"As U.S. airports begin installing face-recognition systems to thwart terrorism in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, civil rights activists are rushing to decry the technology as ineffective and invasive." [CNet]

RoboGames (formerly called Robolympics) in San Francisco gives machines a chance to show their stuff in contests from sumo to soccer. An article by Richard Shim.

Clear Methods says XML programming must be simplified, so it created Water, a general-purpose language that can replace the many languages programmers need to master to produce Web services. [CNET News.com]

News story with a few links. CNET News.com.

By Stephen Shankland. Sun Microsystems is scaling back its Jini software intended to network everything from kitchen appliances to cell phones, adding a stripped-down version more likely to work on today's gadgets.

By Mark Driver, Gartner Analyst. Transformational leaps in network computing never occur at blink-of-an-eye speeds. The much-ballyhooed Java Jini software is a case in point.

Marc Fleury explains his vision for JBoss software, which he says will displace commercial Java server software faster than Linux is replacing more entrenched OSs. [ZDNet UK]

CNet article.

Java inventor James Gosling says he isn't losing much sleep over Microsoft these days, despite the software giant's effort to stem Java's popularity with its own Java-like language.

CNet blog on the intersection of information technology with (primarily US) politics and law.