Quotulatiousness

April 7, 2012

Project Glass: brilliant or cracked?

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:41

Howard Baldwin and Ed Oswald discuss the arguments for and against Google’s most recently announced project:

Here are two opposing viewpoints on Google’s Project Glass eyewear. PCWorld contributor Howard Baldwin argues the pro side of the argument while PCWorld contributor Ed Oswald represents the naysayers.

PRO – People have been trying to build wearable computers for years. Project Glass puts the technology into something people already wear.

CON – Easily breakable? While I understand Google’s desire to make these glasses as unobtrusive as possible, they look awfully fragile. Consumers will use these in situations where they may be dropped or come loose. These are no doubt going to be expensive, so people will want some assurance that these won’t easily break.

PRO – Who doesn’t love hands-free computing? Maybe these will help us bypass those nanny-state laws and let us talk while we’re driving again.

CON – Using the glasses will likely be more distracting than texting currently is. Google glasses places the data in front of your line of sight so that you probably will focus on the data rather than what’s around you. This could be more dangerous than texting or using your cell phone while driving.

In the same way that Bluetooth headsets made it hard to distinguish between the homeless guy arguing with the voices in his head and the investment banker screwing his Muppets, Project Glass may help to weed out the easily distracted amongst us. An updated version of what I referred to as the Darwinator app:

April 3, 2012

Popehat tells Arizona “Come Get Me, Coppers!”

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:44

Arizona has a law on the books that should replace the old chestnut about King Canute and the tide: they’ve criminalized annoying and offending people on the internet:

Dear Members of the Arizona State Legislature,

By this post, it is my specific intent to use this digital device — a computer — to annoy and offend you.

I do so because you have passed Arizona H.B. 2549, which provides in relevant part as follows:

    It is unlawful for any person, with intent to terrify, intimidate, threaten, harass, annoy or offend, to use a telephone ANY ELECTRONIC OR DIGITAL DEVICE and use any obscene, lewd or profane language or suggest any lewd or lascivious act, or threaten to inflict physical harm to the person or property of any person.

OK. I certainly don’t intend to convey any physical threat. And I can’t terrify or intimidate you, even with the prospect of revealing you for a pack of morons who ought to be voted out of office — after all, you’re in Arizona, where prolonged lawlessness, venality and idiocy seem to be sure paths to electoral victory.

I certainly do mean to annoy and offend you, though. You’ve been swept up in the moronic and thoughtless anti-bullying craze and consequently passed a bill that is ridiculous on its face, a bill that criminalizes annoying and offending people on the internet. That’s like criminalizing driving on the road. By so clearly violating the First Amendment, you’ve violated your oaths of office. You should be ashamed of yourselves. What kind of example are you setting for the children of Arizona by ignoring the law to pass fashionable rubbish? It is no excuse that you are merely modifying an archaic law to apply it to the internet — you’re still enacting patently unconstitutional legislation.

That’s Ken at Popehat, inviting the Arizona state legislature to “snort my taint, go to Hell, and go fuck yourselves”.

April 1, 2012

Nightmare progression from Facebook data to stalker app to genocide tool

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:11

Charles Stross on the very disturbing implications of Facebook and other social media tools:

There is an app, currently on the Apple app store as a free download, called Girls Around Me.

A couple of days ago, computer journalist John Brownlee wrote an essay about it explaining why he found it disturbing. I’d like to propose that it is symptomatic of a really major side-effect of our forced acculturation into Facebook’s broken model of human social interaction — a broken model shared by all the most successful social networks, by design — and that it is going to get much worse, until it kills people. Quite possibly in very large numbers.

I wish this was an April Fool’s joke or a piece of dystopian near-future fiction. Unfortunately it isn’t.

[. . .]

What “Girls Around Me” does is simple: it looks up your GPS location, then queries Facebook and FourSquare for people matching a simple search criterion (are they female?) who have checked in (or been checked in by their friends) in your vicinity. It then makes it really easy to pull up their publicly visible information — stuff such as age, occupation, favourite sports, what school they attended, and so on. All the stuff Facebook encourages you to share.

You can probably see why John and his friends became increasingly uneasy about this app: it’s pitched as innocent, slightly hokey fun, but it stops being amusing the instant you imagine it in the hands of a stalker or serial rapist. Or even just an unscrupulous ass-hat in search of a one night stand who isn’t above researching his target’s taste in music and drinks without their knowledge.

Creepy and stalkerish, right? So where’s the dystopic vision? Right here:

It’s easy to imagine how we could make something worse than “Girls Around Me” — something much worse. Facebook encourages us to disclose a wide range of information about ourselves, including our religion and a photograph. Religion is obvious: “Yids Among Us” would obviously be one of the go-to tools of choice for Neo-Nazis. As for skin colour, ethnicity identification from face images is out there already. Want to go queer bashing? There’s an algorithm out there for guessing sexual orientation based on the network graph of the target’s facebook friends. It’s probably possible to apply this sort of data mining exercise to determine whether a woman has had an abortion or is pro-choice.

In the worst case, it’s possible to envisage geolocation and data aggregation apps being designed to facilitate the identification and elimination of some ethnic or class enemy, not only by making it easy for users to track them down, but by making it easy for users to identify each other and form ad-hoc lynch mobs. (Hence my reference to the Rwandan Genocide earlier. Think it couldn’t happen? Look at Iran and imagine an app written for the Basij to make it easy to identify dissidents and form ad-hoc goon squads to proactively hunt them down. Or any other organization in the post-networked world that has a social role corresponding to the Red Guards.)

But as I said earlier, the app is not the problem. The problem is the deployment by profit-oriented corporations of behavioural psychology techniques to induce people to over-share information which can then be aggregated and disclosed to third parties for targeted marketing purposes.

Update, 2 April: The app has been pulled from the App Store after Foursquare revoked the developer’s API access, but the underlying problem is still there.

March 31, 2012

Botched investigation into GCHQ staff member’s mysterious death

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

This sounds particularly bad:

Forensic investigators have apologized for the bungling of the inquiry into the mysterious death of a codebreaker employed by the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

In August 2010, Gareth Williams, described as a mathematical genius by his peers and employed at GCHQ since leaving university, was found dead in his flat in London. Williams, who had recently qualified for deployment with MI6 — Britain’s version of the CIA — was found naked and partially decomposed in a sports bag that had been locked from the outside and placed in the bath.

In the pre-inquest hearing on Friday, the court heard that the investigation into Williams’ death had been botched from the start. LGS Forensics said that DNA found on Mr Williams’ body was investigated, but later turned out to have been transferred there from one of the forensic scientists investigating the death, and a search of the apartment turned up no clues as to his death.

Warning: Despite a total lack of evidence, we still want video game “violence” warning stickers

Filed under: Gaming, Government, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:14

Erik Kain in Forbes on the latest attempt to put scare warnings on pretty much all video games sold in stores:

“WARNING: Exposure to violent video games has been linked to aggressive behavior.”

That’s the label Reps. Joe Baca and Frank Wolf want to place on every video game that hits store shelves.

Well okay, not every video game. Just every game with an E (Everyone) rating or higher. Only EC (Early Childhood) games would avoid the label. Every other game, regardless of content, would have the equivalent of cigarette warnings slapped on them.

This means that games like Tiger Woods PGA Tour would get a violence-warning label.

Can I humbly suggest that we sponsor a bill that would slap warning labels on all our elected officials?

“WARNING: May enact pointless, freedom-quashing laws based on bad data and lies due to sanctimonious pandering to special interest groups.”

The EFF is on the case.

EFF has put together an action alert that lets you to tell your Congressmember that you stand against the unnecessary and burdensome regulation of speech in video games, and that she should too.

Even though it is not required by law, many video game developers have been self-regulating games for age-level and content with Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) ratings since 1994. That system is widely understood in the marketplace, and allows consumers and parents to make informed decisions about their video game purchases.

March 29, 2012

F-35 and the “bubbling skin” problem

Filed under: Cancon, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:25

Michael Byers and Stewart Webb report on the latest technical glitch to be reported in the F-35 development:

The ability of F-35s to avoid radar detection depends on a “fibre mat,” which is cured into the composite surfaces of the aircraft.

In December 2011, a test version of the F-35 for the first time achieved the design speed of Mach 1.6. According to Bill Sweetman of Aviation Week, the flight caused “peeling and bubbling” of the stealth coating on the horizontal tails and damage to the engine’s thermal panels, and the entire test fleet was subsequently limited to Mach 1.0.

Repairing and replacing stealth materials is a time- and technology-intensive process that reduces the “mission capable rate” of aircraft. Indeed, it has been reported by the U.S. Congressional Research Service that after five years of service the F-35’s sister plane, the F-22, has a mission capable rate of just 60%.

And then they touch on the issue that has been lurking below the surface for a while, regarding the small number of aircraft the RCAF will be able to afford (assuming the government goes through with the F-35 purchase):

If the F-35 has a similar mission capable rate, Canada will, at any given time, only be able to deploy approximately 44 of its planned 65 planes. When attrition through accidents is factored in — and Canada has lost 18 of its CF-18s since 1982 — we could soon have an available fleet of just 30-35 planes, or roughly half of what the Department of National Defence says we need.

That might be the crucial point on which the F-35 acquisition fails: no matter how good the aircraft are (and I believe they will eventually work through and fix all the major issues), we can’t afford enough of them. Even without taking on new missions, we need a certain minimum number of aircraft, and I thought 65 was low-balling that number. The alternatives are to buy some F-35’s and a larger number of less expensive planes like the Super Hornet, or skip the F-35 altogether and just buy a different aircraft. The problem with splitting the order is that what we’d save on reduced F-35 acquisition costs, we’d more than lose because the RCAF would have to maintain duplicate maintenance and training programs. Unlike the RAF or the USAF, the RCAF isn’t big enough to fly multiple models on an ongoing basis (and you know that the government can’t and won’t fund a larger air force budget).

March 28, 2012

Speaking of science, here’s a new development in “thermal cloaking”

Filed under: France, Science, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:42

Lewis Page at The Register walks us through the high points of a new development from France:

Top boffins in France have come up with a radical new take on the “cloaking” and invisible-shed physics breakthroughs of recent years. They have designed a technology which instead of bending microwaves or light can shield an object from heat — or concentrate heat upon it.

“Our key goal with this research was to control the way heat diffuses in a manner similar to those that have already been achieved for waves, such as light waves or sound waves,” says Sebastien Guenneau, of Aix-Marseille uni and France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CRNS).

“Heat isn’t a wave — it simply diffuses from hot to cold regions,” Guenneau adds. “The mathematics and physics at play are much different.”

For now designed only in two dimensions, Guenneau and his colleagues’ approach involved shaping isotherms — lines showing density of heat flux transferring from point — so as to make heat travel around a given area rather than into it.

“We can design a cloak so that heat diffuses around an invisibility region, which is then protected from heat. Or we can force heat to concentrate in a small volume, which will then heat up very rapidly,” Guenneau says.

Odd network issue

Filed under: Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:18

As many of you know, I’m an editor at GuildMag, an online magazine devoted to the ArenaNet games Guild Wars and the soon-to-be-released Guild Wars 2. Yesterday, I’d been on the GuildMag site several times to update our most recent beta coverage post. Around 5 pm, I’d added a few entries to the blog post and saved the page (it’s a WordPress blog). The page timed out on me.

Not a big deal, just reload the page — but it still won’t reload. It’s not just the blog UI, it’s the whole site that is inaccessible. Several re-tries, but no change. I posted a Twitter update to let people know that the site was temporarily down and that we’d be back as soon as possible … but I was told that the site is fine: it’s apparently just me having connectivity problems. Well, it was getting toward time to break for dinner anyway, so I logged off for a few hours.

Later that night, I still have the same problem, but on a different computer (that is, it’s not just my laptop being unable to load www.guildmag.com). That means the problem lies somewhere between our wireless router and the site. I took my laptop down into the basement and directly connected it to the cable modem, but the site is still inaccessible (so it’s not our router that’s suddenly allergic to GuildMag). I did a “whois” search to get the IP address (81.169.145.152). Still can’t connect using the IP address in Chrome, Firefox, and IE.

The editor-in-chief says he believes me, but clearly suspects that I’m trying to avoid some upcoming work…

Update: Ah, thanks to a suggestion from Marc, I tried connecting to the site on my iPhone: it works on a 3G connection, but doesn’t work when I use the wifi.

(more…)

March 26, 2012

Rick Mercer updates us on the status of the F-35

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:27

March 23, 2012

Software patents: a legal minefield with no accurate maps

Filed under: Economics, Law, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:33

In the Atlantic, Timothy B. Lee explains why most software companies are effectively ignoring the patent system:

A major reason for the recent explosion of patent litigation is that it’s hard for software firms to figure out which patents they’re in danger of infringing. There are hundreds of thousands of software patents in existence, with more than 40,000 new ones issued each year. Indeed, in a recent paper, Christina Mulligan and I estimated that it’s effectively impossible for all software-producing firms to do the legal research, known as a “freedom-to-operate” (FTO) search, required to avoid infringing software patents — there simply aren’t enough patent attorneys to do the work. That’s a major reason why most software firms simply ignore the patent system.

One of the striking things about the patent debate is vast gulf between the views of computer programmers on the one hand and patent attorneys on the other. Steve Lundberg is a patent attorney and blogger who mentioned our paper in a blog post exploring the challenges of performing FTO searches in the software industry. I don’t want to pick on Lundberg, because I think you’d get similar arguments from many patent lawyers. But his post shows a fundamental lack of understanding of how the software industry works.

I work in the software industry (although not as a programmer), and I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen software patents granted for things that clearly do not meet the stated criteria for granting patents. It could be a geeky party drinking game: guess whether a particular common programming technique or decades-old user interface element is patented or not, take a drink when you guess wrong. It’d be educational, although guessing “patented” every time might leave you stone cold sober at the end of the party.

As a matter of patent theory, Lundberg is absolutely correct. Patent law’s novelty and obviousness requirements are supposed to narrow the scope of patent protection. But in practice he’s dead wrong. The patent office issues a seemingly endless stream of patents on broad, obvious concepts like emoticon menus, one-click shopping, and wireless email.

And the existence of these broad, obvious patents means that software companies are constantly infringing each other’s patents by accident. The companies with the largest patent portfolios, such as Microsoft and IBM, have tens of thousands of patents, allowing them to credibly threaten almost anyone in the software industry. Even Yahoo, with its relatively modest cache of 1000 patents, was able to find ten patents to assert against Facebook.

Facebook seen as harmful … to deployed troops

Filed under: Asia, Middle East, Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:17

Strategy Page explains how increasing sophistication on the part of the al Qaeda/Taliban forces has been allowing them to select targets of opportunity through things like Facebook posts and cell phone traffic:

The U.S. Army is warning its troops to be careful what they post to on social networking sites (like Facebook). When they post photos of themselves they often reveal militarily useful information. This was discovered in Iraq, where a lot of tech savvy people working with terrorists were able to compile information from what troops posted. This sometimes led to attacks, and this was discovered from interrogating captured terrorists and captured documents and computer data. The background of pictures often indicated targets for the terrorists, or details of base defenses and American tactics. Islamic terrorists have been quick to use the Internet and other modern technology to plan and carry out their attacks.

Some of this technology can be very dangerous, like the geo-locating capability of many smart phones (which include GPS receivers and location data that hackers can obtain.) Troops in combat zones are ordered to turn geo-locating off while in areas where the enemy could use it. Even without geo-locating turned on, cell phone use can provide militarily useful information. This goes back to a century old practice called traffic analysis. This has been used with great success against terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, but it can be used against the troops.

[. . .]

Al Qaeda was long suspected of knowing how to manipulate message traffic in order to deceive our traffic analysis methods. This was rarely the case, but this form of deception has been used in the past with success. For example, when the June 6, 1944 D-Day invasion of France was being planned, a fake army group headquarters was set up in England. Actually, this “army group” consisted largely of a lot of radio and telegraph operators sending a large number of messages that would be normal if the “army group” were preparing for an invasion of France, in an area other than where the actual invasion was going to take place. The deception worked. German traffic analysis experts were fooled and the Germans believed the actual invasion at Normandy was just a feint, a move to get the Germans to send their reinforcements to Normandy rather than were the fake “army group” was going to invade.

Intelligence agencies have to be constantly on the guard for al Qaeda, or any other terrorist group, using this kind of deception. It has happened in a few instances, so a larger-scale attempt is not out of the question.

March 22, 2012

GAO latest to attempt to shoot down the F-35

Filed under: Australia, Cancon, Japan, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:08

The situation is looking grimmer for all potential purchasers of the F-35, not just the RCAF:

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the supposed backbone of the Pentagon’s future air arsenal, could need additional years of work and billions of dollars in unplanned fixes, the Air Force and the Government Accountability Office revealed on Tuesday. Congressional testimony by Air Force and Navy leaders, plus a new report by the GAO, heaped bad news on a program that was already almost a decade late, hundreds of billions of dollars over its original budget and vexed by mismanagement, safety woes and rigged test results.

At an estimated $1 trillion to develop, purchase and support through 2050, the Lockheed Martin-built F-35 was already the most expensive conventional weapons program ever even before Tuesday’s bulletins. The Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps are counting on buying as many as 2,500 F-35s to replace almost every tactical jet in their current inventories. More than a dozen foreign countries are lined up to acquire the stealthy, single-engine fighter, as well.

[. . .]

If cuts do occur, the U.S. will be in good company. Australia, Canada and Japan have already begun backing away from the troubled JSF as the new plane has gradually exceeded their budgets. For these countries, alternatives include the Super Hornet and an upgraded F-15 from Boeing, Lockheed’s new F-16V and the European Typhoon, Rafale and Gripen fighters. But so far the U.S. military prefers the F-35, even if the stealthy jet is more than a decade late, twice as expensive as originally projected and available in fewer numbers. “We will remain committed to the long-term success of the F-35 program,” Air Combat Command asserted.

Update, 23 March: The summary of the GAO report with a link to the PDF version for download.

March 20, 2012

“You’d have to be blind and deaf not to know how much this project has gone off the rails”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:22

In the National Post, John Ivison explains why he thinks the new Auditor-General will have a field day examining the F-35 project:

Alan Williams is a retired assistant deputy minister, responsible for procurement at DND in the early years of the F-35 project, and recently he shared his thoughts on the shortcomings of the tendering process with the Office of the Auditor-General. “The whole process was twisted to suit the needs of the military, with the acknowledgment and support of ministers. It was totally unacceptable,” he said.

He thinks the government should write a new statement of requirement and put the whole project out to an open competition.

“You could run a competition today and have it done within two years,” he said. “You’d have to be blind and deaf not to know how much this project has gone off the rails.”

He said that in his experience, maintenance costs on sophisticated military equipment run at two to three times acquisition costs. He believes the eventual cost to taxpayers for the F-35s is likely to be $25- to $30-billion — double the current government estimate.

It’s quite possible that the F-35 purchase was a bad idea, and that the military rigged the competition from the start. Not inevitable, but possible. The criticism of the military procurement process in the article is a bit over-done, especially here in Canada where almost any military spending has to be assessed primarily for political advantage and regional distribution before the actual military benefit or value to the taxpayers is taken into account. Every major project’s specifications are “tweaked” to meet certain overriding criteria.

To oversimplify, if the item in question is available from two different suppliers that provide effectively the same function, tacking on a secondary requirement that only one of the suppliers can readily meet distorts the process to favour that supplier. It’s not usually that blatant, but if it happens when the item in question is as simple as network cable or packaging material or socks, you can be certain that it happens for multi-billion dollar purchases whose specifications are the size of paperback novels.

March 19, 2012

An unanticipated down-side to e-books

Filed under: Books, Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:24

It’s possible that e-books actually make it harder to retain what we read:

I received a Kindle for my birthday, and enjoying “light reading,” in addition to the dense science I read for work, I immediately loaded it with mysteries by my favorite authors. But I soon found that I had difficulty recalling the names of characters from chapter to chapter. At first, I attributed the lapses to a scary reality of getting older — but then I discovered that I didn’t have this problem when I read paperbacks.

When I discussed my quirky recall with friends and colleagues, I found out I wasn’t the only one who suffered from “e-book moments.” Online, I discovered that Google’s Larry Page himself had concerns about research showing that on-screen reading is measurably slower than reading on paper.

This seems like a particularly troubling trend for academia, where digital books are slowly overtaking the heavy tomes I used to lug around. On many levels, e-books seem like better alternatives to textbooks — they can be easily updated and many formats allow readers to interact with the material more, with quizzes, video, audio and other multimedia to reinforce lessons. But some studies suggest that there may be significant advantages in printed books if your goal is to remember what you read long-term.

H/T to Tyler Cowen for the link.

The beached corpse of a Caspian Sea Monster

Filed under: History, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:22

A LiveJournal post by Igor113 has lots of photos (and text in Russian) of a visit to the resting place of one of the most fascinating technological relics of the Soviet era — an Ekranoplan:

Google translate offers this as the introduction to Igor’s post:

Here are my hands and came up ekranoplana. Ya break a story about it for 3 or 4 parts: a winged-outside (1 or 2 parts), 2-winged inside the 3-winged dock.

In 1987 the water came, “Lun” the first ship of a series of missile-carrying combat WIG weighing 400 tons was the chief designer V.Kirillovyh. The ship was armed with three pairs of cruise missile 3M80 or 80M “Mosquito” (NATO membership designation SS-N-22 Sunburn). The second “Lun” is also being laid as a missile, but the outbreak of the conversion brought about changes, and planned to finish a rescue.

LTH:
Modification of the Lun
Wingspan, m 44.00
Length, m 73.80
Height, m ​​19.20
Wing area, m2 550.00
Weight, kg
Empty 243 000
maximum take-off 380 000
8 turbojet engine type NC-87
Thrust, kg 8 x 13 000
Maximum speed, km / h 500
Operational range, km 2000
The height of the flight on the screen, 5.1 m
Seaworthiness, 6.5 points
Crew 10
Armament: 6 IP ASM ZM-80 Mosquito

Wikipedia has more. In spite of the apparent derelict condition of the Lun, Wikipedia mentions plans to resume development in 2012.

Update: Charles Stross sent a tweet with a link to this satellite shot of the Lun in dry dock: http://mapper.acme.com/?ll=42.88184,47.65690&z=19&t=H

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