Quotulatiousness

March 31, 2013

The question is not whether armed drones will be deployed domestically, but when

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:01

Glenn Greenwald presents a strong case that it is inevitable that armed drones will be deployed over the US:

The use of drones by domestic US law enforcement agencies is growing rapidly, both in terms of numbers and types of usage. As a result, civil liberties and privacy groups led by the ACLU — while accepting that domestic drones are inevitable — have been devoting increasing efforts to publicizing their unique dangers and agitating for statutory limits. These efforts are being impeded by those who mock the idea that domestic drones pose unique dangers (often the same people who mock concern over their usage on foreign soil). This dismissive posture is grounded not only in soft authoritarianism (a religious-type faith in the Goodness of US political leaders and state power generally) but also ignorance over current drone capabilities, the ways drones are now being developed and marketed for domestic use, and the activities of the increasingly powerful domestic drone lobby. So it’s quite worthwhile to lay out the key under-discussed facts shaping this issue.

I’m going to focus here most on domestic surveillance drones, but I want to say a few words about weaponized drones. The belief that weaponized drones won’t be used on US soil is patently irrational. Of course they will be. It’s not just likely but inevitable. Police departments are already speaking openly about how their drones “could be equipped to carry nonlethal weapons such as Tasers or a bean-bag gun.” The drone industry has already developed and is now aggressively marketing precisely such weaponized drones for domestic law enforcement use. It likely won’t be in the form that has received the most media attention: the type of large Predator or Reaper drones that shoot Hellfire missiles which destroy homes and cars in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and multiple other countries aimed at Muslims (although US law enforcement agencies already possess Predator drones and have used them over US soil for surveillance).

March 30, 2013

Looking at crowdfunding as a replacement for venture capital

Filed under: Business, Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:43

ESR looks at where crowdfunding fits in the traditional tech start-up food chain:

In How crowdfunding and the JOBS Act will shape open source companies, Fred Trotter proposes that crowdfunding a la Kickstarter and IndieGoGo is going to displace venture capitalists as the normal engine of funding for open-source tech startups, and that this development will be a tremendous enabler. Trotter paints a rosy picture of idealistic geeks enabled to do fully open-source projects because they’ll no longer feel as pressed to offer a lucrative early exit to VCs on the promise of rent capture from proprietary technology.

Some of the early evidence from crowdfunding successes does seem to point at this kind of outcome, especially near 3D printing and consumer electronics with a lot of geek buy-in. And I’d love to believe all of Trotter’s optimism. But there’s a nagging problem of scale here that makes me think the actual consequences will be more mixed and messy than he suggests.

In general, VCs don’t want to talk to you at all unless they can see a good case for ploughing in at least $2 million, and they don’t get really interested below a scale of about $15M. This is because the amount of time required for them to babysit an investment (sit on the company’s board, assist job searches, etc.) doesn’t scale down for smaller investments — small plays are just as much work for much less money. This is why there’s a second class of investors, often called “angels”, who trade early financing on the $100K order of magnitude for equity. The normal trajectory of a startup goes from friends & family money through angels up to VCs. Each successive stage in this pipeline is generally placing a larger bet and accordingly has less risk tolerance and a higher time discount than the previous; VCs, in particular, will be looking for a fast cash-out via initial public offering.

The problem is this: it’s quite rare for crowdfunding to raise money even equivalent to the low-end threshold of a VC, let alone the volume they lay down when they’re willing to bet heavily. Unless crowdfunding becomes an order of magnitude more effective than it is now (which seems to me possible but unlikely) the financing source it will displace isn’t VCs but angels.

March 27, 2013

MI5 and GCHQ will include assistance from the IT industry in the fight against online crime

Filed under: Britain, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:42

Two of the British government’s top intelligence agencies will team up with specialists from the IT field in a new initiative to counter online “cyber” crime:

Cyber-security experts from industry are to operate alongside the intelligence agencies for the first time in an attempt to combat the growing online threat to British firms.

The government is creating a so-called fusion cell where analysts from MI5 and GCHQ, the domestic eavesdropping agency, will work with private sector counterparts.

The cell is part of the Cyber Security Information Sharing Partnership (Cisp), launched on Wednesday, to provide industry with a forum to share details of techniques used by hackers as well as methods of countering them.

At any one time there will be about 12 to 15 analysts working at the cell, based at an undisclosed location in London.

“What the fusion cell will be doing is pulling together a single, richer intelligence picture of what is going on in cyberspace and the threats attacking the UK,” a senior official said.

John Leyden at The Register has more:

The programme, which follows a successful pilot scheme in 2011, is designed to support the wider aims of the UK’s cyber security strategy: such as making Britain the best country in the world to do e-business and protecting critical components of the national infrastructure (ie banks, utilities, telecoms and power grid).

Eighty companies from five key sectors of the economy — finance, defence, energy, telecommunications and pharmaceuticals — were encouraged to share information as part of the pilot scheme. The wider programme (involving a reported 160 organisations, at least initially) will allow access to a secure web-portal to gain access to shared threat intelligence information in real time, the BBC reports.

[. . .]

Terry Greer-King, UK MD for internet security firm Check Point, commented:

“This is a key step forward for both Governments and business in fighting web attacks, and reducing their impact. It’s essential that organisations collaborate and share intelligence with each other to track emerging threats, mitigate their severity or block them before they cause damage. Fighting threats together is much more effective than fighting alone.”

“In 2012, our research found that 63 per cent of organisations were infected with bots, and 54 per cent infected with malware that they didn’t know about. Any move which helps to reduce these figures is very welcome,” he added.

March 21, 2013

The technological imbalance between security and threats

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:17

Bruce Schneier on the power of technology in a security context:

A core, not side, effect of technology is its ability to magnify power and multiply force — for both attackers and defenders. One side creates ceramic handguns, laser-guided missiles, and new-identity theft techniques, while the other side creates anti-missile defense systems, fingerprint databases, and automatic facial recognition systems.

The problem is that it’s not balanced: Attackers generally benefit from new security technologies before defenders do. They have a first-mover advantage. They’re more nimble and adaptable than defensive institutions like police forces. They’re not limited by bureaucracy, laws, or ethics. They can evolve faster. And entropy is on their side — it’s easier to destroy something than it is to prevent, defend against, or recover from that destruction.

For the most part, though, society still wins. The bad guys simply can’t do enough damage to destroy the underlying social system. The question for us is: can society still maintain security as technology becomes more advanced?

I don’t think it can.

March 19, 2013

Sifting through the 3D printing hype

Filed under: Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:06

At The Register, Professor James Woudhuysen looks at the gap between the breathless hype about 3D printing and the current and near-term technological, political, and legal limitations:

3D printing, otherwise known as additive manufacturing, is a subject that pumps out enthusiasts faster than any real-life 3D printer can churn out products.

In conventional machining, computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing (CADCAM) combine to make products or parts of products by cutting away at, drilling and otherwise manhandling materials. With 3D printing, CADCAM works with product scanners, other bits of IT and special plastics and metals to build products up, whether through the squirts of an inkjet-like device or the sintering of metal powder by lasers or electron beams.

Rather in the same way, America’s somewhat self-conscious Maker Movement — several thousand DIY fans out to revive manufacturing through the web and from the privacy of their own garages — promotes 3D printing with layer upon layer of hype.

It’s true that 3D printing has its good points. Without having to engage in expensive retooling, a 3D printer can easily be reprogrammed to make variations on a basic product — good for dental crowns, for example. 3D printing can also make intricate products with designs that cannot be emulated by conventional, “subtractive” techniques.

[. . .]

Despite all this, those who blithely proclaim that 3D printing brings a revolution to manufacturing make a mistake. 3D printing does not represent a pervasive, durable and penetrating transformation of the dynamics and status of manufacturing. Nor, as The Economist newspaper has proposed, is its emergence akin to the birth of the printing press (1450), the steam engine (1750) or the transistor (1950). There is much to celebrate about 3D printing, and even its too-fervent advocates at least represent a reasonable desire to produce new kinds of things in new kinds of ways. Yet what characterises 3D printing is how, as with other powerful technologies today, it need only barely arrive on the world economic stage for zealots to overrate it, and for others to turn it into an object of fear.

March 15, 2013

Will the death of Google Reader also be the death of RSS?

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:14

Felix Salmon on the knock-on ramifications of Google’s announcement that it is killing Google Reader:

But whether or not Reader was ever going to be a good business for Google, it was from day one a fantastic public service for its users. Google started as a public service — a way to find what you were looking for on the internet — and didn’t stop there. Google would also do things like buy the entire Usenet archives, or scan millions of out-of-print books, or put thousands of people to work making maps, all in order to be able to get all sorts of information to anybody who wants it. [. . .]

The problem with the death of Reader is that it was the architecture underpinning lots of other services — the connective tissue of just about all RSS readers and services, from Summify to Reeder to Flipboard. You didn’t even need to use Google Reader; it was just the master central repository of your master OPML list, all the different feeds that you were subscribed to. Google spent real money to provide that public service, and it’s going to be sorely missed. As Marco Arment says, “every major iOS RSS client is still dependent on Google Reader for feed crawling and sync.”

Arment sees a silver lining in the cloud, saying that with Google gone, “we’re finally likely to see substantial innovation and competition in RSS desktop apps and sync platforms for the first time in almost a decade.” I’m less sanguine. Building an RSS sync platform is a hard and pretty thankless task, it costs real money, and it might not work at all — especially in a world where less and less content is actually available in RSS format. (You can subscribe to my Tumblr feed in RSS format, but there’s no such feed for my posts on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or Path or even Google+.)

RSS has been dying for years — that’s why Google killed Reader. It was a lovely open format; it has sadly been replaced with proprietary feeds like the ones we get from Twitter and Facebook. That’s not an improvement, but it is reality. Google, with Reader, was really providing the life-support mechanism for RSS. Once Reader is gone, I fear that RSS won’t last much longer.

March 14, 2013

Google Reader to be scrapped

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:23

I started using Google Reader about a year and a half ago. It quickly became an invaluable part of my online toolkit. Yesterday, Google announced that it was going to be dropping the service. Charles Stross posted this as his reaction to the awful news, and I feel very much the same way:

March 12, 2013

A stunning technical achievement

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:22

No, not the tablet — the stunning ability to condescend to half of the human race:

The ePad Femme: for women everywhere who have no interests except their own bodies and having babies, which is apparently all of them.

The ePad Femme: for women everywhere who have no interests except their own bodies and having babies, which is apparently all of them.

At long last, a company has designed a tablet fit for the use of an entire gender that has, thus far, apparently gone unserved. The ePad Femme, designed and distributed by the Eurostar Group, is an eight-inch tablet that comes pre-loaded with apps concerning yoga, grocery shopping, and cooking. Thank the heavens, ladies may never trouble their pretty heads with such difficulties as finding and downloading their own apps ever again.

The tablet was first announced back in October but received a marketing push in February as “the perfect Valentine’s Day gift,” noted one site. The tablet runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, or as a woman might call it, “the Android screensaver.” Eurostar calls the ePad Femme “the first tablet specifically for ladies.”

Several sites highlight that the tablet “comes in light pink.” Despite our best efforts, we’ve failed to find an image verifying that the actual body of the tablet is pink, so we assume this is in reference to the home screen wallpaper. Just as well, since what woman is going to figure out how to configure that, am I right? Settings, right? What even are they?

Speaking to the Jerusalem Post, Eurostar associate vice president of marketing Mani Nair said that the tablet comes with the preloaded womanly applications so the user can “just turn it on and log in to cooking recipes or yoga.” He went on to state that the ePad Femme “makes a perfect gadget for a woman who might find difficulties in terms of downloading these applications and it is a quick reference.”

US Army to standardize on four current UAV models

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:56

The US Army reasonably expects their budget to be under strain for some time. Here’s at least one sensible economy move:

Faced with smaller budgets over the next decade the U.S. Army has halted evaluation of new UAVs and is standardizing on four existing models (Gray Eagle, Shadow 2000, Raven and Puma). All four of these were developed and purchased in large quantities over the last dozen years and will remain the primary army UAVs for the next 5-10 years.

The army currently has nearly 7,000 UAVs. Over 6,000 are micro-UAVs like the Raven and Puma, These tiny (under six kg/13.2 pound) reconnaissance aircraft have become very popular with the troops, anyone of which can become an operator after a few hours of training. These tiny UAVs are a radical new military aircraft technology that is took air recon to a new level. That level is low, a few hundred meters off the ground. The army has nearly 1,798 Raven and 325 Puma UAVs systems in use by ground troops. A complete system (controller, spare parts, and three UAVs) costs $250,000 for the Raven and over $400,000 for Puma. These tiny aircraft have changed how the troops fight and greatly reduced army dependence on the air force for air reconnaissance. The lightweight, hand launched Raven UAV can only stay airborne about an hour per sortie, but troops have found that this is enough time to do all sorts of useful work, even when there’s no fighting going on. This is most of the time. The heavier Puma can stay up for 120 minutes.

March 11, 2013

Best comment on the EU move to penalize Microsoft over web browser choice

Filed under: Europe, Humour, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:06

From “Purp” at Ace of Spades H.Q.:

In other news, the EU plans to fine Microsoft $700M dollars because European users are apparently too stupid to figure out they can download other browsers for free. Porn and bootleg software? Mad skilz baby, mad skilz. Browsers? Not so much…huh? what? where am I? what is this thing, why does it beep? Help, I’ve fallen down and can’t get up.

The fine works out to around $50 for each machine in violation that was shipped by OEM’s. The EU says they’re cutting Microsoft a bargain cuz they could have been fined $7B, or $500/machine. Either way, its a pretty harsh shakedown caused by Euro-users (apparently) being lemming like incompetent imbeciles who are unaware other stuff exists. Its truly a wonder they manage to find the power switch…or maybe the EU sends out specially trained techs to turn on computers for people?

March 4, 2013

Admit it, you probably know someone who would wear this “ironically”

Filed under: Business, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:20

Amazon Keep Calm and blank T-shirt

Pete Ashton explains how such an item appears on the Amazon.com website:

Nobody made, or approved, the design. This is the headfuck moment that most people can’t comprehend. There’s a completely understandable assumption that someone decided it would be a great idea to sell Keep Calm t-shirts with the word Rape on them and, because they exist (which they don’t, but let’s assume they do) that there’s a reasonable demand for them. This is because we’re used to there being a cost in producing a product like a t-shirt and an economic requirement to mass-produce them in huge numbers. If there’s a significant cost then a decision has to be made whether to spend it or not. We’re looking to blame whoever made that decision, or lament that it was even an option.

But, as we see above, there’s no cost involved. The shirts don’t exist. All that exists is a graphics file on a computer ready to be printed onto a shirt if an order comes through. Still, you might say, someone had to make that file, to type those words and click save. Not necessarily.

The t-shirts are created by an algorithm. The word “algorithm” is a little scary to some people because they don’t know what it means. It’s basically a process automated by a computer programme, sometimes simple, sometimes complex as hell. Amazon’s recommendations are powered by an algorithm. They look at what you’ve been browsing and buying, find patterns in that behaviour and show you things the algorithm thinks you might like to buy. Amazon’s algorithms are very complex and powerful, which is why they work. The algorithm that creates these t-shirts is not complex or powerful. This is how I expect it works.

1) Start a sentence with the words KEEP CALM AND.
2) Pick a word from this long list of verbs. Any word will do. Don’t worry, I’m sure they’re all fine.
3) Finish the sentence with one of the following: OFF, THEM, IT, A LOT or US.
4) Lay these words out in the classic Keep Calm style.
5) Create a mockup jpeg of a t-shirt.
6) Submit the design to Amazon using our boilerplate t-shirt description.
7) Go back to 1 and start again.

H/T to Cory Doctorow for the link.

March 3, 2013

3D-printed gun parts

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:19

3D printing is becoming much more interesting every day:

Cody Wilson, like many Texan gunsmiths, is fast-talkin’ and fast-shootin’—but unlike his predecessors in the Lone Star State, he’s got 3D printing technology to help him with his craft.

Wilson’s nonprofit organization, Defense Distributed, released a video this week showing a gun firing off over 600 rounds—illustrating what is likely to be the first wave of semi-automatic and automatic weapons produced by the additive manufacturing process.

Last year, his group famously demonstrated that it could use a 3D-printed “lower” for an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle—but the gun failed after six rounds. Now, after some re-tooling, Defense Distributed has shown that it has fixed the design flaws and a gun using its lower can seemingly fire for quite a while. (The AR-15 is the civilian version of the military M16 rifle.)

The lower, or “lower receiver” part of a firearm, is the crucial part that contains all of the gun’s operating parts, including the trigger group and the magazine port. (Under American law, the lower is what’s defined as the firearm itself.) The AR is designed to be modular, meaning it can receive different types of “uppers” (barrels) as well as different-sized magazines.

H/T to Marina Stover for the link.

March 2, 2013

“The most important Google Glass experience is not the user experience – it’s the experience of everyone else”

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:08

Charles Stross linked to this article saying that it’s the second order effects that are going to be more important over time:

The key experiential question of Google Glass isn’t what it’s like to wear them, it’s what it’s like to be around someone else who’s wearing them. I’ll give an easy example. Your one-on-one conversation with someone wearing Google Glass is likely to be annoying, because you’ll suspect that you don’t have their undivided attention. And you can’t comfortably ask them to take the glasses off (especially when, inevitably, the device is integrated into prescription lenses). Finally – here’s where the problems really start – you don’t know if they’re taking a video of you.

Now pretend you don’t know a single person who wears Google Glass… and take a walk outside. Anywhere you go in public – any store, any sidewalk, any bus or subway – you’re liable to be recorded: audio and video. Fifty people on the bus might be Glassless, but if a single person wearing Glass gets on, you – and all 49 other passengers – could be recorded. Not just for a temporary throwaway video buffer, like a security camera, but recorded, stored permanently, and shared to the world.

[. . .]

Remember when people were kind of creeped out by that car Google drove around to take pictures of your house? Most people got over it, because they got a nice StreetView feature in Google Maps as a result.

Google Glass is like one camera car for each of the thousands, possibly millions, of people who will wear the device – every single day, everywhere they go – on sidewalks, into restaurants, up elevators, around your office, into your home. From now on, starting today, anywhere you go within range of a Google Glass device, everything you do could be recorded and uploaded to Google’s cloud, and stored there for the rest of your life. You won’t know if you’re being recorded or not; and even if you do, you’ll have no way to stop it.

And that, my friends, is the experience that Google Glass creates. That is the experience we should be thinking about. The most important Google Glass experience is not the user experience – it’s the experience of everyone else. The experience of being a citizen, in public, is about to change.

February 28, 2013

Cybersecurity … can it be anything more than fear + handwaving = “we must have a law!”

Filed under: Business, Government, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

At Techdirt, Mike Masnick fisks “the worst article you might ever read about ‘Cybersecurity'”:

There has been a lot of discussion lately about “cybersecurity” “cyberwar” “cyberattacks” and all sorts of related subjects which really really (really!) could do without the outdated and undeniably lame “cyber-” prefix. This is, in large part, due to the return of CISPA along with the White House’s cybersecurity executive order. Of course, the unfortunate part is that we’re still dealing in a massive amount of hype about the “threats” these initiatives are trying to face. They’re always couched in vague and scary terms, like something out of a movie. There are rarely any specifics, and the few times there are, there is no indication how things like CISPA would actually help. The formula is straightforward: fear + handwaving = “we must have a law!”

However, I think we may now have come across what I believe may top the list of the worst articles ever written about cybersecurity. If it’s not at the top, it’s close. It is by lawyer Michael Volkov, and kicks off with a title that shows us that Volkov is fully on board with new laws and ramping up the FUD: The Storm Has Arrived: Cybersecurity, Risks And Response. As with many of these types of articles, I went searching for the evidence of these risks, but came away, instead, scratching my head, wondering if Volkov actually understands this subject at all, with his confused thinking culminating in an amazing paragraph so full of wrong that almost makes me wonder if the whole thing is a parody.

[. . .]

There’s been plenty of talk about these Chinese hacks, which definitely do appear to be happening. But, what economic activity has been undermined? So far, the hacks may have been a nuisance, but it’s unclear that they’ve done any real damage. It is also unclear how CISPA helps stop such hacks, other than making Congress feel like it’s “done something.”

Are there issues with online security that need to be taken seriously? Yes, absolutely. Do we need legislation to deal with those problems? That’s debatable, and we’re still waiting for some evidence not just of scary sounding threats, but that this kind of legislation will actually help. Unfortunately, this article keeps us waiting. But, it did make us laugh. Unintentionally (we think).

February 26, 2013

Defence industry lobbyists versus actual USAF needs

Filed under: Business, Government, Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:35

Strategy Page talks about the ongoing drama of the Global Hawk UAV and the US Air Force’s attempt to get rid of the weapon:

The U.S. Air Force recently disbanded a Global Hawk UAV squadron. The reserve unit contained 200 personnel and operated an aircraft the air force is getting rid of. This is in spite of political opposition to the move (helped along by the manufacturers many lobbyists).

This all began last year when the U.S. Air Force cancelled all orders for the Block 30 Global Hawk because of reliability issues. This renewed Department of Defense threats to cancel the Global Hawk program entirely. In response Northrop Grumman (the RQ-4 manufacturer) lobbyists made sure that key members of Congress knew where Global Hawk components were being built and how many jobs that added up to. Elected politicians pay attention to that. This move delayed the RQ-4 Block 30 until there was enough political support to convince Congress to order the air force to accept the Block 30 RQ-4s and shut up.

The air force can take some comfort in the fact that Northrop Grumman fixed some of the problems (some of which the manufacturer said don’t exist or didn’t matter). The Block 30 was supposed to be good to go but the air force was not convinced and decided that Block 30 was just more broken promises. Congress was also tired of all the feuding and being caught between Northrup lobbyists and exasperated air force generals. The lobbyists, as is usually the case, eventually won. But the air force is not required to pay for operating the Global Hawks, thus the disbanding of the Global Hawk unit.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress