Wednesday, August 07. 2013
Via Treehugger
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By Megan Treacy
Undeniably one of the biggest stories of the year has been the leak about the NSA PRISM program, which has been monitoring American citizens' communications. Many people have been appalled by this revelation, but it turns out there is an environmentally appalling part of this spying program too. More details have been released about NSA's new Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center, otherwise known as that massive data center being built by the agency in Bluffdale, Utah.
Turns out that collecting tons of information in the form of phone calls, emails and web searches is an energy and water-hungry business. According to reports, the one million square-foot facility will house 100,000 square feet of data-storing servers and will use 1.7 million gallons of water per day to keep those servers cool.
The data center will account for one percent of all water use in the area and the city of Bluffdale is looking for additional water sources for when the facility is finished in September.
It won't be an energy-sipper either, but that was obvious from the size of the place. The facility will require 65 megawatts of power, which is the equivalent of 65,000 homes. It will have its own power substation and back-up diesel power generators.
The crazy thing is that this gigantic data center isn't quite enough. The NSA is also building another data center in Fort Meade, Maryland that will be two-thirds the size of the mega center, but that's still pretty darn big.
Friday, July 26. 2013
Via Digital Trends
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By Kate Knibbs
Facebook leaking user information, a dust-up over Facebook shadow profiles has relaunched. A “shadow profile” sounds like something a CIA operative would have – but if you’re a Facebook user, you have a shadow profile, whether you’re a real-life James Bond or just an accountant from Des Moines.
So what is a Facebook shadow profile, and where does yours lurk?
A Facebook shadow profile is a file that Facebook keeps on you containing data it pulls up from looking at the information that a user’s friends voluntarily provide. You’re not supposed to see it, or even know it exists. This collection of information can include phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and other pertinent data about a user that they don’t necessarily put on their public profile. Even if you never gave Facebook your second email address or your home phone number, they may still have it on file, since anyone who uses the “Find My Friends” feature allows Facebook to scan their contacts. So if your friend has your contact info on her phone and uses that feature, Facebook can match your name to that information and add it to your file.
“When people use Facebook, they may store and share information about you.”
Facebook recently announced that it fixed a bug that inadvertently revealed this hidden contact information for six million users. Their mea culpa was not particularly well-received, since this security breach revealed that the social network had been collecting this data on all of its users and compiling it into shadow profiles for years. Some people who use Facebook’s Download Your Information (DYI) tool could see the dossiers Facebook had been collecting as well as information their friends put up themselves. So, if I downloaded my information and was affected by the bug, I’d see some of the email addresses and phone numbers of my friends who did not make that information public.
Although Facebook corrected the bug, it hasn’t stopped this program of accumulating extra information on people. And researchers looking at the numbers say the breach is actually more involved than Facebook initially claimed, with four pieces of data released for a user that Facebook said had one piece of data leaked.
This snafu won’t come as a surprise to researchers who brought up Facebook’s shadow profiles long before this most recent breach. In 2011, an Irish advocacy group filed a complaint against Facebook for collecting information like email addresses, phone numbers, work details, and other data to create shadow profiles for people who don’t use the service. Since it actually takes moral fortitude to resist the social pull of Facebook, this is a slap in the face for people who make a point to stay off the network: The group claimed that Facebook still has profiles for non-Facebookers anyway.
Though the decision to publicly own up to the bug was a step in the right direction, this leak is disturbing because it illustrates just how little control we have over our data when we use services like Facebook. And it illustrates that Facebook isn’t apologizing for collecting information – it’s just apologizing for the bug. The shadow profile will live another day.
Most people understand that Facebook can see, archive, and data-mine the details you voluntarily put up on the site. The reason people are disturbed by shadow profiles is the information was collected in a roundabout way, and users had no control over what was collected (which is how even people who abstain from Facebook may have ended up with dossiers despite their reluctance to get involved with the site). Now we don’t just need to worry about what we choose to share; we also have to worry that the friends we trust with personal information will use programs that collect our data.
To Facebook’s credit, they do make this clear in the privacy policy, it’s just that no one bothers to read it:
“We receive information about you from your friends and others, such as when they upload your contact information, post a photo of you, tag you in a photo or status update, or at a location, or add you to a group. When people use Facebook, they may store and share information about you and others that they have, such as when they upload and manage their invites and contacts.”
Now, the Facebook shadow profiles contain information that many people make public anyways; plenty of people have made their phone numbers and addresses discoverable via a simple Google Search (not that they should, but that’s another story). But if you make a point to keep that kind of information private, this shadow profile business will sting. And even if you don’t mind the fact that Facebook creeped on your phone number via your friends, you should be concerned that next time these shadow profiles make it into the news, it will be over other data-mining that could be potential harmful. Imagine if your credit card information or PIN number ended up going public.
The way Facebook worded its apology is interesting because it doesn’t say that they don’t collect that type of information.
“Additionally, no other types of personal or financial information were included and only people on Facebook – not developers or advertisers – have access to the DYI tool.”
The fact that they said “were included” instead of “were collected” leaves open the possibility that Facebook does have this kind of information on file – it just wasn’t part of this particular mix-up.
Facebook hasn’t reassured users by saying they don’t collect this kind of data, and that’s awfully suspicious; if their shadow data collection was really limited to phone numbers and email addresses, your would think they would’ve explicitly said so, to ameliorate critics. What Facebook isn’t saying here versus what they are saying speaks volumes. The site is sorry for the bug, but not sorry for surreptitiously collecting data on you. And they’re admitting the data that was released in the bug, but not explaining the exact scope of the shadow profile amalgamation.
Facebook’s shadow profiles aren’t uniquely or especially nefarious, but this incident makes it all the more obvious that the amount of data companies are collecting on you far surpasses what you might suspect. And unless there are legislative changes, this will continue unabated.
Personal comment:
To read also another article by MIT Tech Review: "What Facebook Knows"
Thursday, July 25. 2013
Via MIT Technology Review via @chrstphggnrd
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New tricks will enable a life-logging app called Saga to figure out not only where you are, but what you’re doing.
By Tom Simonite
Having mobile devices closely monitoring our behavior could make them more useful, and open up new business opportunities.
Many of us already record the places we go and things we do by using our smartphone to diligently snap photos and videos, and to update social media accounts. A company called ARO is building technology that automatically collects a more comprehensive, automatic record of your life.
ARO is behind an app called Saga that automatically records every place that a person goes. Now ARO’s engineers are testing ways to use the barometer, cameras, and microphones in a device, along with a phone’s location sensors, to figure out where someone is and what they are up to. That approach should debut in the Saga app in late summer or early fall.
The current version of Saga, available for Apple and Android phones, automatically logs the places a person visits; it can also collect data on daily activity from other services, including the exercise-tracking apps FitBit and RunKeeper, and can pull in updates from social media accounts like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Once the app has been running on a person’s phone for a little while, it produces infographics about his or her life; for example, charting the variation in times when they leave for work in the morning.
Software running on ARO’s servers creates and maintains a model of each user’s typical movements. Those models power Saga’s life-summarizing features, and help the app to track a person all day without requiring sensors to be always on, which would burn too much battery life.
“If I know that you’re going to be sitting at work for nine hours, we can power down our collection policy to draw as little power as possible,” says Andy Hickl, CEO of ARO. Saga will wake up and check a person’s location if, for example, a phone’s accelerometer suggests he or she is on the move; and there may be confirmation from other clues, such as the mix of Wi-Fi networks in range of the phone. Hickl says that Saga typically consumes around 1 percent of a device’s battery, significantly less than many popular apps for e-mail, mapping, or social networking.
That consumption is low enough, says Hickl, that Saga can afford to ramp up the information it collects by accessing additional phone sensors. He says that occasionally sampling data from a phone’s barometer, cameras, and microphones will enable logging of details like when a person walked into a conference room for a meeting, or when they visit Starbucks, either alone or with company.
The Android version of Saga recently began using the barometer present in many smartphones to distinguish locations close to one another. “Pressure changes can be used to better distinguish similar places,” says Ian Clifton, who leads development of the Android version of ARO. “That might be first floor versus third floor in the same building, but also inside a vehicle versus outside it, even in the same physical space.”
ARO is internally testing versions of Saga that sample light and sound from a person’s environment. Clifton says that using a phone’s microphone to collect short acoustic fingerprints of different places can be a valuable additional signal of location, and allow inferences about what a person is doing. “Sometimes we’re not sure if you’re in Starbucks or the bar next door,” says Clifton. “With acoustic fingerprints, even if the [location] sensor readings are similar, we can distinguish that.”
Occasionally sampling the light around a phone using its camera provides another kind of extra signal of a person’s activity. “If you go from ambient light to natural light, that would say to us your context has changed,” says Hickl, and it should be possible for Saga to learn the difference between, say, the different areas of an office.
The end result of sampling light, sound, and pressure data will be Saga’s machine learning models being able to fill in more details of a users’ life, says Hickl. “[When] I go home today and spend 12 hours there, to Saga that looks like a wall of nothing,” he says, noting that Saga could use sound or light cues to infer when during that time at home he was, say, watching TV, playing with his kids, or eating dinner.
Andrew Campbell, who leads research into smartphone sensing at Dartmouth College, says that adding more detailed, automatic life-logging features is crucial for Saga or any similar app to have a widespread impact. “Automatic sensing relieves the user of the burden of inputting lots of data,” he says. “Automatic and continuous sensing apps that minimize user interaction are likely to win out.”
Campbell says that automatic logging coupled with machine learning should allow apps to learn more about users’ health and welfare, too. He recently started analyzing data from a trial in which 60 students used a life-logging app that Campbell developed called Biorhythm. It uses various data collection tricks, including listening for nearby voices to determine when a student is in a conversation. “We can see many interesting patterns related to class performance, personality, stress, sociability, and health,” says Campbell. “This could translate into any workplace performance situation, such as a startup, hospital, large company, or the home.”
Campbell’s project may shape how he runs his courses, but it doesn’t have to make money. ARO, funded by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, ultimately needs to make life-logging pay. Hickl says that he has already begun to rent out some of ARO’s technology to other companies that want to be able to identify their users’ location or activities. Aggregate data from Saga users should also be valuable, he says.
“Now we’re getting a critical mass of users in some areas and we’re able to do some trend-spotting,” he says. “The U.S. national soccer team was in Seattle, and we were able to see where activity was heating up around the city.” Hickl says the data from that event could help city authorities or businesses plan for future soccer events in Seattle or elsewhere. He adds that Saga could provide similar insights into many other otherwise invisible patterns of daily life.
Personal comment:
Or how to build up knowledge and minable data from low end "sensors". Finally, how some trivial inputs from low cost sensors can, combined with others, reveal deeper patterns in our everyday habits.
But who's Aro? Who founded it? Who are the "business angels" behind it and what are they up to? What does the technology exactly do? Where are its legal headquarters located (under which law)? That's the first questions you should ask yourself before eventually giving your data to a private company... (I know, this is usual suspects these days). But that's pretty hard to find! CEO is Mr Andy Hickl based in Seattle, having 1096 followers on Twitter and a "Sorry, this page isn't available" on Facebook, you can start to digg from there and mine for him on Google...
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We are in need of some sort of efficient Creative Commons equivalent for data. But that would be respected by companies. As well as some open source equivalent for Facebook, Google, Dropbox, etc. (but also MS, Apple, etc.), located in countries that support these efforts through their laws and where these "Creative Commons" profiles and data would be implemented. Then, at least, we would have some choice.
In Switzerland, we had a term to describe how the landscape has been progressivily used since the 60ies to build small individual or holiday houses: "mitage du territoire" ("urban sprawl" sounds to be the equivalent in english, but "mitage" is related to "moths" to be precise, so rather ""mothed" landscape" if I could say so, which says what it says) and we had the opportunity to vote against it recently, with success. I believe that now the same thing is happening with personal and/or public sphere, with our lives: it is sprawled or "mothed" by private interests.
So, it is time to ask for the opportunity to "vote" (against it) everybody and have the choice between keeping the ownership of your data, releasing them as public or being paid for them (like a share in the company('s product))!
Tuesday, July 23. 2013
Via MIT News
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Illustration: Christine Daniloff/MIT
The comic-book hero Superman uses his X-ray vision to spot bad guys lurking behind walls and other objects. Now we could all have X-ray vision, thanks to researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Researchers have long attempted to build a device capable of seeing people through walls. However, previous efforts to develop such a system have involved the use of expensive and bulky radar technology that uses a part of the electromagnetic spectrum only available to the military.
Now a system being developed by Dina Katabi, a professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and her graduate student Fadel Adib, could give all of us the ability to spot people in different rooms using low-cost Wi-Fi technology. “We wanted to create a device that is low-power, portable and simple enough for anyone to use, to give people the ability to see through walls and closed doors,” Katabi says.
The system, called “Wi-Vi,” is based on a concept similar to radar and sonar imaging. But in contrast to radar and sonar, it transmits a low-power Wi-Fi signal and uses its reflections to track moving humans. It can do so even if the humans are in closed rooms or hiding behind a wall.
As a Wi-Fi signal is transmitted at a wall, a portion of the signal penetrates through it, reflecting off any humans on the other side. However, only a tiny fraction of the signal makes it through to the other room, with the rest being reflected by the wall, or by other objects. “So we had to come up with a technology that could cancel out all these other reflections, and keep only those from the moving human body,” Katabi says.
Motion detector
To do this, the system uses two transmit antennas and a single receiver. The two antennas transmit almost identical signals, except that the signal from the second antenna is the inverse of the first. As a result, the two signals interfere with each other in such a way as to cancel each other out. Since any static objects that the signals hit — including the wall — create identical reflections, they too are cancelled out by this nulling effect.
In this way, only those reflections that change between the two signals, such as those from a moving object, arrive back at the receiver, Adib says. “So, if the person moves behind the wall, all reflections from static objects are cancelled out, and the only thing registered by the device is the moving human.”
Once the system has cancelled out all of the reflections from static objects, it can then concentrate on tracking the person as he or she moves around the room. Most previous attempts to track moving targets through walls have done so using an array of spaced antennas, which each capture the signal reflected off a person moving through the environment. But this would be too expensive and bulky for use in a handheld device.
So instead Wi-Vi uses just one receiver. As the person moves through the room, his or her distance from the receiver changes, meaning the time it takes for the reflected signal to make its way back to the receiver changes too. The system then uses this information to calculate where the person is at any one time.
Possible uses in disaster recovery, personal safety, gaming
Wi-Vi, being presented at the Sigcomm conference in Hong Kong in August, could be used to help search-and-rescue teams to find survivors trapped in rubble after an earthquake, say, or to allow police officers to identify the number and movement of criminals within a building to avoid walking into an ambush.
It could also be used as a personal safety device, Katabi says: “If you are walking at night and you have the feeling that someone is following you, then you could use it to check if there is someone behind the fence or behind a corner.”
The device can also detect gestures or movements by a person standing behind a wall, such as a wave of the arm, Katabi says. This would allow it to be used as a gesture-based interface for controlling lighting or appliances within the home, such as turning off the lights in another room with a wave of the arm.
Venkat Padmanabhan, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, says the possibility of using Wi-Vi as a gesture-based interface that does not require a line of sight between the user and the device itself is perhaps its most interesting application of all. “Such an interface could alter the face of gaming,” he says.
Unlike today’s interactive gaming devices, where users must stay in front of the console and its camera at all times, users could still interact with the system while in another room, for example. This could open up the possibility of more complex and interesting games, Katabi says.
Personal comment:
This will probably restart the interests of private companies to provide "public" or private wifi "for free" or at least to equip large urban areas without charging for the work and the hardware (as you won't need to be connected to the wifi to be tracked, see?). As long as they'll be allowed to collect data, mine for crowd patterns and behaviors... (a new case for persons in charge of data protection).
Wednesday, May 08. 2013
Via MIT Technology Review
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The creator of the Wolfram Alpha search engine explains why he thinks your life should be measured, analyzed, and improved.
By Antonio Regalado
Personal control: Stephen Wolfram created the search engine Wolfram Alpha
Don’t be surprised if Stephen Wolfram, the renowned complexity theorist, software company CEO, and night owl, wants to schedule a work call with you at 9 p.m. In fact, after a decade of logging every phone call he makes, Wolfram knows the exact probability he’ll be on the phone with someone at that time: 39 percent.
Wolfram, a British-born physicist who earned a doctorate at age 20, is obsessed with data and the rules that explain data. He is the creator of the software Mathematica and of Wolfram Alpha, the nerdy “computational knowledge engine” that can tell you the distance to the moon right now, in units including light-seconds.
Now Wolfram wants to apply the same techniques to people’s personal data, an idea he calls “personal analytics.” He started with himself. In a blog post last year, Wolfram disclosed and analyzed a detailed record of his life stretching back three decades, including documents, hundreds of thousands of e-mails, and 10 years of computer keystrokes, a tally of which is e-mailed to him each morning so he can track his productivity the day before.
Last year, his company released its first consumer product in this vein, called “Personal Analytics for Facebook.” In under a minute, the software generates a detailed study of a person’s relationships and behavior on the site. My own report was revealing enough. It told me which friend lives at the highest latitude (Wicklow, Ireland) and the lowest (Brisbane, Australia), the percentage who are married (76.7 percent), and everyone’s local time. More of my friends are Scorpios than any other sign of the zodiac.
It looks just like a dashboard for your life, which Wolfram says is exactly the point. In a phone call that was recorded and whose start and stop time was entered into Wolfram’s life log, he discussed why personal analytics will make people more efficient at work and in their personal lives.
What do you typically record about yourself?
E-mails, documents, and normally, if I was in front of my computer, it would be recording keystrokes. I have a motion sensor for the room that records when I pace up and down. Also a pedometer, and I am trying to get an eye-tracking system set up, but I haven’t done that yet. Oh, and I’ve been wearing a sensor to measure my posture.
Do you think that you’re the most quantified person on the planet?
I couldn’t imagine that that was the case until maybe a year ago, when I collected together a bunch of this data and wrote a blog post on it. I was expecting that there would be people who would come forward and say, “Gosh, I’ve got way more than you.” But nobody’s come forward. I think by default that may mean I’m it, so to speak.
You coined this term “personal analytics.” What does it mean?
There’s organizational analytics, which is looking at an organization and trying to understand what the data says about its operation. Personal analytics is what you can figure out applying analytics to the person, to understand the operation of the person.
Why have you been analyzing Facebook data?
We are trying to feel out the market for personal analytics. Most people are not recording all their keystrokes like I am. But the one thing they are doing is leaving lots of digital trails, including on Facebook, and that is one of the pieces we’ve been experimenting with.
We’ve accumulated a lot of Facebook data—you’re seeing the story of people’s lives, played out in the level of data. You can see relationship status as a function of age, or the evolution of the clustering of friends at different ages. It’s really quite fascinating to see how all this stuff is just right there in the data.
Social grid: People’s friend networks on Facebook are presented as cluster diagrams.
Isn’t a lot of what you find kind of obvious? Like friends from college aren’t connected to the ones from grammar school?
Yes, but then you get a case where the data analysis is buggy. You get some curve, and your reaction is, “Oh, yeah, I understand why the curve is that way, I’ve got an argument for it.” But then, oops, there was a bug in the analysis and actually the curve is something different. That reminds you things aren’t quite so obvious. If you actually measure it, that’s doing science.
What’s the connection to the search engine you built?
Right now Wolfram Alpha is strong on public knowledge: accumulating and searching the knowledge of the civilization. But what you have to do in personal analytics is try to accumulate the knowledge of a person’s life. Then the two can actually be integrated, and I’ll give a kind of silly example. You might ask: “Who do I know that can go out into their backyard and go and look at the night sky right now?” For that you have to be able to compute who is in nighttime, who doesn’t have cloudy weather, and things like this. And we can compute all that stuff.
What do you see as the big applications in personal analytics?
Augmented memory is going to be very important. I’ve been spoiled because for years I’ve had the ability to search my e-mail and all my other records. I’ve been the CEO of the same company for 25 years, and so I never changed jobs and lost my data. That’s something that I think people will just come to expect. Pure memory augmentation is probably the first step.
The next is preëmptive information delivery. That means knowing enough about people’s history to know what they’re going to care about. Imagine someone is reading a newspaper article, and we know there is a person mentioned in it that they went to high school with, and so we can flag it. I think that’s the sort of thing it’s possible to dramatically automate and make more efficient.
Then there will be a certain segment of the population that will be into the self-improvement side of things, using analytics to learn about ourselves. Because we may have a vague sense about something, but when the pattern is explicit, we can decide, “Do we like that behavior, do we not?” Very early on, back in the 1990s, when I first analyzed my e-mail archive, I learned that a lot of e-mail threads at my company would, by a certain time of day, just resolve themselves. That was a useful thing to know, because if I jumped in too early I was just wasting my time.
What technologies are needed to do personal analytics at a large scale?
It’s data science and the whole cluster of technologies that come with that. Then it’s having computational knowledge about the world and being able to make queries in natural language. Then you need to sense things about the world, whether it’s with sensors or being able to do visual recognition to know what one is seeing. Then the final thing is just all the plumbing infrastructure to get all of these devices to communicate and feed their information to a place where one can do analysis.
Where do you stand on commercializing these ideas?
The personal analytics of Facebook for Wolfram Alpha is a deployed project, and there will be more of those in the personal-analytics space. We think we can do terrific things, but you have to be able to get to the data. That has been the holdup. The data isn’t readily available. Recently we’ve been working with different companies to try and make sure we can connect their sensors to kind of a generic analytics platform, to take people’s data, move it to the cloud, and do analytics on it.
How much better do you think that people or organizations can become with some data feedback?
I think it will be fairly dramatic. It’s like asking how much more money can you make if you track your portfolio rather than just vaguely remembering what investments you made.
Tuesday, December 04. 2012
Via BLDGBLOG
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de noreply@blogger.com (Geoff Manaugh)
[Image: An otherwise only conceptually related photo by Steve Rowell shows the LAPD's Edward M. Davis Emergency Vehicle Operations Center & Tactics/Firearms Training Facility in Granada Hills, CA; courtesy of the Center for Land Use Intrepretation].
I was fascinated to read yesterday that a cyberwarfare training city is under construction, to be opened by March 2013, "a small-scale city located close by the New Jersey Turnpike complete with a bank, hospital, water tower, train system, electric power grid, and a coffee shop."
I envisioned whole empty streets and bank towers—suburban houses and replica transportation depots—sitting there in the rain whilst troops of code-wielding warriors hurl electromagnetic spells from laptops against elevator circuit boards, sump pumps, and garage doors, flooding basements, popping open underground gold vaults, and frying traffic lights, like some gonzo version of The Italian Job wed with the digital wizardry of a new sorcerer class, the "first-line cyber defenders" who will be trained in this place, our 21st-century Hogwarts along the freeway. Then they clean it all and start again tomorrow.
Alas. Although this, in many ways, is even more interesting, the entire "test city" truly is miniature: indeed, the whole thing "fits in a six by eight foot area and was created using miniature buildings and houses, [and] the underlying power control systems, hospital software, and other infrastructures are directly from the real world."
Nonetheless, this 6-x-8 surrogate urban world will be under near-constant microcosmic attack: "NetWars CyberCity participants, which include cyber warriors from the Department of Defense and other defenders within the U.S. Government, will be tasked with protecting the city's critical infrastructure and systems as they come under attack. Cyber warriors will be presented with potential real-world attacks; their job is to defend against them. Missions will include fending off attacks on the city's power company, hospital, water system and transportation services."
Which means, in the end, that this is really just an enlarged board game with an eye-catching press release—but there is still something compelling about the notion of an anointed patch of circuits and wifi routers, accepted as an adequate stand-in—an electromagnetic stunt double—for something like all of New York City, let alone the United States. A voodoo doll made of light, animated from within by packet switches, under constant surveillance in an invisible war.
(Via @pd_smith).
Monday, October 22. 2012
Christophe forwarded me last day this link to a teaser for new game he saw on Pablo Marques's blog. When game play meets anticipatory, critical (and catastrophic) techno-social scenarios...
Ubisoft Montreal_Watch Dogs "Blackout" from Patrick Clair on Vimeo.
Tuesday, September 18. 2012
An interesting work by Adam Harvey about camouflage from computer vision (even though if the piuctures below look like photoshop demo). Which could lead to new type of haircut and makup when Facebook's identifying (surevillance) camera will be displayed all over the place, in shopping areas and franchised spaces.
See more of it on the project's website, with additionnal picture: CV Dazzle.
Wednesday, June 06. 2012
Because moose aren't the only thing in Canada's north.
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As it becomes increasingly clear that climate change and the race for new sources of oil and gas are going to turn Earth's poles into hotbeds of military contention, Northrup Grumman is responding by offering Canada a drone that can fly under even the harshest of conditions.
The RQ-4 Global Hawk has been used by the US military for surveillance since its introduction in 1998. And now it's going to get a second life protecting Canada from the Reds, or whoever else wants to dispute their claims on their own resource-rich northern wastes.
Fightglobal reports:
Dubbed the Polar Hawk, the aircraft is a modified version of the basic Block 30 airframe. […] To meet Canada's specific requirements, the aircraft's satellite communications system has been modified to cope with the spotty coverage found in the arctic. The aircraft would also have wing deicing and engine anti-icing capability
The Polar Hawk can survey 40,000 square miles of territory a day, which means it would take only three of them to monitor all of Canada's northern reaches. Which is good, because one Hawk plus all its support infrastructure is $215 million.
Personal comment:
Arctic is getting permanent monitoring... or rather let's say surveillance in this case. It reminds me of the project we exhibited in 2010 on the Frioul archipelago, Arctic Opening (and that is published in Bracket issue # 2 [goes soft]), where we tried to pinpoint the changes that would occur in the Arctic.
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