Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Slashdot

Google WiFi+VPN Confirmed
An anonymous reader writes "Google is actually (confirmed!) rolling out their wifi network, first in the San Francisco bay area (see the FAQ for details.) They are also including a Secure Access program for use in conjunction with this. So far, as per usual, it's in beta, and only for the San Fran bay area. Soon the entire US, perhaps??

Space Elevator Gets FAA Clearance
lonesome phreak writes "Techzonez has a short piece about the recent FAA waiver received by the LiftPort Group allowing them to conduct preliminary tests or their high altitude robotic lifters. The lifters are early prototypes of the technology that the company is developing for use in its commercial space elevator to ferry cargo back and forth into space."

Saturday, September 10, 2005

Ultimate USB Drive

USB thumb drives have shown themselves to be a superior alternative to other portable media such as diskettes and writable optical discs. They're smaller and can hold tons of data, and most current operating systems recognize them without needing any special drivers. We've seen 1GB drives for under $100, and drives with smaller capacities start at under $20.

Most people don't realize that these drives can also carry enough applications to serve as a personal office on the road, and can even contain a complete bootable operating system to provide total security when you are computing away from home. There are plenty of reasons to carry applications or an operating system on your USB drive: You'll have your e-mail and instant messaging accounts, Internet bookmarks, log-on passwords, and even document templates instantly available on any computer you find in a hotel's computer center, a home, or an office that you might visit. You can also be certain that your settings will stay on your USB drive and won't be stored in the browser cache or anywhere else on a remote machine. Here's what we put on our ultimate USB drive; the programs are free for personal use, unless noted. Most of the apps we describe can run entirely from the USB drive without installation.

Your Internet Office on the Road

Enthralled by Firefox but frustrated that many PCs you use still don't have it installed? Or perhaps you just prefer to steer clear of the spyware potentially lurking inside Microsoft Internet Explorer, the more popular browser? Firefox leaves no clues to your browsing activities on the remote computer, something you can never be sure of when using IE. Developer John Haller has created portable versions of Firefox, Thunderbird, the Sunbird calendar application, and the NVU Web-page editor (all can be downloaded from http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla ). Portable Fire-fox has minor limitations when run from a USB drive, but the others work perfectly.


Portable Firefox 1.0.4 () renders most sites exactly as it does when installed on your hard drive, but Java applets will run only if Java (which will work only if it finds settings already specified in the registry) is installed on the host machine. You also won't be able to view PDF files if no PDF software is installed on the host, so download the fast and tiny (less than 1MB) Foxit PDF Reader 1.3 for standalone viewing of PDF files. You'll need to download PDFs instead of viewing them in the browser. ( www.foxitsoftware.com )

If you install the Firefox Bookmarks Synchronizer extension, you can upload new bookmarks to an FTP server and import them to your home machine when you return, or download your bookmarks on the road if you forgot to update them before you left. If you use Portable Firefox on a host computer that doesn't have Firefox already installed, it creates two directories on the host, but your settings, cookies, and other private files remain on the thumb drive. ( http://addons.mozilla.org )

Portable Thunderbird 1.0.2 (beta; ), based on the excellent Mozilla.org mail client, works without problems on a USB drive. You'll get the best results if you have an IMAP account that lets you leave messages on the server instead of transferring them to your drive, as you normally do with conventional POP mailboxes. Although not as high-powered as Microsoft Outlook for calendars and scheduling, Portable Sunbird 0.2 () gets the job done and may be enough for anyone whose work doesn't require carrying an Outlook-equipped laptop everywhere. Portable NVU 1.0 Preview Release ), a basic HTML editor still in early development, is also trouble-free on a USB key but doesn't compare to Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage.

For FTP and Secure FTP, FileZilla 2.2.14b lets you choose between a secure mode that never stores passwords and a less-secure mode that stores passwords in an XML file on your thumb drive. FileZilla doesn't have the prettiest interface you've seen on an FTP client, but it's fast and secure, and worth considering for your desktop machine as well as for your thumb drive. ( http://filezilla.sourceforge.net )

The free Trillian Basic 3.1 instant messaging client works with AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo! Messenger, but it isn't designed to be run from a portable drive. The third-party Trillian Anywhere Web site provides simple instructions for setting up Trillian on your hard drive, creating all its settings, and then transferring it to a USB drive. The result is a trouble-free universal IM client that leaves no traces on the host computer. ( www.trilliananywhere.com )

John Haller has also created USB-friendly versions of the http://OpenOffice.org office suite; you can choose between a stable 1.1.4 version and a faster and slicker 2.0 Alpha version. The 2.0 version fills 127MB, so you'll need a generous-size USB drive, but it guarantees you a full-featured productivity suite compatible with Microsoft Office wherever you plug in the drive. You may need to click through the license agreement on each new host machine, but that's a minimal inconvenience. ( http://johnhaller.com/jh/useful_stuff/portable_openoffice )

All work and no play makes for a dull USB key. Fortunately you can store your favorite tunes on your thumb drive and listen to them with XMPlay, a miniature but high-powered media player. It has the tiny, overelaborate interface typical of freeware media players, but with downloadable skins that can slightly improve it. Alternatively, consider CoolPlayer, a compact open-source MP3 player that can be extended via plug-ins to handle almost any current media format. (XMPlay, www.un4seen.com/xmplay.html , ; CoolPlayer, http://coolplayer.sourceforge.net , )

Security

Every time you plug a USB key into someone else's computer, you risk catching a virus or other malware. For a scanner that checks the full range of viruses found in the wild, download AntiVir PersonalEdition Classic, which can be installed to your USB drive and run from any host computer. (It puts a few Registry entries on your hard drive, which you can remove or ignore.) One minor problem with AntiVir on a USB drive: If you haven't used the drive for a day or two, you should run the AntiVir updater as soon as you plug your drive into a new machine. But after you run the built-in updater, the updater component remains in memory, so the Safely Remove Hardware icon will tell you that you can't remove your USB drive safely. You can use the Windows Task Manager to close down the AntiVir process before removing the drive, or simply pull the drive out without further ado if you're certain that no other program on it is still running. ( www.free-av.com )

If space is at a premium, make sure your USB drive has at least a reduced antivirus program that focuses on a few high-risk attacks; McAfee's Avert Stinger is probably the best. ( http://vil.nai.com/vil/stinger )

Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition 1.06 isn't the most powerful spyware remover—and ideally needs to be used in combination with other programs—but you can carry it with you on a USB drive, and it's infinitely better than nothing. Install it in the normal way to your hard disk, then simply copy its folder to your USB drive. ( www.lavasoft.de )

You'll also want to save your passwords securely. The most efficient way to save Web passwords and forms is with Pass2Go ($39.95), also known as RoboForm Portable, a version of our Editor's Choice RoboForm form filler. If you browse the Web by running IE from the host computer while using a USB drive, then you can simply run Pass2Go from the USB key; the host's copy of IE will display the RoboForm toolbar and use your stored log-on information. If you use Portable Firefox, you'll also need to download the RoboForm Mozilla Adapter and follow the specific instructions on www.roboform.com/removeable.html for Portable Firefox. While running, Pass2Go writes files (but not your private settings) to a Temp folder on the host's hard drive. It cleans up after itself when you exit, leaving only a copy of the executable Pass2Go program on the host drive, and no other settings. ( www.roboform.com )

Among traditional standalone password storage programs, a good first choice is KeePass Password Safe, a high-powered open-source utility that uses AES and TwoFish encryption and is designed so that passwords won't be visible to keystroke loggers or any other snooping software. It has special storage for the use-once TAN (transaction number) passwords used for online banking. The keyboard interface is somewhat unreliable; accelerator keys such as Alt-F for the File menu or Ctrl-O for Open database sometimes don't have any effect. ( http://keepass.sourceforge.net )

To secure programs and data against prying eyes, you can use USB drives that come with encryption already on the drive or software-only solutions that can be installed on any thumb drive. Kingston Technology ( www.kingston.com ) uses a combination of hardware and software encryption on its DataTraveler Elite USB drives. Other vendors, such as Lexar ( www.lexar.com ) and Trek 2000 ( www.thumbdrive.com ), use software-only encryption that can be installed only on the same vendor's USB drives.

In either case, the drive comes with software that divides it into a normally visible region and an encrypted region. When you unlock the encrypted region with a password, the visible region disappears, and the same drive letter that the system assigned to the visible portion of the drive is assigned to the encrypted region. When you log out of the encrypted region, the visible portion regains its original drive letter, and the encrypted portion becomes invisible. Some new drives, such as Lexar's JumpDrive TouchGuard and SanDisk's upcoming Cruzer Profile line ( www.sandisk.com ), include fingerprint authentication.

The software in these combined solutions works only with specific drives sold by the same vendor. Software-only solutions that work with any USB drive include Folder Lock ($35), which offers multiple levels of encryption and a clear but graphics-heavy interface. The program creates a password-protected folder that isn't visible in Windows Explorer or any other directory listing until you run the program to unlock it. When you lock the folder and exit the program, it completely cleans up after itself. The encrypted folder is visible if you plug the drive into a Macintosh or Linux system, although the contents and filenames are still encrypted. ( www.newsoftwares.net )

Other drive-encryption programs tend to be less convenient. StorageCrypt 2.0.1 ($29.95) works only with drives that are formatted with multiple partitions, each with its own drive letter. You install the software on a partition that remains visible, and you run the software to encrypt or decrypt a second partition. It's easy to use despite the badly translated dialogs. StorageSafe ($29.95) doesn't require a partitioned drive to start with but works by completely reformatting your existing drive, wiping out any data that may be on it and creating a public area and a protected, encrypted area that you unlock by running the program and entering a password. Unfortunately, you need to install StorageSafe on any host computer from which you want to access the protected area, and the host computer may be set up so that you can't install anything. (StorageCrypt 2.0.1, www.magic2003.net , ; StorageSafe, www.modsol.com/StorageSafe , .)

Environments to Go

To protect your privacy on the Web, you may not need to have special security software. Instead, launch an emulated Windows CE or Linux system on your USB drive.

You don't need to carry a PDA to use the Windows CE operating system and its small-screen versions of IE and Windows Messenger. Just follow the instructions on Steve Makofsky's weblog to learn how to download Microsoft's free Windows CE emulator to your USB drive and use a batch file to launch the emulator and save its settings on the same drive. Make sure to read all the comments posted on the weblog to find essential modifications to the method described in the initial post.

After you run the emulator for the first time, it restarts instantly with the browser or IM client already open and ready for action if you left them open earlier. You don't get an e-mail client or Firefox's powerful browsing, but nothing else on a USB drive gives you the same instant-on convenience, and you'll need only 32MB for the whole package. No one seems to have figured out how to add other applications to the default setup. ( www.furrygoat.com/2004/12/portable_ce.html )

For even more security, you can run a miniature Linux system from your USB drive without rebooting. Metropipe's Portable Virtual Privacy Machine is a 125MB Linux environment that uses the open-source QEMU emulator software to allow the Linux system to run either in a window or full-screen on a Windows system. The Linux system is Damn Small Linux, based on the popular "live CD" Knoppix distribution, and includes Firefox, Thunderbird, and other open-source applications (see the sidebar below). All settings are stored inside the files used by the Linux system. On our 3-GHz test machines, the system was painfully slow to start, the Technology Preview release available during testing was buggy, and configuration programs that required the keyboard did not respond to the keystrokes needed for navigating them. ( www.metropipe.net/ProductsPVPM.shtml )

An Easier Future

Starting in fall 2005, you'll be able to buy many commercial software products—including the ZoneAlarm firewall—in portable versions based on the new U3 standard ( www.u3.com ), using a single launcher for all U3 programs on the drive and drivers that automatically clean up all traces of your programs when you detach your drive from the host machine. Though this will make things easier, the software will require U3-compatible USB drives and probably won't be compatible with your existing drives. But since there are already so many good apps that can run on current USB keys, there's no reason to wait until the new drives are out. Go ahead and load your thumb drive with apps for your next road trip.


You can set up your USB drive so that it automatically runs a program when you plug it into a Microsoft Windows XP SP2 computer, and so it will display a custom icon next to its name in Windows Explorer. You can also give the drive any name you like—not just the standard 11-character drive label normally permitted by Windows. To do all this, create a text file named Autorun.inf in the drive's root directory, with contents something like this:

[autorun]

open=PortableFirefox.exe action=Start PortableFirefox

icon=PortableFirefox.exe label=Portable Internet

The open= line and action= lines are used only by the AutoPlay feature of Windows XP SP2. They specify, respectively, the action that the AutoPlay dialog will offer to perform and the text that the dialog will display to describe that action. The files you specify can be anywhere on your drive, but if they're not in the root, you need to give the full path. Be sure to omit the drive letter, because you can't predict what letter your drive will receive on a host computer. The icon= and label= lines indicate the icon or name of the drive as displayed in Windows Explorer. The icon can be a program file's built-in icon or any other icon resource such as a DLL or ICO file. The first icon in the file is used by default, but you can use other icons by following the filename with a comma and a number specifying the icon; numbering starts with 0, so use Filename.exe,2 to specify the third icon in the file.

Make Your Thumb Drive Bootable

Your USB drive can be your emergency toolkit at home and away, and if the host machine supports booting from a USB drive, you can boot to a USB key that you've prepared in advance. USB drives can boot to MS-DOS (including the DOS that comes with Windows 95/98/Me), specially prepared versions of Linux, and the Windows preboot environment (which permits minimal file management and other troubleshooting but doesn't load the full Microsoft Windows GUI).

The job of making your USB drive bootable may be simple or frustrating, depending on the hardware in the host computer and the size of the USB drive. (Some BIOSs treat all USB drives smaller than 512MB as floppy disk drives, unless you tell the BIOS to treat the USB drive as a hard drive or CD-ROM.) Creating a bootable MS-DOS USB drive is easiest on a Windows 98 system, where you can often use third-party software like Symantec's PartitionMagic or Acronis Disk Director Suite to format a USB drive and mark its partition as active, and then use Windows 98's FORMAT /S command to make it bootable. Alternatively, you can find detailed manual instructions through Web searches, but be warned that methods that worked for some users won't work for others.

The most reliable and flexible software for making USB keys bootable is FlashBoot 1.2 (19.95 euros—about $24, www.prime-expert.com ), which can create anything from a minimal bootable DOS floppy to bootable Windows XP repair disks and even a fully customizable USB version of the popular BartPE boot CD-ROM, based on the Windows XP preboot environment ( www.nu2.nu ). If you build your BartPE disk carefully, you can load it with maintenance and repair tools. You may have to experiment with floppy and hard drive–style formatting of your drive before FlashBoot can make your drive bootable, but we had more success with this program than with most manual techniques. We were able to make all our test drives bootable, though some of our test computers could boot only some combinations of drives and software and not others. In general, the newer the motherboard, the more different combinations of software and USB hardware could be used for booting. An IBM ThinkPad T42 was able to boot from everything we plugged in.

Installing Linux on a USB key isn't a trivial task, but you can find plenty of helpful hints on the Web. For best results, download Damn Small Linux ( www.damnsmalllinux.org ), and proceed in one of two ways: Burn it to a CD, boot it from the CD, and use the right-click Tools menu to install it to a USB drive; or—working entirely within Windows—follow the instructions found at http://fuzzymunchkin.dyndns.org:8080/tdot/usbkeyfob/index.php . Using both methods, we created USB drives that booted on most, but not all, of our test systems.

Friday, September 09, 2005

Leaders Lacking Disaster Experience

'Brain Drain' At Agency Cited

By Spencer S. Hsu

Five of eight top Federal Emergency Management Agency officials came to their posts with virtually no experience in handling disasters and now lead an agency whose ranks of seasoned crisis managers have thinned dramatically since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

FEMA's top three leaders -- Director Michael D. Brown, Chief of Staff Patrick J. Rhode and Deputy Chief of Staff Brooks D. Altshuler -- arrived with ties to President Bush's 2000 campaign or to the White House advance operation, according to the agency. Two other senior operational jobs are filled by a former Republican lieutenant governor of Nebraska and a U.S. Chamber of Commerce official who was once a political operative.

Meanwhile, veterans such as U.S. hurricane specialist Eric Tolbert and World Trade Center disaster managers Laurence W. Zensinger and Bruce P. Baughman -- who led FEMA's offices of response, recovery and preparedness, respectively -- have left since 2003, taking jobs as consultants or state emergency managers, according to current and former officials.

Because of the turnover, three of the five FEMA chiefs for natural-disaster-related operations and nine of 10 regional directors are working in an acting capacity, agency officials said.

Patronage appointments to the crisis-response agency are nothing new to Washington administrations. But inexperience in FEMA's top ranks is emerging as a key concern of local, state and federal leaders as investigators begin to sift through what the government has admitted was a bungled response to Hurricane Katrina.

"FEMA requires strong leadership and experience because state and local governments rely on them," said Trina Sheets, executive director of the National Emergency Management Association. "When you don't have trained, qualified people in those positions, the program suffers as a whole."

Last week's greatest foe was, of course, a storm of such magnitude that it "overwhelmed" all levels of government, according to Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). And several top FEMA officials are well-regarded by state and private counterparts in disaster preparedness and response.

They include Edward G. Buikema, acting director of response since February, and Kenneth O. Burris, acting chief of operations, a career firefighter and former Marietta, Ga., fire chief.

But scorching criticism has been aimed at FEMA, and it starts at the top with Brown, who has admitted to errors in responding to Hurricane Katrina and the flooding in New Orleans. The Oklahoma native, 50, was hired to the agency after a rocky tenure as commissioner of a horse sporting group by former FEMA director Joe M. Allbaugh, the 2000 Bush campaign manager and a college friend of Brown's.

Rhode, Brown's chief of staff, is a former television reporter who came to Washington as advance deputy director for Bush's Austin-based 2000 campaign and then the White House. He joined FEMA in April 2003 after stints at the Commerce Department and the U.S. Small Business Administration.

Altshuler is a former presidential advance man. His predecessor, Scott Morris, was a media strategist for Bush with the Austin firm Maverick Media.

David I. Maurstad, who stepped down as Nebraska lieutenant governor in 2001 to join FEMA, has served as acting director for risk reduction and federal insurance administrator since June 2004. Daniel A. Craig, a onetime political fundraiser and campaign adviser, came to FEMA in 2001 from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he directed the eastern regional office, after working as a lobbyist for the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association.

Department of Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said Brown has managed more than 160 natural disasters as FEMA general counsel and deputy director since 2001, "hands-on experience [that] cannot be understated. Other leadership at FEMA brings particular skill sets -- policy management leadership, for example."

The agency has a deep bench of career professionals, said FEMA spokeswoman Nicol Andrews, including two dozen senior field coordinators and Gil Jamieson, director of the National Incident Management System. "Simply because folks who have left the agency have a disagreement with how it's being run doesn't necessarily indicate that there is a lack of experience leading it," she said.

Andrews said the "acting" designation for regional officials is a designation that signifies that they are FEMA civil servants -- not political appointees.

Touring the wrecked Gulf Coast with Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff yesterday, Vice President Cheney also defended FEMA leaders, saying, "We're always trying to strike the right balance" between political appointees and "career professionals that fill the jobs underneath them."

But experts inside and out of government said a "brain drain" of experienced disaster hands throughout the agency, hastened in part by the appointment of leaders without backgrounds in emergency management, has weakened the agency's ability to respond to natural disasters. Some security experts and congressional critics say the exodus was fueled by a bureaucratic reshuffling in Washington in 2003, when FEMA was stripped of its independent Cabinet-level status and folded into the Department of Homeland Security.

Emergency preparedness has atrophied as a result, some analysts said, extending from Washington to localities.

FEMA "has gone downhill within the department, drained of resources and leadership," said I.M. "Mac" Destler, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. "The crippling of FEMA was one important reason why it failed."

Richard A. Andrews, former emergency services director for the state of California and a member of the president's Homeland Security Advisory Council, said state and local failures were critical in the Katrina response, but competence, funding and political will in Washington were also lacking.

"I do not think fundamentally this is an organizational issue," Andrews said. "You need people in there who have both experience and the confidence of the president, who are able to fight and articulate what FEMA's mission and role is, and who understand how emergency management works."

The agency's troubles are no secret. The Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit group that promotes careers in federal government, ranked FEMA last of 28 agencies studied in 2003.

In its list of best places to work in the government, a 2004 survey by the American Federation of Government Employees found that of 84 career FEMA professionals who responded, only 10 people ranked agency leaders excellent or good.

An additional 28 said the leadership was fair and 33 called it poor.

More than 50 said they would move to another agency if they could remain at the same pay grade, and 67 ranked the agency as poorer since its merger into the Department of Homeland Security.

Wednesday, September 07, 2005

Marvel Gets Cash To Do 10 Films

Marvel has raised $525 million to independently finance 10 movies based on its comics over seven years. The titles named are Captain America, The Avengers, Nick Fury, Black Panther, Ant-Man, Cloak & Dagger, Dr. Strange, Hawkeye, Power Pack and Shang-Chi. The company's also changing its name from Marvel Enterprises to Marvel Entertainment.

Monday, September 05, 2005

Cheat Sheets for Developers

frustratedWhether you're an experienced web developer, or are just starting out, chances are you'll find something useful in Pete Freitag's Cheat Sheet Roundup. Pete's put together links to over 30 cheat sheets for developers, including guides to CSS, PHP, perl and Unix commands. One that I've been using regularly is the HTML entities sheet; I've got a mental block about some of them (I keep typing emdash when I mean mdash), so it's nice to have all of this in one place.

Saturday, September 03, 2005

EFF Releases Music DRM Guide

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently created a plain English guide to several fair use restrictions that major online music services, such as Apple's iTunes, force on their customers via Digital Rights Management (DRM) laden music files and End User License Agreements (EULAs). An excerpt from the guide follows: 'Forget about breaking the DRM to make traditional uses like CD burning and so forth. Breaking the DRM or distributing the tools to break DRM may expose you to liability under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) even if you're not making any illegal uses.' The EFF also lists four alternative music services which sell unrestricted files.

Friday, September 02, 2005

Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can't Index



August 31, 2005 | Issue 41•35

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—Executives at Google, the rapidly growing online-search company that promises to "organize the world's information," announced Monday the latest step in their expansion effort: a far-reaching plan to destroy all the information it is unable to index.

google

CEO Eric Schmidt speaks at Google's California headquarters (below).

"Our users want the world to be as simple, clean, and accessible as the Google home page itself," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt at a press conference held in their corporate offices. "Soon, it will be."

The new project, dubbed Google Purge, will join such popular services as Google Images, Google News, and Google Maps, which catalogs the entire surface of the Earth using high-resolution satellites.

As a part of Purge's first phase, executives will destroy all copyrighted materials that cannot be searched by Google.

"A year ago, Google offered to scan every book on the planet for its Google Print project. Now, they are promising to burn the rest," John Battelle wrote in his widely read "Searchblog." "Thanks to Google Purge, you'll never have to worry that your search has missed some obscure book, because that book will no longer exist. And the same goes for movies, art, and music."

"Book burning is just the beginning," said Google co-founder Larry Page. "This fall, we'll unveil Google Sound, which will record and index all the noise on Earth. Is your baby sleeping soundly? Does your high-school sweetheart still talk about you? Google will have the answers."

Enlarge ImageGoogle 2

Page added: "And thanks to Google Purge, anything our global microphone network can't pick up will be silenced by noise-cancellation machines in low-Earth orbit."

As a part of Phase One operations, Google executives will permanently erase the hard drive of any computer that is not already indexed by the Google Desktop Search.

"We believe that Google Desktop Search is the best way to unlock the information hidden on your hard drive," Schmidt said. "If you haven't given it a try, now's the time. In one week, the deleting begins."

Although Google executives are keeping many details about Google Purge under wraps, some analysts speculate that the categories of information Google will eventually index or destroy include handwritten correspondence, buried fossils, and private thoughts and feelings.

The company's new directive may explain its recent acquisition of Celera Genomics, the company that mapped the human genome, and its buildup of a vast army of laser-equipped robots.

"Google finally has what it needs to catalog the DNA of every organism on Earth," said analyst Imran Kahn of J.P. Morgan Chase. "Of course, some people might not want their DNA indexed. Hence, the robot army. It's crazy, it's brilliant—typical Google."

Google 3

Google executives oversee the first stage of Google Purge.

Google's robot army is rumored to include some 4 million cybernetic search-and-destroy units, each capable of capturing and scanning up to 100 humans per day. Said co-founder Sergey Brin: "The scanning will be relatively painless. Hey, it's Google. It'll be fun to be scanned by a Googlebot. But in the event people resist, the robots are programmed to liquify the brain."

Markets responded favorably to the announcement of Google Purge, with traders bidding up Google's share price by $1.24, to $285.92, in late trading after the announcement. But some critics of the company have found cause for complaint.

"This announcement is a red flag," said Daniel Brandt, founder of Google-Watch.org. "I certainly don't want to accuse of them having bad intentions. But this campaign of destruction and genocide raises some potential privacy concerns."

Brandt also expressed reservations about the company's new motto. Until yesterday's news conference, the company's unofficial slogan had been "Don't be evil." The slogan has now been expanded to "Don't be evil, unless it's necessary for the greater good."

Co-founders Page and Brin dismiss their critics.

"A lot of companies are so worried about short-term reactions that they ignore the long view," Page said. "Not us. Our team is focused on something more than just making money. At Google, we're using technology to make dreams come true."

"Soon," Brin added, "we'll make dreams clickable, or destroy them forever."