My continuing fascination with Bison: it’s great to see the wild herds growing and spreading out, and escaping the killer cattle ranchers. And its great to see Indian tribes succeeding in this effort, which means so much more than just preserving animals.
Wish I had been there for the arrival.
This week the NYT had a “Room for Debate” feature on wearable computing. The title was provocative, “Is Wearable Tech Destined to Fail?”, and asked, among other questions, “Will consumers ever embrace wearable technology, or are the devices too intrusive?:
Four respondents provided short comments that were surprisingly non-responsive, very short sighted, and quite revealing. Many public comments followed.
Bridget Carey comments that what is needed is to “Make the Data From Wearable Devices More Relevant.”
“To make wearable tech truly compelling, we don’t need more data. We need smarter interpretation of data”
Sure, but she appears to equate “wearable” with “fitness app”, which reflects the current state of the technology, which is far too limited.
Ben Bajarin is on the right track when he says we need to “Embed Technology in Our Lives”. Wearables “need to disappear and become embedded into the apparel we already wear”.
Good point.
But he, too, takes fitness apps as the goal. He makes the curious remark,
“For wearables to truly add value they need to help us create and sustain new and better habits.”
Huh? Since when did the goal of any kind of computing become behavior modification? Wow!
Pierre Theodore takes a different angle, noting “The Promise of Smart Glasses in Health Care”. Of course, heads up displays have been explored for decades in medicine, and commercial products require “considerable evolution required to withstand the demands of hospital use.”
Again, wearable is apparently equated with “health related”, plus he limits consideration to the least novel wearable, heads up visual displays. Other wearable sensors are far, far more interesting medically, I would say, for long term, in situ, tracking of physiology, for example.
Finally, Eva Chen comments sensibly on “Tech and Fashion That Complement Each Other”. She recounts that her “inbox lately looks more and more like a C.E.S. ticker” filled with product announcements and glossy corporate promotions.
But, as I have complained, we don’t have anything compelling yet. Whatever “it” turns out to be, ““it will have to balance elegant form with functionality that you just can’t live without.” And, she says, “I’m waiting.”
Me to.
It is very interesting that none of the respondents directly considered the headline question, nor did they address the specific question about intrusiveness.
But the public comments sure did! Lot’s of them complained about intimate tracking, and many mentioned the inevitability of hackers gaining access to your wearable devices and data from them. Eeww!
Overall, this was a pretty unsatisfactory discussion. But, as me and Eva Chen have said, we’re still waiting for a wearable app worth wearing.
Kingpin by Kevin Poulsen
Written by an editor of Wired in 2010, this is an interesting contemporary crime story about Cybercrime and the people who do it. It is also a reminder for everyone to pay attention to their networks and computers, don’t take them for granted, and be very paranoid about e-commerce.
The technical descriptions are accurate, although they date back several decades, so the details of the technology are mostly out of date—nothing about hacking Androids or iPhones, nothing about Clouds or server farms. But that’s not really the point. The point is the sociotechnical interplay of necessarily flawed technology, relatively clueless users, and plain old human greed.
I’m pretty sure that most of the cops and robbers stuff is out of date as well. Everyone has geared up, with the military and Wall Street definitely in the game, as well as Russian and Chinese “grown ups”, Iranian forces, and jihadists of all religions. Its not kiddie stuff any more, and not about some Valley Girls credit card scamming.
The poignant and mostly sad descriptions of the hackers, how they live and think, is far too real to be comfortable for any of us who were there and doing it. I know these people. Heck, I am these people, or at least I was at that time. How can I not see myself in these guys? What would it have taken for me to go off the rails as far as they did? Not that much.
I guess the best thing about the strange gold rush out of Silicon Valley over the last 20 years is that it has let so many geeks earn a living legally, if not sustainably. There is nothing like having your own company to turn you off to recreational crime.
This story is also a bit of nostalgia for the good old days (all of ten years ago) when things were so much simpler, and ordinary teenagers could be world class hackers. These days the field is full of professionals, dangerous professionals.
Abracadaver by Laura Resnick
This is the latest is a series of novels featuring actress/supernatural sleuth Esther Diamond. Resnick is good, and this one does not disappoint our high expectations.
As in The Misfortune Cookie and earlier novels, this isn’t deep literature, or even particularly tricky mystery. In fact, the stories don’t actually make too much sense, strictly speaking. A lot of slapstick, lethal supernatural danger, and a little smoldering romance—pretty much average for an aspiring actress in NYC, no?
This particular story is yet another supernatural threat to New York, apparently involving demonic possession and reanimation of corpses. Esther and her allies must figure out what is going on and save the city–again.
The Diamond books feature considerable detail of the life of an aspiring actress (autobiographical?), done in the style of a light romantic comedy, with supernatural thrown in. I don’t generally enjoy “supernatural” thrillers, nor “romance” novels, nor police stories. So why do I like this series? Good writing and a touch of comedy, I think.
There should be at least one more book in this series. I’m looking forward to it.
1. Laura Resnick, Abracadaver, New York, Daw Books, Inc, 2014.
Today is Thanksgiving Day in the US.
This is one of my favorite holidays, with just the right balance of secular and spiritual semantics, an all-American origin, and an extremely complex array of rituals which have developed “bottom up”, from the people.
For the record, we never eat Turkey on Thanksgiving (any other day is fine), we hand make a vegetarian harvest soup and I bake bread. Peasant fare, home made. Perfect.
The part I like is the giving thanks. Regardless of your traditions and beliefs about morality and sacred scorekeeping, it is wise for everyone to pause, realize what good fortune we may have had, and be grateful.
Expressing gratitude is also good for you.
We’ve made it to another Thanksgiving. We have each other.
Peace to you all.
NPR reported this week about Pandora (“play only music you like”).
This service is famous for having supposedly clever algorithms to recommend music to you based on music you already listen to (and presumably like). Yet another echo chamber, filtering the music to fit each listener.
This is a service I don’t need, I really like having other people suggest music based on their own tastes–how else would I ever grow?
I’ve also pointed out the logical fallacies underlying the notion that people have a single, stable, context free “preference” for music. The algorithms are, at best, tracking history, and at worst, constructing a shallow stereotype for you. Who needs that?
But Pandora isn’t just pointless, it is also corrupt and ‘evil’.
The NPR story makes clear that Pandora is operating a payola scheme, “recommending” music from sources who pay them to do so. Remember, the recommendations are claimed to be based on your own preferences, so this practice is not only venal, it is deeply deceptive and dishonest.
I note, too, that this is scarcely “innovative”, as the NPR report notes. Payola is widely recognized as corruption, and has been banned for decades. So how is this even legal? It’s clearly not right.
Bottom line: just say “no” to pointless and corrupt algorithmic programming. Listen to human DJs,
Things have been quiet on the NSA front, as the secret intelligence agencies demonstrate their abilities to both keep secrets and conceal through public information.
But this week we have a real security report from Semantec, describing “Regin”, a sophisticated covert spy tool (for Microsoft Windows, as far as I can tell). It has apparently been in use for 8 years or more.
Wow! A glance at the report [PDF] shows that this is an awesome piece of work. It’s really, really cool technology. It is exactly what you want secret spyware to be like! Clean, well built, flexible. Very difficult to detect. Difficult to just copy and reuse it. (The latter is a valuable attribute in a weapon!)
Whoever made this was very competent, well informed, and well funded.
And they have excellent OpSec: no boasting, no rumors, no copies for sale to script kiddies. For that matter, no silly signatures or accidental signatures in the code have been reported.
Professional.
This public report was immediately incorporated into “the NSA Narrative“, with the aid of the media. “Everyone knows” that this was probably the product of US/GCHQ and possibly Israel. Partly, this is inferred from the geography of the known infections, but mostly because it fits into the existing narrative.
So, The Intercept reports that it resembles Stuxnet, a widely reported cyberweapon deployed by the US and Israel. (The resemblance is in the architecture, though many other programs, including most operating systems and virtual machines share similar design, though uncloaked.)
More telling, The Intercept says that documents leaked by Edward Snowden, now residing in Russia, claimed something like this was in use. So, the reasoning goes, this must be the unknown thing the unverifiable Snowden documents refer to.
So we have two parts of the story. The technical facts, which are that we found something not unexpected. And a story explaining what it means. Both provided by “independent” sources.
Whoever has been using Regin may be disappointed to have it revealed, but this must have been a known risk. It had a good long run and is probably still usable until MS Windows goes away. (Noone knows exactly how it is introduced, so there is no “vaccine”. And the most easily detectable pieces can easily mutate, so there is no “penicillin” either.) And in any case, the successor is probably already in use, sneaking into mobile devices and cloud servers.
In any case, the NSA will certainly be pleased with the narrative: the NSA is watching you, using nearly magical levels of technology! Don’t trust the Internet and IT, especially to subvert the US/UK.
In addition, the narrative supports the NSA and other forces public campaigns pointing to sophisticated cyber attacks attributed to China and Russia, among others. A public awareness of just how sophisticated malware can be is vital for NSA’s defensive mission. Anyone looking at Regin knows that the Russians and Chinese can do something like this, too. An probably are doing so.
If this software is from the NSA or related groups, it is no less than I would expect from them. A beautiful piece of work.
And the media stories have fit NSA’s narrative pretty well, too. Another beautiful piece of work.
While it is tempting to have some fun with
In stead I’ll comment on Pete Rizzo’s report in Coindesk about NCR offering Bitcoin payments in its name-brand-of-all-name-brand small business equipment, which he reports was very well received initially.
I’m still not convinced that Bitcoin will be as popular as Apple Pay and competitors, but this certainly demonstrates both the “end-to-end” principle and the importance of “trust” in this supposedly “trustless” system. NCR is scarcely the first POS system that takes Bitcoin, but NCR is freakin’ NCR, man. They practically invented the cash register, we trust them. If they let you pay with sea shells merchants would be happy to take them.
In recent posts I have started enumerating the factions of the Bitcoin community, which is now segmenting. I overlooked an important industrial sector: “gaming”.
Akin to the flat out “pirate” sector, there has always been interest in cryptocurrencies from the legal “sin” businesses, gambling and porn. Just as in the conventional economy, these sectors parallel more main street businesses, and sometimes lead the technology.
Pete Rizzo reports in Coindesk that the adoption of cryptocurrency in “gaming” has been slow. Partly, this is because the gaming industry isn’t “broken”, and certainly does not want to be “disrupted”. (And frankly, I would never even think about “disrupting” gaming interests.)
Ironicaly, a big barrier is the necessity for regulation. Gaming is highly regulated for a constellation of reasons, and unregulated cryptocurrency seriously “disrupts” the rules of the game.
The Coindesk report discusses BreakOut Coin, which is sort of a blockchain based poker chip. This is yet another metaphor that can be applied to crypto coins (Virtual “currency”, “property deeds”, “mileage points”, and “pokemon cards” are others).
This particular effort is not successful yet, perhaps because cryptocurrency brings nothing significant to the table compared to conventional “chips”. Apparently they also had some unusual limitations on mining, which seriously reduced the incentives for some potential “investors”.
Obviously, the gaming industry will happily suck up Bitcoin and anything else people want to spend, but it remains unclear whether cryptocurrency will “disrupt” gambling or gaming.
In the mean time, these folks form an interesting segment of crypto enthusiasts. Their customers have strong interests in privacy and cash-like transfers, similar to the “pirate” segment. The industry has a deep interest in clear regulation and policing, both for safety and reputation. In this, they are aligned with the “wall street” factions. Both the customers and industry are extremely interested in conversion to non-digital assets and conventional currencies–you want to “buy in” and “cash out” of the game worlds.
Altogether, another interesting front in the culture wars inside “the crypto community”.
Let me join in the chorus of congrats to Rachel Harmon, local girl, now a Rhodes Scholar.
I don’t know Rachael personally, but I sure know where she comes from, and I am sure we’ll be hearing a lot more from her. From Uni Hi, class of ’71: we are proud of you, but not at all surprised to see your accomplishments.
Well done, Ms. Harmon!
Keep up the good work.
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