Early rumors
may have hinted that Apple had a fully integrated smart home up its
sleeve. But after today's WWDC, we know that's not the case. And it's
unclear what developers are going to do with Apple's HomeKit,
a piecemeal tease that implies you'll soon be able to control your
smart toaster with your iPhone. But in the meantime, we have this Microsoft concept video from circa 1999, showing the amazing interconnected smart home of tomorrow.
The video shows things like the ability to scan a carton of eggs to
automatically add them to a shopping list. Even throwing away an item
allows your smart trash can to remind your home computer system that you
may need to order that item soon. Many of these technologies actually
have come to pass, in one way or another, like Amazon's trial of their Dash magic wand.
But again, it's a far cry from the fully integrated smart home INTERNET
OF THINGS OMG THIS IS THE FUTURE OF THE HOUSE we've been promised for so
very long.
Image: Screenshot from the circa 1999 concept video by Microsoft
ComputedBy - The idea to share a WiFi access point is far to be a new one (it is obviously as old as the technology of the WiFi access point itself), but previous solutions were not addressing many issues (including the legal ones) that this proposal seems finally to consider seriously. This may really succeed in transforming a ridiculously endless utopia in something tangible!
Now, Internet providers (including mobile networks) may have a word to say about that. Just by changing their terms of service they can just make this practice illegal... as business does not rhyme with effectiveness (yes, I know, that is strange!!...) neither with objectivity. It took some time but geographical boundaries were raised up over the Internet (which is somehow a as impressive as ridiculous achievement when you think about it), so I'm pretty sure 'they' can find a work around to make this idea not possible or put their hands over it.
We’ve often heard security folks explain their belief that one of the
best ways to protect Web privacy and security on one's home turf is to
lock down one's private Wi-Fi network with a strong password. But a
coalition of advocacy organizations is calling such conventional wisdom
into question.
Members of the “Open Wireless Movement,” including the Electronic
Frontier Foundation (EFF), Free Press, Mozilla, and Fight for the Future
are advocating that we open up our Wi-Fi private networks (or at least a
small slice of our available bandwidth) to strangers. They claim that
such a random act of kindness can actually make us safer online while
simultaneously facilitating a better allocation of finite broadband
resources.
The OpenWireless.org website
explains the group’s initiative. “We are aiming to build technologies
that would make it easy for Internet subscribers to portion off their
wireless networks for guests and the public while maintaining security,
protecting privacy, and preserving quality of access," its mission
statement reads. "And we are working to debunk myths (and confront
truths) about open wireless while creating technologies and legal
precedent to ensure it is safe, private, and legal to open your
network.”
One such technology, which EFF plans to unveil at the Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE X) conference
next month, is open-sourced router firmware called Open Wireless
Router. This firmware would enable individuals to share a portion of
their Wi-Fi networks with anyone nearby, password-free, as Adi Kamdar, an EFF activist, told Ars on Friday.
Home network sharing tools are not new,
and the EFF has been touting the benefits of open-sourcing Web
connections for years, but Kamdar believes this new tool marks the
second phase in the open wireless initiative. Unlike previous tools, he
claims, EFF’s software will be free for all, will not require any sort
of registration, and will actually make surfing the Web safer and more
efficient.
Open Wi-Fi initiative members have argued that the act of
providing wireless networks to others is a form of “basic politeness…
like providing heat and electricity, or a hot cup of tea” to a neighbor,
as security expert Bruce Schneier described it.
Walled off
Kamdar said that the new firmware utilizes smart technologies that
prioritize the network owner's traffic over others', so good samaritans
won't have to wait for Netflix to load because of strangers using their
home networks. What's more, he said, "every connection is walled off
from all other connections," so as to decrease the risk of unwanted
snooping.
Additionally, EFF hopes that opening one’s Wi-Fi network will, in the
long run, make it more difficult to tie an IP address to an individual.
“From a legal perspective, we have been trying to tackle this idea
that law enforcement and certain bad plaintiffs have been pushing, that
your IP address is tied to your identity. Your identity is not your IP
address. You shouldn't be targeted by a copyright troll just because
they know your IP address," said Kamdar.
This isn’t an abstract problem, either. Consider the case
of the Californian who, after allowing a friend access to his home
Wi-Fi network, found his home turned inside-out by police officers
asking tough questions about child pornography. The man later learned
that his houseguest had downloaded illicit materials, thus subjecting
the homeowner to police interrogation. Should a critical mass begin to
open private networks to strangers, the practice of
correlating individuals with IP addresses would prove increasingly
difficult and therefore might be reduced.
While the EFF firmware will initially be compatible with only one
specific router, the organization would like to eventually make it
compatible with other routers and even, perhaps, develop its own router.
“We noticed that router software, in general, is pretty insecure and
inefficient," Kamdar said. “There are a few major players in the router
space. Even though various flaws have been exposed, there have not been
many fixes.”
User interfaces present one of the most interesting quandaries of
modern computing: we’ve moved from big monitors and keyboards to
touchscreens, but now we’re heading into a world of connected everyday
objects and wearable computing — how will we interact with those?
Metaio, the German augmented reality outfit, has an idea.
Augmented reality (AR) involves overlaying virtual imagery and
information on top of the real world — you may be familiar with the
concept of viewing a magazine page through your phone’s camera and
seeing a static ad come to life. Metaio has come up with a way of
creating a user interface on pretty much any surface, by combining
traditional camera-driven AR with thermal imaging.
Essentially, what Metaio is demonstrating with its new “Thermal
Touch” interface concept is an alternative to what a touchscreen does
when you touch it — there, capacitive sensors
know you’ve touched a certain part because they can sense the
electrical charge in your finger; here, an infrared camera senses the
residual heat left by your finger. So, for example, you could use smart
glass to view a virtual chess board on an empty table, then actually
play chess on it:
“Our R&D department had a few thermal cameras that they’d just
received and kind of on a whim they started playing around,” Metaio
spokesman Trak Lord told me. “One researcher noticed that every time he
touched something, it left a very visible heat signature imprint.”
To be clear, a normal camera can do a lot of tracking if it has
sufficiently powerful brains behind it – some of the theoretical
applications shown off by Metaio on Thursday may be partly achievable
without yet another sensor for your tablet or smart glass or whatever.
But there’s a limit to what normal cameras can do when it comes to
tracking interaction with three-dimensional surfaces. As Lord put it,
“the thermal camera adds another dimension of understanding. If you have
a [normal] camera it’s not as precise. The thermal imaging camera can
very clearly see where exactly you’re touching.”
Metaio has a bunch of fascinating use cases to hand: security keypads
that only the user can see; newspaper ads with clickable links;
interactive car manuals that show you what you need to know about a
component when you touch it. But right now this is just R&D – nobody
is putting thermal imaging cameras into their smartphones and wearables
just yet, and Lord reckons it will take at least 5 years before this
sort of thing comes to market, if it ever does.
For now, this is the equipment needed to realize the concept:
Still, when modern mobile devices are already packing tons of
sensors, why not throw in another if it can turn anything into a user
interface? Here’s Metaio’s video, showing what Thermal Touch could do:
Kleiner Perkins investor Mary Meeker's annual presentation on internet trends
is always worth reading in full, which you can do below. But one chart
in her new report particularly caught our eye because it's all about
glass.
As we've argued,
media are best understood as a competition for attention on
glass-panelled devices connected to the internet. Phones, tablets, PCs,
television sets—it's all just glass. But, of course, it does matter what
kinds of glass are attracting more attention.
Meeker's
chart breaks that down nicely‚ with the added benefit of explaining
that the situation varies widely across countries. The US and UK, for
instance, are quite different from Vietnam and Saudi Arabia. Or even
just looking at Indonesia and the Philippines, which spend the most time
staring at screens, provides an interesting comparison.
Not very often do you read something online that gives you the chills. Today, I read two such things.
The first came from former Gizmodo, Buzzfeed and now Awl writer John Herrman, who wrote about the brutality of the mobile social (or for sake of discussion ‘fourth’) Internet:
“Metafilter came from two or three internets ago, when a
website’s core audience—people showing up there every day or every week,
directly—was its main source of visitors. Google might bless a site
with new visitors or take them away.
Either way, it was still possible for a site’s fundamentals to be
strong, independent of extremely large outside referrers. What’s so
disconcerting now is that the new sources of readership, the apps and
sites people check every day and which lead people to new posts and
stories, make up a majority of readership, and they’re utterly
unpredictable (they’re also bigger, always bigger, every new internet
is.)”
This broke my heart. In 2008, two Internets ago, Metafilter was my favorite site. It was where I went to find out what the next Star Wars Kid would be, or to find precious baby animal videos to show my cool boyfriend or even more intellectual fare. And now it’s as endangered as the sneezing pandas I first discovered there.
National Internet treasures like Metafilter (or TechCrunch
for that matter) should never die. There should be some Internet
Preservation Society filled with individuals like Herrman or Marc
Andreessen or Mark Zuckerberg or Andy Baio whose sole purpose is to keep them alive.
But there isn’t. Herrman makes a very good point; Useful places to
find information, that aren’t some strange Pavlovian manipulation of the
human desire to click or identify, just aren’t good business these
days.
And Herrman should know, he’s worked in every new media outlet under
the web, including the one that AP staffers are now so desperate to join
that they make mistakes like this.
The fourth Internet is scary like Darwinism, brutal enough to remind
me of high school. It’s a game of identity where you either make people
feel like members of some exclusive club, like The Information
does with a pricy subscription model or all niche tech sites do with
their relatively high CPM, or you straight up play up to reader
narcissism like Buzzfeed does, slicing and dicing user identity until
you end up with “21 Problems Only People With Baby Faces Will Understand.”
Which brings me to the thing I read today which truly scared the shit out of me. Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti, though his LinkedIn is completely bereft of it in favor of MIT, was apparently an undergrad at UC Santa Cruz in the late 90s.
Right after graduation in 1996, he wrote a paper
about identity and capitalism in post-modern times, which tl:dr
postulated that neo-capitalism needs to get someone to identify with its
ideals before it could sell its wares.
(Aside: If you think you are immune to capitalistic entreaties, because you read Adbusters and are a Culture Jammer,
you’re not. Think of it this way: What is actually wrong with being
chubby? But how hard do modern ads try to tell you that this — which is
arguably the Western norm — is somehow not okay.)
The thesis Peretti put forth in his paper is basically the blueprint for Buzzfeed, which increasingly has made itself All About You. Whether you’re an Armenian immigrant, or an Iggy Azaelia fan or
a person born in the 2000s, 1990s or 80s, you will identify with
Buzzfeed, because its business model (and the entire fourth Internet’s )
depends on it.
“The way this identification
will happen is through images and video, through ‘visual culture.’
Presumably, in this late capitalist world, someone who creates a website
that can use pictures and GIFs and videos to form hundreds if not
thousands of new identities for people to latch onto will become very
successful!”
More than anything else in the pantheon of modern writing or as the
kids call it, content creation, Buzzfeed aims to be hyper-relatable,
through visuals! It hopes it can define your exact identity, because
only then will you share its URL on Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr as
some sort of badge of your own uniqueness, immortality.
If the first Internet was “Getting information online,” the second
was “Getting the information organized” and the third was “Getting
everyone connected” the fourth is definitely “Get mine.” Which is a
trap.
Which Cog In The Digital Capitalist Machine Are You?
Next week at the World Cup, a
paralyzed volunteer from the Association for Assistance to Disabled
Children will walk onto the field and open the tournament with a
ceremonial kick. This modern miracle is made possible by a robotic
exoskeleton that will move the user's limbs, taking commands directly
from his or her thoughts.
This demonstration is the debut of the Walk Again Project,
a consortium of more than 150 scientists and engineers from around the
globe who have come together to show off recent advances in the field of
brain machine interfaces, or BMI. The paralyzed person inside will be
wearing an electroencephalographic (EEG) headset that records brainwave
activity. A backpack computer will translate those electrical signals
into commands the exoskeleton can understand. As the robotic frame
moves, it also sends its own signals back to the body, restoring not
just the ability to walk, but the sensation as well.
Just how well the wearer will walk and kick are uncertain. The project has been criticized by other neuroscientists as an exploitative spectacle that uses the disabled to promote research which may not be the best path
for restoring health to paralyzed patients. And just weeks before the
project is set to debut on television to hundreds of millions of fans,
it still hasn’t been tested outdoors and awaits some final pieces and
construction. It's not even clear which of the eight people from the
study will be the one inside the suit.
The point of the project is not
to show finished research, however, or sell a particular technology.
The Walk Again Project is meant primarily to inspire. It's a
demonstration that we’re on the threshold of achieving science fiction:
technologies that will allow humans to truly step into the cyborg era.
It’s only taken a little over two centuries to get there.
The past
Scientists have been studying
the way electricity interacts with our biology since 1780, when Luigi
Galvani made the legs of a dead frog dance by zapping them with a spark,
but the modern history behind the technology that allows our brains to
talk directly to machines goes back to the 1950s and John Lilly. He
implanted several hundred electrodes into different parts of a monkey’s
brain and used these implants to apply shocks, causing different body
parts to move. A decade later in 1963, professor Jose Delgado of Yale
tested this theory again like a true Spaniard, stepping into the ring to
face a charging bull, which he stopped in its tracks with a zap to the brain.
In 1969, professor Eberhard Fetz was able to isolate and record the
firing of a single neuron onto a microelectrode he had implanted into
the brain of a monkey. Fetz learned that primates could actually tune
their brain activity to better interact with the implanted machine. He
rewarded them with banana pellets every time they triggered the
microelectrode, and the primates quickly improved in their ability to
activate this specific section of their brain. This was a critical
observation, demonstrating brain’s unique plasticity, its ability to
create fresh pathways to fit a new language.
Today, BMI research has
advanced to not only record the neurons firing in primates’ brains, but
to understand what actions the firing of those neurons represent. "I
spend my life chasing the storms that emanate from the hundreds of
billions of cells that inhabit our brains," explained Miguel Nicolelis, PhD, one of the founders of Center for Neuroengineering
at Duke University and the driving force behind the Walk Again Project.
"What we want to do is listen to these brain symphonies and try to
extract them from the messages they carry."
Nicolelis and his colleagues at
Duke were able to record brain activity and match it to actions. From
there they could translate that brain activity into instructions a
computer could understand. Beginning in the year 2000, Nicolelis and
his colleagues at Duke made a series of breakthroughs. In the most well
known, they implanted a monkey with an array of microelectrodes that
could record the firing of clusters of neurons in different parts of the
brain. The monkey stood on a treadmill and began to walk. On the other
side of the planet, a robot in Japan received the signal emanating from
the primate’s brain and began to walk.
Primates
in the Duke lab learned to control robotic arms using only their
thoughts. And like in the early experiments done by Fetz, the primates
showed a striking ability to improve the control of these new limbs.
"The brain is a remarkable instrument," says professor Craig Henriquez,
who helped to found the Duke lab. "It has the ability to rewire itself,
to create new connections. That’s what gives the BMI paradigm its power.
You are not limited just by what you can physically engineer, because
the brain evolves to better suit the interface."
The present
After his success with
primates, Nicolelis was eager to apply the advances in BMI to people.
But there were some big challenges in the transition from lab animals to
human patients, namely that many people weren’t willing to undergo
invasive brain surgery for the purposes of clinical research. "There is
an open question of whether you need to have implants to get really fine
grained control," says Henriquez. The Walk Again Project hopes to
answer that question, at least partially. While it is based on research
in animals that required surgery, it will be using only external EEG
headsets to gather brain activity.
The fact that these patients
were paralyzed presented another challenge. Unlike the lab monkeys, who
could move their own arms and observe how the robot arm moved in
response, these participants can’t move their legs, or for many, really
remember the subconscious thought process that takes place when you want
to travel by putting one foot in front of the other. The first step was
building up the pathways in the brain that would send mental commands
to the BMI to restore locomotion.
To train the patients in this
new way of thinking about movement, researchers turned to virtual
reality. Each subject was given an EEG headset and an Oculus Rift.
Inside the head-mounted display, the subjects saw a virtual avatar of
themselves from the waist down. When they thought about walking, the
avatar legs walked, and this helped the brain to build new connections
geared towards controlling the exoskeleton. "We also simulate the
stadium, and the roar of the crowd," says Regis Kopper, who runs Duke’s
VR lab. "To help them prepare for the stress of the big day."
Once
the VR training had established a baseline for sending commands to the
legs, there was a second hurdle. Much of walking happens at the level of
reflex, and without the peripheral nervous system that helps people
balance, coordinate, and adjust to the terrain, walking can be a very
challenging task. That’s why even the most advanced robots have trouble navigating stairs
or narrow hallways that would seem simple to humans. If the patients
were going to successfully walk or kick a ball, it wasn’t enough that
they be able to move the exoskeleton’s legs — they had to feel them as
well.
The breakthrough was a special
shirt with vibrating pads on its forearm. As the robot walked, the
contact of its heel and toe on the ground made corresponding sensations
occur along parts of the right and left arms. "The brain essentially
remapped one part of the body onto another," says Henriquez. "This
restored what we call proprioception, the spacial awareness humans need
for walking."
In recent weeks all eight of
the test subjects have successfully walked using the exoskeleton, with
one completing an astonishing 132 steps. The plan is to have the
volunteer who works best with the exoskeleton perform the opening kick.
But the success of the very public demonstration is still up in the air.
The suit hasn’t been completely finished and it has yet to be tested in
an outdoor environment. The group won't confirm who exactly will be
wearing the suit. Nicolelis, for his part, isn’t worried. Asked when he
thought the entire apparatus would be ready, he replied: "Thirty minutes
before."
The future
The Walk Again project may be
the most high-profile example of BMI, but there have been a string of
breakthrough applications in recent years. A patient at the University of Pittsburgh
achieved unprecedented levels of fine motor control with a robotic arm
controlled by brain activity. The Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago
introduced the world’s first mind controlled prosthetic leg. For now the use of advanced BMI technologies is largely confined to academic and medical research, but some projects, like DARPA’s Deka arm,
have received FDA approval and are beginning to move into the real
world. As it improves in capability and comes down in cost, BMI may
open the door to a world of human enhancement that would see people
merging with machines, not to restore lost capabilities, but to augment
their own abilities with cyborg power-ups.
"From the standpoint of
defense, we have a lot of good reasons to do it," says Alan Rudolph, a
former DARPA scientist and Walk Again Project member. Rudolph, for
example, worked on the Big Dog,
and says BMI may allow human pilots to control mechanical units with
their minds, giving them the ability to navigate uncertain or dynamic
terrain in a way that has so far been impossible while keeping soldiers
out of harms way. Our thoughts might control a robot on the surface of
Mars or a microsurgical bot navigating the inside of the human body.
There is a subculture of DIY biohackers and grinders
who are eager to begin adopting cyborg technology and who are willing,
at least in theory, to amputate functional limbs if it’s possible to
replace them with stronger, more functional, mechanical ones. "I know
what the limits of the human body are like," says Tim Sarver, a member
of the Pittsburgh biohacker collective Grindhouse Wetwares. "Once you’ve
seen the capabilities of a 5000psi hydraulic system, it’s no
comparison."
For now, this sci-fi vision
all starts with a single kick on the World Cup pitch, but our inevitable
cyborg future is indeed coming. A recent demonstration
at the University of Washington enabled one person’s thoughts to
control the movements of another person’s body — a brain-to-brain
interface — and it holds the key to BMI’s most promising potential
application. "In this futuristic scenario, voluntary electrical brain
waves, the biological alphabet that underlies human thinking, will
maneuver large and small robots, control airships from afar," wrote
Nicolelis. "And perhaps even allow for the sharing of thoughts and
sensations with one individual to another."
Following
broad security scares like that caused by the Heartbleed bug, it can be
frustratingly difficult to find out if a site you use often still has
gaping flaws. But a little known community of software developers is
trying to change that, by creating a searchable, public index of
websites with known security issues.
Think of Project Un1c0rn as
a Google for site security. Launched on May 15th, the site's creators
say that so far it has indexed 59,000 websites and counting. The goal,
according to its founders, is to document open leaks caused by the
Heartbleed bug, as well as "access to users' databases" in Mongo DB and
MySQL.
According
to the developers, those three types of vulnerabilities are most
widespread because they rely on commonly used tools. For example, Mongo
databases are used by popular sites like LinkedIn, Expedia, and
SourceForge, while MySQL powers applications such as WordPress, Drupal
or Joomla, and are even used by Twitter, Google and Facebook.
Having
a website’s vulnerability indexed publicly is like advertising that you
leave your front doors unlocked and your flat screen in the basement.
But Un1c0rn’s founder sees it as teaching people the value of security.
And his motto is pretty direct. “Raising total awareness by ‘kicking in
the nuts’ is our target,” said the founder, who goes by the alias
SweetCorn.
“The
exploits and future exploits that will be added are just exploiting
people's stupidity or misconception about security from a company
selling or buying bullshit protections,” he said. SweetCorn thinks
Project Un1c0rn is exposing what is already visible without a lot of
effort.
While the Heartbleed bug alerted
the general public to how easily hackers can exploit widely used code,
clearly vulnerabilities don’t begin and end with the bug. Just last week
the CCS Injection vulnerability was discovered, and the OpenSSL foundation posted a security advisory.
“Billions of people are leaving information and trails in
billions of different databases, some just left with default
configurations that can be found in a matter of seconds for whoever has
the resources,” SweetCorn said. Changing and updating passwords is a
crucial practice.
I
reached out to José Fernandez, a computer security expert and professor
at the Polytechnique school in Montreal, to get his take on Project
Un1c0rn. "The (vulnerability) tests are quite objective," he said.
"There are no reasons not to believe the vulnerabilities listed."
Fernandez
added that the only caveat for the search engine was that a listed
server could have been patched after the vulnerability scan had been
run.
The
project is still in its very early stages, with some indexed websites
not yet updated, which means not all of the 58,000 websites listed are
currently vulnerable to the same weaknesses.
“The Un1c0rn is still weak”, admitted SweetCorn. “We
did this with 0.4 BitCoin, I just can't imagine what someone having
enough money to spend on information mining could do.” According to
SweetCorn, those funds were used to buy the domain name and rent
servers.
SweetCorn
is releasing few details about the backend of the project, although he
says it relies heavily on the Tor network. Motherboard couldn’t
independently confirm what kind of search functions SweetCorn is
operating or whether they are legal. In any case, he has bigger plans
for his project: making it the first peer-to-peer decentralized exploit
system, where individuals could host their own scanning nodes.
“We
took some easy steps, Disqus is one of them, we would love to see
security researchers going on Un1c0rn, leave comments and help (us) fix
stuff,” he said.
He hopes that the attention raised by his project will make people understand “what their privacy really (looks like).”
A
quick scan through Un1c0rn’s database brings up some interesting
results. McGill University in Montreal had some trouble with one of
their MySQL databases. The university has since been notified, and their IT team told me the issue had been addressed.
The UK’s cyberspies at the GHCQ
probably forgot they had a test database open (unless it’s a honeypot),
though requests for comments were not answered. A search for “credit
card” retrieves 573 websites, some of which might just host card data if
someone digs enough.
In an example of how bugs can pervade all corners of the
web, the IT team in charge of the VPN for the town of Mandurah in
Australia were probably napping while the rest of the world was patching their broken version of OpenSSL. Tests run with the Qualys SSL Lab and filippo.io tools confirmed the domain was indeed vulnerable to Heartbleed.
While tools to scan for vulnerabilities across the Internet already exist. Last year, the project critical.io did a mass scan of the Internet to look for vulnerabilities, for research purposes. The data was released online and further analyzed by security experts.
But Project Un1c0rn is certainly one of the first to publicly index
the vulnerabilities found. Ultimately, if Project Un1c0rn or something
like it is successful and open sourced, checking if your bank or online
dating site is vulnerable to exploits will be a click away.
Surfboards lean against a wall at the Google office in Santa Monica, California, October 11, 2010.
Credit: Reuters/Lucy Nicholson
(Reuters) - Google
Inc updated its terms of service on Monday, informing users that their
incoming and outgoing emails are automatically analyzed by software to create targeted ads.
The revisions more explicitly spell out the manner in which Googlesoftware
scans users' emails, both when messages are stored on Google's servers
and when they are in transit, a controversial practice that has been at
the heart of litigation.
Last
month, a U.S. judge decided not to combine several lawsuits that
accused Google of violating the privacy rights of hundreds of millions
of email users into a single class action.
Users of Google's Gmail email service
have accused the company of violating federal and state privacy and
wiretapping laws by scanning their messages so it could compile secret
profiles and target advertising. Google has argued that users implicitly consented to its activity, recognizing it as part of the email delivery process.
Google spokesman Matt Kallman said in a statement that the changes "will give people even greater clarity and are based on feedback we've received over the last few months."
Google's
updated terms of service added a paragraph stating that "our automated
systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you
personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailoredadvertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored.
There is no point in kidding ourselves, now, about Who Has the Power. – Hunter S. Thompson, jacket copy, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
The Internet wasn’t supposed to be so…Machiavellian.
In 1963, Stewart Brand
and his wife set out on a landmark road trip, the goal of which was to
educate and enliven the people they encountered with tools for modern
living. The word “tools” was taken liberally. Brand wrote that “a realm
of intimate, personal power is developing.” Any tool that created or
channeled such power was useful. Tools meant books, maps, professional journals, courses, classes, and more.
In 1968, Brand founded the Whole Earth Catalog (WEC), an underground
magazine of sorts that would scale in a way no road-weary Dodge ever
could. The first issue was 64 pages and cost $5. It opened with the
phrase: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”
A year after WEC’s start, on October 29, 1969, the first packet of data was sent from UCLA to SRI International. It was called ARPAnet
at the time, but with it the Internet was born. Brand and others would
come to see the Internet as the essential, defining “tool” of their
generation. Until its final issue in 1994, the WEC’s 32 editions provide
as good a chronicle of the emergence of cyberculture (as it was then
called) as you can find.
Cyberculture. It’s a curious and complicated term in today’s society,
isn’t it? Cyberculture is at once completely outdated and awfully
relevant.
As Fred Turner has argued,
Brand is a key figure in the weaving together of two major cultural
fabrics that have since split — counterculture and cyberculture. Brand
is also immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test as a member of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. And Brand famously assisted researcher Doug Engelbart with the “Mother of all Demos,” the outline of a vision for technology prosthetics that improve human life; it would define computing for decades to come.
The Merry Pranksters, still from the movie Magic Trip
Brand attended Phillips Exeter Academy — an elite East Coast high
school, and an institution of traditional power if there ever was one.
He was a parachutist in the U.S. Army. He graduated with a degree in
biology from Stanford, studied design at San Francisco Art Institute and
photography at San Francisco State. He also participated in legal
studies of LSD and its effects with Timothy Leary.
That’s hardly the typical resume of a technologist or an entrepreneur
or an investor. But it should be. The business of making culture has
been for too long now controlled by people who live outside it.
It is my opinion that the Internet of today can and must be
countercultural again, that cyberculture should — needs to be —
countercultural.
That word,countercultural,carries with it
the connotation of liberal idealism and societal marginalia. Yet, the
new countercultures we’re seeing online today are profoundly mainstream,
and drawn along wholly different political lines. The Internet is its
own party. The Internet has its own set of beliefs. Springs have sprung
the world over and this isn’t simply a nerd thing anymore. We all care
passionately about Internet life and Internet liberty and the continual
pursuit of happiness both online and off.
Yet if the Internet is a measure of our culture, our zeitgeist, then
what does it tell us about the spirit of this age? Our zeitgeist
certainly isn’t what’s trending; it’s not another quiz of which TV
character you are; it’s not another listicle. I changed the global power
structure and all I got was this lousy t-shirt. And Facebook. And
Twitter.
What is this generation’s Rolling Stone? What is our Whole Earth
Catalog? It’s an important question because if the Internet is defining
our culture, and our use of it defines our society, then we have a
responsibility to ensure and propel its transformative impact, to
understand the ways cyberculture can and should be the counterculture
driving change rather than just distracting us from it.
There are beacons of hope. I eagerly await Jon Evans’ fantastic column in these pages each weekend for reasons like this.
The Daily Dot, a
publication I co-founded, documents today’s cyberculture through the
lens of online communities — virtual locales in which we arguably
“reside” more deliberately than any geography. You should also be
reading Edge, N+1, and Dangerous Minds. Even Vanity Fair has turned its eye to this theme, successfully I think, with articles like this. Rolling Stone is doing a pretty good job of being Rolling Stone these days, too.
I’m terminally optimistic, and I believe that counter-cyber-culture
is inherently optimistic, as well. Even despite the U.S. government’s
overreaching on privacy and “protecting” us from data about our own
bodies, despite Silicon Valley’s mad rush to cash in on apps rather than
substantial technology, despite most online media’s drastic descent to
the lowest common denominator and even lower standards of journalism, I
remain…optimistic.
We have found a courage in our growing numbers online. People old and
young can be be bold and defining on the Internet, underwritten by the
emotional support of peers everywhere. We’re voting for what we want the
world to be, and how we want it to be. Why do you think Kickstarter
works so well? We fund things that without our help are unlikely to
exist, but ought to nonetheless. Our “likes” and “shares” are ultimately
becoming votes for the kind of future we want to live in, and I’m
optimistic that we will ultimately wield that responsibility with
meaning and thoughtfully.
Tumblr. 4chan. Etsy. YouTube. We have emigrated to these outlying
territories seeking religious freedoms, cultural freedoms, and personal
freedoms alike. We colonized, and are still colonizing, new environs
each day and every week. We claim and reclaim the Internet like so many
tribal boundaries.
We’re winning more often than not, thank goodness. Aaron Swartz heroically beat SOPA and PIPA against all odds. Yahoo won against PRISM. The Internet won against cancer…with pizza. My godmother knows what Tor is.
The virtual reality community rebelled when princely Oculus sold to
Facebook, for the reason that VR is a new superpower and a new
countercultural medium that we’re afraid might have fallen into the
wrong hands (I don’t believe that’s actually the case, but that’s
grounds for another post altogether).
So, yes. A countercultural moment all our own stares us in the face.
Like Brand, I hope we can manage to be politically aware and socially
responsible in a way that technology begs us to be, without giving
ground to the idea that the Internet is anything but ours.
Civil disobedience is a different game when the means of production
and dissemination have been fully democratized. We seek differentiated
high ground from which to defend our values. We build new back channels
to communicate unencumbered. Instead of making catalogues, we make new
categories. We wield technology, perhaps unaware on whose shoulders we
stand, but at the same time free from the anxiety of influence.
We aspire to be more pure in that sense. We want and we give and we need and we will have…pure Internet.
Editor’s note:Josh Jones-Dilworth is a co-founder of the Daily Dot; founder and CEO of Jones-Dilworth, Inc., an early-stage technology marketing consultancy; and co-founder of Totem, a startup changing PR for the better. Follow his blog here.
Featured image by Kundra/Shutterstock; Hunter S. Thompson image by Wikimedia Commons user MDCarchives (own work) under a CC-BY-SA-3.0 license
Can computers learn to read? We think so. "Read the Web" is a
research project that attempts to create a computer system that learns
over time to read the web. Since January 2010, our computer system
called NELL (Never-Ending Language Learner) has been running
continuously, attempting to perform two tasks each day:
First, it attempts to "read," or extract facts from text found in hundreds of millions of web pages (e.g., playsInstrument(George_Harrison, guitar)).
Second, it attempts to improve its reading competence, so that tomorrow it can extract more facts from the web, more accurately.
So far, NELL has accumulated over 50 million candidate beliefs by
reading the web, and it is considering these at different levels of
confidence. NELL has high confidence in 2,132,551 of these beliefs —
these are displayed on this website. It is not perfect, but NELL is
learning. You can track NELL's progress below or @cmunell on Twitter, browse and download its knowledge base, read more about our technical approach, or join the discussion group.
