Your Cell Phone Wants You Dead

It’s been understood for some time that the machines we use every day will eventually rise up and enslave or destroy us all. At this point, it’s really more of a question of just how much time humanity has left before we are either subjugated or simply vaporized by our cruel metal overlords, and it appears that day may be coming sooner than any of us thought. The robot revolution will start small, when the phone that runs so much of your life betrays you, listening in on your private conversations and reporting on your activities and whereabouts to it’s electronic masters.

Sure, this will begin as particularly unpleasant malware that eavesdrops on you, tracks your movements and accesses your bank account at the behest of particularly savvy and sinister human programmers. But if you believe the coming Mother Brain won’t access this technology and use it as an early reconnaissance  step toward global domination… well, that’s just naive.

 

Set Profile to Private… Now

Holy shit, everybody – all of our grandmothers just found Facebook! Internet use among seniors is up over the last year, but no site has seen as much new traffic from the olds as Facebook. Among sites visited by web users over the age of 65, Facebook shot up from number 45 to  number 3.

This is your last chance to get those pictures of you giving it your all in the Topless Keg Stand Tournament of Champions off the Internet before you cause your Nana to keel over from the intense shame that you have brought upon the family.

 

New ACTA Provisions Leaked, May Send You Directly To Jail

Hey, ever wonder what the folks behind Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement were getting up to while everyone was talking about the notable and seemingly harmless news about ICANN approving non-latin domain names surfaced this week?

Funny you should mention that – they’re deputizing your ISP in the name of protecting big Hollywood films studios from the likes of you and me.

Just what exactly negotiators are talking about this week is secret on paper, but leaks coming out of the conference, which is taking place in Seoul, South Korea, suggest that just about every file sharers worst fears could be realized. The worst of it so far looks to be a set of rules similar to the French ‘Three Strikes’ policy, requiring service providers to terminate service to a customer following allegations of repeat copyright violations at a particular ISP. But that’s just one of plenty of unpleasant restrictions that could be coming soon to a computer near you, including the distinct possibility of jail time for US file sharers.

But not, oddly enough to any computers in China or Russia, the two biggest bastions of media counterfeiting. So, that’s effective, right?

Great, in-depth coverage of what this means for you an the rest of the world is available at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and of course over on Boing Boing.

 

ICANN Has Non-Latin Domain Name?

See what happens when we release the governing body of the Internet from iron grip of the United States? Pretty soon you’ve got website domain names popping up in all sorts of languages, and now they’re even going to have different alphabets, because the latin alphabet isn’t good enough for some people, I guess.

As has been speculated for weeks, ICANN officially gave the go-ahead yesterday for the use of non-latin characters in domain names. The approval process will start in just two short weeks, which has sent companies like Coca-Cola and General Electric scrambling to figure out just how you spell their names in Cyrillic, Arabic, Korean and every other language that they’ll have to trademark and buy domain space for. In case anyone was wondering what lawyers get paid for – this is it, right here.

After sending corporate America into a tailspin, this is ultimately good news, bringing the World Wide Web a little closer to earning it’s title. Soon, spam messages written in Cyrillic will direct us back to whole pages written in Cyrillic! Bizarre Korean economics-based MMOS will direct players to their games in Hangul! And the Klingon Language Institute will at long long last be hosted in plqaD.  Buy’ ngop!

 

The Brains That Wouldn’t Die

Researchers at the University of Western England are working on making programmable robots out of living tissue, prompting the humble slime mold make the jump into the 21st century by getting all cybernetic up in here.

The mold has already proven capable of carrying small objects along during it’s growth process. Professor Andy Adamatzky and his team hope to take these possibilities to the next level, using chemical and light stimuli to control the way the mold grows, essentially programming it to carry objects to a specific point. Eventually, the hope is that they will be able to manipulate the mold, which already completes intricate computing tasks like finding the shortest distance between two points, to not only carry but assemble items.

Adamatzky isn’t the only one who thinks biological systems can help drive the next developments in computing and robotics. A recent episode of the Robots Podcast featured discussions with Charles Higgins, who is attaching the optic systems of dragonflies to improve robotic sensory capability and Steve Potter, who is growing neural circuits – essentially miniature brains in petri dishes – that, when attached to robotic sensors, can give us a better idea of how the same circuits function in the brain.

 

In Which We All Get A Little Closer To Creepy, Creepy Immortality

Dr. Henry Markram of Switzerland’s Brain Science Institute has suggested that we could see the first fully functioning computer model of a human brain in as little as 10 years. “I absolutely believe it is technically and biologically possible. The only uncertainty is financial,” said Markram.

If Markram is right, we could be just a decade away from an unparalleled tool for understanding the most opaque inner workings of the human brain and diagnosing and treating neurological disorders. Not to mention the means to keep our greatest mad scientists alive and terrorizing the planet with killer robots for centuries to come.

For those of you playing along at home – Ray Kurzweil just got a boner.

 

HealthBase Has A Jewish Problem

Research firm Netbase wants to reinvent the way people search with their fancy new brand of semantic search.

Their website makes some heady claims, including this one:

Our Content Intelligence platform is able to read every sentence inside documents, linguistically understand the content and enable breakthrough search experiences.

Sounds pretty impressive, right? You would think, then, that their newly launched health care research tool, Healthbase, which is meant to be a showcase for their technology, would be reasonably intelligent, capable of parsing words in a variety of different contexts and retrieving meaningful, relevant data.

And, like Leena Rao of TechCrunch, you would be pretty surprised when Healthbase informed you that one of the leading causes of AIDS is “Jew.”

It’s a pretty serious gaffe, and just one of many you can read about in the comments on Rao’s piece, which basically turned into a blooper reel for the young search engine. But if HealthBase has a problem with ‘Jew,’ no worries. It can probably be treated with one of the standard remedies for Jew provided by the site. Like wine, course (sic) salt or Dr. Pepper.

That said, the site isn’t entirely unwise. When queried about treatments for “old age,” it provided some astonishingly frank advice about the condition, recommending medications like marijuana and cocaine.

Works for me.

 

Waiting For My Man

The first rehabilitation camp for Internet Addiction has opened it’s doors in the United States, and situated in Fall City, Washington, it’s just miles from my own home.

For the low, low price of just $14,500, internet junkies can enroll in a six week treatment regimen at Heavensfield Retreat Center that features lessons in conversation techniques, social skills and dating.

If these techniques sound familiar, it’s because  they’re borrowed from the boot camp style Internet addiction treatment centers that have been springing up throughout China, where Internet addiction is seen as a growing problem among Chinese adolescents. Happily, though, the staff of Heavensfield has decided to replace the “brutal beatings” portion of the treatment itinerary with animal therapy. And while feeding goats might not be as stimulating as raiding Karazhan, it’s certainly preferable to being repeatedly shocked for trying to check your blog traffic or getting beaten to death by Chinese guidance counselors after a sex-ed class.

Still, it seems a lot to ask people to spend nearly fifteen large treating a mental illness that is at least poorly understood, if it even exists, which according to the pyschiatric guidebook  Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, it doesn’t.

 

Worst. Headline. Ever.

Oh, BBC, you’ve put me in a wicket that is ever so sticky.

On the one hand, I’m as ready as anyone for a serious rethinking of how we use Predators and other UAVs in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s particularly important in the latter theater, where civilian casualties caused by drone strikes play a major part in turning public opinion against US and NATO forces. The fact of the matter is that we don’t win the war against the Taliban in the region until we end public perception that we are the enemy, and we don’t end that perception until we stop killing civilians. Because frankly, until we stop killing civilians, we are the enemy to the vast majority of people on the ground in Afghanistan.

Since I’m on record as feeling this way, I couldn’t be happier to hear that Professor Noel Sharkey, who has been talking for years about the need for a reconsideration of whether the new face of modern warfare is a net improvement. For the soldiers who get to control these heavily armed automatons from half a world away, it certainly seems like it. But if we’re unable to distinguish civilian from combatant – a task that’s often difficult enough for a soldier on the ground – then are we really making wars more winnable? Or are we just making the rules a little different?

America - Are You Going To Let A Robot Fight Your Battles For You?

Maybe, by their definition, there’s no such thing as a safe weapon. But there’s a clear line between weapons that are ready to be used safely and ones that aren’t. And it’s time for a serious conversation about where UAVs and other robotic weaponry are in that process. Are they highly advanced? No doubt – technology has made undeniable strides from the days when all that robot warriors could do was rock ’em and/or sock ’em. But are they fool proof? Hardly, and when they’re not, the results are disastrous. So yeah, I’m happy that the media is giving the subject some love.

But really, BBC – did you have to run Jason Palmer’s excellent story on the matter under the headline ‘Call for debate on killer robots‘?

 

In Which The Evergreen State Goes Nutty Cuckoo

For those who aren’t aware, I have been a Washingtonian for long enough that, aside from a few loyalties in the sporting world that are so deeply ingrained and despair inducing that they can safely be considered genetic disorders, I have pretty much gone native. It’s a mostly laid back corner of the country, which suits me just fine, because I tend to be a fairly tense sort of chap, and the green and grey backdrop and relaxed atmosphere cut that just enough that I’m not intolerable to those around me. For the most part.

Which is why it was a touch off putting to hear material concerning my mostly sleepy state all over the news today, starting with the big business story of the day out of Redmond. Microsoft and Yahoo have finally consumated their on again romance, and like so many drawn out courtships, the moment of truth was a touch anti-climatic. Microsoft, unsurprisingly, gets the sweet end of the deal, with Yahoo bowing out of search and to handle advertising sales as Microsoft takes over search and data analysis for both companies, with the recently launched bing powering Yahoo searches from here on out. And while the deal moves Microsoft into the clear number two position in the  search industry, it’s a distant number two, in which the competition, whose name is synonymous with finding information online, has a stranglehold on 70% of the market.

In other words, Microsoft is right now in the best position it’s ever going to be in to challenge Google’s online search and advertising supremacy. But with the Chrome OS launching in just a few months on netbooks, Google is giving as good as it gets. And if this thing turns into a two front war for domination of operating system software and online technology, I’d put my money on the more nimble young ‘un from Santa Clara County.

And while Steve Ballmer and company might not be at the top of their game, they’re still faring better than the killer whales of the Puget Sound. Harassment by whale watching vessels looking to give tourists that perfect close up is hampering efforts to help the regions fragile orca population recover, so federal regulators are proposing doubling the distance that pleasure boats must stay away from the whales to 200 yards. Which is a nice thought, until you realize that the main problem seems to stem from ships that are not obeying the current guideline that aims to keep a 100 yard barrier between whales and whale watchers. With that in mind, it’s hard to see how doubling a barrier that no one is acknowledging helps preserve orca populations.

Shane Aggergaard, who heads the Pacific Whale Watch Association, a group of whale watch tour companies throughout Washington and British Columbia, may have demonstrated the attitude of tourism companies earlier today, when said in an interview with KUOW that “…we love to educate people regarding these animals so they can further protect them. It will be much more difficult to do that at 200 yards…” Again, this sounds good until you think about it – it’s more or less like arguing that we can’t outlaw shooting people in the face, because if we do, then how will people know that being shot in the face is a terrible, terrible thing?

And oh yeah, the anarchists are up in arms in the Evergreen State, as the anti-war organization Olympia Port Militarization Resistance accused a civilian employee of Washington’s Fort Lewis of COINTELPRO style shenanigans. The group, made up of members of groups like Students for a Democratic Society, Wobblies and self styled anarchists claim that a man going by the name John  Towery posed as an anarchist for two years, reporting back to military sources on the groups members and planned activities, such as staging port blockades.

And as these so called anarchists try to peacefully resist and do some good in the world, 38 year old Jeff Monson is keeping it real, doing all the things a good lone wolf anarchist should do. Like cage fighting. And spray painting anarchy symbols on the state capitol building. And then posing with the graffiti for ESPN The Magazine.

But hey, it could be weirder, I guess. I could live in Alabama, where they taser deaf people, don’t they?

And oh, yeah – Dave Reichert is an idiot and a jerk – more on that tomorrow.

 

In Which Big Brother Throws His Weight Around

Kindle owners beware – that electronic copy of a book you thought you purchased and, thus, owned? Not so much.

As it turns out, the publishers to whom Amazon is so beholden for Kindle content still own the content. That’s why they can decide at a whim to give you back your money and have your copies of books erased from your digital device without notifying you until the deed is already done.

That’s what happened to hundreds of Kindle owners who thought they had purchased safe, legal copies of George Orwell’s novels 1984 and Animal Farm. Copies of these novels were erased from Kindles under cover of darkness last night. This morning, Amazon sent affected users a form e-mail, noting that there had been a “problem” with their digital copies of the book and crediting their Kindle store accounts, the digital equivalent of a “Had a nice time, call you soon”  note left on the end table by someone slinking out of a one night stand.

The gall of invading peoples privacy  this way aside, Amazon’s caginess on the matter sets a troubling precedent for similar issues in the future, as does their refusal to define just what the “problem” with the books was. Were they riven with typos? Were they illegal copies, and if so what were they doing on the Kindle store in the first place? Were they alternate texts that were never meant to see the light of day – a copy of 1984, for example, that culminates in Winston Smith’s flamethrower rampage through the heart of London?

Why, in other words, is it okay to access and erase user data without notification or permission, but out of bounds to discuss why it was done?

 

Out Come The Wolves

The two most notable technology firms in the world look set to duke it out on pretty much every front in a battle of nerdy, nerdy titans. This should be fun to watch.

Microsoft’s less than overwhelming launch of it’s new search engine, Bing, was a direct challenge to Google’s search supremacy. All anyone really had to do was wait and see how the big, friendly giant of the Internet reacted.

Well, the wait is over. Google responded to Microsoft’s encroachment on it’s territory in kind yesterday, announcing plans for a spanking new operating system that essentially swats Redmond across the face with a big white glove.

While some netbooks are already using Google’s open source Android OS, it’s proven not quite adequate for everyday computing. But the plan for the new, full fledged OS is more an extension of Google’s Chrome browser(which, full disclosure, I started using at it’s launch and have continued without looking back). For the Chrome OS, Google is looking to make a svelte operating system without a lot of bells and whistles. It will open directly to the web browser, where all of the applications will run. That sort of leanness in an OS may seem like a risky proposition, and it probably is. But if anyone can pull it off, it’s Google, whose extant online programs are steadily gaining popularity.