Web sites and a broad sweep of electronic databases are being targeted by the military for a vast surveillance project aimed at detecting incidents of bio-terrorism before it's too late. The project is applauded by people toiling against bio-terrorism, but privacy advocates, while not condemnatory in this early stage of the research, warn against building a system that is overly intrusive.
In a move that blends decentralized networks with the massively parallel architecture of supercomputers, several distributed-computing ventures are rapidly developing software and services that will tap the unused resources of Internet-connected PCs to solve computationally intensive tasks. These companies envision massive "computing grids" of thousands of computers, collectively a big brain that will be the foundation for a new class of dynamic Net applications.