TECH WATCH

By MICHAEL BRUNTON, DANIEL EISENBERG AND DAVID S. JACKSON

IN PARLIAMENT, POLITICS BY PAGER

The British government's weekly Question Time has always been a 19th century affair: charming, wooden and occasionally raucous. But last week the hallowed institution got a jolt from the Labour Party's modern arsenal of database and communications weaponry. As Conservative Prime Minister John Major fielded a softball question about the insurance business, a member of Labour's "rebuttal unit" dived into the party's database and identified the questioner as a paid consultant for the insurance industry. The researcher zapped the news via pager to a Labour M.P. sitting in the House of Commons, producing an awkward moment for Major and a revolution in real-time technological politics.

The Tories were not amused. Cell phones were already banned in the chamber because of their disruptive rings, but use of a silent pager presented a whole new issue. And the notion of stiff-lipped British pols beeping and winking their way through the Commons made more than one Conservative M.P. queasy. After mulling the matter over for an evening, Speaker Betty Boothroyd ruled that using the gadgets as an aide-memoire was "totally unacceptable," handing the Tories a victory in battle. But with the general election fast approaching, Labour's rapid response showed its determination to win the war.

THIN BLUE ONLINE

For the sheer voyeuristic pleasure of tracking law enforcement in action, local TV news has nothing on the Internet. Take the bloody, botched Los Angeles robbery attempt that recently turned into a real-life Hollywood chase scene. Instead of just glancing at the familiar chopper footage on the tube, many crime seekers surfed over to PoliceScanner.com a Website with real-time audio from police radio, including the Dallas and L.A. cops. The result: a sort of gruesome copspeak play-by-play to accompany the TV spectacle. Even the site's more mundane offerings--including lost kittens and traffic stops--attract some 10,000 daily visitors, each eager to take a byte out of crime.

NEW FOR PHONES: CALL RATING

After years of confounding customers with a tsunami of new rates, packages and plans, big telephone companies like AT&T and MCI may have finally met their match: PhoneMiser. The palm-size PC adapter, below, links a personal computer to your telephone line and then uses software to calculate which of dozens of carriers offers the best deal at any given moment. All your phones on one line (and fax machines and Internet connections) can be simultaneously tied in to the program, which takes about a second to find the cheapest alternative and place the call. The system, due out this summer from Bedford, Massachusetts-based MediaCom www.phonemiser.com) should cost less than $100, plus a $4.95 monthly fee to keep the software constantly updated (the various calls are charged to one credit card). If company founder Robert Pokress is correct that it can save as much as 66% on the average phone bill, this is one computer product that should quickly pay for itself.