As long as it is not done “maliciously, or to an excessive extent, or with resulting injury,” Niagara County, NY Judge Sara Sheldon Sperrazza ruled that using a Taser to obtain a DNA sample is legally valid.

In the case of one Ryan S. Smith, accused of shooting and a gas station robbery:

Smith was handcuffed and sitting on the floor of Niagara Falls Police Headquarters when he was zapped with the 50,000- volt electronic stun gun after he insisted he would not give a DNA sample.

He already had given a sample, a swab of the inside of his cheek, without protest the previous month. But police sent it to the wrong lab, where it was opened and spoiled. Prosecutors who had obtained a court order for the first sample went back to Sperrazza, who signed another order without consulting the defense.

To be fair, Sperrazza cited several precedents of her own to justify the ruling—including one case in Wyoming where it was deemed legal for the police to Taser a suspect to force him to open his hand for a search. The state’s own Criminal Procedure Law also states that the use of reasonable force is legal to carry out a court order. Is refusing to give up a DNA sample on the same level as being violent? That is to say, should it be a Taserable offence? [Buffalo News via HardOCP Image via Flickr]

As an American who has lived in the UK for four years now, let me tell you: this is a good thing. The BBC produces a ton of channels and a wide variety of content, the best of which never seems to make its way to BBC America, which actually shows content from second and third tier British networks as much as it does actual BBC program(me)s. Plus, trade balance! Any American version would have to add advertising to the Beeb’s generally untainted Broadcasts, but hell, we’re used to that. [Telegraph]

Cnet says that hundreds of critical hospital devices across the U.S. have been infected by the Conficker worm. The number of hospitals affected wasn’t disclosed, but the problem isn’t thought to be widespread.

Cybersecurity expert Marcus Sachs broke the news at a security conference in San Francisco, raising the question of what would happen if this were to happen to millions of machines in the medical industry. According to sachs, the devices affected were hospital computers and devices used to control critical equipment, such as heart monitors and MRI machines.

No one is quite sure how the computers acquired the worms to begin with, but most of the Windows 2000/NT machines were to old to benefit from Microsoft’s October patch which fixed many of the vulnerabilities Conficker preyed on. [Cnet via Slashdot]

At a lobbying dinner hosted by the MPAA, Vice President Joe Biden chastised piracy as “pure theft” and assured the MPAA that President Obama’s administration will find the right person for the intellectual property czar.

Showing favour towards the MPAA, President Obama also appointed Jon Leibowitz—former vice president of congressional affairs of the MPAA—as the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission earlier this year. As you may recall, former president Bush signed a bill last October, creating the intellectual property czar position to lead the fight against piracy and intellectual property violations. [ArsTechnica]

Apple, the best-ranked hardware manufacturer, ranked 23rd on the list out of 113, which is fine, but nothing to write home about. HP and Compaq took the 72nd and 74th spots, respectively, and Dell was ranked all the way down at number 93. The study’s author suspects Microsoft may be at fault for the PC manufacturers’ low scores, though to be fair, this seems to be drawn from the “Ease of Use” rubric, which could refer either to hardware or software.

None of the hardware manufacturers came close to the top, however. Even Apple barely made it into the “Good” category, whereas retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble easily scored “Excellent.”

Wireless and internet service providers scored painfully low. Charter Communications, an ISP, ranked last out of the whole group, and both Comcast and Verizon ranked in the bottom third. On the wireless side, AT&T and Verizon were crushed by, surprise surprise, Alltel and T-Mobile. But even Alltel only hit number 48. Check out the basic list below. [CNN]

WEEKLY ADDRESS: President Obama Discusses Efforts to Reform Spending, Government Waste; Names Chief Performance Officer and Chief Technology Officer

WASHINGTON – In his weekly address, President Barack Obama announced that Jeffrey Zients, a CEO, management consultant and entrepreneur, will join the administration as the Chief Performance Officer, and that Aneesh Chopra, Virginia’s Secretary of Technology, will serve as the Chief Technology Officer. Zients will also serve as Deputy Director for Management of the Office of Management and Budget. He will work to streamline processes, cut costs, and find the best practices throughout the government. As Chief Technology Officer, Chopra will promote technological innovation to help the country meet its goals from job creation, to reducing health care costs, to protecting the homeland. Together with Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, they will help give all Americans a government that is effective, efficient, and transparent.

President Obama announced his appointments of the following individuals today:

Jeffrey D. Zients
Zients has twenty years of business experience as a CEO, management consultant and entrepreneur with a deep understanding of business strategy, process reengineering and financial management. He served as CEO and Chairman of the Advisory Board Company and Chairman of the Corporate Executive Board. These firms are leading providers of performance benchmarks and best practices across a wide range of industries. Currently, he is the Founder and Managing Partner of Portfolio Logic, an investment firm focused primarily on business and healthcare service companies.

Aneesh Paul Chopra
Chopra serves as Virginia’s Secretary of Technology. He leads the Commonwealth’s strategy to effectively leverage technology in government reform, to promote Virginia’s innovation agenda, and to foster technology-related economic development. Previously, he worked as Managing Director with the Advisory Board Company, leading the firm’s Financial Leadership Council and the Working Council for Health Plan Executives.

Obama’s right-hand goon, Joe Biden, unveiled the administration’s plans for high-speed rail all across the country today, showing off a seriously impressive map that adds lines connecting cities all over the country.

Of course, this is all going to take time and a whole lot of money. The first line that’s likely to go in, thanks to its advanced state of planning, is the California section, which hopes to link up its major cities with a 320kph rail line sometime in the next decade.

What’s unclear is how all of this will be paid for. After all, the current stimulus package has $US8 billion marked for high-speed rail projects. Sounds like a lot until you learn that the CA section alone will cost somewhere around $US40 billion.

But still, in the long run the benefits of a reliable, fast rail system connecting major cities is clear. I hope they’re able to make this happen. [WhiteHouse.gov and The Economist]

Wired’s Ryan Singel says the FCC is taking input from average Joes (but probably not plumbers), public interest groups and telecommunication corporations. So far, Obama has dished out 7.2 billion in grants, bogged down in vague stipulations like only being used for “under-served” areas.

But fingers are crossed that the FCC will hammer out this net neutrality plan and roll out a network as powerful as our foreign counterparts, much like Australia did this week. Singel mentioned they rolled out a $US31 billion plan to provide 100mbps broadband internet that can reach to all citizens. C’mon, FCC! [Wired]

AU: Obviously this one’s all US, but it’s interesting to see the performance of the next generation of wireless technologies – NB

It’s hard to conceive of harnessing that much bandwidth wirelessly while sitting outside a shopping centre, enjoying an unseasonably warm March day. It’s almost a joke, being able to watch Jon Stewart ream Jim Cramer—streamed via Hulu—while sitting in the backseat of a Lincoln Navigator doing 60 on the freeway. Having reviewed gadgets for almost a decade, I sometimes have to fake excitement that I may not truly feel in my loins. But this is different—real, honest-to-God wireless broadband made me freakin’ giddy, even if it didn’t deliver peak speeds at every spot where I parked.

If most of what we review is a chunk of the present, WiMax is from the future. Thankfully, it’s the near future.

The Test
Clearwire is a wireless data service now majority owned by Sprint (but with Comcast and others holding stakes). Currently it’s got the Clear WiMax service in both Portland and Baltimore. In Portland, it sells mobile and home modems that can pull down up to 4Mbps, but you know from reading Giz Explains that WiMax is already capable of a lot more: It’s the first 4G network that’s actually up and running in the US.

Clearwire gave me a chance to see what WiMax was like without any throttling: I got a USB dongle that could pull down whatever was out there. That turned out to be, in some places, nearly 13Mbps downstream—the current speed of your typical cable modem, and about 10 times what wired broadband delivered just a few years back.

I trekked around Portland, OR for a couple of days, testing the boundaries of the WiMax network, and spot testing in different locations around town to see what I got. I used the Motorola USBw25100 WiMax dongle, connected directly to a very sweet, very pimped-out HP Pavilion dv4 notebook that I borrowed for the occasion. (At the moment, there’s no Mac driver for the WiMax modem, but as you can imagine that’s in the works.)

As a helpful comparison, I used a 3G dongle from Verizon Wireless. I want to be clear that this isn’t to be read as a test of Verizon’s Portland network. However, that little USB modem held its own amazingly well, 3G beating 4G on a few occasions—at one point reaching a top speed of 3.3Mbps—so good on you, Verizon!

The tests were fairly simple, and resembled the ones we used for our Coast-to-Coast 3G Test last fall. I ran the Speakeasy Speed Test a minimum of five times in each location with each connection, then averaged those results. I loaded a very heavy page—the Wikimedia Commons Hubble Images page—at least five times, timing the pageload with the YSlow plug-in for Firefox. And I pinged local servers in three sets of 10 to determine latency. I chose locations based on their overall geographic variety, throwing in some locations that just made sense for me to visit, like my in-laws, and the family of my buddy Tom.

Here are the locations, neatly marked on the map, followed by a chart of test results:

View Larger Map

Hot Spots and Cold Spots
As you can see, though I got the kind of awesomeness that blisters during three of my stops, I saw some mediocrity in three more, and in one location, smack in the centre of town, I got nothing at all. When I checked with Clearwire, they not surprisingly told me I had accidentally chosen four locations that were slated for improved coverage, the two downtown locations set to get lit up in the coming months.

The up side of the experience was exciting enough that the downside didn’t bash my spirits. You’ll notice in the chart that even when the connection wasn’t that great, latency tended to stay low, and even when the connection was shabby, the download speeds tended to stay at or above 3G levels. I mean, before now, when was 1.2Mbps wireless considered a bad thing? Uploads were consistently just below 2Mbps—a far cry from the 10Mbps I can get with hard-wired cable, but pretty much on par with 3G.

Clearwire has to lease all of its cell towers just like any other wireless carrier, and not having a legacy network in place does keep it from automatically having a tower everywhere it’s needed. Also, the fact that WiMax runs in the 2.5GHz band points to a need for more towers. 3G is in the 1.8 to 2.1GHz, and the proposed LTE operates in the 700MHz spectrum. Though WiMax’s higher frequency may guarantee a more stronger signal closer in, it also has shorter range with the same power. WiMax doesn’t feel like Wi-Fi—it can handle smooth handoffs from tower to tower at high speeds—but the Clearwire coverage map of Portland does look a bit like a tightly packed collection of hotspots.

This can be good news: Clearwire knows every inch of the city, and can look up any customer’s home, workplace or favourite hangout to see if getting the service even makes sense. But it also means that if you’re not covered—depending on how a school board votes about what happens on their rooftops, or what the local port authority has to say about radio antennas—it may be a while before that changes.

Rockin’ Down the Highway
Like most carriers, Clearwire takes advantage the many tall cell towers that line the highway, meaning you get WiMax’s sick bandwidth pretty much unbroken as you fly down the road at 60 or 70 miles per hour. In the following video—in 90 quick seconds—you’ll see the following:
• Speakeasy speedtest showing roughly 13Mbps at 60 miles per hour
• Skype voice call (sorry we didn’t do a video conference)
• Slingbox video that’s being uploaded via WiMax at Clearwire’s office, and downloaded via WiMax in the car
• Hulu, where we load up and begin watching a full-screen episode of The Daily Show, at 70 miles per hour

In Summary:

It’s easy to reach download speeds that are four times the peak of today’s best 3G networks

Power demand does not seem to be any greater than other wireless connections

Most available Clear services now are capped at 4Mbps, though uncapped plans may be available sometime this year

Only a handful of cities will have this service in 2009, with more to come in 2010

Wide fluctuations in bandwidth feel weird: 12Mbps upside makes 3Mbps feel like a disappointing trickle

Within Portland’s city limits, there were plenty of dead zones that will hopefully be filled in soon

[More information on Clearwire service]