Wednesday, October 30. 2013Le drone, objet violent non identifié | #drones
Via Le Temps (thx Nicolas Besson for the link) ----- Par Réda Benkirane Dans un livre pionnier, «Théorie du drone», le philosophe français Grégoire Chamayou analyse le rôle grandissant du drone dans la guerre moderne, et sur ce qu’il changera en termes de géopolitique et de surveillance globale.
Grégoire Chamayou, Editions La Fabrique, 363 pages.
Le drone est un «objet violent non identifié» qui est en train de miner le concept de guerre tel qu’on le connaît depuis Sun Tzu jusqu’à Clausewitz. Dans une œuvre de pionnier, le philosophe français Grégoire Chamayou décode cet objet qui soulève quantité de questions relatives à la stratégie, à la violence armée, à l’éthique de la guerre et de la paix, à la souveraineté et au droit. Le drone et ses clones robotiques ouvrent au sein des conflits violents une vaste terra incognita totalement impensée par le droit international et les lois immémoriales de la guerre. Dans un ouvrage magistral, le philosophe entreprend la toute première réflexion sur cette nouvelle forme de violence, née de la généralisation d’un gadget militaire, le drone, ce véhicule terrestre, naval ou aéronautique sans homme à son bord (unmanned). Les drones Predator et Reaper ont la particularité de voler à plus de 6000 mètres d’altitude et d’être télécommandés par des individus souvent civils (faut-il les considérer comme des combattants?) depuis une salle de contrôle informatique du Nevada. D’un clic de souris, un téléopérateur appuie sur une gâchette et déclenche un missile distant de milliers de kilomètres qui immédiatement s’abat sur un village du Pakistan, du Yémen ou de Somalie. Le drone est «l’œil de Dieu», il entend et intercepte toutes sortes de données qu’il fusionne (data fusion) et archive à la volée: en une année, il a généré l’équivalent de 24 années d’enregistrements vidéo. Cette Théorie du drone a le mérite d’informer sur la mutation majeure des conflits violents entamée sous les présidences Bush et adoptée par l’administration d’Obama. Le drone et la suite des engins tueurs qui se profilent à l’horizon – les Etats-Unis disposent de 6000 drones et travaillent à des avions de chasse sans pilote pour 2030 – transforment une tactique adjacente en stratégie globale, et font de l’anti-terrorisme et de la politique sécuritaire leur doctrine de combat du siècle. Initiés par les Israéliens, premiers adeptes de l’euphémique devise «personne ne meurt sauf l’ennemi», puis repris par les «neocons» américains, les drones font le miel de l’équipe d’Obama, pour qui «tuer vaut mieux que capturer», liquider par avance les suspects terroristes étant préférable à leur enfermement à Guantanamo. L’auteur poursuit sa démonstration sur l’imprécision et la contre-productivité du drone; du fait de l’altitude à laquelle il opère, son rayon létal est de 20 mètres, tandis que celui d’une grenade est de 3 mètres. Seule la munition classique peut être véritablement considérée comme une «arme chirurgicale» du point de vue de sa précision létale. Etant donné les milliers de morts civils qu’ils ont occasionnés, les drones ont aussi le désavantage de rallier toujours plus les populations locales aux groupuscules terroristes. L’auteur montre comment la diminution croissante des morts des militaires et l’extension continue du «dommage collatéral» – ce mot qui cache depuis la fin de la Guerre froide la liquidation informelle de civils non combattants – procèdent de l’assomption suivante: dès qu’un actant de «l’axe du mal» est identifié, son réseau social fait de facto partie du c(h)amp du mal que l’on pourra vitrifier depuis une interface informatique. Certains avancent même l’idéal déréalisant que la robotique létale constituerait l’«arme humanitaire» par excellence et l’auteur fait observer combien l’euphémisation des enjeux militaires est légitimée par la rhétorique du care. Chamayou voit dans la novlangue sur le militaire humanitaire les débuts d’une politique «humilitaire». La géopolitique est en train de laisser place à une aéropolitique. La guerre n’est plus un affrontement ni un duel entre parties combattantes sur un territoire délimité, mais une «chasse à l’homme», où un prédateur poursuit partout et tout le temps une proie humaine. Les notions de temporalité, de territorialité, de frontière, d’éthique guerrière et de droit humanitaire sont rendues obsolètes par ces armes low cost et high-tech. L’auteur prédit un avenir fait de robots-insectes miniaturisés – les nanotechnologies aidant – concourant à la mise en place d’un système panoptique complet qui risque d’enserrer les Etats et les citoyens. Cet ouvrage, d’ores et déjà incontournable, en appelle à une prise de conscience politique face à la déshumanisation en cours derrière ce nouvel art de surveiller, d’intercepter et d’anéantir.
Related Links:Personal comment: Following my recent post about drones (as scanning devices), there are obviously different types of drones and like any other technology, it looks like that this one too has two sides... We are now probably in need of some renewed "Contrat Social" that would take into account additional "parameters" (between humans and machines/technologies + between humans and our planet --Contrat naturel--).
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society, Science & technology, Territory
at
09:36
Defined tags for this entry: books, culture & society, politics, robotics, science & technology, surveillance, territory, thinkers, thinking, war
Tuesday, October 29. 2013eBee drones create 3D model of the Matterhorn | #drones #scan
Via Treehhugger ----- The possible applications for drones are growing every day. From watching out for poachers in wildlife parks in Africa to delivering textbooks to students, the autonomous flying machines are tackling problems both big and small. The ability for the drones to have onboard sensors and HD cameras makes them ideal tools for mapping and surveillance. Taking that idea to the extreme, engineers from senseFly, partnered with Drone Adventures, Pix4D and Mapbox, were able to create a digital model of the Matterhorn with a 20-cm resolution in three dimensions. Two teams took the company's eBee drones to the mountain with Team 1 hiking to the summit and launching the devices to fly around the top of the peak. Team 2 launched eBees from the bottom of the mountain to cover the lower parts of the mountain.
© senseFly
SenseFly says, "The main challenges successfully overcome were to demonstrate the mapping capabilities of minidrones at a very high altitude and in mountainous terrain where 3D flight planning is essential, all the while coping with the turbulences typically encountered in mountainous environments." For the project, 11 flights were made totaling 340 minutes. The drones took 2,188 photos and created an HD point-cloud with 3 million datapoints. The company's eMotion2 software provided the ground control for the flights, automatically creating flight paths for the multiple drones.
© senseFly
You can watch a video about the project below and see how the mapping and flight planning took place.
Related Links:Monday, October 21. 2013Have We Passed “Peak Automobile”? | #mobility
Via NextNature -----
You’ve heard about peak oil, but what about peak automobile? There is mounting evidence that society has already passed the years of maximum car use. Fewer young consumers are getting driver’s licenses than their parents, and they are also buying fewer cars. Numerous studies point to a significant change in consumption that is not explained away by the recent financial crisis. Over the past century, the automobile has been a dominant force, changing the way we build and connect cities, the way we live, and even the way we perceive distance. So why are we driving less? Over the past 15 years, the ways we communicate with each other have changed drastically. A study by U.S. PIRG notes that while the use of the internet and so-called smart phones has expanded rapidly, the amount of automobile travel in the USA has not only peaked but is actually declining; Americans drive about as much today as they did in 1996. This effect is more pronounced among younger generations. A likely explanation is that smart phones have done for the 21st century what cars did a hundred years ago. They make seemingly long distances much smaller, and they connect us to people and places we couldn’t reach before. Better communication technology has increased our ability to see and interact with our social networks without actually being there, which may be why we have not only reached, but long since passed peak automobile.
Personal comment: I was a "precursor" ;) Sounds obvious but this gives me a good additional excuse not to pass my driving license! An Inflatable Emergency Airborne Communications Network | #instantcity
Note: will the communication industry be the one to finally build the Instant City?
----- A rapidly-deployable airborne communications network could transform communications during disasters, say researchers
Most people will have had the experience of being unable to get a mobile phone signal at a major sporting event, music festival or just in a crowded railway station. The problem becomes even more acute in emergency situations, such as in earthquake disasters zones, where the telecommunications infrastructure has been damaged. So the ability to set up a new infrastructure quickly and easily is surely of great use. Today, Alvaro Valcarce at TRiaGnoSys, a mobile communications R&D company in Germany, and a few pals unveil a system that could make this easier. These guys have developed a rapidly deployable wireless network system in the form of airborne base stations carried aloft by kite-shaped balloons called Helikites with a lifting capacity of 10 kg and that can remain airborne at an altitude of up to 4 km for several days, provided the weather conditions allow. Valcarce and co say the system can be quickly deployed and provides large local mobile phone coverage thanks to a combination of multiple airborne nodes that link in to terrestrial and satellite telecommunications systems. Their idea is that these systems could be deployed by network companies during temporary events such as the Olympic Games, or by first responders to an emergency event to set up the vital communications infrastructure necessary to coordinate emergency services. One of the key challenges is to get the new equipment to work seamlessly with existing terrestrial networks. And to that end, Valcarce have been testing their airborne Helikite. The team has a number of challenges to overcome in its ongoing work. For example the altitude of the Helikite determines its coverage but also influences the network capacity and delays. Evaluating these effects is one part of their future goals. Having ironed out these kinds of operational problems, such a system will surely be valuable in a wide range of situations where reliable communication is not just a useful bonus but a life-saving necessity.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1307.3158 : Airborne Base Stations for Emergency and Temporary Events
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Science & technology, Territory
at
08:51
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, communication, community, mobility, science & technology, territory
Wednesday, October 16. 2013arkOS: Building the anti-cloud (on a Raspberry Pi)
Via TechWorld ----- By Rohan Pearce
arkOS is an open source project designed to let its users take control of their personal data and make running a home server as easy as using a PC
At the start of this year, analyst firm Gartner predicted that over the next four years a total of US$677 billion would be spent on cloud services. The growth of 'things-as-a-service' is upending enterprise IT and creating entirely new, innovative business models. At the same time, social networks such as Facebook and Twitter have built massive user bases, and created databases that are home to enormous amounts of information about account holders. Collectively, all of this means that people's data, and the services they use with it, are more likely than ever to be found outside of home PCs and other personal devices, housed in servers that they will probably never likely to see let alone touch. But, when everything is delivered as a service, people's control and even ownership of their data gets hazy to say the least. Earlier this year NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden offered some insight – in revelations that probably surprised few but still outraged many – into the massive level of data collection and analysis carried out by state actors. arkOS is not a solution to the surveillance state, but it does offer an alternative to those who would rather exercise some measure of control over their data and, at the very least, not lock away their information in online services where its retrieval and use is at the whim of a corporation, not the user. arkOS is a Linux-based operating system currently in alpha created by Jacob Cook and the CitizenWeb Project. It's designed to run on a Raspberry Pi – a super-low-cost single board computer – and ultimately will let users, even of the non-technical variety, run from within their homes email, social networking, storage and other services that are increasingly getting shunted out into the cloud.
CitizenWeb Project Cook is the founder of the CitizenWeb Project, whose goal is to promote a more decentralised and democratic Internet "It does this by encouraging developers that work on tools to these ends, offering an 'umbrella' to aid with management and publicity for these projects," Cook says "Decentralisation rarely gets any attention, even within the tech community, and it was even more obscure before the NSA scandal broke a few months ago," he adds. Atlassian taps crowdsourcing, open source for charity The best way to promote decentralisation "is to provide great platforms with great experiences that can compete with those larger providers," Cook says "This may seem like an impossible task for the open source development community, especially without the head start that the platforms have, but I believe it is entirely doable. "We produce the best tools in the world – far better than any proprietary solutions can give – but there is a huge gap with these tools that the majority of the population cannot cross. "When we tell them, 'oh, using this tool is as easy as installing a Python module on your computer,' for us geeks that is incredibly easy, but for most people, you lost them at the word Python and you will never get them back. "So the momentum toward using centralised platforms will not relent until developers start making tools for a wider audience. Experience and usability is every bit as important as features or functionality." arkOS is the CitizenWeb Project's first major initiative but more are on the way. "There are quite a few planned that have nothing to do with arkOS," Cook says. "I've been working on arkOS since about February of this year, which was a few months before the [NSA] revelations," Cook says.
The birth of arkOS There were two things that spurred work on arkOS "The first was my decision to set up my own home server to host all of my data a few years ago," Cook explains. "I had a good deal of experience with Linux and system administration, but it still took a huge amount of time and research to get the services I wanted set up, and secured properly. "This experience made me realise, if I have background in these things and it takes me so long to do it, it must be impossible for individuals who don't have the expertise and the time that I do to work things out." The second was the push by corporations "to own every aspect of one's online life." "Regardless of your personal feelings about Google, Facebook, etc., there have been countless examples of these services closing themselves off from each other, creating those 'walled gardens' that give them supreme control over your data," Cook says. "This might not bother people, until we find out what we did from Snowden, that this data doesn't always rest with them and that as long as there is a single point of failure, you always have to rely on 'trusting' your provider. "I don't know about you, but I wouldn't trust a company that is tasked to sell me things to act in my best interest." "All that being said, the NSA revelations have really provided a great deal of interest to the project. In all of the networks and communities that I have been through since the scandal broke, people are clamouring for an easy way to self-host things at home. It shouldn't have to be rocket science. I hope that arkOS can represent part of the solution for them." The aim of the project is an easy-to-use server operating system than can let people self-host their own services with the ease that someone might install a regular desktop application "Hosting one's own websites, email, cloud data, etc. from home can be a very time-consuming and occasionally expensive endeavour," Cook says. "Not to mention the fact that it takes a good amount of knowledge and practice to do properly and securely. arkOS lets you set up these systems just like you do on your home computer or your smartphone, when you install something from an app store. It 'just works' with minimal configuration. "There is no good reason why server software shouldn't be able to have the same experience."
Making servers simple The OS is "all about simplicity" straight out of the box, Cook says. "For example, on the Raspberry Pi, hosting server software that routinely writes to log files can quickly wear out your SD card. So arkOS caches them in memory to make as few writes as possible, and it does this from its first boot." The team is building a range of tools that make it easy to manage an arkOS server. These include Beacon, which lets users find other arkOS servers on a local network, and Genesis, a GUI management system for arkOS. Genesis is the "most important part" of the OS, Cook says. "It's the tool that does all the heavy lifting for you – installing new apps and software with one click, automatically configuring security settings, giving wizards for navigating through lengthy setup [processes]. "The goal with Genesis is to allow you to do anything you want with your server in an easy and straightforward way, without even having to think about touching the command line. It runs locally on the arkOS server, accessible through the browser of your home computer." There are more tools for arkOS on the way, Cook says. "Any one of these tools can be made to work with other distros; the key is that they are available in the default working environment with no additional setup or bother on the user's part." At the moment the system is still very much in alpha. "It is minimally stable and still getting most of its major features piled in," Cook says. Despite it being early days the reception so far has been "very positive". "It's been downloaded several hundred times, ostensibly by intrepid people willing to try out the framework and see if they can produce bugs," he says. At the moment, Cook is leading the arkOS project and also doing the bulk of the development work on Genesis. "Aside from myself, there are other individuals who contribute features when they are able, like working on Deluge or putting together plugins to use with Genesis," he says. He is interested in finding more people to help out with the components of arkOS, particularly with Python and Golang experience, which are being used extensively. He's also interested in sysadmins or Linux veterans to help manage repositories, with an to expanding the operating system to other architectures. "Web design is also a big one, both for the Genesis front-end as well as our Web properties and outreach efforts. Even non-tech people can lend a hand with outreach, community support and the like. No offer of help will be refused so people can be in touch confidently," he adds.
Looking beyond alpha arkOS is under active development but the OS is still at a "very experimental" stage. Most of Cook's time is spent working on frameworks for Genesis, with a goal of completing its major frameworks by the end of this year and releasing a beta of arkOS. A major sub-project the team working on is called Deluge: A dynamic DNS service and port proxy for users who don't have access to their own domain name or static IPs. "This would make putting your services online truly simple and hassle-free," Cook says. "I am working on the security framework right now, allowing users to easily segment their services based on the zone that they should be available to. For example, you can set your ownCloud site that you run with arkOS to only be available on your home network, while your Jeykll blog should be available to everyone. "Then comes the certificates system, easily making SSL certs available to your different applications." "Beyond that, most of what I will be working on is plugins that do certain things. Email is a really big thing, something that nearly everyone who asks about arkOS is interested in self-hosting. With the NSA revelations it isn't hard to see why." Other features to be included in arkOS include XMPP chat server hosting, Radicale (calendar/contacts hosting), automatic backups, internationalisation, Tor integration, "and much, much more."
Contact Rohan Pearce at rohan_pearce at idg.com.au or follow him on Twitter: @rohan_p
Related Links:
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Culture & society, Science & technology, Territory
at
08:49
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, communication, culture & society, data, digital life, hardware, mobility, opensource, privacy, science & technology, territory
(Page 1 of 2, totaling 7 entries)
» next page
|
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.
QuicksearchCategoriesCalendarSyndicate This BlogArchivesBlog Administration |