Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 211
January 26, 2014
Spime Watch: the “Basket of Remotes” problem
*This blogpost about the Internet-of-Things is worth reading for the sake of that neologism alone.
http://www.mondaynote.com/2014/01/12/internet-of-things-the-basket-of-remotes-problem/
Wired Italia’s idea of the world in 2014
*That’s hard to beat for hip.
http://www.wired.it/attualita/tech/2014/01/24/wired-ti-racconta-il-mondo-nel-2014/
Ecco alcuni argomenti approfonditi nello speciale:
- Scienza: alla scoperta di una Terra gemella alla nostra dove trovare forme di vita, la fine della spazzatura e l’uso dei videogiochi per studiare la società.
- Tecnologia: tutte le novità della stampa 3D, l’evoluzione di Android, tutto sui Big Data e i droni che inizieranno a recapitare la corrispondenza.
- Lifestyle: alfabetizzazione low cost, l’Africa decolla con gli smartphone, pasti multisensoriali e cene digitali.
- Ambiente: la rivoluzione dei trasporti, sorveglianza in alta definizione, posti che nascono e posti che scompaiono.
- Medicina: curarsi senza antibiotici, vaccini stampati in 3D e lezioni online per formare nuovi chirurghi.
- Politica: l’altruismo è una strategia vincente, il potere sorvegliato dal basso, la “lotta informata” (grazie al Web) contro i regimi oppressivi.
- Media: la pubblicità sempre più mirata e la tecnologia che si indossa, i siti di contenuti come nuovi Big Media.
- Economia: il boom della moneta virtuale Bitcoin, Internet rivoluziona la Borsa, la fine del trading ad alta frequenza.
OuiShare Fest 2014
http://blog.ouisharefest.com/post/74065518135/ouishare-fest-community-kick-offs
“Are you interested in OuiShare Fest and want to get involved? Then you should join our Fest Community kick-off events all across Europe to hear the latest news about this second edition of OuiShare Fest and learn more about our program co-creation process. Let’s write history together!
“As you already may or may not have heard, OuiShare Fest is returning for a second edition this May that we all expect to be even more participative, bigger and ambitious than the first one. OuiShare Fest #2 will be entirely co-created and co-curated with its participants: that means that from day 1, people, communities and organisations can help us build and develop the event program by submitting suggestions for sessions, workshops and satellite events to our call for proposals, simply sharing your ideas on our Idea Wall, or becoming a volunteer. In fact, since we know that you have many ideas we would not want to miss, the program is still an empty sheet of paper. It’s up to you to help us write this story and fill the program with amazing content!
“You want to know more? That’s what the Community kick-off events are for: to inform you about the latest news on the OuiShare Fest organisation, explain how you can get involved, to share with you the enthusiasm and excitement that the team has had since last years event. And to show you that “the Age of Communities” is much more than this year’s Fest theme, but also a principle we live by with every single action as a community.
“On January 28th, OuiShare Connectors all across Europe are holding special kick-off events to help you get you on board for this OuiShare Fest and find the role in this world of co-creation and participation – principles that may still be unknown to you as they are not the most common in event design. We are here to give you all the details you need about your involvement in the Fest !
“Join us on January 28th at the following events:”
In Paris at NuMa
In Rome at CoWo 360
In Munich
In Barcelona
In Berlin
“No event in your city? Submit your idea to our call for proposals or become a volunteer. And if you have questions, don’t hesitate to ask our volunteers coordinator David.”
January 24, 2014
Resolution to Renounce the National Security Agency’s Surveillance Program, by the Republican National Committee
*Politics makes strange bedfellows.
Resolution to Renounce the National Security Agency’s Surveillance Program
WHEREAS, the secret surveillance program called PRISM targets, among other things, the surveillance of U.S. citizens on a vast scale and monitors searching habits of virtually every American on the internet;
WHEREAS, this dragnet program is, as far as we know, the largest surveillance effort ever launched by a democratic government against its own citizens, consisting of the mass acquisition of Americans’ call details encompassing all wireless and landline subscribers of the country’s three largest phone companies;
WHEREAS, every time an American citizen makes a phone call, the NSA gets a record of the location, the number called, the time of the call and the length of the conversation, all of which are an invasion into the personal lives of American citizens that violates the right of free speech and association afforded by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution;
WHEREAS, the mass collection and retention of personal data is in itself contrary to the right of privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution, which guarantees the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, that warrants shall issue only upon probable cause, and generally prevents the American government from issuing modern-day writs of assistance;
WHEREAS, unwarranted government surveillance is an intrusion on basic human rights that threatens the very foundations of a democratic society and this program represents a gross infringement of the freedom of association and the right to privacy and goes far beyond even the permissive limits set by the Patriot Act; and
WHEREAS, Republican House Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, an author of the Patriot Act and Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee at the time of Section 215′s passage, called the Section 215 surveillance program “an abuse of that law,” writing that, “based on the scope of the released order, both the administration and the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court are relying on an unbounded interpretation of the act that Congress never intended,” therefore be it
RESOLVED, the Republican National Committee encourages Republican lawmakers to enact legislation to amend Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, the state secrets privilege, and the FISA Amendments Act to make it clear that blanket surveillance of the Internet activity, phone records and correspondence — electronic, physical, and otherwise — of any person residing in the U.S. is prohibited by law and that violations can be reviewed in adversarial proceedings before a public court;
RESOLVED, the Republican National Committee encourages Republican lawmakers to call for a special committee to investigate, report, and reveal to the public the extent of this domestic spying and the committee should create specific recommendations for legal and regulatory reform ot end unconstitutional surveillance as well as hold accountable those public officials who are found to be responsible for this unconstitutional surveillance; and
RESOLVED, the Republican National Committee encourages Republican lawmakers to immediately take action to halt current unconstitutional surveillance programs and provide a full public accounting of the NSA’s data collection programs.
Read more: Exclusive: Republican Party Calls For End To NSA Domestic Phone Records Program | TIME.com http://swampland.time.com/2014/01/24/...
Design Fiction: espionage technology and diegetic prototypes
*Real, yet covert, technologies slyly announcing themselves to a general audience through cinema. Sort of. Kind of.
*It’s also great that this BBC webpage, which vaguely resembles news of some kind, is actually a semi-advertisement from an American motion-picture corporation.
http://www.bbc.com/future/sponsored/story/20140108-spy-technologies
“THE JET PACK
“Ever since its appearance in 1965′s Thunderball, the jet pack – used to propel Bond into the air after he kills Jacques Bouvar – became the envy of children everywhere. They would be disappointed to hear that the real-life original had a flying time of only 20 seconds. The Bell Rocket Belt – also known as the simulated Lunar Flying Vehicle (LFV) – was built by Bell Aerospace for NASA and the US Army in the early 1960s. Costing $380,000 (£232,000) each, it used hydrogen peroxide as fuel, which was mixed with nitrogen and ejected as steam and oxygen via two hand-steered propulsion nozzles. However, due to the steam’s superheated temperature of 74°C, all pilots had to wear insulated clothes. Even then the jet pack could climb no higher than around nine metres, and only reach speeds up to 16km/h. Even worse, additional engineering in the 1990s could only improve the flying time to 30 seconds – paltry by the standards of any child….”
An Open Letter from US Researchers in Cryptography and Information Security
An Open Letter from US Researchers in Cryptography and Information Security
January 24, 2014
Media reports since last June have revealed that the US government conducts domestic and international surveillance on a massive scale, that it engages in deliberate and covert weakening of Internet security standards, and that it pressures US technology companies to deploy backdoors and other data-collection features. As leading members of the US cryptography and information-security research communities, we deplore these practices and urge that they be changed.
Indiscriminate collection, storage, and processing of unprecedented amounts of personal information chill free speech and invite many types of abuse, ranging from mission creep to identity theft. These are not hypothetical problems; they have occurred many times in the past. Inserting backdoors, sabotaging standards, and tapping commercial data-center links provide bad actors, foreign and domestic, opportunities to exploit the resulting vulnerabilities.
The value of society-wide surveillance in preventing terrorism is unclear, but the threat that such surveillance poses to privacy, democracy, and the US technology sector is readily apparent. Because transparency and public consent are at the core of our democracy, we call upon the US government to subject all mass-surveillance activities to public scrutiny and to resist the deployment of mass-surveillance programs in advance of sound technical and social controls. In finding a way forward, the five principles promulgated at http://reformgovernmentsurveillance.com/ provide a good starting point.
The choice is not whether to allow the NSA to spy. The choice is between a communications infrastructure that is vulnerable to attack at its core and one that, by default, is intrinsically secure for its users. Every country, including our own, must give intelligence and law-enforcement authorities the means to pursue terrorists and criminals, but we can do so without fundamentally undermining the security that enables commerce, entertainment, personal communication, and other aspects of 21st-century life. We urge the US government to reject society-wide surveillance and the subversion of security technology, to adopt state-of-the-art, privacy-preserving technology, and to ensure that new policies, guided by enunciated principles, support human rights, trustworthy commerce, and technical innovation.
Martín Abadi
Professor Emeritus, University of California, Santa Cruz
Hal Abelson
Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Alessandro Acquisti
Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon University
Boaz Barak
Editorial-board member, Journal of the ACM1
Mihir Bellare
Professor, University of California, San Diego
Steven Bellovin
Professor, Columbia University
L. Jean Camp
Professor, Indiana University
Ran Canetti
Professor, Boston University and Tel Aviv University
Lorrie Faith Cranor
Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon University
Cynthia Dwork
Member, US National Academy of Engineering
Joan Feigenbaum
Professor, Yale University
Edward Felten
Professor, Princeton University
Niels Ferguson
Author, Cryptography Engineering: Design Principles and Practical Applications
Michael Fischer
Professor, Yale University
Bryan Ford
Assistant Professor, Yale University
Matthew Franklin
Professor, University of California, Davis
Juan Garay
Program Committee Co-Chair, CRYPTO2 2014
Shai Halevi
Director, International Association for Cryptologic Research
Somesh Jha
Professor, University of Wisconsin – Madison
Ari Juels
Program Committee Co-Chair, 2013 ACM Cloud-Computing Security Workshop1
M. Frans Kaashoek
Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Hugo Krawczyk
Fellow, International Association for Cryptologic Research
Susan Landau
Author, Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies
Wenke Lee
Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology
Anna Lysyanskaya
Professor, Brown University
Tal Malkin
Associate Professor, Columbia University
David Mazières
Associate Professor, Stanford University
Kevin McCurley
Fellow, International Association for Cryptologic Research
Patrick McDaniel
Professor, The Pennsylvania State University
Daniele Micciancio
Professor, University of California, San Diego
Andrew Myers
Professor, Cornell University
Vern Paxson
Professor, University of California, Berkeley
Jon Peha
Professor, Carnegie Mellon University
Thomas Ristenpart
Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin – Madison
Ronald Rivest
Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Phillip Rogaway
Professor, University of California, Davis
Greg Rose
Officer, International Association for Cryptologic Research
Amit Sahai
Professor, University of California, Los Angeles
Bruce Schneier
Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School
Hovav Shacham
Associate Professor, University of California, San Diego
Abhi Shelat
Associate Professor, University of Virginia
Thomas Shrimpton
Associate Professor, Portland State University
Avi Silberschatz
Professor, Yale University
Adam Smith
Associate Professor, The Pennsylvania State University
Dawn Song
Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley
Gene Tsudik
Professor, University of California, Irvine
Salil Vadhan
Professor, Harvard University
Rebecca Wright
Professor, Rutgers University
Moti Yung
Fellow, Association for Computing Machinery1
Nickolai Zeldovich
Associate Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This letter can be found at: http://MassSurveillance.info
Institutional affiliations for identification purposes only. This letter represents the views of the signatories, not necessarily those of their employers or other organizations with which they are affiliated.
1 The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is the premier organization of computing professionals.
2 CRYPTO is an annual research conference sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research.
January 23, 2014
Spam horrors of 2013
*The study of crime is a dreadful business, but you don’t know how the world works unless you understand it.
http://www.securelist.com/en/analysis/204792322/Kaspersky_Security_Bulletin_Spam_evolution_2013
(…)
“‘Gray’ mailings
“Another issue is that on the one hand, advertisers want to advertise via well-designed official mailings (without any kind of spammer tricks and ‘noise’ making advertisements hard to read), which will reach users. On the other hand, they want to use huge databases that include millions of addresses rather than sending their messages to the few subscribers they already have.
“The result is an increasing number of ‘gray’ mailings. These are official mailings that are sent from senders’ own servers rather that via botnets, they can be subscribed to and unsubscribed from. But in addition to official subscribers these messages are often sent to addresses taken from huge databases these companies have purchased – to people who never gave their consent to receive such messages. (It is worth noting that under many countries’ laws mailings without the prior consent of the recipients are illegal.)
“This leads to situations in which part of a mailing is legal and legitimate and part of it is spam. This poses a new challenge for the anti-spam industry and leads to the development of new technologies based on sender reputations.
“Trend of 2013: fake messages from antivirus vendors
“Typically, malicious and fraudulent emails target credulous people or those who know very little about online security rules. A sensible person can hardly be expected to believe in the authenticity of an email saying he or she has won millions of dollars by pure chance, and someone who knows the basic rules of IT security would never follow a link in a message ‘from the bank’ and enter credentials to an online banking account.
“In 2013, we detected several mailings which looked like messages from antivirus vendors, i.e., were designed for people who understand the basics of security….”
Architecture Fiction: Uneven Growth Studio, Hong Kong, 2047, Columbia Graduate School of Architecture
*Hey, I’d go.
*Okay, maybe I wouldn’t go, but at least I’d follow the Tumblr.
http://varnelis.net/blog/uneven_growth_studio_2047_2014_gsapp_studio
“Students participating in this studio will be required to travel to Hong Kong for site visits. Travel will be funded through the school.”
(…)
“Representation
“We propose that the ultra-realistic renderings commonly used in studios today are inappropriate, corresponding to what Mark Fischer has dubbed “capitalist realism,” a condition in which we are offered nothing but the present, delivered to us through the wonders of technology while we eagerly wait for the next thrill the system has to offer. Evacuated of any critical intent, such work only cements the false notion that modern technology has made communication transparent.
“But more than that, if all architects produce a form of science fiction, then to paraphrase William Gibson, we need to remember that as we construct futures, all we have at our disposal is the moment that we are currently living in. The moment we construct a future it starts to age rapidly. Since the crash, along with the development of technologies that were formerly consigned to an endlessly deferred proximate future such as near-universal wireless Internet, locative media, tablet computing, and touchscreen interfaces, it seems that we have exhausted the era of the next new thing, of rapid technological and cultural development and obsolescence.
“If Gibson is right and society is gripped by “future fatigue,” then envisioning the future through architecture forces us to follow Alex Galloway’s suggestion that “all media is dead media,” to understand that appropriate representational strategies that might resist capitalist realist representations might emerge out of a new understanding of what Gibson calls a “long now,” (((Uh, that one’s originally a Brian Eno coinage there, but if you’re paraphrasing Gibson, you’ve got to be pretty keen on Gibson sometimes paraphrasing Eno))) a temporally stretched condition out of which we can freely recombine material and representational motifs.
“We will look at forms of representation immanent to our topic at hand, both the means of representation that architects and others working on these and similar projects would have used, but also the other means of representation of the day, e.g. schedules, traffic engineering plans, flowcharts, exploded axonometrics, and so on. Such diagrams not only offer rich territory to mine for representational strategies, their close study allows us to better understand how to think and represent visually….”
Design Fiction: Financial Times review of “Speculative Everything” by Dunne and Raby
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/d9a0f03c-7e9f-11e3-8642-00144feabdc0.html
“High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d9a0f03c-7e... (((Hey, nice one with the high quality global journalism, Financial Times! I’m with the program! Good luck with those “investments”!)))
Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming, by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, MIT Press, RRP£19.95/$29.95, 200 pages (((I promise I’m not “cutting-and-pasting” this Financial Times book review, I’m just kind of piercing and bleeding it a little because our interest on the blog here is so intense!)))
“Designers are usually seen as problem solvers. Their function is to make a product better or more beautiful, or to make a process more efficient. But what if, instead of solving problems, they posed them? That is the premise behind Speculative Everything, the first book to look in detail at the kinds of results such an approach might throw up. (((
“Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, professors at London’s Royal College of Art, have been the most articulate proponents of the idea of “critical design”. Their concern is not to design products to be sent out into a slightly uncertain future but rather to imagine how that future might be entirely different. The result is a series of scenarios that help to illuminate moral, ethical, political and aesthetic problems.
“One example might be food. If we are going to engineer our meat in laboratories, how should it appear on the plate? Should it be the formless mass of cells, the spongy blob that would appear at the end of the process, or should it be beautified? Should it be made to look like a steak? Or something else?
“Dunne and Raby are not alone in this field….”
Intel CEO points toward wearable future
*I don’t know how much of that flung spaghetti will stick to the wall, but that is just a *heap* of Intel stuff. It’s dazzling.
(…)
“Krzanich then launched Edison, a successor to the Quark embedded processor that Intel launched at the Intel Developer Forum, but made using a 22-nanometer process. It runs Linux, and features Wi-Fi and Bluetooth low energy. It even integrates Mathematica, and Wolfram Alpha’s language processing.
“Alongside Rest Devices, a small startup from MIT, Intel created a “smart onesie” that measures pulse, temperature, and breathing. The onesie not only monitors body heat, but it can also project a display on something like a coffee cup if the baby gets too hot. And if the baby’s hungry, the onesie can signal a bottle warmer to start up.
“Krzanich then announced a content for the best wearable design with a whopping $1.3 million in prizes. The top prize will be $500,000, and the winners will be connected with the top executives at Intel to take their products further.
“For security, the phones, tablets, and other wearables will be protected by Intel’s McAfee division. “We want to bring this capability to everybody, because we think this is critical” Krzanich said. All mobile devices—tablets, phones, wearables powered by Intel or by other suppliers—will be protected by McAfee software under a new offer by Intel. And all for free.
” “We believe this will allow this ecosystem to flourish,” Krzanich told the audience….”
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