In a bid to win Google's offer of free fiber optic networks, Topeka, Kansas has renamed itself to Google, Kansas for the the month of March.

Recently, Cisco placed the first physical internet router (as opposed to a switch) in space aboard a satellite.

These are two seemingly unrelated things, but I believe they're intrinsically tied. The Internet is at a crossroads right now. Some want governments to step in with a program of "network neutrality" (which is anything but neutral) to force regulation of the telecommunication companies, while others want the telcos to be able to charge consumers for tiered network access.

But the private companies are moving forward anyway. It's important for these innovations to take place in the private arena, where they can avoid being stifled by government largesse. I believe this is better for overall privacy as well, as these companies are much more beholden to consumers than governments ever are to their voters.

And privacy is an important issue in how this plays out. *Cue segue to project* It's an important issue in how our group implements our video recording system. Some people will simply not want to be recorded. So we need a way around that, when we can't really inform people not to record others. One idea that was suggested in group meeting is some sort of image recognition software that blurs a face automatically. Another one was to give some sort of RFID or IR tag to those people and auto detect the wearer of that tag. These are both good ideas and warrant some additional research.