Thursday, June 25. 2009EU Wants Tighter Privacy on Social NetworksAre social networks such as Facebook and MySpace doing enough to protect their users’ privacy? In the European Union, they might need to do more. A panel of European regulators has laid out operating guidelines for social networks, which will ensure their compliance with strict – albeit sometimes vague – online privacy laws in the European Union. These laws mostly stem from the European Union Directive on Data Protection of 1995, which, among other regulations, prohibits collection of personal information without consumers’ permission, forbids employers to read workers’ private e-mail, and doesn’t allow companies to share personal information on users without their permission. Nevertheless, the guidelines that were laid out will require quite a bit of effort from sites such as Facebook and MySpace, who cannot neglect their European user base and will therefore surely at least try to comply to avoid clashing with the EU regulators. According to the guidelines, social networks must set security settings to high by default; they must allow users to limit data disclosed to third parties, and they must limit the use of sensitive information (race, religion, political views) in behavioral advertising. Furthermore, social networks must delete accounts that have been inactive for long periods, as well as discard users’ personal information after they delete their accounts; an interesting regulation in view of the recent Facebook scandal, in which Facebook claimed ownership of all the content you’ve ever uploaded even if you quit the service. Facebook later apologized and restored their previous Terms of Service, even letting users be part of the decision process in creating the new ToS. However, it must be noted that even if this sounds like democracy, it’s a frail one, as Facebook still sets up the stage and has the last word on every decision. It is therefore good that there’s an overseer, looking over our online privacy and security. These latest guidelines from the European Union will definitely make life harder for social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, but will most likely have a positive impact on user privacy in the long run. You can read the entire set of guidelines created by the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party in PDF format here. ----- Vis Mashable Personal comment: De façon générale, la thématique de la privacité monte dans les médias, l'intérêt du public aussi et la législation tente de suivre...
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society, Science & technology
at
09:45
Defined tags for this entry: culture & society, identification, marketing, media, monitoring, science & technology, social, surveillance
Just Another Online Fad--or the Biggest Revolution Since the Internet?By Stephen Cass According to its advocates, cloud computing is poised to succeed where so many other attempts to deliver on-demand computing to anyone with a network connection have failed. Some skepticism is warranted. The history of the computer industry is littered with the remains of previous aspirants to this holy grail, from the time-sharing utilities envisioned in the 1960s and 1970s to the network computers of the 1990s (simple computers acting as graphical clients for software running on central servers) to the commercial grid systems of more recent years (aimed at turning clusters of servers into high-performance computers). But cloud computing draws strength from forces that could propel it beyond the ranks of the also-rans. Rather than running software on dedicated hardware--a mail server here, a database host there--cloud systems can let software run on virtual machines, simulated systems generated at a moment's notice in massive data centers (see "Water-Powered Computers"). If a customer's needs expand, more virtual machines can be created and configured with ease, and should those needs later decline, the underlying hardware resources are returned to the data center's pool. No elaborate construction or development program is needed to kick-start such technology--the infrastructure is already in place and making money. Existing data centers, built to support the likes of Amazon and Google, can rent spare capacity, creating a collection of services that provide the illusion of infinite computing power and storage on tap. Technologies like virtualization (as explained in "Conjuring Clouds"), combined with growing market pressures to reduce capital spending (see "Virtual Computers, Real Money"), could revolutionize the software industry, enabling startups to offer online applications or services without investing much in storage, Web, or e-commerce infrastructure. End users could have seamless access to applications and data anywhere, on any device. As reported in "Making Art Pay", eliminating the need for infrastructure investment allows rapid development of applications. An ecosystem of startups has sprung up to provide platforms, tools, and expertise--recently joined by companies such as IBM and Intel (see "Companies to Watch"). As a still-maturing technology, however, cloud computing has yet to overcome certain challenges, such as guaranteeing the integrity and security of users' data, providing a seamless user experience, and establishing standards to allow companies to move from provider to provider (see "The Standards Question"). A number of key players are driving many of the industry's responses to these challenges, and open-source efforts and academic research consortiums are likely to play a role as well (see "Open-Source Projects and Research Consortiums"). A survey of corporate software buyers by the 451 Group showed the use of public cloud computing increasing by more than 60 percent in the last quarter of 2008 over the previous two quarters, and International Data Corporation has predicted that business IT spending on cloud services will rise from $16 billion last year to $42 billion by 2012, setting up cloud computing as one of the few areas of growth in an otherwise gloomy economy. Copyright Technology Review 2009. ----- Personal comment: Soyons prête à en entendre de plus en plus parler ces prochains temps!
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Science & technology
at
08:38
Defined tags for this entry: hardware, science & technology
Tuesday, June 23. 2009Server space
Photos: NY Times: Search Me ----- Via Space & Culture Personal comment: Rien qu'on ne sache déjà, mais ça le souligne... A mettre en lien avec l'article précédent concernant le chauffage de bâtiment par un cluster de serveurs. Traveling the Web TogetherA browser plug-in aims to make it far simpler to browse the Web with friends.
By Erica Naone
Researchers from the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, VA, hope to change that with software called RCB (for real-time collaborative browsing) that makes it far simpler to connect with another person as he or she clicks around the Web. There are already a few ways to navigate through Web pages collaboratively, but each has its limitations. Trailfire, for example, lets a user record her Web sessions but doesn't allow users to browse together at the same time. Another service, called Weblin, provides a way to annotate sites with animations and avatars, but it is only geared toward interacting on a single Web page. More powerful "screen sharing" lets users browse together as if sharing the same machine, but this normally involves connecting to an outside server. What sets RCB apart, says Haining Wang, an assistant professor of computer science at William and Mary, is its simplicity. Only the person leading a session needs to have a browser extension installed--others can then participate with any standard Web browser. "This makes cobrowsing very simple and practical," Wang says. The researchers suggest that RCB could be particularly useful for businesses offering customer support, for distance-learning courses, or for friends who want to share links. To use RCB, one person has to install a Firefox browser extension. This allows her to generate a session URL that can be sent to other participants. When a second user clicks on the URL, the host's RCB extension sends him to a Web page that then connects him to the first person's browser. Once connected, both users can interact with a Web page and follow links, with all actions funneled through the host's browser. The host also retains control over the session and can add or remove participants as needed. A host can connect to up to 10 participants without losing too much performance, but the researchers say that RCB is best suited for two people at a time. "There is a real desire by users to share URLs with collaborators in real time," says Meredith Ringel Morris, a computer scientist in the adaptive systems and interaction group at Microsoft Research, who launched a collaborative search tool called SearchTogether last year. A survey conducted by Morris in 2006 found that 30 percent of participants said that they had tried to browse with others using instant messaging. Morris says that the researchers' efforts to simplify cobrowsing through RCB "are a big step in the right direction." Users with limited technical skills could especially benefit from a cobrowsing tool, Morris says, since it allows a more experienced Internet user to walk them through unfamiliar tasks. Because this needs to be easy to do, she says, it's important that RCB uses a regular Web browser. On the other hand, Morris worries that RCB places too much of a burden on the host of a cobrowsing session. As the system is currently implemented, a user can only set up a session if she knows her computer's host name or Internet protocol (IP) address, as well as the number of an unused transmission control protocol (TCP) port. Vladimir Estivill-Castro, a professor at the School of Information and Communication Technology at Griffith University, in Australia, who has studied the usability of cobrowsing tools, says that the approach "seems rather convenient." But he thinks that more work needs to be done to improve the system so that many users can take actions on a single Web page. RCB is not yet available to the public, but the researchers presented their work last week at the Usenix Technical Conference, in San Diego. Wang says that his group filed a provisional patent last September with the hope of getting the technology adopted by major browser vendors. Copyright Technology Review 2009. ----- Personal comment: Ca ne vous fait penser à rien? Knowscape? (qui allait d'ailleurs plus loin en terme de concepts) Monday, June 22. 2009Cell Phones That Listen and LearnNew software tracks a user's behavior by monitoring everyday sounds.
By Kristina Grifantini
Now a group at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, NH, has created software that uses the microphone on a cell phone to track and interpret a user's situation. The software, called SoundSense, picks up sounds and tries to classify them into certain categories. In contrast to similar software developed previously, SoundSense can be trained by the user to recognize completely unfamiliar sounds, and it also runs entirely on the device. SoundSense automatically classifies sounds as "voice," "music," or "ambient noise." If a sound is repeated often enough or for long enough, SoundSense gives it a high "sound rank" and asks the user to confirm that it is significant and offers the option to label the sound. The Dartmouth team focused on monitoring sound because every phone has a microphone and because GPS doesn't work well indoors, while accelerometers provide only limited information. "When we think about sounds, we don't typically think that they can also represent a location that has a unique signature," says Andrew Campbell, an associate professor of computer science at Dartmouth and a lead researcher on the project. The researchers made sure the program is small, so that it doesn't use too much power. To address privacy concerns, they designed SoundSense so that information is not removed from the device for processing. Additionally, the program itself doesn't store raw audio clips. A user can also tell the software to ignore any sounds deemed off limits. In testing, the SoundSense software was able to correctly determine when the user was in a particular coffee shop, walking outside, brushing her teeth, cycling, and driving in the car. It also picked up the noise of an ATM machine and a fan in a particular room. The results of the experiments will be presented this week at the MobiSys 2009 conference, in Krakow, Poland. "The SoundSense system is our first step in building a system that can learn [user behavior] on the go," says Tanzeem Choudhury, an assistant professor at Dartmouth who was also involved in the project and TR35 winner. Choudhury says that enabling the software to learn to recognize new sounds will be essential for practical applications. "A system that can recognize sounds in a person's life can be used to search for others who have the same preferences," she says. Using sounds to classify events can give users feedback on their daily activities for health or time-management applications, she adds. Kurt Partridge, a researcher at Palo Alto Research Center, who has also created cell-phone software that tracks behavior, believes that the SoundSense project exploits an underused resource. "I don't think the field has really realized both how little power audio-based activity-sensing takes, and how informative it can be," Partridge says. "Audio can distinguish so many more activities [and] adds a social aspect to contextual sensing that's not possible otherwise." Dan Ellis, an associate professor at Columbia University, who has researched the use of continuous audio recordings, says that this type of "life logging" could someday be used as routinely as the outbox in an e-mail application. "Maybe you don't look at your outbox very often, but given the right tools to quickly find what you're looking for, it's very convenient to keep a record of every e-mail you're ever sent," he says. "A near-continuous, audio-based record collected by a personal device could be similarly desirable." Copyright Technology Review 2009. ----- Personal comment: On a déjà posté quelques articles qui touchent au "reality mining" ainsi qu'au monitoring d'informations par les téléphones (notamment pour de meilleurs réveils matin ou pour la santé). Ici aussi un piste de recherche qui poursuit son chemin.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Science & technology
at
13:24
Defined tags for this entry: mobile, mobility, monitoring, research, science & technology, sound, surveillance
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fabric | rblgThis blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research. We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings. Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations. This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
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