All watched over by machines of loving grace is Adam Greenfield's take on the consequences for designers of ubicomp. Setting moral guidelines seems critical in these early days of technological encroachment-- but how long can decency hold out against the promise of profit? I was forwarded a recent email from the CEO a major bookseller that made it clear that it's possible for them to track everything I do in their stores and online, and thank goodness they choose not to take advantage. But how long will that last? And with homeland security crumbling our civil liberties, article's like Adam's that remind us about our responsibility are even more important than ever.
posted by christina
on Oct 30, 2004 -
7 comments
Cybermohalla --really interesting group project in and around Delhi, bringing young people together via "Compughars" (fully-equipped media centers in their neighborhoods). Located in LNJP Basti (an illegal neighborhood) in Delhi, and Ambedkar Nagar (a resettlement colony) at Dakshinpuri in south Delhi, and cyberspace, and created by ANKUR - Society for Alternatives in Education (an NGO) with
Sarai, the New Media & Urban Culture Programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, they've created everything from texts, collages, posters, animations, and publications, to videos, and large-scale installations. Don't miss
by lanes --collected excerpts of some of the kids' personal and public diaries (pdfs), and
the
scratchbook (55-page pdf) and the
animated gifs.
posted by amberglow
on Aug 20, 2004 -
3 comments
Digital Utopia and its Flaws
Cory Doctorow In Conversation With R.U. Sirius
"Every other media revolution that we've had from Gutenberg to the radio to recorded music and so on, ended up with an industry that's a thousand times larger, that makes a thousand times more money, and makes available a thousand times more work. That happens every single time! If you go back far enough, you will find the guild of clavichord makers decrying the advent of the lute."
posted by moonbird
on Mar 4, 2004 -
10 comments
Trashtalking - German Style. Forget talking dolls, Berlin's speechifying its trash cans to thank pedestrians after they dump their litter. But is it appropriate to have immaterial things tell you how to use them? [More Inside]
posted by gregb1007
on Nov 23, 2003 -
15 comments
Heaven or Hell? It's Your Choice
A new
shareware E-Book is out, penned by the likes of
Captain Crunch and
Matthew Smith, that makes the claims:
Don't bother planning your pension, the world is about to change and we can prove it, please just take 2 minutes out of your life to read this page, it may change your life.
Artificial intelligence is coming and it may become smarter than any of us. Smart networks using grid technologies could become a threat to us ALL, this is the real Matrix.
From Dot.Net to the X-Box, from M-Theory to the Playstation 3 the future is V.R. / A.I. and Nanotech.
If you ever wanted to know what the system is and what it has done to you, then this ebook is for you.
You left school, you were standardised, you took an exam, you were graded, they made you believe in money, this is the last great social control mechanism. There's more to this, than you can imagine.
...and there you have it. Or do you?
posted by metameme
on Jul 7, 2003 -
24 comments
Ever since I became a TiVo addict, I've found myself wanting to use its features in real life, wishing I could rewind & replay moments of random comedy & chaos, usually involving my pugs. Soon, thanks the good folks at Deja View, I will be able to, with the help of a
head mounted micro video camera unit that is always on, recording a 30 second buffer of real time, and up to four hours of manually recordable space for once you activate the record button. The scourge of ephemera will be wiped out in our lifetime.
posted by jonson
on Jun 19, 2003 -
13 comments
Technology comes to the rescue via the Department of Homeland Security. Now we will never have to fear terrorists, or criminals again. This post is 23 days late, but remains ever so relevant.
posted by caddis
on Apr 24, 2003 -
9 comments
Japanese create "invisible" cloak. Well, not really. Technically, just a two sided cloak, the front of which is a projector, and the back of which is a camera. Only works, one would imagine, if you're looking at a person straight on, and even then it would help if you were partially blind, or at the very least, raised in the wilderness & easily fooled by modern technology.
posted by jonson
on Feb 5, 2003 -
55 comments
The Self-Healing Minefield From the current Village Voice: "Utilizing commercial off-the-shelf computer chips and 'healing' software, the networked minefield detects rude attempts to clear it, deduces which parts of itself have been removed, and signals its remaining munitions to close the hole using best-fit mathematics."
Bonus ubertasteless Flash animation courtesy of DARPA
here. Color me fascinated and repulsed in equal measure.
posted by Armitage Shanks
on Nov 27, 2002 -
40 comments
Geekroom contest 2002. [this is a mirror, the site was recently slashdotted] They say these are the
best geekrooms; to me they seem to fall somewhere between somewhere between quintessential, and epitome-of. Does your computing take over a significant chunk of your space? A room? A nook? What do Mefites' geek lairs look like?
posted by condour75
on Nov 10, 2002 -
35 comments
Alien Equipment Turning immigrants into cyborgs. A small video monitor and loudspeakers are installed at the center of the instrument and in front of the user's mouth. The monitor and the loudspeakers replace the real act of speech with an audio-visual broadcast of pre-recorded statements.
posted by riley370
on Nov 6, 2002 -
13 comments
"Your car will be watching the road even if you're not" Or so says DaimlerChrysler in their new ad campaign. Electronic eyes, infrared systems, ways to keep your eyes on the road better.... All in good time, as we all expected - but wouldn't you be worried if your car could just stop itself if it saw a squirrel in the road? (via the Wall St. Journal ad 10/9/02)
posted by djspicerack
on Oct 10, 2002 -
23 comments
Nüp2 Incorporated will revolutionize the electronic memory business. Using our patented memory technology and our patent-pending "Topolithographic" manufacturing process, we will develop and produce solid-state electronic memory having gigabytes of storage in a tiny package for just a few dollars per Gigabyte.
Hoax? Vaporware? Revolution in data storage? You decide.
posted by RylandDotNet
on Sep 17, 2002 -
3 comments
Employing a rather breath-taking counter,
Netsizer claims to track the growth of the internet (users and hosts) in real time based on a methodology briefly and unsatisfyingly explained
here. According to Netsizer the number of internet users already tops 800 million, but the
Cyber Atlas is projecting 700-950 million users in 2004. Does anybody really know what's going on?
posted by taz
on Sep 1, 2002 -
7 comments
With teeny tiny xGB hard drives like the Archos line available, why do PDAs/handhelds have such small memory capacity? The gorgeous new
Sony Clie has a mere 16 MB to its name, and most PocketPCs top out around 64MB. When do you think we'll see handheld devices that really parallel the capabilities of a desktop computer?
posted by Zettai
on Jun 17, 2002 -
26 comments
Lying with video. Researchers at MIT have created videos of people uttering sentences they never said that consistently fool viewers and are accepted by them as real. Once upon a time, it was a lot harder to be false with film, but whether the medium will be in any way trustworthy going forward seems doubtful. What will it mean when you can't even believe your own eyes?
posted by zoopraxiscope
on May 15, 2002 -
17 comments
Professor becomes world's first cyborg Surgeons have carried out a ground-breaking operation on a cybernetics professor so that his nervous system can be wired up to a computer.
It is hoped that the procedure could lead to a medical breakthrough for people paralysed by spinal cord damage, like Superman actor Christopher Reeve.
Prof Warwick believes it also opens up the possibility of a sci-fi world of cyborgs, where the human brain can one day be upgraded with implants for extra memory, intelligence or X-ray vision.
The medical possibilities with this are amazing, so why does it make me feel so uneasy?
posted by Tarrama
on Mar 22, 2002 -
24 comments
