Amazon Echo: Are They Insane?

Please allow me to join the chorus of “Are you insane?” to Amazon Echo.  Not content to screw authors and publishers, and to suppress books they don’t like, they think people want Amazon to spy on them continuously.

And this after worldwide fury over NSA merely tracking phone calls–how can they even think this is a good idea?

I understand why Amazon wants this, and it probably will be quite useful for burglars and government monitors.  But why would anyone want this in their home.

The suggested features appear are just stupid: they are no different than anything we already have (and mostly don’t need).  Basically, instead of using a computer or your phone–which you certainly have with you at all times–you just speak to the room.

Frankly, I wasn’t having any trouble managing my grocery list without Amazon’s help, thank you very much.

The advanced feature, of course, is voice recognition. In other words, Amazon knows everything you say, when you say it, and where you are (in your private home).  They can also tell who else visits, and when (and what is said). I’ll bet they can analyze the background sounds to find out what radio and TV you listen to, any speakerphone conversations, etc.

The services, such as they are, are “in the cloud”, also known as “trust us, we won’t spy on you” land.  You can think of it as connecting yourself to Amazon’s servers whenever you are home, or you can think of it as extending Amazon’s servers into you living room.  Either way, it’s a horrible idea.

The only security feature mentioned (other than “trust us”) is an “off” button.  Well, good.  But if I leave it off all the time, why did I get it?

So, in addition to Amazon spying on you (you asked to do so, didn’t you?) I’m pretty sure that hackers, G-men, and probably the teenagers down the block will be able to hack in and listen to

The kicker for me is that not only are you asking them to spy on you, you are paying them to do it!  What a brilliant business plan.  (I grant you, Amazon needs to figure out some way to make money one of these days.)

Some people think Amazon is a front for the NSA.  If so, they aren’t hiding it very well.

Lunacy.  Pure lunacy.

Just say “no”.

Tape: Paris – Handyman’s Secret Art Supply

A rather disturbing installation piece from Numen / For Use, called ‘Tape: Paris‘.

Constructed of plastic tape, the installation “a maze of accessible translucent passageways” suspended meters above the floor.

The website suggests that the installation transforms “the whole building into a convulsive mind/body organism” (along with other high concept claims). I’m sure it sounds better in French.

To me, it certainly looks ‘biological’.  In fact, it resembles nothing so much as a funnel web spider’s web.  (Very common where I live, and not especially scary or dangerous.)

copyright (2003-2013) by Kris H. Light

This isn’t all that attractive–I’ve never hankered to visit a funnel web.  And, if you know these spiders, you realize that they are traps for their prey.  Possibly not the image intended by the museum.

On the other hand, it is a great exhibition of the fact that you can do almost anything with tape-as documented on all the best TV shows.  “The Handyman’s Secret Weapon“.

From the website I gather that this is one of a series of “Tape” installations, along with a series on “String” and “Net”.  Evidently, they have not yet exhausted the creative space offered by simple materials.

 

Cawley on Bitcoin Businesses

Daniel Cawley writes at Coindesk yet another article about “new businesses” enabled by Bitcoin.  I have commented on earlier discussions of this topic several times.

In this installment, “6 Types of Businesses Bitcoin Will Enable for the First Time“, the biggest news is that the list of “new” ideas hasn’t changed.  We are getting a clearer idea of the near term uses for Bitcoin and blockchains (not that much has been implemented yet).

To be fair, this list is a list of proposed business models, as opposed to use cases or applications.

The list is:

1. Record-keeping – in a very general sense.  (Finally, recognition that the blockchain is basically a replacement for a database or other store.)
2. Asset distribution – lightweight securitization of anything, but especially digital assets.  (Actually a variation of #1.)
3. Wallet technologies – business opportunity to provide decent user software. Very challenging to provide strong security combined with convenience, usable by your grandparents.
4. Smart contracts – on everyone’s list, probably a superset of #2 above.  Many interesting challenges here.  (ChainPhishing, anyone? BlockVirus?)
5. Mining – I.e., business opportunities in mining.
6. Bitcoin support – business opportunities promoting business opportunities….

Overall, this list overlaps with previous lists, and is kind of small bore.  Scarcely disruptive or revolutionary, not even that innovative.  (Take something that uses a database on the Internet.  Substitute a blockchain for that database.  Ta da!  New product.)

However, it is actually good to see these comparatively sensible and reasonable ideas put forward.  Less about reinventing money, more about making a reasonable living.  Good.

Philae Will Land at ‘Agilkia’

ESA has announced the Philae lander site, “Site J” from the original list, will be known as ‘Agilkia’, named after “an island on the Nile River in the south of Egypt” which is connected with the ruins of Philae.

Agilkia, Philae’s landing site on Comet 67P/C-G. Credit: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA

Next week (on 12 November) the Philae lander will touch down at this location.

This process is way cool and pretty risky:  the module will be lobbed toward the comet, just right, to make an unpowered (AKA “crash”) landing.

It looks like there will be same day TV coverage where I am, probably in many parts of the world.  Tres Cool!

FTC: Dating Service Evilly Betrays Customers

It was reported last week that an online dating company JDI Dating Limited was penalized by the US Federal Trade Commission for scamming its customers.  Basically, they hit new customers with fake prospective dates, to get them to sign up for the paid service.  Pretty sleazy, but maybe a useful lesson for some of the customers.

It seems obvious why dating services are both a happy hunting ground for operators and evoke such revulsion when they use “perfectly normal” Internet business practices.  By design, dating sites exploit the emotional weaknesses of their users, and deceptive practices are a betrayal and just plain icky.

Unlike OKCupid and Facebook, who I have criticized for conducting “research” without permission on their users, this is much more Amazonian:  they are just plain cheating the users, because they can.

Yes, this is how the Internet conducts business.  No, it is not OK.

Wikidata: Open Linked Data

Taking a break from the neverending saga of the Cryptocurrency Rush, I noticed an article by  Vrandecis and Krotzsch (apologies for the missing diacritical marks–my software choked on them) in October Communications of the ACM, “Wikidata: a free collaborative knowlegebase“.

If there is one thing truly and deeply missing from Wikipedia, it is deep indexing throughout the whole collection, especially in machine usable forms.  In other words, linked data (AKA a semantic web).  There are lots of cross links and lots of metainformation, but it is human generated, inconsistent, and mostly opaque to computers.

I am not surprised to find that the Wikipedia community sees the same lack, and seeks to address it, with what is called Wikidata.

First, let me say that this is basically the right idea.  Linked Data is designed for exactly this situation:  maintaining an independent collection of assertions about relations among data items.  We don’t want to-and couldn’t-centralize Wikipedia or try to impose an impractical process on everyone.  We need to ‘find’ the data as it is, yet be able to make connections in a logical and machine readable way.

There are automatic tools coming on line that extract relations from Wikipedia pages as they are edited, and generate assertions about relations.  The initial target is to document related items across languages.  This concept is such a good idea I even did a little demo of something similar a while back.

This is what Wikidata does, and it is a pretty standard linked data system in this.

There are a couple of interesting points about Wikidata that are not common or standard for linked data, both of which come out of the “Wikipedia” culture.

First, the data is designed to be editable by anyone, just like Wikipedia.  And like Wikipedia, you wonder how this will work.  The answer is the same as for the the texts:  it works better than it  reasonably should.  However, if people are going to be using the data via APIs, instability and variability in quality are going to be a challenge.  How can my analytics know what is stable, carefully vetted data, and what is iffy stuff that no human has ever looked at?

Second, and more interesting, is the design for “plurality”: “It would be naive to expect global agreement on the “true” data, since many facts are disputed or simply uncertain. Wikidata allows conflicting data to coexist and provides mechanisms to organize this plurality.” (V&K, p. 79)

As far as I can tell, these mechanisms are built on the fact that liked data can have many assertions about the same items, which need not agree.  So long as the source of these assertions is kept clear, they can coexist, and even enrich the information.

This is actually standard operating procedure for linked data, though many systems that use linked data will try to “clean up” the data, to impose an orderly consistency on their view of the data.

I gather that there are also conventions for marking assertions as “preferred” and “deprecated”.  No doubt there may be more nuances to these editorial remarks in the future.  This will obviously be problematic in cases with sharply contested arguments (e.g., about political borders).

It will be interesting to see if this gains as much traction as Wikipedia has. If so, it will be pretty cool.

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Denny,Vrandecis and Markus Krotzsch, Wikidata: a free collaborative knowledgebase. Commun. ACM %@ 0001-0782, 57 (10):78-85,  2014.

Robert E. McGrath, “How to Build a Better Wikipedia: Ubiquitous Infrastructure for Deep Accountability”, Microsoft E-Science Workshop, Indianapolis, December 7-9, 2008.

Cryptocurrencies Can, And Will, Be Regulated

As I expected an predicted, the powers-that-be insist that, amazingly enough, cryptocurrencies are definitely covered by existing regulations.

While I was attending to other things, FINCEN finally dropped the hammer on cryptocurrency exchanges, ruling clearly that conveying cryptocurrencies requires a money transfer license in the US.

You don’t need a license to use cryptocurrency, or to sell things for cryptocurrency, but you do need a license to convert to and from other currencies.

I’m sure there is a lot of fire-breathing rhetoric out there, but the fact is, this basically puts a lot of cryptocurrency operations out of business, at least until they get the right license.  You’d be a darn fool to deal with an unlicensed service, cause you could lose everything if (when) it is shut down.

In particular, this puts a big dent in “remittance” applications.

On the other hand, approaches like Ripple at least can work in principle with such a regime: the gateway nodes can get licenses, and users can trust that they are dealing with safe parties.

Combined with the release of Apple Pay, this is has been a bad couple of weeks for cryptocurrency.

Apparently, the revolution is going to be more of a struggle than some had hoped.

 

Coworking As A Movement

The United States is mad for religions.  “100 religions, and only one sauce” snarked Voltaire.

But more than that, most important cultural movements adopt the psychology and trappings of what might be religious in other places.

The ecology movement birthed the serious Green political parties in Europe, and produced a range of spiritual and philosophical movements in the US.

In the US, cultural chatter is dominated by statements of faith in markets, capital, and “innovation”.  What might be thought to be political or scientific issues (e.g., tax policy or the effects of atmospheric emissions) are badges of purity.

For that matter, the “open source” community, which originated in a purely technical means of publishing code, has become a mantra for a number of movements, far beyond any logical relation to computer programming.

This is our heritage (and as a descendant of Irishmen, I blame the English).   I’m neither condemning it or running from it.

I was thinking about this today because I ran across the “Coworking Wiki“.

I’ve been examining and studying co-working, which is part of the “new way of work”.  We don’t have “jobs” or careers any more, and workers are expected to provide their own equipment and office space (as well as health insurance and pensions).  The boss still keeps his 90%, but the workers get even less from him.

To me, co-working spaces are also interesting because they often combine social and psychological factors not seen in conventional workplaces. In particular, they are closely associated with ideas about startups, freelancing, and “community”.

Like any office, there are zillions of ways to set it up and use it. So I’m in no way surprised to find a lot of variation among “co-working” spaces.  Even in my home town there are several such locations, and they are quite different in important ways.  This is great, and certainly grist to my own research mills.

So I was interested and amused to find the Coworking Wiki, which advocates much more than contemporary office arrangements.  It is a movement, “Open Coworking”, committed to common values.

Whoa!  We’re not talking about cheap wi-fi and desk-by-the-month here!

Cool!

Obviously, I need to look more closely at this.