borders

The Bush administration's plan to outfit the U.S.-Mexico border with a "virtual" fence consisting of sensors, cameras, and drone aircraft is running into technical snags.

Federal officials told a congressional committee on Wednesday that the first phase of the project--consisting of about 100 miles near Yuma and Tuscon, Ariz., and El Paso, Texas--won't likely be completed until 2011, about three years later than expected, according to The Washington Post. The task is being overseen by the Department of Homeland Security and has been contracted out to Boeing.

For years, the Bush administration has been heralding … Read more

WASHINGTON--We already know that some aging politicians and bureaucrats are prone to less-than-coherent ramblings about the technological topics that fall within their job descriptions (See: Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, former chairman of the panel overseeing Internet regulation, "The Internet is a series of tubes," July 2006).

You can imagine what goes through their minds: I really need to show the public that I get it. The only problem is that it doesn't always work.

Take an event held Wednesday at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a storied pro-business lobbying group. It was called "RFID Solutions: … Read more

WASHINGTON--A handful of new drones is expected to begin patrolling the nation's northern and southern borders within the next few years.

For the moment, we're not talking swarms, here. But U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials, backed by the Bush administration and some in Congress, are nevertheless hoping to steadily increase the presence of unmanned aerial vehicles aloft in an effort to nab illegal immigrants and drug traffickers more effectively, said Michael Kostelnik, a retired U.S. Air Force official who now serves as assistant commissioner of the CBP's air and marine unit.

For the … Read more

Contrary to popular belief, not all of Japan's R&D goes into robots and Hello Kitty (or so we're told). In fact, it's not even all destined for the consumer market.

NEC, for example, has applied its technological prowess to "the world's first automated border control system that uses facial recognition technology capable of identifying people inside their automobiles," according to Pink Tentacle, and it's already being used at checkpoints between Hong Kong and Shenzhen. The biometrics system was developed to break immigration logjams in China and elsewhere, checking chip-embedded national ID … Read more

GreenBorder Technologies has been acquired by Google.

The acquisition, according to a posting Monday on the Google Operating System blog, should provide the Internet giant with a Web "sandbox" for its users. Basically users could enter the sandbox, search and interact with various Web sites, and leave any viruses they encounter back in the sandbox when they exit.

As it turns out, a couple weeks back GreenBorder customers had been wondering the company's discussion board if something was afoot.

On its Web site, the security software developer noted it would discontinue sales of its GreenBorder Pro products, … Read more

Although China's government has been mired in human rights problems for years, the bureaucrats do know a thing about customer service.

Communist party members have to undergo the "360" review process for promotions, the peer-review system that helps determine promotions at companies like Intel. (The party picked it up from U.S. corporations, Jian Daning, director of the Shanghai Waigaoqiao Free Trade Zone, told us a few years ago).

Want to open a company here? The system for tax breaks for exporters is well mapped-out, and there are several regions offering deals on land in industrial parks. … Read more