Great blog post by about Google Glass by Jason Calcanis.
I’ve run into several friends wearing Google Glass in the past three months, and I have three words of advice for them:
Take. Them. Off.
First, you look like an idiot.
Second, you’re killing the party.
Third, are you recording me right now?!?
Great, illuminating post. Worth reading in full.
Needs to be taken with the mandatory dose of salt but still…. If autonomous vehicles do become an everyday reality, then lots of other things will start to change.
While driverless cars might still seem like science fiction outside the Valley, the people working and thinking about these technologies are starting to ask what these autos could mean for the city of the future. The short answer is “a lot.”
Imagine a city where you don’t drive in loops looking for a parking spot because your car drops you off and scoots off to some location to wait, sort of like taxi holding pens at airports. Or maybe it is picked up by a robotic minder and carted off with other vehicles, like a row of shopping carts.
A test of Google’s self-driving car.
Inner-city parking lots could become parks. Traffic lights could be less common because hidden sensors in cars and streets coordinate traffic. And, yes, parking tickets could become a rarity since cars would be smart enough to know where they are not supposed to be.
As scientists and car companies forge ahead — many expect self-driving cars to become commonplace in the next decade — researchers, city planners and engineers are contemplating how city spaces could change if our cars start doing the driving for us. There are risks, of course: People might be more open to a longer daily commute, leading to even more urban sprawl.
So the answer to the question is: a definite maybe (as Sam Goldwyn used to say).
Amazing report in the WSJ.
The National Security Agency’s ability to gather phone data on millions of Americans hinges on a secret court ruling that redefined a single word: “relevant.”
The National Security Agency’s ability to gather phone data on millions of Americans hinges on the secret redefinition of the word “relevant.”
This change—which specifically enabled the surveillance recently revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden—was made by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a group of judges responsible for making decisions about government surveillance in national-security cases. In classified orders starting in the mid-2000s, the court accepted that “relevant” could be broadened to permit an entire database of records on millions of people, in contrast to a more conservative interpretation widely applied in criminal cases, in which only some of those records would likely be allowed, according to people familiar with the ruling.
The ‘relevant’ language was added to the Patriot Act when it came up for reauthorization; it was signed by President Bush in 2006.
In interviews with The Wall Street Journal, current and former administration and congressional officials are shedding new light on the history of the NSA program and the secret legal theory underpinning it. The court’s interpretation of the word enabled the government, under the Patriot Act, to collect the phone records of the majority of Americans, including phone numbers people dialed and where they were calling from, as part of a continuing investigation into international terrorism.
“Relevant” has long been a broad standard, but the way the court is interpreting it, to mean, in effect, “everything,” is new, says Mark Eckenwiler, a senior counsel at Perkins Coie LLP who, until December, was the Justice Department’s primary authority on federal criminal surveillance law.
OK, I know you’re busy, but if you have eight minutes to spare, given this a play. (And skip the ad.)
Thanks to Desmond Hanlon for the link.
This morning’s Observer column.
Over the past two weeks, I have lost count of the number of officials and government ministers who, when challenged about internet surveillance by GCHQ and the NSA, try to reassure their citizens by saying that the spooks are “only” collecting metadata, not “content”. Only two conclusions are possible from this: either the relevant spokespersons are unbelievably dumb or they are displaying a breathtaking contempt for their citizenry.
In a way, it doesn’t matter which conclusion one draws. The fact is that, as I argued two weeks ago, the metadata is what the spooks want for the simple reason that it’s machine-readable and therefore searchable. It’s what makes comprehensive internet-scale surveillance possible.
Why hasn’t there been greater public outrage about the cynicism of the “just metadata” mantra?
After Doug died, when I was thinking about a topic for my Observer column, I asked my editor if I should do a piece on him. His recommendation was that there would be lots of obits on the Web, so better to do something else. So I did.
But reading through the obituaries, I was struck by the fact that many of them got it wrong. Not in the fact-checking sense, but in terms of failing to understand why Engelbart was such an important figure in the evolution of computing. Many of the obits did indeed mention the famous “mother of all demonstrations” he gave to the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco in 1968, but in a way they failed to understand its wider significance. They thought it was about bit-mapped, windowing screens, the mouse, etc. (which of course it demonstrated) whereas in fact that Engelbart was on about was the potential the technology offered for augmenting human intellect through collaborative working at a distance. Harnessing the collective intelligence of the network, in other words. Stuff we now take for granted.
The trouble was that, in 1968, there was no network (the ARPAnet was just being built) and the personal computer movement was about to get under way. The only way Engelbart could realise his dream was by harnessing the power of the time-shared mainframe — the technology that Apple & Co were determined to supplant. So while people understood the originality and power of the WIMPS interface that Doug created (and that Xerox PARC and, later, Apple and then Microsoft implemented), they missed the significance of networking. This also helps to explain, incidentally, why after the personal computer bandwagon began to roll, poor Doug was sidelined.
The only blogger I’ve found who has picked up on this in the wake of Engelbart’s death is Tom Foremski who wrote a lovely, insightful piece. He recounts how he went to a Silicon Valley party for the launch of John Markoff’s book
The event was supposed to be about the book, but it quickly turned into a tribute to Doug Engelbart, as John Markoff, and many members of the Homebrew Club, and former colleagues of his spoke about his incredible influence on their work, ideas, and how he changed their lives.
It seemed as if he was the Buckminster Fuller of Silicon Valley in terms of how insightful and how brilliant he was, in story after story shared by people at the event. Others compared him to Leonardo DaVinci.
I was astounded when an elderly man sitting behind me, was given the microphone and started to speak. It was Doug Engelbart. I’d assumed he had passed away a long time ago by the way everyone spoke about him in the past.
I was invited to a post-event dinner for the speakers and press at a local restaurant. I was late in arriving and everyone was already seated. Everyone had crowded onto a large circular table trying to be as close as possible to where New York Times reporter John Markoff was sitting.
I couldn’t believe my luck. Over on another large circular table, half-empty, sat Doug Engelbart. I asked him if I could sit next to him and we talked for hours. I walked out with a great story, a story that no one had written before, a story of a genius whose work was largely killed by the personal computer “revolution” and how he’d spent decades trying to find companies to fund his work and research.
It’s a story that shows Silicon Valley’s ignorance of its own history and its disgraceful treatment of truly inspired visionaries such as Doug Engelbart, in favor of celebrating PR-boosted business managers who say they are changing the world but don’t come close.
Yep. As it happens, I also told this story in my History of the Internet
This morning’s Observer column.
In a way, identifying and barring the truly horrible content is the easy part, at least in legal terms. If downloading or viewing certain kinds of online content is deemed illegal, then internet companies know where they stand, and they will obey the law. If a site contains illicit content, then Google et al will find ways of not pointing to it.
The problem is that this alone will not stop people who are willing to take the legal risk implicit in accessing illegitimate sites. The next logical step, therefore, is to make access impossible by forcing internet service providers to block them, using the same technology that the Chinese government employs to make sure that nobody in China learns anything about, say, Falun Gong.
Not surprisingly, nobody in the industry likes this idea. Apart from the extra costs it would impose, it also places companies in the uncomfortable position of deciding what their customers can read and view. And it would effectively put the UK in the same boat as China, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan and other countries whose governments decide what citizens can access.
Nevertheless, the ISPs are feeling the heat from a government desperate to be seen to be “doing something” about porn…
This is just wonderful. Beyond parody — especially the “network hygiene” bit.
File this under “F” for futile: The Army is restricting access to the Guardian website to try to crack down on leaks, the Monterey County Herald reports. The Guardian was the first to write about the extent of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program earlier this month, and it reported details about a separate spying program yesterday. The Guardian’s reports are based on classified documents leaked by former government tech contractor Edward Snowden, who is now wanted by U.S. authorities.
The access restriction is part of the Department of Defense’s routine preventative “network hygiene,” Gordon Van Vleet, spokesman for the Army Network Enterprise Technology Command (NETCOM), told the Herald. The censorship/network hygiene is meant to prevent the downloading of classified documents — like the kind the Guardian has linked to on its website and which presumably has already been seen by many people. “Until declassified by appropriate officials, classified information — including material released through an unauthorized disclosure — must be treated accordingly by DoD personnel,” Van Vleet wrote.
No comment needed.
My favourite newsagent has begun selling coffee. Today, a sign has appeared outside his premises. It’s headed “Coffee Solutions!” and includes a list of the various kinds of coffee on offer inside. Which led me to think about what kind of problem is it to which coffee is a ‘solution’? Sleepiness? Boredom? The need for a break from work?
Of course, in a literal sense coffee is a solution — defined as “a homogeneous mixture composed of only one phase”. But I don’t think that’s the sense envisaged by the person who composed the newsagent’s notice. S/he was simply parroting the almost-ubiquitous abuse of the term in contemporary commercial life. Once upon a time, people sold products or services. Nowadays they sell only solutions.
And ‘solutionism’ (to use Evgeny Morozov’s term
If a ‘solution’ is “a means of solving a problem”, then often it isn’t really a big deal. Many years ago, Donald Schön, in a wonderful book entitled The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (Arena)
Most of the really difficult, intractable things in organizational, political and ordinary life, however, do not fit that description, because we usually are unsure or in disagreement about where we are, and even more so about where we want to go. They are not ‘problems’ but something else: messy, unclear, contentious. And what professionals do, Schön argued, is to take these messy difficulties and do some work on them to extract some of their constituent ‘problems’ for which known solutions exist.
So, for example, if I want to write a Will that will be fair to my children from different marriages and wish to minimise the amount of inheritance tax that they will pay, I take that to a lawyer who will analyse my current situation and my (vague) wishes and suggest some legal ‘solutions’ (perhaps Trusts) which will meet some of my needs or desires.
In Schön’s view, therefore, professionals are not problem-solvers, but problem-creators. Reading his book changed my life, because it made me look at the occupational world in an entirely new way.
And, having written all that, I definitely need a coffee.