As usual, the bought and paid for self-fulfilling tech press is missing the elephant in the room.
The blogosphere discussion
surrounding a self-imposed 'blackout' of "key" websites and services
that we apparently can't live without, is scheduled for this wednesday.
All in protest of proposed legislation in the house and senate.
I submit this is a big fat red herring.
First some background:
Actually there are 3 pieces of
legislation; the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) the Protect Intellectual
Property Act (PIPA) and the Online Protection and Enforcement of
Digital Trade Act (OPEN,) which is currently in draft form, initially
proposed by Darrel Issa (R) who will be holding a hearing on Wednesday
regarding the strong opposition to DNS 'tampering' as a punitive measure
against foreign registered websites infringing on intellectual property
and trademarks of US companies within the borders of the United
States.
I have read all three pieces
of legislation (its a hobby) and can confidently say that not only are
they pretty much identical in scope. The key differences are that only
SOPA proposes the DNS 'tampering', which would allow US officials to
remove an infringing website's DNS records from the root servers if
deemed to be operating in defiance of Intellectual Property and
Trademark law, effectively rendering them unfindable when you type in a
corresponding domain name website address.
The boundaries of what is
legal and not is not actually contained in any of the bills, as they all
universally refer to mainly the Lanham Act. All of it tried and true legislation. Nothing new there.
All three bills further
provide language that will allow justice to forbid US based financial
transaction providers, search engines and advertising companies from
doing business with a 'website' that is found to be guilty of
infringement.
Of the three proposals, OPEN
appears most fair to all parties in any dispute, by requiring a
complainant to post a bond when requesting an investigation of
infringement in order to combat frivolous use of the provisions
available.
The outrage over SOPA's DNS provisions is justified, but misdirected, Congress is already backpedaling on including it in any final legislation and even the Administration's own response to the "We the People Petitions on SOPA" included an firm stance against measures that would affect the DNS infrastructure:
We must avoid
creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying
architecture of the Internet. Proposed laws must not tamper with the
technical architecture of the Internet through manipulation of the
Domain Name System (DNS), a foundation of Internet security. Our
analysis of the DNS filtering provisions in some proposed legislation
suggests that they pose a real risk to cybersecurity and yet leave
contraband goods and services accessible online. We must avoid
legislation that drives users to dangerous, unreliable DNS servers and
puts next-generation security policies, such as the deployment of
DNSSEC, at risk.
Without the DNS clause, it
would appear perfectly logical that the government pursue action against
websites that attempt to cash in on fake products and stolen
intellectual property of it's people.
The entire reason for even
trying to get a DNS provision into law is because it is nearly
impossible to track down the owner of a website, or domain name, through
today's registration tools.
A whois lookup on a domain
name merely provides whatever information is given at time of
registration, and there is no verification of the registrant.
So, here's what the press has missed;
During all the shouting about
SOPA and proposed blackouts to 'protest', the organization that
actually runs the DNS root servers, ICANN, the backbone of the web, has
been quite busy in plain view on changing the game, in favor of the government.
It's been highly underreported that ICANN is now accepting submissions for new gTLD's, or 'generic top level domains'.
Without getting into all the
details of what that means, other than possibly hundreds if not
thousands of new domains like .shop .dork .shill and .drone that you
will be able to register vanity domain names under, ICANN has come up
with a new requirement upon registration:
You must verify who you are when you register a new domain name, even an international one.
So, if I pay GoDaddy or any
other outfit my $9 for curry.blog and have it point to my server at
blog.curry.com, I will have to prove my identity upon registration.
Presumably with some form of government approved ID.
This way, when OPEN or
perhaps a non-NDS-version of SOPA is passed, if you break the rules, you
will be hunted down, regardless of where you live or operate since this
also includes international domain names.
The Administration like this approach as well. Just read the language from the International Strategy For Cyberspace document [pdf]:
In this
future, individuals and businesses can quickly and easily obtain the
tools necessary to set up their own presence online; domain names and
addresses are available, secure, and properly maintained, without
onerous licenses or unreasonable disclosures of personal information.
onerous licenses and unreasonable disclosures of personal information clearly indicates you will have to provide verification of your identity, which in today's world is not a requirement.
"Hey Citizen, if you have
nothing to hide, what are you worried about?" Just follow the rules and
all will be fine. I don't think I need to explain the implications of
this massive change in internet domain name policy and to your privacy.
The term for this new type of registration is Thick Whois
and you'll be hearing about it eventually, when the so called 'tech
press' stops their circle jerking around the latest
facebook/google/twitter cat fights and actually starts reporting on
things that matter.
Until then, feel free to make your google+ facebook and twitter icons all black, as your faux protest
is futile. The real change, that of your privacy online, is being made
in plain sight by former Director of the National Cyber Security Center
of the Department of Homeland Security Rod Beckstrom, current CEO of ICANN. Shill anyone?
Hackers reportedly plan to fight back against Internet censorship by
putting their own communications satellites into orbit and developing a
grid of ground stations to track and communicate with them.
The news comes as the tech world is up in arms about proposed legislation that many feel would threaten online freedom.
According to BBC News, the satellite plan was recently outlined at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin. It's being called the "Hackerspace Global Grid."
If you don't like the idea of hackers being able to communicate better,
hacker activist Nick Farr said knowledge is the only motive of the
project, which also includes the development of new electronics that can
survive in space, and launch vehicles that can get them there.
Farr and his cohorts are working on the project along with Constellation, a German aerospace research initiative that involves interlinked student projects.
You might think it would be hard for just anybody to put a satellite
into space, but hobbyists and amateurs have been able in recent years to
use balloons to get them up there. However, without the deep pockets of
national agencies or large companies they have a hard time tracking the
devices.
To
better locate their satellites, the German hacker group came up with
the idea of a sort of reverse GPS that uses a distributed network of
low-cost ground stations that can be bought or built by individuals.
Supposedly, these stations would be able to pinpoint satellites at any
given time while improving the transmission of data from the satellites
to Earth.
The plan isn't without limitations.
For one thing, low orbit satellites don't stay in a single place. And
any country could go to the trouble of disabling them. At the same time,
outer space isn’t actually governed by the countries over which it
floats.
The scheme
discussed by hackers follows the introduction of the controversial Stop
Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the United States, which many believe to be
a threat to online freedom.
As PC World's Tony Bradley put it, the bill is
a combination of an overzealous drive to fight Internet piracy, with
elected representatives who don't know the difference between DNS, IM,
and MP3. In short, SOPA is a "draconian legislation that far exceeds its intended scope, and threatens the Constitutional rights of law abiding citizens," he wrote.
And apparently those who typically don't follow the law -- hackers -- think there's something they can do about it.
The tech-nerd legion bent on saving humanity from asteroids, contagions, and robot revolutions
Illustration by Asaf Hanuka
Rick Schwall retired seven years ago after a successful career in
Silicon Valley. He says he’s a millionaire but declines to reveal where
he worked or how he made his money. “I consider all of that stuff to be
absolutely pointless,” he says. “What is important is that in 2006 I
stumbled upon existential risk.”
For the uninitiated, existential risk is a broad term covering
catastrophic events that could wipe out the human species. Some
existential risk devotees agonize over nuclear wars, climate change, and
virus outbreaks. Others, such as Schwall, put more energy into worrying
about the potential downside of information technology. They fret about
a super-powerful artificial intelligence run amok and hordes of killer
nanobots. “There are a number of people who have knowledge in this field
that estimate humanity’s chance at making it through this century at
about 50 percent,” Schwall says. “Even if that number is way off and
it’s one in a billion, that’s too high for me.”
In August, Schwall started an organization called Saving Humanity
from Homo Sapiens. The nonprofit, which boasts an eye-catching logo of a
man holding a gun to his throat, looks to fund researchers who have
plans for taming artificial intelligence and developing safeguards that
protect man from machines. So far, Schwall has doled out a few thousand
dollars to a handful of researchers, but it’s early days for SHFHS.
Schwall, after all, is thinking big and answering the grandest of
callings. “There are so many people who cannot wrap their minds around
all of humanity,” he says. “I don’t know why I rose above that. I have
no clue.”
Religious groups have long dominated talk of the apocalypse. Most
often the world ends at the hands of a god who transfers people to a
better place. These days, though, you’ll find plenty of atheistic types
in Silicon Valley meditating on man’s potential for self-inflicted
destruction, and it doesn’t often lead much of anywhere. These people
design the most sophisticated technology on the planet but bemoan its
dark potential. They’re adherents of the Singularity, a sort of nerd
rapture that will occur when machines become smarter than people and
begin advancing technological change on their own, eventually outpacing
and—in a worst-case scenario—enslaving people before getting bored and
grinding us up into fleshy pulp. This, as it happens, resembles the
prospect that had the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, all worked up.
One of the gripes emanating from the existential risk adherents is
that people have not taken these warnings seriously enough. Sure,
governments, research organizations, and philanthropists fund work to
curb global warming, contain nuclear weapons arsenals, and prevent viral
outbreaks. But where’s the money for a much needed artificial
intelligence force field or an asteroid blocker? With some people
predicting the Singularity’s arrival as early as the next decade, the
race is on for man to defend himself from his own creations.
To properly address such threats before it’s too late, a booming
subculture of tech-minded thinkers, entrepreneurs, and nongovernmental
organizations has stepped into the existential risk realm. Many of the
groups, like SHFHS, focus on worries about artificial intelligence (AI).
Others have secured some serious cash to fund a broader set of projects
to protect us from annihilation in whatever form it might take.
Consider, for example, the Lifeboat Foundation. It’s an organization
run out of the Minden (Nev.) home of Eric Klien, a technologist who has
dabbled in the fields of cryonics and online dating. This group frets
about science fiction scenarios such as computers gone bad, alien
attacks, and the arrival of nasty man-made synthetic creatures. To date,
the Lifeboat Foundation has raised more than $500,000 from corporations
such as Google (GOOG), Oracle (ORCL), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), and Fannie Mae (FNMA)
and from hundreds of individuals. Asked to comment, a spokesman for
Fannie Mae was surprised to learn of the donations, which were part of
an employer match program.
The Lifeboat Foundation’s flashiest project is the A-Prize, a contest
to create an artificial life form “with an emphasis on the safety of
the researchers, public, and environment.” Thus far, donors have pledged
$29,000 to the winner. The real down-and-dirty work, however, revolves
around shields, with projects under way to build Asteroid, Brain, Alien,
Internet, Black Hole, and Antimatter shields. Other work includes the
creation of space habitats and personality preservers.
It’s unclear how far along any of these projects is. Most of the
Lifeboat Foundation’s money seems to go toward supporting conferences
and publishing papers. But laying down the rigorous theoretical
groundwork for such projects ensures their viability when the
existential hammer falls. Lifeboat remains one of the only places where
people think about the panoply of nontraditional risks to mankind.
Klien would like to see some bigger donors step up and allow the
Lifeboat Foundation to tackle truly massive endeavors. Part of the
problem is that people have not gotten a real taste for a near-death
experience that awakens their existential risk spirit. “There will be a
9/11 with dirty bombs or nuclear bombs,” he says. “It will make it a lot
easier for us at that point.”
The major success story of the existential risk movement is the
Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, which focuses on
making sure we end up with “friendly” AI. Every year it holds an event
called the Singularity Summit where some speakers dazzle the crowd with
cutting-edge technology, while others reinforce the existential risk
cause.
The Singularity Institute prides itself on examining existential risk
with a rational eye. One of its thought leaders and board members is
Eliezer Yudkowsky, a prolific blogger who spends a great deal of time
laying out the logical reasons people should be concerned about
existential risk and developing a mathematical framework for friendly
AI. Yudkowsky has a knack for walking people through the logical
constraints that a computer scientist might want to consider when
building an artificial intelligence to help make sure it doesn’t light
up and take over the world. “He is a good candidate for being the most
important person on the planet,” Schwall says of Yudkowsky. Backers of
the Singularity Institute and this type of work include Peter Thiel, the
first investor in Facebook, Jaan Tallinn, one of the programmers who
helped build Skype Technologies, and companies such as Microsoft (MSFT), Motorola (MSI), and Fidelity Investments.
Tallinn attended this year’s summit and delivered an impassioned
speech about the need to direct more money toward the prevention of
existential risk. Estimates bandied about at the conference placed
worldwide spending on existential risk at about $59 million per year.
With this in mind, Tallinn made a $100,000 donation to the Singularity
Institute on the spot and then called on other philanthropists to stop
thinking about boosting their “social status” by donating to the usual
do-gooder causes. Instead, the rich should support longer-term efforts.
“Future societies will look back on us and feel depressed because of the
actions we did not do,” he said.
This kind of talk isn’t limited to technophiles suffering from
midlife crises; there is, in fact, a youthful existential risk
contingent, too. Thomas Eliot, 23, bounded around the Singularity Summit
in a uniform consisting of red Converse All-Stars, jeans, a bow tie,
and rosy, fresh-faced cheeks. Eliot, who had just obtained a math degree
from Willamette University, plans to spend the next year or two living
off his savings while he studies machine learning and AI. He’s also been
tapped by Schwall as the executive director of SHFSH. “An unfriendly
artificial intelligence could cause a negative Singularity and turn the
entire planet into paper clips,” Eliot warns. “Even if the chances of
something like this happening are low, it would be the worst thing
ever.”
The lottery of who you sit next to on an airline flight can make travel interesting, or unbearable. Recognizing that the experience of its passengers can be greatly influenced by the people sitting next to them, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines is introducing ‘Meet & Seat.’ The service will allow passengers to choose who they sit next to based on their social media profiles.
The service will be available to everybody and both passengers must choose to take part in the service in order to pick your fellow passenger. Those who enjoy simply putting on their headphones and enjoying a movie on their laptop – alone – can just avoid the experiment altogether according to the International Business Times.
The newspaper naturally discusses the match making potential of KLM’s service.According to the IBT, a recent poll showed a third of passengers surveyed said they later met with a fellow passenger after a flight.
Everybody’s favorite news analysis animators over at Next Media Animation in Taiwan were a bit more blunt. Their description of how KLM’s new service might work doesn’t include waiting for the airplane to land.
This concept model for a next-generation vending machine, which features a see through display, is being developed by Sanden, a large manufacturer of vending machines, in conjunction with Okaya Electronics and Intel.
This concept model has a vertical, 65-inch, Full HD transparent display. The products behind the display can be seen through the glass, and you can simultaneously see high definition text, pictures, and Flash animations on the display.
"This vending machine uses the Intel SandyBridge Core. It features Audience Impression Metric, or AIM, and can do anonymous face recognition. So this machine can recognize whether customers are male or female, or old or young."
When there aren't any customers, the machine shows a large digital clock and animations, to attract the attention of people passing by. If a customer stands in front of the machine, it estimates their attributes from anonymous video analysis, and shows advertising content to match the customers demographic.
"In this demo, we're suggesting that vending machines could be used to purchase luxury items, such as cosmetics and wine. The machine also has a public safety mode in times of emergency, which shows information such as evacuation routes."
"I think this machine could be used in lots of ways, depending on customers' imagination. It has a great many possibilities, so we'd like to get ideas from everyone, rather than just using it as a regular vending machine."
Once Upon is a brilliant project that has recreated three popular sites from today as if they were built in the dial-up era, in 1997.
Witness Facebook, with no real-names policy and photos displayed in
an ugly grey table; YouTube, with a choice of encoding options to select
before you watch a video, and Google+, where Circles of contacts are
displayed as far easier to render squares. Be prepared for a wait though
– the recreations are limited to 8kbps transfer speeds, as if you were
loading it on a particularly slow dial-up connection.
This is perhaps the most extreme version of Web nostalgia we’ve seen. On a related note, these imaginings of what online social networking would have been like in centuries gone by are worth a look. Also, our report on 10 websites that changed the world is worth reading- they’re not what you might expect.
With the holiday season heating up, you can imagine that Amazon.com
has lots of orders to fulfill. The amount of packages that their
fulfillment centers have to manage these days is simply incredible. Here
we a look inside their Swansea, Wales, warehouse and the endless row of
packages is overwhelming. The scenery is almost worth a Gursky
photograph with the patterns that the packages and small warehouse
personell are building.
In a tongue-in-cheek contest of microscopic mobility, a line of
bone marrow stem cells from Singapore beat out dozens of competitors
to claim the title of the world’s fastest cells. They whizzed
across a petri dish at the breakneck speed of 5.2 microns per minute
— or 0.000000312 kilometers per hour.
Results of the World Cell
Race were announced on 3 December at the annual meeting of the American
Society for Cell Biology in Denver, Colorado. Organizers declared the
competition a success: “50 participating labs all over the world!
70 cells lines recorded! without a single dollar to fund the project!”
says Manuel Théry from Institut de Recherche en Technologies
et Sciences pour le Vivant (iRTSV) in Grenoble, France.
Behind the fun is a serious goal: looking broadly at how cells
move. Ultimately, cell migration lets embryos and organs develop and
allows to cancer spread. The contest provides the first reference for
many cell types migrating under the same conditions, and is already
leading to some interesting comparisons, says Théry. For example,
stem cells and cancer cells seem to be faster than their mature and
healthy counterparts.
Rather than actually racing cells at a scientific conference, teams
shipped frozen cells to designated laboratories in Boston, London, Heidelberg,
Paris, San Francisco, and Singapore. Thawed cells were placed in wells
containing “race tracks”. Each track was 400 microns (0.4
mm) long and coated with a substance that gives cells some traction.
Digital cameras recorded cells for 24 hours to determine the fastest
run down the track for each cell line. In total, about 200 cells of
each cell type were timed to see how long it took the fastest individual
cell of each type to reach the end of its track.
Through this signage at Promenade Temecula, the mall is notifying shoppers that their phones may be tracked as they move throughout the premises.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Attention holiday shoppers: your cell phone may be tracked this year.
Starting on Black Friday and running through New Year's Day, two U.S. malls -- Promenade Temecula in southern California and Short Pump Town Center in Richmond, Va. -- will track guests' movements by monitoring the signals from their cell phones.
While the data that's collected is anonymous, it can follow shoppers' paths from store to store.
The goal is for stores to answer questions like: How many Nordstrom shoppers also stop at Starbucks? How long do most customers linger in Victoria's Secret? Are there unpopular spots in the mall that aren't being visited?
While U.S. malls have long tracked how crowds move throughout their stores, this is the first time they've used cell phones.
But obtaining that information comes with privacy concerns.
The management company of both malls, Forest City Commercial Management, says personal data is not being tracked.
"We won't be looking at singular shoppers," said Stephanie Shriver-Engdahl, vice president of digital strategy for Forest City. "The system monitors patterns of movement. We can see, like migrating birds, where people are going to."
Still, the company is preemptively notifying customers by hanging small signs around the shopping centers. Consumers can opt out by turning off their phones.
The tracking system, called FootPath Technology, works through a series of antennas positioned throughout the shopping center that capture the unique identification number assigned to each phone (similar to a computer's IP address), and tracks its movement throughout the stores.
The system can't take photos or collect data on what shoppers have purchased. And it doesn't collect any personal details associated with the ID, like the user's name or phone number. That information is fiercely protected by mobile carriers, and often can be legally obtained only through a court order.
"We don't need to know who it is and we don't need to know anyone's cell phone number, nor do we want that," Shriver-Engdahl said.
Manufactured by a British company, Path Intelligence, this technology has already been used in shopping centers in Europe and Australia. And according to Path Intelligence CEO Sharon Biggar, hardly any shoppers decide to opt out.
"It's just not invasive of privacy," she said. "There are no risks to privacy, so I don't see why anyone would opt out."
Now, U.S. retailers including JCPenney (JCP,Fortune 500) and Home Depot (HD,Fortune 500) are also working with Path Intelligence to use their technology, Biggar said.
Home Depot has considered implementing the technology but is not currently using it any stores, a company spokesman said.JCPenney declined to comment on its relationship with the vendor.
Some retail analysts say the new technology is nothing to be worried about. Malls have been tracking shoppers for years through people counters, security cameras, heat maps and even undercover researchers who follow shoppers around.
And some even say websites that trackonline shoppersare more invasive, recording not only a user's name and purchases, but then targeting them with ads even after they've left a site.
"It's important for shoppers to realize this sort of data is being collected anyway," Biggar said.
Whereas a website can track a customer who doesn't make a purchase, physical stores have been struggling to perfect this kind of research, Biggar said. By combining the data from FootPath with their own sales figures, stores will have better measurements to help them improve the shopping experience.
"We can now say, you had 100 people come to this product, but no one purchased it," Biggar said. "From there, we can help a retailer narrow down what's going wrong."
But some industry analysts worry about the broader implications of this kind of technology.
"Most of this information is harmless and nobody ever does anything nefarious with it," said Sucharita Mulpuru, retail analyst at Forrester Research. "But the reality is, what happens when you start having hackers potentially having access to this information and being able to track your movements?"
Last year,hackers hit AT&T, exposing the unique ID numbers and e-mail addresses of more than 100,000 iPad 3G owners. To make it harder for hackers to get at this information, Path Intelligence scrambles those numbers twice.
"I'm sure as more people get more cell phones, it's probably inevitable that it will continue as a resource," Mulpuru said. "But I think the future is going to have to be opt in, not opt out."
Personal comment:
One step further. I guess we have to be thankful to be given the ability to opt out the system by 'just' switching off our cell-phone!!!
