:: storyglot ::

Flat-pack Housing

2006-08-28T12:05:00.000-07:00

Much has been made lately about the latent housing potential of shipping containers. But according to Chris Johnson, an Australian architect and curator of the Houses of the Future exhibit at Sydney Olympic Park, container-based homes are only one step in a larger global trend toward alternative modular housing systems. "Companies such as Ikea and Toyota are moving into housing and the question is whether people putting brick on brick is, in the early 21st century, the most efficient way to build housing," says Johnson in a 2005 interview with the Sydney Morning Herald. Take, for example, the Ikea BoKlok, an entire house that comes in the same kind of "flat-pack" packaging as that desk you bought back in college:

From this spring, if an Anglo-Swedish project takes off, it will be possible to buy an entire home from the furnishing superstore Ikea with the option - though this would be the hard part - of following the flatpack instructions and assembling it yourself.
Shoppers familiar with the unique Ikea system may blanch at the prospect, but the store is preparing the package to sell to customers with incomes as modest as £15,000. Provided they are handy with Allen keys, Phillips screwdrivers and pliers, they will have a simple open-plan, one-bedroom apartment plus a voucher, probably for £250, to buy a "start package" of Ikea furniture...
The homes were invented in 1997 in response to similar housing problems in Sweden, where Ikea shaved the basic cost of a home in the way it has done for humbler objects like the Jerker cupboard and Gassbo stool. Costly but "unnecessary" house details were cut out after an exhaustive survey of what young house-hunters considered essential, as opposed to ideal.
The BoKloks will available over the counter at Ikea's 13 British stores if all goes well, with between three and seven blocks of six per site, plus communal gardens and car parking. The package may also include advice and support in setting up a new home, a personal shopper, mortgage and insurance discounts and a year's interest-free loans on large purchases of items like the Plutt and Gorm. (The Guardian)

With these and similar projects taking hold in countries throughout Europe and North America, the mid-90s projects of maverick design group Atelier van Lieshout seem more prescient than ever. Now if only Ikea could find a way to put property into a cardboard box, we'd be set...

Dr. Lipson's self-replicating robots

2006-08-14T01:28:00.000-07:00

Undaunted by the distant prospect of the grey goo problem, researchers at Cornell University have constructed a modular, self-replicating toy robot:

So far, the robots, if they can be called that, consist of just three or four mobile cubes.

Each unit comes with a small computer code carrying a blueprint for the layout of the robot, electrical contacts to let it communicate with its neighbours, and magnets to let them stick together.

By turning and moving, the cubes can pick up new units, decide where they belong, and stack them alongside each other to make new devices.

In a little more than a minute, a simple three-cube robot can make a copy of itself. (BBC)

Minneapolis Surveillance Map

2006-08-04T02:00:00.000-07:00

Pedestrian surveilance cameras are now ubiquitous in urban centres around the world. A citizen's group in Minneapolis has created an online, user-updated map to keep track of new cameras as they appear:

To what extent are pedestrians in downtown Minneapolis monitored on surveillance cameras? Are most of the downtown cameras owned by the city or private businesses? Is the footage from these cameras recorded or just viewed? How long are the recordings kept? Who has access to the public camera footage?

The Minneapolis Surveillance Camera Project exists to answer these questions. Working with a shoestring budget, and a lot of very dedicated volunteers were working to inventory all the security cameras that record public spaces within the downtown area. Anyone is free to help out, just report any cameras you see that aren't on our list. (mpls-watched.org)

Second Life: First Impressions

2006-08-02T02:52:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I like to pretend that I don't have a million unfinished projects that need my attention. It's during times like this that I think up new ideas, thus perpetuating the cycle of incompletion. I've been interested in machinima for a long time now, and I'd heard that the MMORPG Second Life was a promising platform for this new type of filmmaking/animation. So during one of those moments where I was pretending I had nothing more pressing to attend to, I downloaded the Second Life (or SL for short) client, signed up for a free starter account, and started exploring.

I didn't know what to expect. The idea of a persistent online "mirror-world", complete with its own internal economy, political system and geography, has been around for a while, but each implementation I've seen has been somewhat underwhelming. Popular MMORPGs like World of Warcraft have always struck me as being, well, a little boring -- run across the mountains, collect an item, bring it back to a specific place to collect a reward, etc. Such classical adventure-based MMORPGs are only as interesting as their individual adventures, and the social and creative aspect seems to always take a back seat to the sword and sorcery stuff. Second Life is very much the opposite. There are almost no built-in "adventures" or game narratives; everything that happens in the virtual world is created by its participants. As one might expect, much of what happens consequently has to do with sex.

My first experience took place while I was reinstalling the operating system on my Mac. To while away the minutes, I put the SL client on my laptop and started flying around. A few minutes later, Stephanie joined me, and once Tiger was on the Mac, we put SL on there, too, and flew around together (everyone can fly in the SL world). Here's some of what we saw:

-A woman building a small chapel for her upcoming wedding. I asked her how long she'd been engaged, and she said only a month (and that even included a recent breakup). She told us she and her virtual lover hadn't yet met in "RL" (real life). "Hopefully someday," she said through the text-messaging client. "A lot of marriages in SL work out in RL, too," she added. We wanted to ask more questions, but her sister appeared and they needed to talk details about the design for the wedding dress.
-An amorous couple engaged in various sex acts. These two had customized their avatars to look like porn stars, complete with huge boobs on the woman and a giant erection on the man. They had sex right in front of us, and seemed to like the company. "Looks like we have an audience," the man said as he entered his partner from behind.
-Several more amorous couples, some of whom did not appreciate our voyeurism.
-A group of furries, all dressed as horses, gathered in a barn on the outskirts of a more populated area. They were all standing still, staring up at the barn wall. I looked at what they were staring at. It was a slide show of line-art anthropomorphic horse porn. I watched for a few minutes as the group's leader clicked through the slides. "Wow, that's hot," said one. "I've already got that one," said another. It was disturbing but intriguing.
-A friendly avatar took us to a park for a ride down a river on inner-tubes. We chatted with him as we floated down the river. He said he was from Tucson and introduced us to his friend (perhaps his girlfriend, we weren't sure), who said she was from Pittsburgh. She later took us back to her private garden where we danced for a while to some 80s pop music. It was a relaxing end to the day.

Perhaps the most exciting thing I discovered while in Second Life was what it offers to filmmakers who want to experiment with machinima. The number of potential sets is basically endless, and there seems to be no shortage of people who could be employed as virtual actors and technicians. And the best part is, you could pay them all scale with virtual cash -- "Linden dollars" -- which currently exchange at a rate of about 250 game dollars to 1 US dollar.

Spiritual Machines

2006-07-27T02:49:00.000-07:00

Reflecting on Douglas Hofstadter's question, "Will spiritual robots replace humanity by 2100?", Kevin Kelly writes:

When thinking in the long term, especially about technology, I find it very helpful to think in terms of human generations. As a rough estimate I reckon 25 years per generation. Civilization began about 10,000 years ago (the oldest city, Jericho, was born in 8000 BC) which makes the civilization now present in Jericho and the rest of the world about 400 generations old. Tha's 400 reproductive cycles of mother to daughter. Four hundred generations of civilized humans is not very long. We could almost memorize the names of all 400 cycles if we had nothing much else to do. After 400 generations we are different people than when we began. We had the idea of automatons and robots only maybe 8 generations ago, and made the first electronic computers 2 generations ago. The entire World Wide Web less than 2,000 days old! The year 2100 is only four generations away, keeping the same human lifespan. If we morph into robots in 2100, civilized humans will have lasted only 400 generations. That would be the shortest lifespan of a species in the history of life.

[The] central question, the central issue, of this coming century is not “what is an AI,?” but “what is a human?” What are humans good for? I forecast that variants of the question “What is a human” will be a recurring headline in USA Today-like newspapers in this coming century. Movies, novels, conferences and websites will all grapple with this central question of “Who are we? What is humanity?” Fed by a prosperous long boom, where anything is possible, but nothing is certain, we’ll have more questions about our identity than answers. Who are we? What does it mean to be a male, or female, or a father, an American, or a human being? The next century can be described as a massive, global scale, 100-year identity crisis. By 2100, people will be amazed that we humans back here now, thought we knew what humans were.

I agree with Kevin's thesis here, but an equally important question [if only as a corollary] is, "What is a machine?" Barring some catastrophe, the boundaries between organism and machine, self and other, will gradually blur to the point where it will sometimes be difficult to tell the difference. Ubiquitous computing technologies -- the next-next-gen of so-called Web 2.0 applications -- will enable humans to colocate segments of their memories and even identities, moving beyond remote storage systems to "remote agency" systems. Where then will the boundary line be drawn? Is a software agent that intelligently acts on my behalf -- based on an acquired understanding of my needs and desires -- a mere robotic employee, or is it an extension of my self, a partner in the forging of my identity, a semantic feedback matrix that is uniquely my own? Like a book or other utterance, such an agent would be a partial representation of my inner being, but unlike traditional texts, it would be an active representation, capable of performing tasks or making additional utterances in a mode consonant with my projected identity. Furthermore, and most importantly, its active nature would enable a kind of collaboration between "it" and "me" in the evolution of my identity. Authors typically claim books as extensions of themselves; would the same hold true for a software or robotic agent that putatively contained and contributed to some essential aspect of selfhood?

(My response is also posted in the comments on Kevin's blog.)

Orit Zuckerman's Memory Machines

2006-07-17T07:41:00.000-07:00

Orit Zuckerman's "Moving Portraits" -- animated photographs that interact through gesture with the viewer -- are bold statements about memory and technology. Zuckerman's site describes how one of these portraits -- essentially a slim LCD screeen connected (wirelessly, it appears) to a computer -- at first looksto be a picture of a little girl covering her eyes. But if the viewer looks long enough, the little girl starts peeking out, eventually smiling. If the viewer leaves, the little girl in the portait again covers her eyes.

Equally exciting are Zuckerman's multi-portrait arrays that interact with each other. Like David Rokeby's seminal (n)chant, what we have here is essentially a network of autonomous software agents interacting with one another. But where (n)chant used words and sounds (and the influence of the viewer) as the medium for the software agents to interact with one another, Zuckerman uses her moving portrait technology to create "...an interactive artwork visualizing how collective behavior emerges from decentralized interaction in a small social network."

Recently, Zuckerman has been experimenting with haptic systems such as TapTap (with Leonardo Bonanni, Jeff Lieberman, and Cati Vaucelle), a scarf that "allows nurturing human touch to be recorded, broadcast and played back."

Banksy's Stencil Grafitti

2006-06-30T18:39:00.000-07:00

Banksy is a U.K. grafitti artist who's received some recent attention on the web for his striking stencil work in London, Palestine and elsewhere. His website contains pictures of his various works, plus some insights on making your own grafitti (and life in general):

• Think from outside the box.

• Collapse the box and take a fucking sharp knife to it.

• Leave the house before you find something worth staying in for.

• It's easier to get forgiveness than permission.

• Spray the paint sparingly onto the stencil from a distance of 8 inches.

• Be aware that going on a major mission totally drunk out of your head will result in some truly spectacular artwork and at least one night in the cells.

• When explaining yourself to the Police its worth being as reasonable as possible. Graffiti writers are not real villains. I am always reminded of this by real villains who consider the idea of breaking in someplace, not stealing anything and then leaving behind a painting of your name in four foot high letters the most retarded thing they ever heard of.

• Remember crime against property is not real crime. People look at an oil painting and admire the use of brushstrokes to convey meaning. People look at a graffiti painting and admire the use of a drainpipe to gain access.

• The time of getting fame for your name on its own is over. Artwork that is only about wanting to be famous will never make you famous. Any fame is a by-product of making something that means something. You don't go to a restaurant and order a meal because you want to have a shit.

Mini flying drones coming soon to a city near you

2006-06-14T02:24:00.000-07:00

University research into things like ultra-miniturized spy planes has become a lucrative pursuit as US defense skunkworks like DARPA turn their attention toward street-level aerial surveillance.

The airflow characteristics at the low speed small planes fly at are very different to those at high speed and not very well understood, he adds. That is one reason his team is investigating novel designs.

It is difficult to quantify how manoeuvrable the new drones are. But during flight tests they have been capable of performing three continuous 360° rolls in 1 second. F-16 fighter jets can carry out one roll per second but have safeguards to prevent more than this in case the pilot passes out through g-force effects. But even without these safeguards Lind, a former NASA engineer, doubts F-16 could match his drones’ performance.

The drones are being developed for use in an urban landscape. (New Scientist)

An unusual solution to the Fermi paradox

2006-04-17T13:36:00.000-07:00

...of course, any solution to the Fermi paradox is going to be unusual. Back in 1950, Nobel laureate physicist Enrico Fermi wondered why, given the vastness of our universe and the fact of our own existence, we haven't heard from any alien civilizations. His thinking led to several seemingly insoluble questions. Is life really so rare that we are literally alone, at least in our local galactic area? Or is it our observational methodologies that are "rare," and are we in fact bathing in messages that we simply cannot detect? Another classic 20th century problem of uncertainty... Until now?

Dr. Gato-Rivera suggests that we might be embedded in a higher civilization in the same way that mountain gorillas and chimpanzees are embedded in our civilization, and that alien secrecy may be nothing more than an inability to communicate with beings on a lower level. She points out that it might make as little sense for aliens to send us an ambassador as it would for us to send ambassadors to baboon troupes. (unknowncountry.com)

An abstract of Ms. Gato-Rivera's paper can be found here, along with a PDF of the text itself.

What's SAIC Spelled Backwards?

2006-04-01T00:54:00.000-08:00

George H.W. Bush, during his mid-70s tenure as head of the CIA, spearheaded the privatization of the US intelligence apparatus, an act that has led to a massive decentralization and deregulation of America's national security and foreign policy operations. Thirty years later, companies such as Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC) are reaping the rewards of a for-profit intelligence service. But is allowing the free market to capitalize on terrorism, war, and insecurity a recipe for disaster?

To get a good sense of who SAIC is and what they're up to, check out their web site. The job opportunities page alone is worth hours of attention, detailing SAIC's involvement with everything from WMD inspection to boots-on-the-ground human intelligence-gathering and covert operations.

But SAIC isn't just about providing contract personnel to the CIA: they also make the weapons systems that support those agents in the field, nifty little toys like the Vigilante and the Global Hawk.

Need a bioweapons scanner? An aerial combat command and control system? Interrogation equipment? Email interceptor? SAIC can handle it. Check out their disturbingly complete products list for more shivers.

Creepy, sure, but one could suppose that somebody has to do it (um, how about the government?). There are concerns, however, that SAIC is doing more than just "supporting" the United States' various wars and covert operations -- after all, they're the ones (along with regular partners Boeing, Halliburton and so forth) who stand to make a profit when America goes to war.

The connections run from the mundanely corrupt to the truly bizarre. Suspected bio-terrorist Steven Hatfill (remember the Anthrax scare? He was the only suspect), for example, is a long-time SAIC employee. CNN, among many other news agencies, got very excited about him for a while until the FBI dropped him as a suspect in the anthrax letter-bombing case (they never produced another):

FBI agents searched the apartment of a former researcher at the U.S. Army's biological warfare defense laboratory at Fort Detrick for the second time in two months Thursday.

The researcher, Steven Hatfill, 48, had previously been questioned in the investigation of last fall's anthrax attacks and had his apartment searched in June. No arrests are imminent, sources said.

FBI Director Robert Mueller said only that investigators had made progress in Thursday's search, which included trash bins outside Hatfill's apartment. Sources said authorities also searched the apartment of a Hatfill friend.

Mueller said an FBI profile of the suspected anthrax mailer -- a lone person living within the United States with experience working in labs and smart enough to "produce a highly refined and deadly product" -- had not changed.

A State Department official revealed Thursday that Hatfill, an infectious disease specialist who has worked both in and for the government for nearly two decades, is on the standby roster of experts waiting to go to Iraq with the U.N. weapons inspection team if President Saddam Hussein approves. (CNN.com)

The Washington Post later profiled Hatfill, detailing his connection to SAIC:

[Stephen Hatfill] took a consulting job with the behemoth government contractor Science Applications International Corp., better known as SAIC. With a sprawling campus in McLean, it did work for a multitude of federal agencies. Many projects were classified, and SAIC's tight relationship with the CIA had led to a standing one-liner: "What is SAIC spelled backwards?"

[At SAIC, Hatfill designed and taught bioterror preparedness courses, but his responsibilities also included "black," or classified, biowarfare projects. One of Hatfill's major roles was working with the Joint Special Operations Command, which handled U.S. military counter-terrorism operations.]

At Fort Bragg, N.C., Hatfill led gruelling training for Army commandos preparing for covert missions to find and destroy weapons of mass destruction, according to friends and former colleagues. He conducted counter-terrorism training for Defense Intelligence agents and did a "super job," says DIA spokesman Don Black.

Hatfill designed programs and training equipment for Navy SEALs, and SAIC colleagues say he often sat at his desk designing mock bioterror training devices, including a backpack that could be used by enemies to spray germs on the battlefield. He trained CIA agents in counter-proliferation, and shuttled to U.S. embassies abroad to teach bioterrorism preparedness. (Washington Post)

Maryland, under the direction of Republican officials, used SAIC to justify the use of Diebold machines. C.D. Sludge of Scoop reports on the various conflicts of interest associated with the Maryland fiasco:

On the board of the Enterprise Solutions Division of the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) – a lobbying organisation bidding to provide a $200,000+ public opinion manipulation campaign on electronic voting – is a senior vice president of SAIC, the company tasked with investigating the security of the Diebold voting machine technology in the states of Maryland and Ohio.

...

SAIC has been tasked by the Governor of the state of Maryland to report on security concerns around Diebold Election Systems software and hardware..

To date in the developing story about electronic security concerns about new touch screen voting systems – black box voting – high profile conflicts of interest have already caused problems for 1) Nebraska Republican Senator Chuck Hagel and 2) for Johns Hopkins university professor Avi Rubin, co-author a report damning Diebold's touch screen software security published in June. (Scoop)

SAIC is one of the "big five" US military contractors, and a major player in the global security, intelligence, and mercenary industry. SAIC's contracts in Iraq alone run into the billions of dollars. One of its most controversial activities is the establishment and operation of a state-wide propaganda organ:

"Information dominance" came of age during the conflict in Iraq. It is a little discussed but highly significant part of the US government strategy of "full spectrum dominance", integrating propaganda and news media into the military command structure more fundamentally than ever before.

In the past, propaganda involved managing the media. Information dominance, by contrast, sees little distinction between command and control systems, propaganda and journalism. They are all types of "weaponized information" to be deployed. As strategic expert Colonel Kenneth Allard noted, the 2003 attack on Iraq "will be remembered as a conflict in which information fully took its place as a weapon of war".

The new TV service for Iraq was paid for by the Pentagon. In keeping with the philosophy of information dominance it was supplied, not by an independent news organisation, but by a defence contractor, Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC). Its expertise in the area - according to its website - is in "information operations" and "information dominance". (The Guardian)

There was also an article on this in the NYTimes. Here's the abstract:

Pentagon has quietly awarded $300,000 contract to SAIC, major defense consultant, to study how Defense Dept could design 'effective strategic influence' campaign to combat global terror; this comes year after Defense Sec Rumsfeld disbanded Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence after it became known that office was considering plans to provide false news items to unwitting foreign journalists to influence policymakers and public sentiment abroad; senior Pentagon officials say new contract with SAIC does not reflect backdoor effort to resurrect discredited office and is merely study to understand Al Qaeda better and find ways to combat it. (New York Times)

One of the more striking examples of how deep the SAIC-Bush ties run is the case of David Kay the latest (and supposedly final) "weapons inspector" in Iraq. Kay has been a SAIC VP since 1993. His biography is interesting reading, especially in light of his relationship to Iraq, Anthrax suspect Hatfill, and the current "War on Terror." (Mail Archive Bio)

[This article originally appeared January 17, 2004 on my now-defunct Oakley Centre website; since then, several developments relating to this story have occured, not least of which was David Kay's announcement following his tour of duty as chief inspector that there were no WMDs in Iraq. Oh, yeah, and the election. Bush won.]

Robert A. Freitas, Jr: Limits to Global Ecophagy

2006-03-15T13:51:00.000-08:00

Any paper containing the section heading "Minimum Replibot Dispersal Time as a Function of the Number of Uniformly-Distributed Replibot Release Sites" is worth a read:

Perhaps the earliest-recognized and best-known danger of molecular nanotechnology is the risk that self-replicating nanorobots capable of functioning autonomously in the natural environment could quickly convert that natural environment (e.g., "biomass") into replicas of themselves (e.g., "nanomass") on a global basis, a scenario usually referred to as the "gray goo problem" but perhaps more properly termed "global ecophagy."

...

However, biovorous nanorobots capable of comprehensive ecophagy will not be easy to build and their design will require exquisite attention to numerous complex specifications and operational challenges. Such biovores can emerge only after a lengthy period of purposeful focused effort, or as a result of deliberate experiments aimed at creating general-purpose artificial life, perhaps by employing genetic algorithms, and are highly unlikely to arise solely by accident. (Foresight.org)

William Walker and "the recurrent strain of imperialism in American culture"

2006-03-10T02:18:00.000-08:00

They used to call them filibusters:

Few figures in Latin American history have attracted more attention from North American biographers than the mid-nineteenth-century filibuster William Walker. This restless product of the Tennessee frontier studied medicine and law in the United States and Europe before turning to journalism in New Orleans in 1849. A tragic romance contributed to his decision to leave the Crescent City to join the rush to California in 1850. Neither law nor business nor journalism satisfied him there, however, and he soon became involved in filibustering schemes, first to Mexico and later to Central America.

Before a Central American national army defeated him in 1857, Walker had made himself military commander and president of Nicaragua, and embarked on a conscious policy of "Americanization" and "democratization" of that state's institutions. Expelled, he conspired repeatedly to return to Central America, only to die before a Honduran firing squad in 1860. Most of the details of the Walker episode were long ago published by Central and North American historians. Few works, in fact, have improved upon William O. Scroggs, Filibusters and Financiers (1916). Yet new volumes on the man and his times continue to appear. The work presently under review, however, is not just one more biography. Instead, it analyzes the presence of the William Walker story in American literature as a reflection of the recurrent strain of imperialism in American culture. (H-net)

Afghanistan: Burgeoning Narco-State

2006-02-22T02:22:00.000-08:00

Afghanistan now takes care of 87 percent of the global heroin demand. Opium poppies are the country's primary cash crop, occupying 206,000 hectares of land. By contrast, in 2001, before the mercenary bargains of the US/Allied invasion, the amount of production was so small - owing to the Taliban's curiously-timed crackdown on poppy farmers - that poppy fields added up to less than 8000 hectares and the heroin trade was nearly stamped out.

What is happening, Charles says, is the transformation of a poor, war torn country struggling with democracy into a narco state where power emanates from a group of drug kingpins far more powerful than the new government.

The process began in 2001 when the United States forged military alliances with powerful warlords and used their private armies to drive al Qaeda and the Taliban out of the country.

But some of Afghanistan’s biggest warlords also happen to be some of the country’s biggest drug lords. Now that they are part of the government, often in high places, a few are even charged with eradicating the drug traffic that many people believe they’re still involved in.

One former warlord suspected of being involved in the opium trade is Hazrat Ali, whose private army fought against al Qaeda at the battle of Tora Bora. In appreciation of his efforts, he was placed in charge of security for Nangahar province until he resigned recently to run for parliament. (CBS News)

SAIC overseeing development of US Army videogame

2006-01-05T01:32:00.000-08:00

Ubiquitous government contractor SAIC doesn't just handle psychological operations in Iraq. Its InfoTech branch is now hiring managers for the development of America's Army, a freeware first-person shooter that is the narrow end of the US Army's recruitment spear:

[The successful candidate will]...manage the software development of the public Americas Army Game and all Americas Army based training and simulation application. Experience with simulation and training applications, video game programming and 3D modeling is desirable. This position involves managing, designing and directing the development of real-time simulation software. The person selected for this position will provide software management over the Americas Army development teams and Americas Army code/asset repository and will also be required to handle duties such as scheduling, estimating, product demonstrations, software project documentation and training. These duties will involve travel assignments to support program reviews, or support demonstrations.(SAIC Job Opportunities)

Potato Brain - WTF?

2005-12-27T03:07:00.000-08:00

Out of context, this paragraph is only slightly more bizarre than it is in its proper place. From something called, "Snake Oil Men, Part 7":

We went to the hospital to get my daughter checked out. By this point we had a police escort, but nobody was buying my story about the Brotherhood. I was just a crazy old Nobel laureate with a swollen finger. But then something happened that lent credence to my story, something that would bring down a thousand year old fraternity of medical practitioners, newsmen, and fighter pilots. The X-rays of my daughter's head came back, and there, floating in intra-cranial jelly, was a brain the size of a potato.

My favorite part is the line about the swollen finger.

The Rise and Fall of Atari

2005-12-04T02:58:00.000-08:00

The tale of game manufacturer Atari's rise to market dominance in the late 70s and early 80s is as much about innovative electronic art as it is savvy business operations. It is unsurprising, then, that when the creativity dried up at Atari, so did the profits.

At its peak, Atari was the pre-eminent video game manufacturer in the world. But by the mid 80s, its fortunes had so radically changed that it was forced to literally dump hundreds of thousands of game cartridges and consoles in the New Mexico desert.

In the early 1980s Atari owned 80% of the video game market, they accounted for 70% of Warner's operating profits, and in the fourth quarter of 1982 the Wall Street "whisper number" concerning Atari's expected earnings predicted a 50% increase over the previous year.

If one game cartridge could be selected as the symbol of the sudden demise of Atari's golden goose, however, it would have to be the ill-fated E.T.

Atari rushed E.T. through development in a matter of months to get it onto the market in time for Christmas, and the result was a virtually unplayable game with a dull plot and crummy graphics in which frustrated players spent most of their time leading the E.T. character around in circles to prevent him from falling into pits. Atari produced five million E.T. cartridges, and according to Atari's then-president and CEO, "nearly all of them came back."

Some other video game manufacturers attempted to rid themselves of excess inventory by selling it at sharply reduced prices, but Atari, stuck with millions of games and consoles that were largely unsellable at any price, sent fourteen truckloads of merchandise from their plant in El Paso, Texas, to be dumped in a city landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico in late September 1983. In order to keep the site from being looted, steamrollers crushed and flattened the games, and a concrete slab was poured over the remains.

Read an exhaustive history of Atari and other early video game companies at "The Dot Eaters".

Snake Robots

2005-11-17T01:39:00.000-08:00

"The question naturally arises, why snake robots? Biological snakes occupy a wide variety of ecological niches, ranging from arid desert to tropical jungle as well as swimming in rivers and oceans. Abandoning limbs and developing elongated spines has proved an effective survival strategy, allowing snakes to hunt underground in confined tunnels, above ground in grassy fields and up in the tree-tops, even falling in a controlled glide from one tree to the next. By attempting to build robots that emulate and perhaps match the capabilities of their biological counterparts, it is possible that we will create useful tools capable of carrying sensors, taking samples, and making physical changes in a wide variety of environments." (SnakeRobots.com)

Arkin: Help For Karen Hughes

2005-10-22T15:55:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post's William M. Arkin outlines the expansive information warfare doctrine of the US Department of Defense:

As Under Secretary of State Karen Hughes begins her monumental campaign to improve the world's opinion of the United States, not to worry, military information warriors are poised to jump in as soon as the FEMA of public diplomacy falters.

Certainly one of the fastest growing military sectors is that of information operations (IO). And in IO, there is no aspect of the military effort to make friends and influence people overseas that is hotter right now than one most people have never even heard of: human factors analysis.

According to an internal Defense Department document, Director of Central Intelligence Directive (DCID) 7/3, "Information Operations and Intelligence Community Related Activities," defines human factors analysis as: "The psychological, cultural, behavioral, and other human attributes that influence decision-making, the flow of information, and the interpretation of information by individuals and groups at any level in any state or organization."

...

[The Department of Defense's] 5 July 2005 draft update of the information operations doctrine, revealed here for the first time, contains a new definition for information operations: "The integrated employment of electronic warfare (EW), computer network operations (CNO), psychological operations (PSYOP), military deception (MILDEC), and operations security (OPSEC), in concert with specified supporting and related capabilities, to influence, disrupt, or deny human [my emphasis] and automated decision-making, while protecting our own."

The draft doctrine breaks down the "information environment" into information, physical and cognitive dimensions. The cognitive is called "the most important of the three," and "the mind of the "decision maker" and the "target audience (TA)," formerly called the populace, is called the objective of all information information. (Washington Post: Early Warning)

Spychips a best-seller

2005-10-06T01:58:00.000-07:00

Spychips by Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre of the privacy rights group Caspian hit the best-seller list on Amazon.com before it was even officially released. Public interest in RFID technology is clearly on the upswing; will governments respond with thoughtful inquiry and legislation?

Albrecht and McIntyre make a staggering accusation in Spychips: that Philips, Procter and Gamble, Gillette, NCR and IBM are conspiring with each other and the federal government to follow individual consumers everywhere, using embedded radio tags planted in their clothing and belongings.

The businesses, who form the center of the RFID industry, hope to wirelessly monitor the contents of consumers' refrigerators, medicine cabinets, basement workbenches -- even their garbage pails, the book claims.

These companies have long insisted they are interested only in making their supply chains run more smoothly.

The authors, who run the consumer privacy rights group Caspian, support their assertions with company documents, records of patents and patent applications, and statements made by RFID industry leaders at corporate events. (Wired)

The Nation: Blackwater Down

2005-10-05T21:53:00.000-07:00

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina exposed more than just the endemic poverty in the richest nation in the world. It also laid bare the US government's unsettling dependency on private military/security forces both at home and abroad.

When asked what authority they were operating under, one guy said, "We're on contract with the Department of Homeland Security." Then, pointing to one of his comrades, he said, "He was even deputized by the governor of the state of Louisiana. We can make arrests and use lethal force if we deem it necessary." The man then held up the gold Louisiana law enforcement badge he wore around his neck. Blackwater spokesperson Anne Duke also said the company has a letter from Louisiana officials authorizing its forces to carry loaded weapons.

"This vigilantism demonstrates the utter breakdown of the government," says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. "These private security forces have behaved brutally, with impunity, in Iraq. To have them now on the streets of New Orleans is frightening and possibly illegal."

Blackwater is not alone. As business leaders and government officials talk openly of changing the demographics of what was one of the most culturally vibrant of America's cities, mercenaries from companies like DynCorp, Intercon, American Security Group, Blackhawk, Wackenhut and an Israeli company called Instinctive Shooting International (ISI) are fanning out to guard private businesses and homes, as well as government projects and institutions. Within two weeks of the hurricane, the number of private security companies registered in Louisiana jumped from 185 to 235. Some, like Blackwater, are under federal contract. Others have been hired by the wealthy elite, like F. Patrick Quinn III, who brought in private security to guard his $3 million private estate and his luxury hotels, which are under consideration for a lucrative federal contract to house FEMA workers. (The Nation)

Carl Bernstein skewers the "New Media"

2005-10-01T13:25:00.000-07:00

Honest public debate is a prerequisite for a healthy democracy. Carl Bernstein, writing about the "unmasking" of Deep Throat in this month's Vanity Fair, identifies a litany of reasons why real debate rarely occurs these days in the US news media.

Deep Throat's unveiling came at a new media moment, at the apogee of talk TV, which hews to a value system predicated on who can shout simplistic syllogisms the loudest and make the most outlandish ahistorical pronouncements. The new media model routinely accords equal time and weight to two opposing views without regard to whether one might be factually demonstrable and the other off the deep end...(Mediabistro)

Michael Geist: Here comes Lawful Access

2005-10-01T01:19:00.000-07:00

Michael Geist holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet & E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa. His concerns over Justice Minister Irwin Cotler's recent moves to implement "lawful access" legislation -- along with any public debate about the legislation itself -- have flown under the media radar, with only a few recent editorial exceptions.

For those who have not followed the issue, lawful access envisions creating significant new network surveillance powers that would be embedded directly in the network. Moreover, ISPs would be required to retain traffic data for significant periods of time. Not only does the proposal (at least as it was presented privately to several groups in the spring) create new surveillance powers, but it actually reduces the level of privacy protection and oversight associated with that surveillance. For example, one proposal floated in the spring would require ISPs to disclose subscriber information within 30 minutes to law enforcement authorities on a 24 hour, 7 day per week basis. Incredibly, law enforcement authorities could make such a request with only a phone call under certain circumstances. No judicial oversight. No advance paperwork. No privacy.(Michael Geist)

VeriChip implanting RFID tags into Katrina corpses

2005-09-20T01:48:00.000-07:00

Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond notes that "for this app [tracking the bodies of hurricane victims with RFID tags], arphids actually MAKE SENSE!" That said, VeriChip's two-pronged PR blitz -- half disaster relief, half Branson-like CEO stunting -- leaves a bad taste in our mouths. Expect RFID makers to increase their profiles with each new disaster as they jockey for market share.

A company that makes ID chips for humans said Friday it has started “chipping” corpses in the Katrina-ravaged region of Mississippi to help expedite the identification process. Florida-based VeriChip said it has already implanted radio frequency identification (RFID) tags into 100 corpses in the state for the Mississippi State Department of Health.

...

Using RFID tags to ID corpses is the company’s latest move in the growing field of RFID, which is expected to one day replace barcode technology. The RFID market, which commonly tracks goods in a supply chain and streamlines factories, is estimated to become a multibillion-dollar industry over the next five years. (Red Herring)

Meanwhile, back in VeriChip's hometown...

To help publicize a company that makes microchips that can be implanted in humans for identification purposes, a prominent San Francisco banker got “chipped” Monday so that his living will is just a scan away if he ever becomes seriously ill.

Before some 40 investors and entrepreneurs in San Francisco, John Merriman, chairman and CEO of investment firm Merriman Curhan Ford & Co., was injected with a rice-sized radio frequency identification (RFID) tag in his upper arm.

Mr. Merriman said he got “chipped” partly to support Florida-based VeriChip, saying he was “taking one for the team.” He also said he wanted the chip to enable swift access to his living will information should he became disabled.

The chip was an answer to his “increasing paranoia of having the specific provisions in his living will executed” in a worst case scenario, said Mr. Merriman, who does not have any serious medical conditions. (Red Herring)

Biometrics Industry Booms

2005-09-19T09:05:00.000-07:00

And we thought the video games industry was booming:

Interest in biometrics technology for access control or personal identification is growing around the world, with the global biometrics market expected to top $4.6 billion in 2008 from $719 million in 2003, according to the International Biometric Group, an industry body. In the United States and Europe, companies such as Alcatel, Nuance Communications and SAFLINK Corp. have been developing non-password biometrics security using fingerprints, face recognition or recognition of veins in the palm or fingers. (Reuters)

California RFID Legislation Shelved

2005-09-16T11:04:00.000-07:00

I like the part, "without discussion:"

"In the face of fierce opposition from high-tech companies, landmark state legislation to limit public agencies from using radio frequency devices was dealt a major setback Thursday. The Assembly Appropriations Committee, without discussion, shelved the measure for the year, though Sen. Joe Simitian, who has been pushing the proposal, vowed to try to revive it before the Legislature adjourns for the year on Sept. 9." (Yahoo! News)

Naomi Klein: A People's Reconstruction

2005-09-15T07:24:00.000-07:00

Naomi Klein writes in The Nation about the next wave of catastrophe looming over the city of New Orleans:

When I was in Sri Lanka six months after the tsunami, many survivors told me that the reconstruction was victimizing them all over again. A council of the country's most prominent businesspeople had been put in charge of the process, and they were handing the coast over to developers at a frantic pace. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of poor fishing people were still stuck in sweltering inland camps, patrolled by soldiers with machine guns and entirely dependent on relief agencies. They called reconstruction "the second tsunami."

There are already signs that New Orleans evacuees could face a similarly brutal second storm. Jimmy Reiss, chairman of the New Orleans Business Council, told Newsweek that he has been brainstorming about how "to use this catastrophe as a once-in-an-eon opportunity to change the dynamic." The Business Council's wish list is well-known: low wages, low taxes, more luxury condos and hotels. Before the flood these schemes were already displacing poor African-Americans: While their music and culture was for sale in an increasingly corporatized French Quarter (where only 4.3 percent of residents are black), their housing developments were being torn down. "For white tourists and businesspeople, New Orleans' reputation is 'a great place to have a vacation but don't leave the French Quarter or you'll get shot,'" Jordan Flaherty, a New Orleans-based labor organizer told me the day after he left the city by boat. "Now the developers have their big chance to disperse the obstacle to gentrification--poor people." (The Nation)

Identity theft, other concerns footnotes at Smart ID conference

2005-09-15T01:34:00.000-07:00

Unsurprisingly, most of the delegates at a recent "Smart ID" conference were starry-eyed about the security utopia offered by integrated all-purpose biometric identity cards. The few naysayers, financed by non-profit action groups, found it difficult to be heard above the din of industry.

Although most of the speakers Tuesday supported smart ID cards, several acknowledged the cards could create privacy and security concerns if implemented improperly, said Nancy Libin, staff counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a privacy advocacy group. Most people, if given a choice of one key that would open their house, open their car, start their car, and open several other locks, would likely choose to carry multiple keys because of the fear of losing the one multi-use key, Libin said.

Likewise, a smart card that includes a national ID, multiple credit card accounts, and other data could cause many problems if it was lost, she said.

Libin also noted that biometric scans that some people want linked to smart cards are not foolproof. For example, fingerprints could be digitally copied and duplicated, she said.

"Unlike passwords, biometrics aren't secret, and they cannot be easily modified," she added. "Once that biometric has been ... compromised, it's done. It cannot be reissued, it's finished."(PC World)

QinetiQ to buy Apogen

2005-09-11T01:01:00.000-07:00

The US isn't the only country whose spy agency has turned to the open market for financing and research. The UK has been doing it for four years. Strangely, both the British (QinetiQ) and American (In-Q-Tel) versions of this idea contain the letter Q:

"Pending U.S. federal regulators' approval, QinetiQ, a $2 billion defense and security company spun off from the U.K. Ministry of Defence in 2001, will buy Apogen for about $300 million in cash...In December 2002, the Defence Ministry, which retained majority ownership in QinetiQ, brought in the Carlyle Group, a Washington, D.C.-based private equity firm. Carlyle took a minority stake in the company. QinetiQ, which posted about $1.5 billion in revenue for the fiscal year ending March 31, has about 12,000 employees in the United Kingdom and the United States." (FCW.com)

In-Q-Tel Invests in Nanosys

2005-09-07T08:22:00.000-07:00

CIA spinoff venture capital firm In-Q-Tel is investing heavily in nanotech, most recently in Nanosys, innovator of the super-thin 'paint-on' antennae required for the production of RFIDs and other ultra-miniaturized tracking devices:

"Nanosys, Inc. today announced that it has signed an agreement expanding its collaboration with In-Q-Tel, a venture group of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to utilize Nanosys' high-performance thin-film electronics technology (Macroelectronics) to develop specialized antennas for the U.S. Government...[The technology] can be applied to numerous other application areas, including portable and large area flat panel displays and low cost RFID (radio frequency identification) tags." (ArriveNet Business)

Paul Saffo on Biometrics

2005-09-05T01:10:00.000-07:00

IFTF's Paul Saffo succinctly summarizes the potential risks of ubiquitous biometric ID technology:

A Japanese cryptographer has demonstrated how, with a bit of gummi bear gelatin, some cyanoacrylic glue, a digital camera and a bit of digital fiddling, he can easily capture a print off a glass and confect an artificial finger that foils fingerprint readers with an 80 percent success rate. Frightening as this is, at least the stunt is far less grisly than the tale, perhaps aprocryphal, of some South African crooks who snipped the finger off an elderly retiree, rushed her still-warm digit down to a government ATM, stuck it on the print reader and collected the victim's pension payment.
(Washington Post)

Usual Suspects Close In

2005-09-04T11:13:00.000-07:00

As the evacuation of New Orleans continues, the next wave of disaster capitalism rolls in:

The Navy has hired Houston-based Halliburton Co. to restore electric power, repair roofs and remove debris at three naval facilities in Mississippi damaged by Hurricane Katrina. Halliburton subsidiary KBR will also perform damage assessments at other naval installations in New Orleans as soon as it is safe to do so. KBR was assigned the work under a "construction capabilities" contract awarded in 2004 after a competitive bidding process. The company is not involved in the Army Corps of Engineers' effort to repair New Orleans' levees.(Houston Chronicle)

WaPo: Storm Exposed Disarray at the Top

2005-09-04T01:18:00.000-07:00

In the aftermath of the hurricane, the Washington Post asks the inevitable question: what about all that money we spent on Homeland Security?

"We've had our first test, and we've failed miserably," said former representative Timothy J. Roemer (D-Ind.), a member of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks. "We have spent billions of dollars in revenues to try to make our country safe, and we have not made nearly enough progress." With Katrina, he noted that "we had some time to prepare. When it's a nuclear, chemical or biological attack," there will be no warning.

...

Some current and former officials argued that as it worked to focus on counterterrorism, the department has diminished the government's ability to respond in a nuts-and-bolts way to disasters in general, and failed to focus enough on threats posed by hurricanes and other natural disasters in particular. From an independent Cabinet-level agency, FEMA has become an underfunded, isolated piece of the vast DHS, yet it is still charged with leading the government's response to disaster.

"It's such an irony I hate to say it, but we have less capability today than we did on September 11," said a veteran FEMA official involved in the hurricane response. "We are so much less than what we were in 2000," added another senior FEMA official. "We've lost a lot of what we were able to do then."(Washington Post)

Ferguson's Safety Smock

2005-09-03T01:12:00.000-07:00

Cory at Boing Boing found this site marketing "suicide-proof" clothing. Check out the disheveled crazy-looking models:

The Safety Smock

Purpose: To safely provide warmth and modesty for suicidal individuals in locked facilities. The garment is designed to eliminate features that make other clothing potential weapons of self-harm.

Description: A simple, sturdily quilted, collarless, sleeveless, gown with adjustable openings at the shoulders and down the front that are closed with nylon hook-and-loop fasteners. (Preventsuicide.com)

SAIC Approves INTEGRITY OS

2005-09-02T00:09:00.000-07:00

After rubber stamping the invasion of Iraq and the electronic voting machines used in the last US federal election, SAIC was the NSA's natural choice to vet its new 'secure operating system', INTEGRITY. Not bad for a company that can't even keep its own computers from being stolen:

Green Hills Software, Inc., a technology leader in operating systems and software development tools for safe and secure systems, announced today that the U.S. Government's National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP), a collaboration between the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Security Agency (NSA), has formally accepted the security evaluation plan for the INTEGRITY-178B operating system...This is a significant milestone toward the most stringent certification ever undertaken by an operating system. The security evaluation of INTEGRITY-178B began in April 2005, when Green Hills Software selected Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a NIAP approved Common Criteria Testing Lab (CCTL), to perform the evaluation
...
INTEGRITY-178B has been designed into almost every major next-generation commercial and military aircraft, including the Boeing 787, Airbus A380, Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, F/A-22 Raptor, Eurofighter Typhoon, Airbus A400M and Boeing C-17 Globemaster.(Businesswire)

Lockheed Subway Contract

2005-08-30T00:52:00.000-07:00

Giant defense company, flush from the windfalls of a war sparked by a domestic terror attack, contracted to ensure that no more such attacks occur:

"The New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has chosen Lockheed [Martin] as the prime contractor for the three-year deal to design and deploy a command and control-based critical infrastructure protection system across the subway and transit system." (Silicon.com)

SAIC Awarded Oman Portal Contract

2005-08-30T00:50:00.000-07:00

CIA/DOD contractor SAIC has been landing jobs all across the middle east, building a new Pentagon-friendly security infrastructure in US-allied states:

"...the Royal Oman Police Customs have signed on to use SAIC's VACIS cargo, vehicle and contraband inspection systems at Oman’s ports of entry. The deal includes installation, on-site operator training and maintenance of the VACIS inspection system..." (San Diego Business Journal)

Registered Traveller Garnering Interest

2005-08-29T10:07:00.000-07:00

Civil liberties organizations can't stop the tidal wave of interest in integrated biometric ID systems such as those now being implemented by the US government's Registered Traveller program:

Some of the USA's biggest businesses — Unisys, Lockheed Martin, EDS and Microsoft, for example — have shown interest in Registered Traveler, which could be a gateway to greatly expanded use of biometric identification. Big business envisions spinning off a massive new industry that uses biometric cards to verify the identity of people in all kinds of other contexts — making credit card purchases or doing anything else in which establishing identity is important.

The federal government sees the technology and procedures adopted for Registered Traveler as a way to move people more quickly across borders and into federal buildings, airport tarmacs, pipeline facilities and other secure sites.

"I would hope that eventually a large number of people find their way into a trusted or vetted traveler program," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff says.

But a two-tiered security system raises the specter of long lines, heightened official skepticism and more intense scrutiny for people who don't have the biometric IDs.

"It's a way of fundamentally changing our culture by making people suspect if they don't willingly give up their privacy" and apply for a card, says American Civil Liberties Union legislative counsel Tim Sparapani. "Regular people will become suspect."(USA Today)

All the time vs Persistent

2005-08-27T03:05:00.000-07:00

I don't always like writing in blog style. Even a cursory, "Here's a neat link, check it out,"

"(and here's a little snippet of text from the site itself)"

sometimes seems too much. I'm in the writing game for the excitement. The default language of the weblog is an often oppresive mixture of pop journo-write and creative confessional, a medium wherein the meta-narrative of the author's own life is an almost unavoidable focus of the content. This is no judgement on the relative "value" of blogging; rather, it is an attempt to explain the intermittency of my writing in this space.

I decided to use Blogger for this very reason. It seems strange to me to pay for private server space just to get to rid of the little menu bar at the top of the page and wow your friends with your very own domain name. Perhaps I should be more concerned about privacy. But this is a weblog. It isn't supposed to be private. So why pay for it -- and, most importantly, why pay for it when you're likely to not even use it for stretches at a time?

Some readers might shake their heads at this point. "The first rule of blogging," a critic might say, "is to post regularly. Otherwise you lose your audience." I know that. But in light of my family and friends, my various other writing projects, the hockey season, and Civilization IV I just can't keep up that pace. At the end of a busy day (or even a not-so busy one), the Blogger interface is calming, but not as calming as lying in bed and watching ten straight episodes of 24.

My position is that it is better to take a little time on each post and put it up there with purpose instead of just churning out a flow of links and sassy little remarks in order to maintain some baseline level of "service" to one's (largely imaginary) readership. Readers of this site will learn to deal with dry spells or they will not return; and that's fine with me.

This site is an archive. Its value is not immediately apparent. I can't drop everything and spend all my time working on it, digging through digg and reddit and anywhere else in hopes of unearthing the Day's Hottest Link. I take a longer view. As long as Google's paying the bills, I'll keep it up here, and I'll keep adding to it.

Hopefully, in the battle of Persistent versus All The Time, Persistent will come out on top.

WaPo on In-Q-Tel

2005-08-25T00:46:00.000-07:00

Unwilling to enter into a discussion of the possible problems associated with for-profit government spy agencies, the Washington Post lavishes praise on the CIA's venture capital investment firm In-Q-Tel:

"...in interviews with more than a dozen current and former CIA officials, congressional aides, venture capitalists that have worked with [In-Q-Tel, Inc.] and executives who have benefited from it, no one disputed that what began as an experiment in transferring private-sector technology into the CIA is working as intended. The Army, NASA and other intelligence and defense agencies have, or are planning, their own "venture capital" efforts based on the In-Q-Tel model." (Washington Post)

Living About the Future

2005-08-22T03:06:00.000-07:00

Perhaps part of the impulse to write about the distant future comes from a longing to experience some of the excitement that will be denied to us by our deaths. It's nostalgia, but in reverse; instead of dreaming of a now-lost past, we envision an inaccesible tomorrow. Either way, it's the same thing. It's about having a little piece of what we can never possess.

I've spent the past ten years (give or take) developing an ability to write screenplays. This work has paid off in the form of a few successful grants, a handful of professional writing jobs, and some story editing and coverage-writing work. But I have yet to have a feature-length film actually shot and released (although a few of my scripts have sold, at the time of this writing, they are all in "development"). All this time, waiting for something to happen. Perhaps the whole effort has been a metatext of some sort, a way of being a filmmaker without actually making any films. Like writing about the future, "living about the future" is a way to fulfill a lack. And that lack is always in the present.

Any teenager knows that most futuristic science fiction is really a way of talking about the present, of pointing to what's missing or overpowering about the Now, and of suggesting in bold terms where it all might lead. This is the accepted function of writing about the future. And so, when one realizes that one has been "living about the future," one must ask: what's missing, what's overpowering, and where is it all going to lead?