillance spending is hidden inside “black budget” military or spy agency programs, the federal budget for 2005 shows double-digit spending increases for research into systems designed to gather information on, well, you.

Kush Wadhwa, a director of research at the consulting company Biometric Group, expects worldwide sales and licensing of fingerprinting, facial recognition, and other biometric devices to jump to more than $1.8 billion in 2005, from $719 million in 2003. By 2008, he says, global biometric revenue will be $4.8 billion just for the gear, not counting billions of dollars more in services.

Biometric scanners are just one facet of the people-surveillance industry. The Central Intelligence Agency has been funding ways to spy on Internet chat rooms. Black-box computers in rental cars use global-positioning satellite technology to track and map a vehicle’s travels, alerting the rental company if, for example, the driver speeds or crosses into Mexico in violation of the contract. Republican leaders in Congress say a top priority this year will be to set nationwide standards for driver’s licenses, which critics fear could lead to a de facto national ID card.

Indeed, surveillance technologies appear to be developing faster than legal safeguards to protect the privacy of citizens. Decrying what they call the government’s “significant redirection in science funding toward the development of systems of mass surveillance,” a group of prominent computer scientists and privacy advocates issued a statement last fall warning of “a fundamental risk to political freedom, privacy, and Constitutional liberty.” Meanwhile, through such laws as the U.S.A. Patriot Act, passed in the weeks after 9/11, judicial oversight of intelligence gathering has been curtailed.

In a report prepared last year for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld evaluating the privacy implications of a proposed universal database holding billions of pieces of information about ordinary citizens, a panel of independent experts concluded that today’s privacy laws are often inadequate to keep up with new technologies for snooping. “That inadequacy,” the report continued, “will only become more acute as the store of digital data and the ability to search it continue to expand dramatically in the future.”

Peter H. Lewis, FORTUNE

A lonely planet? Not remotely

Round the world traveller Emily Barr on the predictability of backpacking

The woman on the platform at New Delhi station took one look at us. ‘You’re going to Dharamsala,’ she said. ‘You people always go there’ Fifteen hours later, we realised what she meant. The town which for 40 years has been the home of the exiled Tibetan community is now packed with westerners. Everyone caters for the backpacker, because these are the people who, relatively speaking, have money.

I spent the past six months in Asia, and I have no idea why Dr Aziz of the Roehampton Institute took two years to uncover the shocking fact that backpackers hang out with each other, speak English and eat western food, when a half a day in McLeodganj or Bangkok would have proved the point.

The sad truth is that backpacking is a painfully predictable affair; all the stereotypes are true. The Khao San Road in Bangkok and similar ghettos elsewhere are packed with people who think they are seeing Asia, while they eat a banana pancake and reminisce about the lovely espresso in Krabi. Backpackers are tourists – the differences between them and package tourists are choice of destination, length of trip, and the amount of money spent.

Cities such as Bangkok and Kathmandu can absorb these ghettos easily. They provide amusement for the locals (many make expeditions to look at the visitors) and home comforts for the tourists. Smaller places, however, have their characters irreversibly changed by invasion by galumphing hordes in backpacks.

The chief culprits for these kinds of changes are the Lonely Planet guides. These books are ubiquitous in Asia, as I discovered on my third day in Vietnam when, on a trip to the Mekong Delta, the guide apologetically announced that, although we would be visiting a floating market, ‘it is not the one in The Book’. Lonely Planet books cover every square inch of Asia. They are the most popular guidebooks with young backpackers, partly because their information is clear and accurate, but mostly because these are the books that everyone else has, and young people travelling for the first time do not want to be left out. The guidebooks make and break guesthouses and restaurants. More importantly, they send young travellers to remote places they would not otherwise get to, and the places inevitably lose the qualities that made them so attractive.

Not all the blame can be laid at the door of Tony Wheeler, Lonely Planet’s boss. In Vang Vieng, I sat at a bar with a cold beer, watching the sun set. About 50 other westerners were doing the same thing. Behind me an argument was raging: ‘But in north London you’ve got a much better Tube network. In south London, you might as well be in Brighton.^’ Business as usual, in other words.

One failsafe method is to go somewhere where there is neither the poverty nor the interest in the west that makes places pander to Europeans. China, for example. Thailand is more of a challenge; but there are places, even in south east Asia, where it is possible to get away from tourism. I only came across a few of them. As for where they are, that would be telling.

The Guardian

^{Silent witnesses}

Hugh Brody charts the repressive effects of colonialism on human expression

Human beings make about 160 different sounds. This is the sum of the vocal elements of all the world’s languages. English, one of the more complicated vocal systems, has about 55 of these sounds. Norwegian has 75. The Bushman or San languages of the Kalahari have more than 145. The San are the great acrobats of the mouth. In their campaigns against tribes, the colonists have despised them for the very sounds of their voices and have sought to eradicate their languages.

Throughout the world, there has been a drastic loss of tribal languages. Some linguists estimate that some 5,000 languages or distinctive dialects have faded away this century. The loss of these ways of speaking and of knowing is a loss of genius that may well be irrecoverable. It is also a cause of intense grief and disorientation to hundreds of thousands of tribal people, who struggle to be themselves without the words to say what that means.

In southern Africa, Dutch settlers dismissed the KhoiSan ways of speaking as ‘gibberings of monkeys’. In both the US and Canada, those concerned to deal with ‘the Indian problem’ in the nineteenth century resolved that ‘those barbaric tongues’ would be eradicated, making way for the English that ‘all who are civilised can understand’.

The Europeans’ assault on tribal languages is well documented, and most persistent when its victims have been hunter-gatherers. These were the tribes whose ways of life meant they were spread far and wide across settlement frontiers. There seems to have been a compulsion to achieve, in these places, a final and decisive silence.

Their barbaric tongues would cease, to be replaced by English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Afrikaans – any language of ‘civilisation’.

Tribal people often say that to have stories about a land is to own it. The stories that hold the knowledge and sustain the links with the spirits are a permanent challenge, a rival to the territory. No wonder, then, that the surviving descendants of these tribes have an intensely difficult and complicated relationship to their own voices. They often speak the languages of their oppressors and have absorbed the lessons of their oppressors: indigenous customs, history and ways of speech are matters of shame. Many tribal peoples have survived by remaining silent and unnoticed, at the margins of the colonial world.

Yet the silence, in many parts of the world, is being broken. With land claim movements, cultural revival, anti-colonial protest, a refusal to disappear. Tribal voices are making themselves heard. There are assertions of pride and rights: to know their place is to claim it, whatever the colonialists might say.

In Australia, Aboriginal groups are defending every part that remains of their heritage and lands. For tribal people, the connections between language and land are self-evident. From the point of view of settlers and their nation states, these are marginal, infertile territories. They are the lands where tribal people have been able to endure. They are languages that somehow ‘belong to the past’. Modern tribes are not arguing for a reinstatement of the past. Rather, they seek to have their own resources with which to prosper in the present. With the lands and languages that are theirs, their lives can be full of opportunity and the strength of cultural and individual health.

The Guardian