I am the first to looks at something that is free and raise an eyebrow. Most of the time, free means junk, but not always. For the last 2 years I have been running Avast Home Edition Anti-virus software on three of my home machines with no problems. Now this software is free for non-commercial & home use, but you must register with Avast each year to keep it free. Registering it not a big issue, and I have not noticed a great increase in my email box since registering with them. Avast has been good at keeping the virus database up to date, and I have noticed that it updates every one to two days (sometimes more). I have not been infected with any viri (viruses) or malware since using the product, and my kids are on the Internet all the time for school. I do periodic checks of my system, just to make sure. Every once and a while someone at my house will hit an objectionable site or get an infected email, but each time Avast pops-up and alerts us to the issue before it becomes a problem.

Overall I can wholely reccomend Avast Home Edition for use. Especially if you have nothing at all. I have seen out there people that are trying to charge for this product, PLEASE make sure that you are getting it for free directly from Avast or Download.com. You have 60 days to try the software before you must register. As I said before, registering has not been an issue thus far.

Don't be caught without virus protection!

While this is cool, I see it being abused in horrible ways. Think corporations who want to know where their employees are during work hours.

BANGALORE (Reuters) - U.S. Internet search company Google Inc released software on Wednesday that allows users of mobile phones and other wireless devices to automatically share their whereabouts with family and friends.

Users in 27 countries will be able to broadcast their location to others constantly, using Google Latitude. Controls allow users to select who receives the information or to go offline at any time, Google said on its Web site.

"Fun aside, we recognize the sensitivity of location data, so we've built fine-grained privacy controls right into the application," Google said in a blog post announcing the service.

"You not only control exactly who gets to see your location, but you also decide the location that they see."

Friends' whereabouts can be tracked on a Google map, either from a handset or from a personal computer.

Google's new service is similar to the service offered by privately-held Loopt.

Companies including Verizon Wireless, owned by Verizon Communications and Vodafone Group Plc, already offer Loopt's service, which also works on iPhone from Apple Inc.

Latitude will work on Research In Motion Ltd's Blackberry and devices running on Symbian S60 devices or Microsoft Corp's Windows Mobile and some T-1 Mobile phones running on Google's Android software.

The software will eventually run on Apple's iPhone and iTouch and many Sony Ericsson devices.

In 2005, Google acquired, but subsequently shut down, a location-finding service that used text messaging to keep mobile phone users aware of their friends' proximity.

(Reporting by Ajay Kamalakaran, editing by Dan Lalor)

Well, it came and it went. The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was a success given the tough economic times. I spent some time there and saw many a wondrous thing. Technology was the order of the day. There were a few things that really stuck out to me that were offered not by the huge corporations, but by smaller companies that are just trying to get by.

CNET Best of Show

I was a bit disappointed by the CNET Best of Show pick. The Palm Pre may have wow'ed them, but really folks its just a phone and more to the point available by only one carrier (one in question I might add). I might have picked say a fuel cell portable generator that runs on salt water, or the gadget that backs up the information on any cell phone, or the new SD XC cards that can hold 2TB of data. But that's just me. Of course, they yawn at that type of stuff.

Windows 7

I got the chance to play with windows 7 at the show, and while a bit faster than the version of vista that I run on my old beater, what impressed me most about windows 7 is how fast it crashes. Now there was no BSOD which is a great improvement, but the fact that now you have a graphical version of the BSOD doesn't really help. Overall, windows 7 does seem to be an improvement over vista, but it is hard to tell since Microsoft chooses to use the biggest and baddest hardware it can find to make windows 7 run well at the show.

Will there be updates? Sure there will. As we put some of the products we saw at CES to the test we will post our opinions from the geek point of view.

Until then...

A segment on 60-minutes on Sunday really bothered me. Must be time to break out the tin foil hat!

The technology that is transforming what once was science fiction into just plain science is a specialized use of MRI scanning called "functional MRI," fMRI for short. It makes it possible to see what's going on inside the brain while people are thinking.

"You know, every time I walk into that scanner room and I see the person's brain appear on the screen, when I see those patterns, it is just incredible, unthinkable," neuroscientist Marcel Just told Stahl.

He calls it "thought identification."

Whatever you want to call it, what Just and his colleague Tom Mitchell at Carnegie Mellon University have done is combine fMRI's ability to look at the brain in action with computer science's new power to sort through massive amounts of data. The goal: to see if they could identify exactly what happens in the brain when people think specific thoughts.

They did an experiment where they asked subjects to think about 10 objects--5 of them tools like screwdriver and hammer, and 5 of them dwellings, like igloo and castle. They then recorded and analyzed the activity in the subjects' brains for each.

"The computer found the place in the brain where that person was thinking 'screwdriver'?" Stahl asked.

"Screwdriver isn't one place in the brain. It's many places in the brain. When you think of a screwdriver, you think about how you hold it, how you twist it, what it looks like, what you use it for," Just explained.

He told Stahl each of those functions are in different places.

When we think "screwdriver" or "igloo" for example, Just says neurons start firing at varying levels of intensity in different areas throughout the brain. "And we found that we could identify which object they were thinking about from their brain activation patterns," he said.

"We're identifying the thought that's occurring. It's...incredible, just incredible," he added.

"Are you saying that if you think of a hammer, that your brain is identical to my brain when I think of a hammer?" Stahl asked.

"Not identical. We have idiosyncrasies. Maybe I've had a bad experience with a hammer and you haven't, but it's close enough to identify each other's thoughts. So, you know, that was never known before," Just explained.

60 Minutes asked if his team was up for a challenge: would they take associate producer Meghan Frank, whose brain had never been scanned before, and see if the computer could identify her thoughts? Just and Mitchell agreed to give it a try and see if they could do it in almost real time.

Just said nobody had ever done an instant analysis like this.

Inside the scanner, Meghan was shown a series of ten items and asked to think for a few seconds about each one.

"If it all comes out right, when she's thinking 'hammer,' the computer will know she's thinking 'hammer'?" Stahl asked.

"Right," Mitchell replied.

Within minutes, the computer, unaware of what pictures Meghan had been shown and working only from her brain activity patterns as read out by the scanner, was ready to tell us, in its own voice, what it believed was the first object Meghan had been thinking about.

The computer correctly analyzed the first three words--knife, hammer, and window, and aced the rest as well.

According to Just, this is just the beginning.

"Who knows what you're gonna be able to read," Stahl commented. "A little scary, actually."

"Well, that's our research program for the next five years," Just said. "To see what, you know--we're not satisfied with "hammer."

And neither are neuroscientists 4,000 miles away in Berlin at the Bernstein Center. John Dylan-Haynes is hard at work there using the scanner not just to identify objects people are thinking about, but to read their intentions.

Subjects were asked to make a simple decision--whether to add or subtract two numbers they would be shown later on. Haynes found he could read directly from the activity in a small part of the brain that controls intentions what they had decided to do.

"This is a kind of blown-up version of the brain activity happening here. And you can see that if a person is planning to add or to subtract, the pattern of brain activity is different in these two cases," Haynes explained.

The future of crime-solving?
"I always tell my students that there is no science fiction anymore. All the science fiction I read in high school, we're doing," Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University in Atlanta, told Stahl.

To Wolpe, the ability to read our thoughts and intentions this way is revolutionary. "Throughout history, we could never actually coerce someone to reveal information. Torture doesn't work that well, persuasion doesn't work that well. The right to keep one's thoughts locked up in their brain is amongst the most fundamental rights of being human."

"You're saying that if someone can read my intentions, we have to talk about who might in the future be able to do that?" Stahl asked.

"Absolutely," he replied. "Whether we're going to let the state do it or whether we're going to let me do it. I have two teenage daughters. I come home one day and my car is dented and both of them say they didn't do it. Am I going to be allowed to drag them off to the local brain imaging lie detection company and get them put in a scanner? We don't know."

But before we've even started the debate, there are two companies already offering lie detection services using brain scans, one with the catchy name "No Lie MRI." But our experts cautioned that the technique is still unproven.

In the meantime, Haynes is working on something he thinks may be even more effective: reading out from your brain exactly where you've been. Haynes showed Stahl an experiment he created out of a video game.

He had Stahl navigate through a series of rooms in different virtual reality houses.

"Now I would put you in a scanner and I would show you some of these scenes that you've seen and some scenes that you haven't seen," he told her.

Stahl recognized the bar. "And right at this moment, we would be able to tell from your brain activity that you've already seen this environment before," Haynes explained.

"And so, this is a potential tool...for the police...in the case of break-ins?" Stahl asked.

"You might be able to tell if someone's been in an al Qaeda training camp before," Haynes replied.

Haynes said while U.S. national security agencies had not been in touch with him, the Germans had.

"So there are people who are considering these kinds of possibilities," Stahl commented.

And some are using them. In India last summer, a woman was convicted of murder after an EEG of her brain allegedly revealed that she was familiar with the circumstances surrounding the poisoning of her ex-fiance.

"Can you through our legal system be forced to take one of these tests?" Stahl asked Paul Root Wolpe.

"It's a great question. And the legal system hasn't decided on this yet," he said.

"But we do have a Fifth Amendment. We don't have to incriminate ourselves," Stahl pointed out.

"Well here's where it gets very interesting, because the Fifth Amendment only prevents the courts from forcing us to testify against ourselves. But you can force me to give DNA or a hair sample or blood even if that would incriminate me. So here's the million dollar question: if you can brain image me and get information directly from my brain, is that testimony? Or is that like DNA, blood, semen, and other things that you could take from me?" Wolpe asked.

"There will be a Supreme Court case about this," he predicted.

For now, it's impossible to force someone to have his or her brain scanned, because the subject has to lie still and cooperate, but that could change.

"There are some other technologies that are being developed that may be able to be used covertly and even remotely. So, for example, they're trying to develop now a beam of light that would be projected onto your forehead. It would go a couple of millimeters into your frontal cortex, and then receptors would get the reflection of that light. And there's some studies that suggest that we could use that as a lie detection device," Wolpe said.

He said we wouldn't know if our brains were being scanned. "If you were sitting there in the airport and being questioned, they could beam that on your forehead without your knowledge. We can't do that yet, but they're working on it."

Scary as that is, imagine a world where companies could read our minds too.

Light beams may be a bit far off, but fMRI scanning is already being used to try to figure out what we want to buy and how to sell it to us. It's a new field called "neuromarketing." One of its pioneers is neuroscientist Gemma Calvert, co-founder of a London company called Neurosense.

Asked if she has a lot of clients, Calvert told Stahl, "Yes, such as Unilever, Intel, McDonald's, Proctor & Gamble, MTV or Viacom."

And she says it's a growing field. "What we've seen is a sort of snowballing effect over the last few years. I think there are about 92 neuromarketing agencies worldwide."

Proceed with caution
But some experts question whether it's ethical to scan the brain for commercial purposes, and say neuromarketers may be promising more than they can really deliver.

"If you image my brain, and you say, 'Ah-ha! Paul craves chocolate chip cookies,' and I say, 'No, I don't,' now are you going to believe the brain over me? You can only do that if you have proven that that part of the brain lighting up means in all cases that that person desires chocolate chip cookies. And what a lot of people are doing is they're just imaging the brain, and then they're declaring what that means, and they're never proving that it actually translates into behavior," Wolpe said.

"You know it's very interesting. When you show someone a brain scan, people just believe it. It just reeks of credibility," Stahl commented.

"Absolutely. Absolutely," John Dylan-Haynes agreed.

"And you telling me, 'That's the area where people add and subtract,' I thought, 'Well, of course. He knows,'" Stahl said.

"But I could have told you anything," he pointed out.

So as brain imaging continues to advance and find its way into the courts, the market, and who knows what other aspects of our lives, one message is: be cautious. Another is to get ready. Back at Carnegie Mellon, Just and Mitchell have already uncovered the signatures in our brains for kindness, hypocrisy, and love.

"It's breathtaking," Stahl said. "And kind of eerie."

"Well, you know, I think the reason people have that reaction is because it reveals the essence of what it means to be a person. All of those kinds of things that define us as human beings are brain patterns," Just replied.

"We don't wanna know that...it all boils down to, I don't know, molecules and things like that," Stahl said.

"But we are, you know, we are biological creatures. You know, our limbs we accept are, you know, muscles and bone. And our brain is a biological thinking machine," he replied.

"Do you think one day, who knows how far into the future, there'll be a machine that'll be able to read very complex thought like 'I hate so-and-so'? Or you know, 'I love the ballet because...'?" Stahl asked.

"Definitely. Definitely," Just said. "And not in 20 years. I think in three, five years."

"In three years?" Stahl asked.

"Well, five," Just replied with a smile.

Produced by Shari Finkelstein