Day: December 31, 2013

Hunting of the Snark

Hunting of the Snark:

So I’d think twice about deciding your online persona is “righteous asshole.” If it seems like a good idea, think two more times. You are not speaking truth to power. It is not a litmus test for determining your true friends. You are not guaranteed that only the “right” people will be pissed off. And you will build an audience that rewards you for being unkind—which makes it all too easy to cross lines you shouldn’t. When you get called on it, it’s too late to rip off your asshole mask and protest that’s not who you really are.

[Smack on.]

The kettle is talking to whom!?

Trust Me (I’m a kettle) – Charlie’s Diary:

And it’s not just keyboards. It’s ebook readers. Flashlights. Not your smartphone, but the removable battery in your smartphone. (Have you noticed it running down just a little bit faster?) Your toaster and your kettle are just the start. Could your electric blanket be spying on you? Koomey’s law is going to keep pushing the power consumption of our devices down even after Moore’s law grinds to a halt: and once Moore’s law ends, the only way forward is to commoditize the product of those ultimate fab lines, and churn out chips for pennies. In another decade, we’ll have embedded computers running some flavour of Linux where today we have smart inventory control tags—any item in a shop that costs more than about £50, basically. Some of those inventory control tags will be watching and listening to us; and some of their siblings will, repurposed, be piggy-backing a ride home and casing the joint.

The possibilities are endless: it’s the dark side of the internet of things. If you’ll excuse me now, I’ve got to go wallpaper my apartment in tinfoil …

[Know your sources folks, it’s going to get worse before it gets better. And since I am one of those folks that for years has been waiting for all these devices to talk to each other for my good, it’s obvious that I’ll have to do stuff to make sure I understand how they’re doing what they’re doing and if anyone else has joined the party without my knowing.]

Screen Shot 2013 12 31 at 9 29 41 AM

The Surveillance Age

The Cassandra Version:

My hope — my expectation, even — for 2014 is that the fog starts to lift.

As much as I like using the fog metaphor, the thing about surveillance is that there is no actual fog. You can’t see it. It’s everywhere and gets in everything, and it still looks like a sunny day on the internet.

But still.

[Now that are our eyes are open, and we continue to add to the piles of data companies like Amazon, Google, Twitter, etc. know about us and of course, the vast amounts of data the Government knows about us what do we do? As a technologist I have a few ideas of where I can make things better for some people. And that’s what I’m going to do.]

Glasshole?

★ Thoughts on Google Glass:

Imagine too, how such glasses would affect something like the proctoring of an exam. A cheater could use their glasses to read the questions (OCR) and give them the answers. It’s not practical to administer all tests within Faraday cages, and for some subjects, like math, you wouldn’t even need network access to facilitate the cheating: just the camera and HUD. ↩

[Up until this last paragraph of the footnote I was in agreement. I find the single use versions much more compelling than the walk about town version. Riding my bike with a HUD? Nice. Operating heavy machinery with an overlay of whatever’s important? Sure. Exam proctoring? Tests taken in a classroom? That’s not the future.]