Innovation&Society

Via The Verge

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Via The Verge

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In Linden Lab's vast experiment, the end has no end

Do you remember Second Life? Set up by developer Linden Lab in 2003, it was the faithful replication of our modern world where whoring, drinking, and fighting were acceptable. It was the place where big brands moved in as neighbors and hawked you their wares online. For many, it was the future — our lives were going to be lived online, as avatars represented us in nightclubs, bedrooms, and banks made of pixels and code.

In the mid-2000s, every self-respecting media outlet sent reporters to the Second Life world to cover the parallel-universe beat. The BBC, (now Bloomberg) Businessweek, and NBC Nightly News all devoted time and coverage to the phenomenon. Amazon, American Apparel, and Disney set up shop in Second Life, aiming to capitalize on the momentum it was building — and to play to the in-world consumer base, which at one point in 2006 boasted a GDP of $64 million.

Of course, stratospheric growth doesn’t continue forever, and when the universe’s expansion slowed and the novelty of people living parallel lives wore off, the media moved on. So did businesses — but not users. Linden Lab doesn’t share historical user figures, but it says the population of Second Life has been relatively stable for a number of years.

You might not have heard a peep about it since the halcyon days of 2006, but that doesn’t mean Second Life has gone away. Far from it: this past June it celebrated its 10th birthday, and it is still a strong community. A million active users still log on and inhabit the world every month, and 13,000 newbies drop into the community every day to see what Second Life is about. I was one of them, and I found out that just because Second Life is no longer under the glare of the media’s spotlight, it doesn’t mean the culture inside the petri dish isn’t still growing.

Packing tape and pyrotechnics

One of Second Life’s million-strong population is Fee Berry, a 55-year-old mother of three children who lives in Middlesex, a leafy suburb of London, England. And though her Second Life avatar, Caliandris Pendragon, is cool and calm, I’ve caught her at a bad time.

“I’m moving house,” she explains. In the background I can hear boxes being heaved back and forth, tape unspooling and being wrapped around packaged items. At one point in our conversation she has to ask her son to keep the noise down.

Berry became a stay-at-home mom after the birth of her first son and started gaming in 1998, playing Riven, a more puzzle-centric sequel to Myst, a popular adventure game first released in 1993. Both were developed by Cyan Worlds, at the time simply called Cyan. A friend introduced Berry to Riven when she bought a second-hand Apple Macintosh; she was initially wary, telling the friend, “I don’t think I like those sorts of things.” She finished the game within three weeks.

She stuck with games produced by Cyan for the next six years, graduating to Uru, their MMO adventure game. When Cyan discontinued support for Uru Live, the online section of the game, Berry, like many others, moved on to an alternative. As with everyone entering their Second Life, she was dropped from the sky. Her feet first hit the turf of the new virtual world on February 12th, 2004.

"I can shrug off my role as a mother."

“It’s like every toy you ever had, all rolled into one,” she tells me in awed tones, recalling the power of the game to keep her playing nearly a decade on. It’s also liberating, she explains, allowing her to forget about the kids, the responsibilities, and the extra few inches she’d rather not have. It lets her cut free.

In Second Life she doesn’t have to be a graying 55-year-old mom; she can keep the bright eyes and warm smile, but can pinch, tuck, and pluck the other bits so that she becomes 25-year-old Pendragon, a vampish babe with full lips, long jet black hair, and heavy eyeliner.

"It's like every toy you ever had, all rolled into one."

“I can shrug off my role as a mother,” she explains. “I can swear or misbehave in Second Life in a way I couldn’t in real life.”

The second-ever person I meet in Second Life, in a drop-off zone, proves that point. HOUSE Chemistry’s been in Second Life for nearly six years. The 28-year-old lives in New Orleans, and may or may not look like his in-universe avatar: a 6-foot-7-inch-tall man wearing all black, with thick brown dreadlocks down to his waist — he won’t say. Regardless, HOUSE Chemistry’s warm and welcoming, and seems to enjoy taking me under his wing, explaining the universe to me.

When I ask him what he does in Second Life, I’m expecting him to advise me to talk to people, make friends, and take some classes. He replies a little differently: “Anything I want. Walk near me. I’ll set this place on fire, watch.”

And so he does, under a clock showing 11:26, on one of Second Life’s introductory islands. Truthfully, I’m not impressed: it’s a pretty poor-quality animation with blocky gray smoke and weirdly flesh-colored balls I presume are meant to represent the actual flames. Still, I politely show my admiration and ask him whether he’d want to set stuff on fire in real life.

“No,” he says. There’s a brief pause. “Take your time. You’ll learn how to do all kinds of cool shit.”

I try and move the conversation on, asking HOUSE Chemistry what he does in real life. “I build things,” he replies. I’m intrigued by this person who builds things in real life, then sets polygonal representations of them on fire in Second Life, and say so out loud. He ignores it, moves on, shuts down the conversation.

“You got it now,” he says. “Enjoy.”

“You a wife or a men?”

The concept of an avatar in the sense we know today first emerged in the 1980s from the LucasArts game Habitat and the cyberpunk novels of the time. Philip Rosedale, who created Second Life, describes an avatar as “the representation of your chosen embodied appearance to other people in a virtual world” — one that often blunts the harsh edges and tones fat into muscle.

There are people like Berry who use their second lives as a way to play a different role, a smudged mirror reflection of themselves — and that’s great. But there are those who believe that identity in Second Life is too opaque.

On my first day in-universe I meet Larki Merlin, a 40-something German Second Lifer who likes to punctuate his conversation with written-word emoticons. “I am all time on big smile,” are his first words to me. His next words are to the point: “You a wife or a men?” Merlin’s asking that for a good reason; he stepped away from Second Life two years ago “for a long time — too many crazy people, only sex and lies. 50% of the girls are in rl [real life] boys.”

This might not be far off the truth: Berry tells me that at one point Linden Lab said six of every ten women in Second Life were men behind their avatars. One of the most famous women in Second Life, Jade Lily, is a male member of the US Air Force named Keith Morris. Morris real-life married another Second Lifer, Coreina Grace (real name Meghan Sheehy) in 2009.

Despite this, Merlin’s back, but he admits that there are slim pickings in the universe: he’s met maybe two of a hundred friends in Second Life — and “you waste 200 hours to find them.” He’s back, but barely.

"There’s huge areas of Second Life that just look like suburbia and people will build a house and put a TV in it."

Every story has two sides. I asked Berry about her experience in Second Life: has it made her more comfortable, more confident? Has it changed her first life persona in any way?

There’s a long pause. “Err… It’s made me realize other people are not as scary as they appear to be.” The first person Berry ever encountered in a virtual world was in Uru. “And I ran away,” she admits softly.

“I don’t know what I was afraid of, really. But they spoke to me and I ran away, because it was a stranger.” As a woman, Berry says, the interaction was completely the opposite of what she’d been taught: “You wouldn’t strike up a conversation with an unknown male because there are dangers associated with that.” But when she plucked up the courage to stay and chat, “it made me realize I’d been frightened of that 5 percent instead of realizing 95 percent are decent.”

When mainstream media outlets touched down in Second Life seven years ago they tended to focus on the strangeness of it all. People were having sex through a game and dressing up as foxes and kittens. The reality, says Tom Boellstorff, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, is more prosaic: “Humans already live many different kinds of life: online is just one more of those kinds of lives.”

“You can do anything in Second Life,” Boellstorff continues, his voice rising in a lilt. “You can do crazy stuff. You can be a ball of light or you can be 500 feet tall, or you can be a child, or a dog, or whatever.”

You can do all that. But most people?

“There’s huge areas of Second Life that just look like suburbia and people will build a house and put a TV in it,” he says. “They’ll watch TV with their friends online.” An entire world of opportunities out there and people choose to be couch potatoes. It is, eerily, just like real life.

Ghost towns and boom towns

“We thought of Second Life as complementing your first life,” Hunter Walk, one of the original Linden Lab team members working on the universe from its launch, tells me. It was conceived as a space that gave you a set of choices that were missing from reality. “In your first life you don’t necessarily get to fly. Here you can fly. In your first life you can’t choose what you look like. Here you can choose what you look like — and it’s malleable.”

That changeability extended right back to the developers. “The story of the internet in general is one of unintended consequences,” begins Boellstorff. “It’s about repurposing and doing things the original designers did not design for.” As the custodians of an internet-based community, Second Life’s developers were little different. When they began sketching out the universe early in development, Linden Lab deliberately left things open-ended. “The early users showed us the way to where the community was,” explains Walk.

That community is now being overlooked, believes Berry, who began working for Linden Lab making textures and music in June 2008, and was fired in June 2013 after a dispute over money. “After five years working quite closely with them, I still don’t feel I really know what the culture is,” she says. “They simply never seem to understand their own product. It’s ludicrous that they don’t understand how people use Second Life, what they like it for, what they want it for.”

There’s no such thing as an average Second Lifer, but some people just don’t get it, no matter how long they spend in-world. Berry tried, years back, to convince her mother and siblings to join the world. “I’ve had very little luck. If I can’t get them to try it they’re obviously not going to understand it. And it’s really hard to explain it to anybody else.”

A giant bubble floated down from on high. “Step in,” she said

For the longest time I didn’t get it. I’d spent several weeks pottering about, teleporting from one place to another. I stood on a dock of a bay, overlooking an azure sea and hearing the whistle of the wind. I walked through a cold, gun-metal gray futuristic world full of walkways that reminded me of any number of first-person shooters. I’d chased a woman, inexplicably sprinting, arms flailing, through the palazzos of Milan, looking at the fashion boutiques. I’d visited London — in reality a tired collection of worn cliches, a cardboard cut-out of the Beatles crossing the street down from a roundabout with a red telephone box on one corner. It was kind of cool, but it was also corny.

Then Berry invited me to Nemesis. It’s where she lives in-universe, all rolling green hills and gated houses. Berry — or Pendragon, as she was in this world — wanted to show me just how magical Second Life could get.

She had in her possession Starax’s Wand. Created by a user, it was at the time the most expensive item a user could buy in Second Life. Clever coding meant that if its possessor mentioned certain words in-game — “money,” for example — the universe would change around it (a briefcase full of cash would descend from the heavens and spit out greenbacks, for example).

The wand has been largely outmoded by updates, but some commands still work. We were standing outside the perimeter wall of Berry’s house, green grass beneath our feet. Her avatar hunched over and moved her hands on an invisible keyboard: the animation shows when the real person is typing. In the chat box appeared a word.

“Bubble.”

A giant bubble floated down from on high. “Step in,” she said. I did. And the bubble rose, and I saw a bird’s eye view of Nemesis. I was suspended in mid-air in a giant bubble, and could roll over the shoreline high above the sea. I couldn’t help but smile; finally, I’d found my niche.

People come to the Second Life universe for different reasons: some go there to escape their reality and to stretch the boundaries of their lives in ways forbidden by the constraints of their bodies or the norms of society. Some go to meet friends and family; there are some who want to create buildings, paintings, and whole new worlds. And some — big companies and small entrepreneurs — hope to make a living.

There’s no such thing as an average Second Lifer, but some people just don’t get it

Even after the deluge dried up there’s a booming economy in Second Life: Berry began taking meetings in 2006 with companies looking to extend their reach into the universe. Her knowledge of the world was her selling point, helping companies avoid missteps in this strange, new place. “Reportedly Adidas spent a million dollars on their sim in Second Life,” Berry says with a laugh. What it got them was a single store selling sneakers. Problem was, the sneakers slowed down the universe: “Anybody running an event would say if you’ve got Adidas trainers on, take them off because they were lagging the sim so bad!” Ironically, Berry says, it was when the big companies descended on Second Life that the place felt most like a ghost town, and not a boom town: they didn’t get the ethos, didn’t engage, and left empty offices and buildings.

Berry’s earnings from Second Life have varied enormously: a poor year can see her earn £5,000 ($7,600) for her consultancy work, as well as creating music and textures for avatars and locations in-world (a few years ago she specialized in providing Christmas trees to those looking to get into the festive spirit). “It’s not a fortune,” she explains. “I haven’t earned a lot of money from it.” But it pays the bills.

Second Life isn’t a whole new world — that’s something everyone, from Berry, to Walk, to Boellstorff, has been keen to stress. For those truly committed, who have property, and cash, and a business, and money invested in the universe, it’s simply an ongoing extension of their lives: “That’s why we chose the name,” Walk says.

Settling a civilization

Second Life has survived its first 10 years, but every society rises and — inevitably — falls. So what of Linden Lab’s creation? Will people still be living Second Lives in 2023?

“I wouldn’t be surprised to see Second Life around for quite a while,” says Hunter Walk. It’s been seven years since he left the prosaically crazy universe, but he still remains on its periphery. For a couple of years after leaving Linden Lab he occasionally dropped back in on the world, teleporting from place to place and checking out the sights. “It never quite got to the point where it was something I’d be able to integrate into my life,” he says regretfully. Instead, he now reads about it, takes pictures, and watches videos.

Tom Boellstorff looks to history for precedent. LambdaMOO was the original MOO (object-oriented MUD, a multi-user dungeon game). Set up so long ago that its creator, Pavel Curtis, can’t remember whether it went online in 1990 or 1991, it lives on today through the benevolence and hard work of a core group of volunteers that refuses to let the world die.

Fee Berry’s less sure. Resident for nearly a decade, she’s seen a lot of areas of Second Life fall victim to the decay that’s part of a relentlessly forward-looking world: “They haven’t really preserved the history of Second Life, as far as I can see, and don’t really rate it as anything worth saving. I think that’s a shame.”

Her 'Second Life' relationship became a real-life romance

Fired by Linden Lab and exasperated at the direction the universe is taking, she’s spending more time in OpenSim, a financially free and less constrained version of the Second Life architecture, working on paid projects. There’s one drawback: it doesn’t have a strong enough community or economy — yet. If it gets those, it wins hands down, she says.

But that doesn’t mean she’s quite done with Linden Lab. She starts extolling the virtues of OpenSim, but brings it back to Second Life.

“I hope to get a better work–life balance, and to be able to spend entertainment — leisure time — in Second Life,” she says. I get the sense that deep down, she’s made such a strong connection that she’s permanently a resident there. After all, her Second Life relationship with partner Oclee Hornet became a real-life romance. “He had a bald avatar, which is quite unusual in any world,” she says. “I was interested to know why.” Berry spent most of May in Rotterdam, where Hornet — real name Eelco Osseweijer — lives. The two own a two-story red brick home together in Second Life, on which they spend $295 a month for the freehold to the land. “There’s a possibility we will live together [in real life] at some stage in the future,” Berry explains.

Despite it all, I ask her, despite the changes, and the intractability, despite the disputes and the stagnancy, you’re still a Second Life fan?

“Oh yeah,” she says. There’s a pause and her voice grows richer, the kind of alteration in voice that only comes when speaking through a genuine, heartfelt, and involuntary smile.

“Oh yes. Yes.”

Via aeon magazine

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In the future, most people will live in a total surveillance state – and some of us might even like it

A Banksy graffiti work in London. Photo by Cate Gillon/Getty Images

Suppose you’re walking home one night, alone, and you decide to take a shortcut through a dark alley. You make it halfway through, when suddenly you hear some drunks stumbling behind you. Some of them are shouting curses. They look large and powerful, and there are several of them. Nonetheless, you feel safe, because you know someone is watching.

You know this because you live in the future where surveillance is universal, ubiquitous and unavoidable. Governments and large corporations have spread cameras, microphones and other tracking devices all across the globe, and they also have the capacity to store and process oceans of surveillance data in real time. Big Brother not only watches your sex life, he analyses it. It sounds nightmarish — but it might be inevitable. So far, attempts to control surveillance have generally failed. We could be headed straight for the panopticon, and if recent news developments are any indication, it might not take that long to get there.

Maybe we should start preparing. And not just by wringing our hands or mounting attempts to defeat surveillance. For if there’s a chance that the panopticon is inevitable, we ought to do some hard thinking about its positive aspects. Cataloguing the downsides of mass surveillance is important, essential even. But we have a whole literature devoted to that. Instead, let’s explore its potential benefits.

The first, and most obvious, advantage of mass surveillance is a drastic reduction in crime. Indeed, this is the advantage most often put forward by surveillance proponents today. The evidence as to whether current surveillance achieves this is ambiguous; cameras, for instance, seem to have an effect on property crime, but not on incidences of violence. But today’s world is very different from a panopticon full of automatically analysed surveillance devices that leave few zones of darkness.

If calibrated properly, total surveillance might eradicate certain types of crime almost entirely. People respond well to inevitable consequences, especially those that follow swiftly on the heels of their conduct. Few would commit easily monitored crimes such as assault or breaking and entering, if it meant being handcuffed within minutes. This kind of ultra-efficient police capability would require not only sensors capable of recording crimes, but also advanced computer vision and recognition algorithms capable of detecting crimes quickly. There has been some recent progress on such algorithms, with further improvements expected. In theory, they would be able to alert the police in real time, while the crime was still ongoing. Prompt police responses would create near-perfect deterrence, and violent crime would be reduced to a few remaining incidents of overwhelming passion or extreme irrationality.

If surveillance recordings were stored for later analysis, other types of crimes could be eradicated as well, because perpetrators would fear later discovery and punishment. We could expect crimes such as low-level corruption to vanish, because bribes would become perilous (to demand or receive) for those who are constantly under watch. We would likely see a similar reduction in police brutality. There might be an initial spike in detected cases of police brutality under a total surveillance regime, as incidents that would previously have gone unnoticed came to light, but then, after a short while, the numbers would tumble. Ubiquitous video recording, mobile and otherwise, has already begun to expose such incidents.

On a smaller scale, mass surveillance would combat all kinds of abuses that currently go unreported because the abuser has power over the abused. You see this dynamic in a variety of scenarios, from the dramatic (child abuse) to the more mundane (line managers insisting on illegal, unpaid overtime). Even if the victim is too scared to report the crime, the simple fact that the recordings existed would go a long way towards equalising existing power differentials. There would be the constant risk of some auditor or analyst stumbling on the recording, and once the abused was out of the abuser’s control (grown up, in another job) they could retaliate and complain, proof in hand. The possibility of deferred vengeance would make abuse much less likely to occur in the first place.

With reduced crime, we could also expect a significant reduction in police work and, by extension, police numbers. Beyond a rapid-reaction force tasked with responding to rare crimes of passion, there would be no need to keep a large police force on hand. And there would also be no need for them to enjoy the special rights they do today. Police officers can, on mere suspicion, detain you, search your person, interrogate you, and sometimes enter your home. They can also arrest you on suspicion of vague ‘crimes’ such as ‘loitering with intent’. Our present police force is given these powers because it needs to be able to investigate. Police officers can’t be expected to know who committed what crime, and when, so they need extra powers to be able to figure this out, and still more special powers to protect themselves while they do so. But in a total-surveillance world, there would be no need for humans to have such extensive powers of investigation. For most crimes, guilt or innocence would be obvious and easy to establish from the recordings. The police’s role could be reduced to arresting specific individuals, who have violated specific laws.

If all goes well, there might be fewer laws for the police to enforce. Most countries currently have an excess of laws, criminalising all sorts of behaviour. This is only tolerated because of selective enforcement; the laws are enforced very rarely, or only against marginalised groups. But if everyone was suddenly subject to enforcement, there would have to be a mass legal repeal. When spliffs on private yachts are punished as severely as spliffs in the ghetto, you can expect the marijuana legalisation movement to gather steam. When it becomes glaringly obvious that most people simply can’t follow all the rules they’re supposed to, these rules will have to be reformed. In the end, there is a chance that mass surveillance could result in more personal freedom, not less.

The military is another arm of state power that is ripe for a surveillance-inspired shrinking. If cross-border surveillance becomes ubiquitous and effective, we could see a reduction in the $1.7 trillion that the world spends on the military each year. Previous attempts to reduce armaments have ultimately been stymied by a lack of reliable verification. Countries can never trust that their enemies aren’t cheating, and that encourages them to cheat themselves. Arms races are also made worse by a psychological phenomenon, whereby each side interprets the actions of the other as a dangerous provocation, while interpreting its own as purely defensive or reactive. With cross-border mass surveillance, countries could check that others are abiding by the rules, and that they weren’t covertly preparing for an attack. If intelligence agencies were to use all the new data to become more sophisticated observers, countries might develop a better understanding of each other. Not in the hand-holding, peace-and-love sense, but in knowing what is a genuine threat and what is bluster or posturing. Freed from fear of surprising new weapons, and surprise attacks, countries could safely shrink their militaries. And with reduced armies, we should be able to expect reduced warfare, continuing the historical trend in conflict reduction since the end of the Second World War.

Of course, these considerations pale when compared with the potential for mass surveillance to help prevent global catastrophic risks, and other huge disasters. Pandemics, to name just one example, are among the deadliest dangers facing the human race. The Black Death killed a third of Europe’s population in the 14th century and, in the early 20th century, the Spanish Flu killed off between 50 and 100 million people. In addition, smallpox buried more people than the two world wars combined. There is no reason to think that great pandemics are a thing of the past, and in fact there are reasons to think that another plague could be due soon. There is also the possibility that a pandemic could arise from synthetic biology, the human manipulation of microbes to perform specific tasks. Experts are divided as to the risks involved in this new technology, but they could be tremendous, especially if someone were to release, accidentally or malevolently, infectious agents deliberately engineered for high transmissibility and deadliness.

You can imagine how many lives would have been saved had AIDS been sniffed out by epidemiologists more swiftly

Mass surveillance could help greatly here, by catching lethal pandemics in their earliest stages, or beforehand, if we were to see one being created artificially. It could also expose lax safety standards or dangerous practices in legitimate organisations. Surveillance could allow for quicker quarantines, and more effective treatment of pandemics. Medicines and doctors could be rushed to exactly the right places, and micro-quarantines could be instituted. More dramatic measures, such as airport closures, are hard to implement on a large scale, but these quick-response tactics could be implemented narrowly and selectively. Most importantly, those infected could be rapidly informed of their condition, allowing them to seek prompt treatment.

With proper procedures and perfect surveillance, we could avoid pandemics altogether. Infections would be quickly isolated and eliminated, and eradication campaigns would be shockingly efficient. Tracking the movements and actions of those who fell ill would make it much easier to research the causes and pathology of diseases. You can imagine how many lives would have been saved had AIDS been sniffed out by epidemiologists more swiftly.

Likewise, mass surveillance could prevent the terrorist use of nukes, dirty bombs, or other futuristic weapons. Instead of blanket bans in dangerous research areas, we could allow research to proceed and use surveillance to catch bad actors and bad practices. We might even see an increase in academic freedom.

Surveillance could also be useful in smaller, more conventional disasters. Knowing where everyone in a city was at the moment an earthquake struck would make rescue services much more effective, and the more cameras around when hurricanes hit, the better. Over time, all of this footage would increase our understanding of disasters, and help us to mitigate their effects.

Indeed, there are whole new bodies of research that could emerge from the data provided by mass surveillance. Instead of formulating theories and laboriously recruiting a biased and sometimes unwilling group for testing, social scientists, economists and epidemiologists could use surveillance data to test their ideas. And they could do it from home, immediately, and have access to the world’s entire population. Many theories could be rapidly confirmed or discarded, with great benefit to society. The panopticon would be a research nirvana.

Lying and hypocrisy would become practically impossible, and one could no longer project a false image of oneself

Mass surveillance could also make our lives more convenient, by eliminating the need for passwords. The surveillance system itself could be used for identification, provided the algorithms were sufficiently effective. Instead of Mr John Smith typing in ‘passw0rd!!!’ to access his computer or ‘2345’ to access his money, the system could simply track where he was at all times, and grant him access to any computers and money he had the right to. Long security lines at airports could also be eliminated. If surveillance can detect prohibited items, then searches are a waste of time. Effective crime detection and deterrence would mean that people would have little reason to lock their cars or their doors.

Doing business in a mass surveillance society would be smoother, too. Outdoor festivals and concerts would no longer need high fences, security patrols, and intimidating warnings. They could simply replace them with clear signs along the boundary of the event, as anyone attending would be identified and billed directly. People could dash into a shop, grab what they needed, and run out, without having to wait in line or check out. The camera system would have already billed them. Drivers who crashed into parked cars would no longer need to leave a note. They’d be tracked anyway, and insurance companies would have already settled the matter by the time they returned home. Everyday human interactions would be changed in far-reaching ways. Lying and hypocrisy would become practically impossible, and one could no longer project a false image of oneself. In the realm of personal identity, there would be less place for imagination or reinvention, and more place for honesty.

Today’s intricate copyright laws could be simplified, and there would be no need for the infantilising mess of reduced functionality that is ‘Digital Rights Management’. Surveillance would render DRM completely unnecessary, meaning that anyone who purchased a song could play it anytime, on any machine, while copying it and reusing it to their heart’s content. There would be no point in restricting these uses, because the behaviour that copyrights holders object to — passing the music on to others — would be detected and tagged separately. Every time you bought a song, a book, or even a movie, you’d do so knowing that it would be with you wherever you went for the rest of your life.

The virtues and vices of surveillance are the imagined virtues and vices of small villages, which tend to be safe and neighbourly, but prejudiced and judgemental. With the whole world as the village, we can hope that the multiplicity of cultures and lifestyles would reduce a global surveillance culture’s built-in potential for prejudice and judgment. With people more trusting, and less fearful, of each other, we could become more willing to help out, more willing to take part in common projects, more pro-social and more considerate. Yes, these potential benefits aren’t the whole story on mass surveillance, and I would never argue that they outweigh the potential downsides. But if we’re headed into a future panopticon, we’d better brush up on the possible upsides. Because governments might not bestow these benefits willingly — we will have to make sure to demand them.

Via Mother Jones

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Last Wednesday, the Fed announced that it would not be tapering its bond buying program. This news was released at precisely 2 p.m. in Washington "as measured by the national atomic clock." It takes seven milliseconds for this information to get to Chicago. However, several huge orders that were based on the Fed's decision were placed on Chicago exchanges two to three milliseconds after 2 p.m. How did this happen?

CNBC has the story here, and the answer is: We don't know. Reporters get the Fed release early, but they get it in a secure room and aren't permitted to communicate with the outside world until precisely 2 p.m. Still, maybe someone figured out a way to game the embargo. It would certainly be worth a ton of money. Investigations are ongoing, but Neil Irwin has this to say:

"In the meantime, there's another useful lesson out of the whole episode. It is the reality of how much trading activity, particularly of the ultra-high-frequency variety is really a dead weight loss for society.

…There is a role in [capital] markets for traders whose work is more speculative…But when taken to its logical extremes, such as computers exploiting five millisecond advantages in the transfer of market-moving information, it's much less clear that society gains anything…In the high-frequency trading business, billions of dollars are spent on high-speed lines, programming talent, and advanced computers by funds looking to capitalize on the smallest and most fleeting of mispricings. Those are computing resources and insanely intelligent people who could instead be put to work making the Internet run faster for everyone, or figuring out how to distribute electricity more efficiently, or really anything other than trying to figure out how to trade gold futures on the latest Fed announcement faster than the speed of light."

Yep. I'm not sure what to do about it, though. A tiny transaction tax still seems like a workable solution, although there are several real-world issues with it. Worth a look, though.

Also read: Is High-Speed Trading the Next Wall Street Disaster?

In a related vein, let's talk a bit more about this seven millisecond figure. That might very well be how long it takes a signal to travel from Washington, DC, to Chicago via a fiber-optic cable, but in fact the two cities are only 960 kilometers apart. At the speed of light, that's 3.2 milliseconds. A straight line path would be a bit less, perhaps 3 milliseconds. So maybe someone has managed to set up a neutrino communications network that transmits directly through the earth. It couldn't transfer very much information, but if all you needed was a few dozen bits (taper/no taper, interest rates up/down, etc.) it might work a treat. Did anyone happen to notice an extra neutrino flux in the upper Midwest corridor at 2 p.m. last Wednesday? Perhaps Wall Street has now co-opted not just the math geek community, and not just the physics geek community, but the experimental physics geek community. Wouldn't that be great?

Via Inhabitat

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Via University of Washington

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Yan Liang, L2XY2.com

An example of a chemical program. Here, A, B and C are different chemical species.

Similar to using Python or Java to write code for a computer, chemists soon could be able to use a structured set of instructions to “program” how DNA molecules interact in a test tube or cell.

A team led by the University of Washington has developed a programming language for chemistry that it hopes will streamline efforts to design a network that can guide the behavior of chemical-reaction mixtures in the same way that embedded electronic controllers guide cars, robots and other devices. In medicine, such networks could serve as “smart” drug deliverers or disease detectors at the cellular level.

The findings were published online this week (Sept. 29) in Nature Nanotechnology.

Chemists and educators teach and use chemical reaction networks, a century-old language of equations that describes how mixtures of chemicals behave. The UW engineers take this language a step further and use it to write programs that direct the movement of tailor-made molecules.

“We start from an abstract, mathematical description of a chemical system, and then use DNA to build the molecules that realize the desired dynamics,” said corresponding author Georg Seelig, a UW assistant professor of electrical engineering and of computer science and engineering. “The vision is that eventually, you can use this technology to build general-purpose tools.”

Currently, when a biologist or chemist makes a certain type of molecular network, the engineering process is complex, cumbersome and hard to repurpose for building other systems. The UW engineers wanted to create a framework that gives scientists more flexibility. Seelig likens this new approach to programming languages that tell a computer what to do.

“I think this is appealing because it allows you to solve more than one problem,” Seelig said. “If you want a computer to do something else, you just reprogram it. This project is very similar in that we can tell chemistry what to do.”

Humans and other organisms already have complex networks of nano-sized molecules that help to regulate cells and keep the body in check. Scientists now are finding ways to design synthetic systems that behave like biological ones with the hope that synthetic molecules could support the body’s natural functions. To that end, a system is needed to create synthetic DNA molecules that vary according to their specific functions.

The new approach isn’t ready to be applied in the medical field, but future uses could include using this framework to make molecules that self-assemble within cells and serve as “smart” sensors. These could be embedded in a cell, then programmed to detect abnormalities and respond as needed, perhaps by delivering drugs directly to those cells.

Seelig and colleague Eric Klavins, a UW associate professor of electrical engineering, recently received $2 million from the National Science Foundation as part of a national initiative to boost research in molecular programming. The new language will be used to support that larger initiative, Seelig said.

Co-authors of the paper are Yuan-Jyue Chen, a UW doctoral student in electrical engineering; David Soloveichik of the University of California, San Francisco; Niranjan Srinivas at the California Institute of Technology; and Neil Dalchau, Andrew Phillips and Luca Cardelli of Microsoft Research.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the National Centers for Systems Biology.

Via Mashable

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Via pcworld

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Via kotaku

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Between 1981 and 1982, renowned photographer Ira Nowinski hiked all over the Bay Area, taking hundreds of photos of arcades. In all, he snapped around 700 images, and in awesome news for retro gaming fans many of them are now available for viewing, courtesy of their acquisition by Stanford University's library.

Once you're done looking at the games, and in particular that cruisey arcade that's nearly all cocktail units, get a load of the fashion. While arcades still exist today, they sure don't have the same diversity of clientèle you see here, like Mr. Texas on the Pac-Man cabinet up top.

Bay Area video arcades : photographs by Ira Nowinski, 1981-1982 [Stanford]

California's Stanford University snaps up a collection of 650 retro arcade photographs [Edge]

Via Le Monde Blog

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Couverture de "Newsweek" du 27 juillet 1970.

C'est une édition du 27 juillet 1970, du magazine américain Newsweek, titrée "La vie privée est-elle morte ?", et repérée par le Daily Beast. Dedans, un article de six pages, qui montre que les inquiétudes soulevées par les révélations sur la surveillance, par l'Agence américaine de la sécurité, des données personnelles des internautes et des communications téléphoniques ne datent pas d'hier. Même, elles apparaissent dès lors comme le dernier rebondissement masquant une tendance plus longue.

En 1970 donc, Newsweek expliquait que "durant les vingt dernières années, les Etats-Unis sont devenus (…) l'un des pays qui espionnent le plus et sont le plus soucieux de ses données dans l'histoire mondiale. Les gros commerçants, les petits commerçants, l'administration fiscale, les institutions de police, les organismes de recensement, les sociologues, les banques, les écoles, les centres médicaux, les patrons, les agences fédérales, les compagnies d'assurance (…), tous cherchent obstinément, stockent et utilisent chaque parcelle d'information qu'ils peuvent trouver sur chacun des 205 millions d'Américains, individus et groupes". Bref, "très bientôt, toute la vie et l'histoire d'une personne va être disponible en un clic sur un ordinateur. On va finir en 1984 avant d'avoir atteint cette année", prévoyait, à cette époque, un juriste américain.

>> Lire la note de Big Browser : "Le scandale de la surveillance des données personnelles booste les ventes de "1984'"

L'article énumère une série d'anecdotes où s'entrechoquent collectes de données pour la sécurité et protection de la vie privée. Par exemple, cette bibliothécaire qui a reçu une visite d'employés de l'IRS, l'agence américaine chargée des impôts, lui demandant de lui fournir les noms des "utilisateurs de matériel militant et subversif" – ouvrage sur les explosifs ou biographie du Che Guevara. Ou ce fichier de l'armée fichant les "potentiels perturbateurs ostensibles de la paix", "en plus des 7 millions de fichiers de routine" sur la loyauté ou le statut criminel des citoyens.

Le chapitre sur les écoutes téléphoniques est tout aussi parlant : les écoutes légales, "prudemment utilisées pendant la seconde guerre mondiale pour pister les espions et les saboteurs, sont devenues une pratique si banale du FBI et de la police à la fin des années 1950 qu'elles étaient menées, dit-on, contre chaque bookmaker du coin". A la suite de l'indignation de certains politiques, "le Congrès a spécifié en 1968 que le département de justice, le FBI et la police ne pouvaient pratiquer la surveillance électronique qu'avec un ordre de justice". Mais le gouvernement fédéral se réserve toujours le droit de faire des écoutes clandestines, sans ordre de justice, dans l'intérêt de la "sécurité nationale", explique Newsweek. Avant de préciser – de manière un peu incongrue, vu d'aujourd'hui : "La méfiance grandissante envers le téléphone représente la seule protection réelle de la vie privée."

En parallèle de ce vaste mouvement de collecte des données, les Américains sont devenus de plus en plus sensibles à leur droit à la protection de leur vie privée, explique l'hebdomadaire. Ce qui n'empêche pas, aujourd'hui, une majorité d'entre eux d'approuver la surveillance des communications téléphoniques, et 62 % d'estimer qu'il est important que le gouvernement fédéral enquête sur d'éventuelles menaces "terroristes", quitte à empiéter sur la vie privée, selon un sondage publié le 10 juin.