♥ ¢¢ ♥ ♥

photo credit: Spanish Flea

I remember the first moment, a few years ago, at which I began to take the Internet seriously. It was a very, very silly thing. There was a guy, a computer research student at Carnegie Mellon, who liked to drink Dr Pepper Light. There was a drinks machine a couple of stories away from him, where he used to regularly go and get his Dr Pepper, but the machine was often out of stock, so he had quite a few wasted journeys.

Eventually he figured out, “hang on, there’s a chip in there and I’m on a computer and there’s a network running around the building, so why don’t I just put the drinks machine on the network, then I can poll it from my terminal whenever I want, and tell if I’m going to have a wasted journey or not?” So he connected the machine to the local network, but the local net was part of the Internet – so suddenly anyone in the world could see what was happening with this drinks machine.

Now, that may not be vital information but it turned out to be curiously fascinating; everyone started to know what was happening with the drinks machine. It began to develop, because the chip in the machine didn’t just say, “The slot which has Dr Pepper Light is empty,” but had all sorts of information; it said, “There are seven Cokes and three Diet Cokes, the temperature they are stored at is this and the last time they were loaded was that.” There was a lot of information in there, and there was one really fabulous piece of information: it turned out that if someone had put their fifty cents in and not pressed the button, i.e., if the machine was pregnant, then you could, from your computer terminal wherever you were in the world, log on to the drinks machine and drop that can! Somebody could be walking down the corridor when suddenly, bang! – there was a Coca-Cola can! What caused that? Well, obviously somebody five thousand miles away!

Now that was a very, very silly but fascinating story, and what it said to me was that this was the first time we could reach back into the world. It may not be terribly important that from five thousand miles away you can reach into a university corridor and drop a Coca-Cola can, but it’s the first shot in the war of bringing to us a whole new way of communicating.

Douglas Adams Q&A after a speech entitled Is There an Artificial God?

Adams is gave this speech in 1998 about something that happened a ‘few years earlier’. So let’s say 1996 or 1995.

When you get excited about things like @towerbridge, @lowflyingrocks, Google energy monitors, and Spimes, remember: the idea and the means was already there, we just had our attention elsewhere for awhile.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

15.

The gas station has long been abandoned. For some reason, one of those old coke machines is still there, still working, and still stocked. A beacon across the darkened parking lot, you find yourself going out of your way to investigate, one hot summer night. To your surprise, the price is 50¢. You buy a drink, and can’t tell whether you’re enjoying the flavour or the nostalgia. You excitedly tell your friends but months later, when they finally make the trek, it’s gone.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

There were a lot of new buzzwords in play in 1999 when I was taking calls for our local Telecom’s ISP. This was 1999, just before the dotCom bubble burst; an exciting time that demanded exciting verbiage. Multimedia. Information Super-Highway. eVerb-of-your-choice.

My favourite was “Paperless Office”. We used to use it as a kind of curse word. An invocation said while waiting for copies of the meeting’s agenda to be printed so that if could be distributed, doodled upon, and then thrown away.

photo credit: Corey Holms

The computer was meant to herald an end to paper documentation but paper multiplied instead. Easy editing + cheap and fast laser printing changed the relationship we had to paper. Real world filing disappeared, as it became easier to just print a new copy if the document had gone missing. Perfection trumped conservation and every discovered typo meant a complete reprinting of all 7 copies of the 50 page report or proposal.

Think about what’s happening here. Documents are undergoing an transition from object to data. The paper copies become physical instantiations of the data but they’ve stopped being the data itself. There’s this sort of adolescent transition in progress, while we – the users of the data – aren’t sure how to treat it, so we end up with these bizarre hybrid entities that slide back and forth between digital and physical, all the while leaving behind recycling bins overflowing with the dead husks of stale snapshots.

A decade later, we’re slowly starting to come to grips with this. Very few of my friends own printers anymore – they feel like a costly burden. We prefer to avoid printing at all if we can, resorting to a trip to the copyshop only when absolutely necessary. The fact that we have to do this at all shows how much of the rest of the world that we’re interfacing with still fetishises paper. So we resort to hacks, using scanned signatures and fax-to-email services to generate much documentation, essentially resorting to forgery to navigate our way through the paper bureaucracy. Adolescence is still in progress.

If all these visionaries are right about the path that manufacturing is going to take, we are in for an even worse transition with objects. Just like with paper, the promise of 3d printers is a blurring between data and objects. Bruce Sterling calls these hybrid things Spimes. Data that gets instantiated in the physical world for a time, before being reclaimed, recycled and sustainably mined for future use.

Scenario: You buy a Spime with a credit card. Your account info is embedded in the transaction, including a special email address set up for your Spimes. After the purchase, a link is sent to you with customer support, relevant product data, history of ownership, geographies, manufacturing origins, ingredients, recipes for customization, and bluebook value. The spime is able to update its data in your database (via radio-frequency ID), to inform you of required service calls, with appropriate links to service centers. This removes guesswork and streamlines recycling.

Bruce Sterling – Viridian Note 00422: The Spime

I think and hope that Sterling is right about the end point, but the transition terrifies me.

Think spam is bad? Fax spam is worse. Object spam will be worse, still. Will be? I should say that it already is. Every time you go to a conference or sales event and come back with a sack full of unwanted tchotchkes that you’re going to toss, you are glimpsing the objectless future. We’re going to be drowning in the stuff. Moreso, I mean.

The problem is fundamentally a materials(marketing?) one. Taken individually, “disposable” and “durable” are each fine selling points. The problem is that over and over, we cram these features into the same stupid objects. The usual culprits – water bottles, disposable tupperware – are all there, but it goes bigger than that. My cellphone has a 3 year contract. When the contract is over, my provider is going to try to sell me a new phone, which will be 4-8x more powerful than this one. I intend to buy it.

Is this a consumer problem? If we started selling cellphones that were designed to decay after about 2 years of use, how would that go over? We’d be run out of town for selling cheap product, I think. There’s a kind of willful blindness. We know obsolescence is planned but if we talk about it, people take their business elsewhere. “I don’t want a phone that’s gonna beak down after 3 years.” YES YOU DO. You’ll want a new one.

There’s a kind of insane packrat mentality to it. “Who knows, I might still want to be running this computer in 8 years, anyone who makes a CRT monitor that falls apart after 3 is a shyster.”

A sane system would build into objects a realistic lifespan and allow them to die gracefully instead of these undead zombie objects that are no longer useful but won’t go away. This is all that cradle to grave design you’ve been hearing so much about.

So we need a better culture around this, we need planning to match practice to match process. We need better materials. And here’s the kicker: to get to that point, we need to throw away the stuff we’re using now.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

So somerled and I were heading from Montreal to Burlington to meet a friend of his and a friend of hers. Plus maybe see Mikey or Sam if they were around.

We got to talking and so on but by the time we realized that we had missed our turn to go here:
View Larger Map

We had ended up here:
View Larger Map

This was the threshold. When we first realized the mistake Google maps wanted us to turn around, but by the time we'd found a place to turn around, it had changed its mind and the new fastest route was continuing on through and crossing at Stanstead:
View Larger Map

When we got to the border, the guard opened with the basic "where are you from, where are you going" questions. The answers: "from Montreal to Burlington" got a long hard look.

"Why are you crossing here?"
"We got turned around and made a mistake."
"Do you realize how big a mistake you've made?"

This is not the kind of question one wants to be asked by a representative of the Department of Homeland Security.

More questions followed about our plans and how long we were going to be there and who we were meeting. Patrick and I need to switch up the talking role: I don't know where we're staying, he doesn't know how to get there, etc. And then:

"I'm gonna need you to put the car in 'park' and pop your trunk."

It's at this point that Patrick realizes that he doesn't know how to pop the trunk on the rental ("Why are you driving a rental?"). What follows is a 5 minute comedy of errors where the guard is opening the door and having us try different buttons, we think we've popped it but instead it's the gas door, Patrick pops the trunk but hits the button twice by accident, and this is a Lincoln with powered everything so that opens and then closes the trunk right in the guard's face. Finally the trunk is open for inspection and the guard discovers that it's completely empty.

"Where's your luggage?"

I have a backpack with my laptop in the back seat. Patrick has nothing.

"I thought you were staying overnight?"

We are.

"What are you going to wear tomorrow?"

"The same clothes, I guess," says Patrick.

Then the big question:
"How do you know these friends you are going to meet?"

The correct answer for me is, "I have no idea, I just hopped in the car for the sake of a trip." So I'm keeping my mouth shut.

Patrick, who does know one of them goes to answer and then pauses.

And pauses.

And I have an chance to inventory every file on my laptop that might be somehow suspect.

And Patrick is pausing.

And I'm thinking about what lawyers I know and who might be good at immigration.

And Patrick is pausing.

And I'm wondering how long they can hold you for being a nuisance.

Finally, "Gosh, I don't know. Blogs, I guess."

And with that, the guard hands us our passports back, makes sure that we know what exit to take and sends us on our way.

14.

In the heart of the University you find the main library. Walking through the atrium you notice a ditch, now dry, that seems to run both out into the cliff and down into the lobby itself. The security guard explains that when the building was first conceived, the ditch was to be a pool fed by a waterfall from the top of the cliffs and meandering through the atrium and into the lobby where the patrons would be soothed by the lapping of the water. He wonders at the lack of foresight of the architects who forgot to account for the bitterly cold winters of the region and tells you about the decision to finally drain the pool and seal the lobby, one frozen Saturday afternoon.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

Will Wiles of Icon Magazine spent some time talking about augmented reality, Tron, and the fictional source of many design and technological innovations on his blog. I couldn’t stop thinking about the last two paragraphs.

photo credit: rbatina

Returning to augmented reality, there is of course a great risk that it will flop, just as the first wave of virtual reality did in the 1990s. I remember being taken to the Trocadero Centre to try out the “Virtuality” machines installed there – the first in the UK. I remember it clearly because it was such a huge disappointment. AR strikes me as massively more practical, but no matter how sophisticated the technology, it still comes up against a fixed limitation – the human arm. Are people going to walk around holding up their mobile phones to navigate the world?

Rationally, I’d say no, but then I wouldn’t have guessed that people would experience real-life events through the tiny screen on their digital cameras or even their mobile phones – and they do, preferring to see an event through a technological surrogate. I wouldn’t have guessed that people would trust the information on their Sat Nav screen over the evidence of their own eyes and instincts, but they do. There’s no guessing what people might prefer to delegate to gadgetry.

Will Wiles – The Unreal Deal

The technological surrogates idea so interesting. I keep thinking about the image of the Obama’s first dance and all the people recording it, themselves being recorded. Ditto for all those people who have been on vacation, seeing the whole thing through the frame of a Polaroid/Camcorder/Flip/iPod Nano. Extra points for the parents ruining their kids’ fidgety fun by yelling at them to pose and smile when all the kids want to do is LOOK at the thing they are posing in front of.

Then I sheepishly think of the GBs of photos on my drive. It’s not that difficult to imagine myself getting distracted enough to make the mistake of Wiles’ Sat Nav driver. It’s not that I don’t trust my senses so much as I don’t trust my memory of directions. Not that I try to remember them much anymore.

A mobile phone with a good notes and maps application makes remembering seem obsolete. I can just look it up. I’ll Google it. I’m pretty sure I wrote it down, somewhere…

I feel like camera phones and GPS navigators are two sides of the same coin: the fear of forgetting. Cameras say, “We will capture this event and keep care of it.” Garmin says, “I will tell you where the path is, you don’t need to write down the directions.” This one thing is so important that it outweighs the many ways in which these devices are terrible.

New technology doesn’t win because it’s so much better than what came before. It wins because some subset of what it does is SO COMPELLING that we put up with the many ways in which using it is worse than the older alternatives. A real map is much, much better than Google maps in presentation, ease of note-taking, ability to quickly scan around, and layers of data available. But they are expensive, it’s hard to carry a comprehensive set, they don’t show you where you are, and they can’t be searched.

I agree with Wiles that the seeds of the future are planted in the stories that people grow up with. The second half of the notion has to be our powerful ability to rewrite expectations. We say that Stephenson, Gibson and Sterling et al. invented cyberspace which led to the Internet. But this thing both fulfils and falls terribly short of the consensual hallucinations that drove the imagination of the people doing the work that led to the Internet that we ended up with.

Where augmented reality apps are likely to get over the hump into ubiquity is when they figure out what it is that they can do that we didn’t realize we wanted them to do, and ruthlessly implement that.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

Patrick and I are coming overnight on Monday night to see friends of his who are in town. Are any other Burlingtonians around?

A little while ago, I was sitting on a bus, considering the invisible infrastructure of cyborgs (like you do). Meaning, all of the things that needs to be happening behind the scenes or have happened in the past to allow the independence of the self-sufficient super-being.

photo credit: Smithsonian Institution

While this was happening, we got stuck in traffic behind a delivery truck. We were surrounded by them, in fact, and it occurred to me that I was on one (Greyhound offers a courier service). I started thinking about the insane infrastructure required to have something like FedEx. The need to rapidly get something from one place to another. The network of planes, warehouses, barcodes, computers, scanners, trucks, garages, boxes, and people all bent to the service of moving things around on our behalf.

FedEx’s business is in serious jeopardy. I wonder if they realize this.

It begins with letters, of course. FedEx is in essence a finely tuned premium mail carrier. That email put a huge dent in regular mail is old news. It’s faster and freer. When it comes to the transmission of information – one of the main uses of mail carriers – the Internet wins in almost every situation.

This doesn’t really matter to FedEx. They were never in the regular mail business. They ARE in the authenticity business and the object business, however. Both of these are under threat.

The Authenticity Business

This is how contracts between far flung business partners get negotiated:
You have a few calls to outline the deal and then someone draws up a draft contract in Word. This gets emailed out with track-changes turned on and then it goes back and forth electronically until a final version is agreed upon. This is promptly printed off, signed and faxed with the originals to follow by Fed Ex.

I have no idea why we still have to send the “originals” by physical mail. A nod to tradition I suppose. There is nothing about a laser-printed 30 page document with signatures on the last page that’s particularly more safe from tampering than an properly secured electronic copy of the same. If eBay, Amazon, Paypal and my bank can solve the authentication problem, it can be solved for contracts. For whatever reason, the business/legal world insists that it needs a copy of a sheet of paper with ink from a pen that I actually touched.

So it gets sent by FedEx and the guy shows up at your door with the package and to prove it was received, you sign for it. On a touch pad. Electronically. I don’t think that the signed documents portion of FedEx’s business is long for this world.

The Object Business

Once the Authenticated Document portion of FedEx’s business fades away, they’ll have to retreat into the molecule moving business. Here’s a need that, at least for the immediate future, doesn’t get demolished by the Internet.

At some point, rapid prototyping and 3d printing becomes a mature technology. It leaves the design studios and then the factories and ends up, if not people’s houses, then at least as commonly distributed as print shops or 24 photo developers (which are themselves getting to be less and less common). Just-in-time fabbing.

So many of the things that we ship are mass-produced and interchangeable. Take a look around you and consider all the stuff you might move, were you planning to move. How much of it is stuff where an exact copy would be fine? How much of it is stuff where a factory-new copy would better than fine? How much crap do you ship because it’s easier/cheaper to just ship it than to get a new or better one?

It’s not everything. Objects with acute sentimental value, hand crafted trinkets, mementoes, these will all be things you want to keep. But even this category is smaller than you might think. It’s not that long ago that photos were on the “must ship” list. Now they’re digital and easily reprintable, if they’re ever printed at all.

With mature 3d printing we’ve ended up with a kind of teleportation. This is the kind of thing that gives philosophers of art nightmares.

Teleportation

Need a computer at your destination? We’ll fab you one and format it from your encrypted cloud-image. It’ll be ready at the airport with your rental car and a change of clothes, which we also printed to your specifications.

Need your bike shipped? Drop it off at a reclamation facility, we’ll scan it and credit you the materials, then for less than the price of flying it across the country, we’ll rebuild it over there. For a small fee, you can fiddle with the specs.

You want to ship books? Really? Who ships books?

Because of mass-production, we’ve been living among essentially interchangeable copies for quite some time. The next step is making them utterly interchangeable. Here’s my prediction: We are less than 50 years away from the shipping of objects being as quaint and specialized a practice as shipping sheets of paper with good-wishes written them.

Whoever rises to replace FedEx? Their slogan can be: “It’s already waiting for you.”

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

I am in an office in the New York Times building.

This is quite a bit more thrilling than I expected.

13.

Wandering down a street near the government district, you see another of the familiar blue Heritage markers that denote a building of particular historical value. You stop to examine it and note that instead of the usual words about heritage and protected properties, this one tells the story of a man waking up drunk in an alley. Careful examination reveals that someone has cleverly mimicked the style of the Heritage markers, though the materials are cheaper and the ink has started to run. As you continue on your way, you can’t help but steal a glance back at the building, uncertain as to why you would have accepted it as a candidate for Heritage protection in the first place.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

A little while ago, I got a new iPhone. You wouldn’t know it to look at it. It’s not an upgrade or anything, just a repair job turned replacement. It looks and behaves the same as my old iPhone except that whatever was wrong with the screen on the old one isn’t on this one. The process was painless – I went in, they looked at the phone, handed me a new one and then I went home and re-loaded all the data.

photo credit: .m for matthijs

A good back-up/restore scheme changes your relationship with your gear. It changes a computer from heirloom to container. The loss, theft or destruction of hardware is transmuted from a crisis to an expensive inconvenience.

This isn’t new. We’re used to disposable containers and windows. Glasses are only useful insofar as they hold water, TVs only insofar as they display shows. No one has ever cried because an Ikea tumbler got smashed. Dropping a plasma screen down the stairs is an costly stumble, but not a crippling one.

The new part is how much stuff and what kind of stuff is being turned into data. (Not to mention what kind of data is being turned into stuff.) I’m surrounded by people for whom the loss of a hard drive would be as burning down their house.

There’s the obvious list: music, movies, books, newspapers. The digitization of these things has provoked a crisis in every industry that’s been touched and it’s coming for more. Think music piracy was a sea change? Wait ’til you see the casual piracy of clothing, cars, plants, and animals.

Beyond the well-worn questions of intellectual property, authenticity, and how to keep creators fed, there’s a lot going on. Consider “personal data” for a second. Not insurance records and banking info, but all of the things that used to be family possessions, which have become files. Consider the twin marketing features of durable and disposable, mirror virtues that we keep cramming into single objects. Think about cloud computing, 3d printing, and nomadic restaurants.

I’d like to spend some time on these. Stay tuned.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

12.

Crossing the lawn, you see that the parking lot is deserted and that the windows of the grocery store are dark. This surprises you, as the sign out front indicates that this is a 24 hour location. There is a small sign posted to the door. “For your shopping convenience,” it says, “we are now closed between Midnight and 7:00am.” You leave, hungry.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

I don't remember how I found this but it's great.


Here's another one. The bit at 4:09-4:20 kills me every time.


Yes, I recognize that I am sharing vlogs from a 15-year-old.

But she's hilarious! The comedic timing and the jump cuts are fantastic. It's this great application of awkward Ricky Gervais humour to adolescence which, now that I think of it, is THE PERFECT PLACE.

Then you get to the comments section, which has a number of pretty awful, vulgar, sexual remarks from random assholes.

Man, being a teen in the era of YouTube and the Internet. I don't even know.

Taking a page from Posterchild, it’s Follow-up Friday!

photo credit: MatthewBradley

1. Sound Ecology.

Picking up on the Augmented Audio Reality post, Justin Pickard pointed me to this interview with an acoustic ecologist.

Anecdotally, there is a feeling that the increasing homogenisation of the soundscape (i.e. places all sounding the same) is speeding up, yet no one is systematically keeping tabs on this change. This is not a prompt for some kind of museum-like stance, but it begs the question, shouldn’t we be considering the soundscape as an integral part of our heritage in the same light as we do for historic building facades?

Paging Nick Sowers and Dan Hill: Imagine an app that let you walk through the city and experience how it sounded a decade ago?

2. Dubai’s Artificial Islands.

I already told you that they were drowning. Well as it turns out, no one wants to live there, either. I wonder if one of the proposed Michael Jackson memorial islands would help the situation. (No.)

3. Nurse Homes.

After finishing up the Buildings That Protest series, I came across this story about smart houses as omniscient robo-nurses. “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” 2.0.

The path for the adoption of voluntary prosthetics seems to go amputees -> disabled people -> wider use? I wonder if monitoring systems for the elderly which give them MORE freedom and independence (at least, felt independence) will be the path that drives the adoption of self-surveillance technology.

4. Drones.

After I posted The Lost Drone Army, Geoff Manaugh pointed me to his piece about UAVs controlled with thoughts. Which then quickly spirals into a roving fantasy about all of the crazy things that can happen when you link machines directly to the brain.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

1.

A few years ago, I spent most of the summer sleeping on the floor of a friend’s kitchen. It was a lots-of-time, not-much-money sort of summer so everyone was pretty excited when the set of lockpicks that he’d ordered off the Internet arrived. We went down to the hardware store and bought a vise, some wood, and 6 random locks. Brought the whole thing home, clamped it all down on the table and armed only with a printout of MIT’s Guide to Lockpicking settled in to try to teach ourselves the skill.

photo credit: snowriderguy

We opened the first lock in under an hour.

He got it first, and it didn’t take long for me to catch up. The second lock came even quicker. Within an afternoon, all 6 had been defeated. Friends came over and we showed them. They learned in minutes. We had speed contests. It wasn’t quite Hollywood-style, shove-a-bobby-pin-in-the-door-and-you’re-in but it wasn’t far off either.

When someone picks a lock for the first time, you can see the dawning realization across their face. This is easy. It feels like a superpower. Suddenly, you are conscious of how many locked doors you pass every day. I could open any of those.

I remember looking at the 6 locks we’d bought, parts scattered amongst their packaging, boldly promising security and safety, each openable in under a minute.

“People secure their HOMES with these,” I said.

2.

And then I learned about bumping locks. And then Kryptonite turned out to be defeated by a Bic pen. And then Wired wrote about Marc Weber Tobias.

3.

Not too long ago, Google Street View debuted in Canada. Amidst the excitement and the I-can-see-my-house-from-here of my generally wired peers, there was one voice of dissent. We were catching up in a coffee shop and the subject came up.

“I think it’s creepy,” she said.

Creepy?

She worried about the fact that there were images of her house online now, that anyone could look up. What if someone used it to plan a crime? To pick a house? Didn’t they need her permission before they recorded everything?

I explained about privacy laws and how the exterior of your house is public, that we don’t need permission to record it. That this was necessary, because if I’d taken her photo right there, then behind her through the window, there would have been 4 households from which to obtain permission. That trying to shut something like that down would grind photography to a halt.

Besides, we already have access to satellite imagery that would make the 1950s CIA gasp – available for free and ad-supported. Besides, even if we shut down street view, there are probably hundreds if not thousands of images of her house online. They aren’t easy to find yet, but software like Photosynth is changing that. They’re building 3d models of cities from Flickr data now.

4.

Online, security through obscurity is widely understood to be a terrible way to go about protecting your systems. The assumption has to be that someone will work out and exploit any weaknesses. The right approach is to actively seek and fix vulnerabilities, then publicize and patch them.

The reason for this is the multiplicative power of computers. It’s very easy to attempt cracking a computer and you can do it many times at once, limited only by bandwidth and processing power. With a botnet of previously compromised systems, that’s not much limit at all. It becomes a casual event, part of the background noise of the Internet. Computers are essentially bathed in a soup of attacks from the moment they are connected.

5.

Consider the arrest of steampunk anarchist Elliot “Dr. Calamity” Madison and friend during the G20 protests.

The pair were found sitting in front of a bank of laptops and emergency frequency radio scanners. They were wearing headphones and microphones and had many maps and contact numbers in the room.

Official police documents allege the two men used Twitter messages to contact protesters at the summit “and to inform the protesters and groups of the movements and actions of law enforcement”.

New York man accused of using Twitter to direct protesters during G20 summit

“It was all just publicly available information,” his defenders cry, “Since when is giving that out a crime?”

It’s an attitude that may help to drum up sympathy but that gives Calamity and friend far too little credit for all the effort that they were putting in. They weren’t dumb pipes. They were organizing, curating, filtering, and broadcasting. That’s real work and it shaped noise into valuable data for people on-the-ground (and prosecutors after-the-fact).

6.

Aircrack-ng is a suite of tools that allows you to determine a Wi-Fi network key by listening in on packets being broadcast between the router and logged-in computers. I’ve seen it in action. It takes only a few minutes to recover the password for a WEP wireless network. From there, you can log in just like a legitimate user. Unless the people who own the network are paying attention to the IP addresses of all the computers and number of active connections, they’ll never notice.

Most people couldn’t tell you their IP address. Or what one is.

7.

In the police’s complaint about Dr. Calamity, I hear the echoes of my friend’s concern about Street View. A great deal of the world of physical security relies on obscurity. A lot of the methods and information required to break into a building is publicly available but there’s been widespread reliance on the fact that it’s hard to gather all of that information, harder still to do it in secret, and there is substantial risk undertaken by the people who try to act on it.

That’s changing as more and more information is getting captured, organized, and distributed. The tools to sift through the data are getting more powerful, but the counter-measures for homeowners and private individuals aren’t necessarily catching up. How can they? How do you patch a lock?

The problems of digital security are coming to the physical world. Attacks will get cheaper, and so they can be more frequent and more casual. Smart homes and the Internet of things mean that more objects will be hybrids, vulnerable to physical and digital attack. Able to act both physically and digitally. Someone will hack your vacuum cleaner. Someone will use your sprinkler to access your bank records.

8.

The reason that consumer locks don’t need to be more pick- or bump-proof than they are now is that it’s generally easier to just smash a window.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

Working on a post about surveillance and security in the physical world and one section of it went off on a tangent that doesn't fit properly. So I'll be cutting most of it our and reworking it. But I liked the feel, so posting it here. It probably makes more sense if you click through and read the linked articles.

Consider the arrest of steampunk anarchist Dr. Calamity and friend during the G20 protests.

The pair were found sitting in front of a bank of laptops and emergency frequency radio scanners. They were wearing headphones and microphones and had many maps and contact numbers in the room.

Official police documents allege the two men used Twitter messages to contact protesters at the summit "and to inform the protesters and groups of the movements and actions of law enforcement".

New York man accused of using Twitter to direct protesters during G20 summit

"It was all just publicly available information," his defenders cry, "Since when is giving that out a crime?"

One has to wonder how sincerely this complaint is felt. Because over here it feels disingenuous. It feels like if you understand that the government was in favour of Twitter as a tool when it might involved overthrowing the wrong guys in Iran, that maybe they might be aware of its uses for the people who are interested in a world without governments.

I feel like Edward Norton in Fight Club, "You morons! You’re running around in ski masks, trying to explode things. What did you think was going to happen?!"


P.S. Bruce Sterling's take on this is spot on. Use Twitter to Wiretap Yourself and Megaphone It To the Police

Another Sign of the Publishopocalypse
Thomas Nelson jettisons editorial control for a new imprint, West Bow Press, which will be entirely packaged by "self-publisher" Author Solutions.

One more time: money flows towards the writer. And if you pay a company to publish your book, neither you nor they can be said to "self" publish anything.

It fascinates me that books have this fear of self-publications when most other entertainment industries grant small creators special status. Indie movies, indie music, indie comics. But books? It's all "vanity press".

MORE money flows toward a good writer who jettison the middle man, makes the capital investment of printing themselves and is able to sell those.

Yes there are also a lot of crappy self-published writers, but that's what filtration is for. Publishers are one (very expensive) filter, but there are others.

11.

Cresting the hill, you begin to hear the syncopated beat of a tambourine. As you approach the park you see a group of people dressed in loose white clothing. In the dimness they seem almost luminescent. You watch as they seem to alternate between fighting and dancing, marvelling as the execute flips and one-handed cartwheels. Your friend tells you that they are practising Capoeira, a martial art developed by slaves and disguised as a dance to hide it from their masters. The disciples are fluid and graceful.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

The comments thread on this story is making me feel like a crazy person.

In adventure stories, one recurring trope is the ranger/guide. Wizened, possessed by wanderlust, removed from the main branch of civilization, they take the heroes through a patch of inhospitable land. Their years of living at one with nature allows them to see pathways invisible to the rest of the party. They consider broken twigs, scraped bark, and other obscure signs. Through this, the forest teaches them to track their prey. Sherlock Holmes displays similar abilities in and around London, thanks to years of tireless, idiosyncratic research.

photo credit: Daniel Raphael Cooper, the Sorry Shutter

Smart buildings are the means to make Holmeses and rangers of anyone with login credentials. The invisible becomes visible, charted and graphed with hourly break-downs, subdivision by demography, regression analysis, and an easy touch-and-swipe interface. This is what it means to make an environment that talks to us. With the right network and the right surveillance subroutines, the city becomes an enormous Baker Street Irregular. Or an enormous Ministry of Love, depending.

In 1998, when Kevin Warwick implanted a primitive RFID transmitter in his arm, he gained a different superpower – the ability to control the Department of Cybernetics at the University of Reading with his presence. The front entrance said “hello” when he arrived, doors opened and lights illuminated automatically. Control is too strong a word here – the building reacted to him because it knew he was there.

That’s pre-pre-alpha stuff. Just a dumb transmitter and a dumb receiver. Make it two-way. Connect it to the nerves (there’s been lots of work in that area already). Let a paraplegic homeowner open and close doors with only willpower. Let a blind person FEEL what doors are open without having to fumble around. Connect it to something other than doors. Why should air conditioning be based on objective temperatures? Why can’t the building feel that you feel cold and adjust accordingly?

Heart monitors and ambient sound detection let the elderly live independently for longer. Databar your house for parties. Mix and match everything we were ever promised about our homes of the future.

It won’t work properly. This is to be expected. There will be mis-configured firmware and competing disability-control standards. The genius of the Jetsons was that they lived in a future full of scientific marvels and technical wonders that routinely broke down.

It’s an old joke. If cars were more like computers, they’d have fantastical performance specs but they’d crash all the time. It’s all true, and we’re in the process of actually turning houses into computers. A set of houses in the midwest will be plagued by heating routines that mysterious spin up and then turn off the furnace. There will be user forums for trying to undo a preference setting that routes all your calls through the television. Homes will crash, they will lock up, they will need to be rebooted. But we’ll put up with it.

Here’s the part – more than anything else – that gets me. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud discuses the way that we extend our identity into the objects that we feel we control. Game designers exploit this routinely.

It’s the same thing that happens when you drive a car. As you drive, you have a sense of the position of the car in space and how far it extends around you. This enables you to parallel park, drive in a lane next to other cars and pull into your garage without crashing. Your senses extend outward, encompassing the car and receiving feedback. As this happens, the car becomes part of you, an extension of both body and self. This is why people who’ve crashed say “You hit me!” rather than “His car hit me!” or “His car hit my car!”

Steve Swink – Game Feel: A Designer’s Guide to Virtual Sensation

What happens, when we extend our senses into our houses? Our cities? When a house cries out in pain? When we feel our neighbourhood?

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.