If you read the title in the voice of Drago, you will better appreciate my intent in linking this note about the pathetic tech underlying the upcoming US census. I saw one of these poor souls standing outside my house and staring intently at her PDA. I thought, at the time, that she must be having some sort of technical difficulty. Turns out that that is just par for the course.
Category: Tech Page 3 of 10
Rob Beschizza on why Britons care about Google Street View, but not the jillion CCTV cameras in the country:
The thing that amazes me about my homeland isn’t its willingness to live under state surveillance, but the way we freak out whenever anyone else uses cameras in public. “I was determined to make a stand,” said one local, who helped block a Google Street View car from heading into a Buckinghamshire village.
My dad, who lives just an hour away from Broughton, suggests that the key to understanding this apparent paradox is in the amused contempt that many Britons have for politics. It’s not that they’re sheep: they just think that no matter what powers are given to the police, freedom is guaranteed by the fundamental incompetence of British police. We trust the authorities because the authorities are too stupid and useless to harm us.
There’s a certain truth to that, and not just in Britain. But surveillance tech is improving, and the delta between its effectiveness and the incompetence of its operators is narrowing.
Wow. You know, I was going to post a few of my surf shots this week, perhaps with some accompanying whinging about how hard it is to illustrate scale when shooting waves, but after this series by Clark Little? I think I’ll just be quiet.
Just got this from Public Knowledge:
Hollywood’s lobbyists are running all over the Hill to sneak in a copyright filtering provision into the stimulus package. The amendment [presented by Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) will] allow ISPs to “deter†child pornography and copyright infringement through network management techniques. The amendment is very, very controversial for a couple of reasons:
- First, infringement can’t be found through “network management†techniques. There are legal uses for copyrighted works even without permission of the owner.
- Second, it would require Internet companies to examine every bit of information everyone puts on the Web in order to find those allegedly infringing works, without a hint of probable cause. That would be a massive invasion of privacy, done at the request of one industry, violating the rights of everyone who is online.
Right now, we need you to contact a few key Senators: Majority Leader Harry Reid, Chairman of the Appropriations Committee Daniel Inouye, and Chairman of the Commerce Committee Jay Rockefeller, Chairman of the Finance Committee Max Baucus, and senior member of the Appropriations Committee Senator Barbara Mikulski, and tell them to leave out this controversial provision.
Click here for Public Knowledge’s suggested letter/fax. Also, California, can you please do us a favor and make Feinstein your governor so the rest of us don’t have to suffer her any more? And don’t give me any noise about what a bad governor she’d be. We already know you have no standards.
I have zero interest in football, but this is a fascinating look at what it takes to transfer the action on the field to your television screen:
If the production crew of a televised football game is like a symphony orchestra, Bob Fishman is its conductor. He sits front and center in the dark trailer, insulated from the sunshine and the roar of the crowd, taking the fragments of sounds and moving images and assembling the broadcast on the fly, mediating the real event into the digital one. He scans the dizzying bank of screens to select the next shot, and the next, and the next, layering in replays, graphics, and sound, barking his orders via headset to his crew, plugging into a rhythm that echoes the pulse of the game.
I understand that we’re getting alll the way into the 40s today, before plunging back into the frozen winter. Sounds like a good time for my annual solicitation for employment near the Equator. I mix an excellent martini.
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Matt Cooper thinks that if we really want to change government, we should get serious about improving defense procurement. I think that the public appetite for this is fairly thin, but if it were done right, it could bring massive returns.
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Getty Images goes looking for content at Flickr. Interesting.  There are loads and loads of phenomenally skilled photographers on Flickr, but I can’t help but feel like this is just one more step in the direction of making it harder to make a living as a professional photographer.
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Apple, making sure your kids sell candy instead of dope. Or something like that. (DopeWars has been on every handheld I’ve had since 1998).
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Thomas Fuchs and Felix Sockwell ofter some branding help to the GOP. Some of them are actually quite thoughtful.
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I’d really like to see some follow-up on, and independent confirmation of, NSA whistleblower Russell Tice’s claims aired on Wednesday night:
TICE: Well, I don’t know what our former president knew or didn’t know. I’m sort of down in the weeds. But the National Security Agency had access to all Americans’ communications, faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications. And that doesn’t — it didn’t matter whether you were in Kansas, you know, in the middle of the country, and you never made a communication — foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications. (emphasis supplied)
He goes on to explain how the NSA, under the guise of trying to ensure that they weren’t reaching into communications they shouldn’t, were doing exactly that.  Now, I do tend to believe that the NSA has done that (see, e.g., statements that some NSA employees were listening in on intimate conversations between deployed soldiers and their wives). A systematic wholesale monitoring on the scale of what Tice is talking about, however, goes well beyond my original suspicions. But not beyond possibility. I’d like to see his claims taken seriously and investigated.
It’s a bit surreal to see the DTV transition come to pass, as I’ve spent much of my legal career dealing with the various factors delaying it. In any event, it looks like it’s coming. For real this time:
At noon sharp Thursday in Hawaii, a message appeared on analog TV sets across the islands: “All full-power Hawaii TV stations are now digital.”
The state shut down old-fashioned broadcast signals, more than a month before the rest of the country is set to make the now-contentious switch.
It was, of course, a surprise to people who can’t actually comprehend what’s been flashing across their screens for months (if not years):
“The calls we’re getting now are from those people who are waking up and saying, `Oh my God, what do I do?'” said Lyle Ishida, the FCC’s Hawaii digital TV project manager, just before the switch.
I alternate between having some sympathy and outright mockery. Maybe the eldery lady down the block simply tunes out whenever see hears the word “digital”. Her? I want to help. But for all these twits who won’t understand why their screens have gone snowy because they couldn’t comprehend the announcements between Judge Judy episodes? They deserve a break from television.
In any event, it’s here. It’s coming. A month from now. For real this time. The incoming administration may delay it a short bit (an ultimately pointless exercise, from a consumer’s point of view, I believe), but that television set in the spare bedroom will very soon need a new box to be useful.
(And if that’s the set your grandmother or dad watches? Maybe you should ask them if you can help.)
This site – Tiltshiftmaker.com – lets you approximate the effects of tiltshift photography without actually doing it. It’s a fun way to explore the possibilities without committing to it.  I used it to rework a photo of my own:
Nifty, no?
Sounds like LiveJournal might be on its way out:
The bubble in social networking has burst, decisively. LiveJournal, the San Francisco-based arm of Sup, a Russian Internet startup, has cut 12 of 28 U.S. employees — and offered them no severance, we’re told.
[ . . . ]
The company’s product managers and engineers were laid off, leaving only a handful of finance and operations workers — which speaks to a website to be left on life support.
Ouch. It’s entirely unsurprising – there are only so many investors in the world willing trade something for nothing – but it’s still a bit sad. LiveJournal – started in 1999 – can lay claim to being part of the foundation upon which online social networking was built. Further, it provides the infrastructure on which a number of unique shared-interest communities depend (however, that sort of ecological frailty is not a good idea). I hope that its users can find a new home (preferably one that doesn’t depend on an unsustainable business model).
This story on “passive” heating of homes just confirms my decision that if I’m ever building a place for myself, I’m hiring Germans to do it:
The concept of the passive house, pioneered in this city of 140,000 outside Frankfurt, approaches the challenge from a different angle. Using ultrathick insulation and complex doors and windows, the architect engineers a home encased in an airtight shell, so that barely any heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a passive house can be warmed not only by the sun, but also by the heat from appliances and even from occupants’ bodies.
And in Germany, passive houses cost only about 5 to 7 percent more to build than conventional houses.
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I wouldn’t even consider owning an iPhone (keyboard required), but I’ll have to admit that this nifty little application – which geocodes your photographs by syncing your iphone’s GPS position with the timestamp on your photos – makes me wish my Treo could do that.
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I wonder if this search/bridge will make the Tor anonymizer service any more useful. I try to keep a Tor node running most of the time, but it doesn’t seem to see much use. What’s Tor?
Tor is endorsed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other civil liberties groups as a method for whistle blowers and human-rights workers to communicate with journalists, among other uses. It works by randomly routing traffic, such as website requests and e-mail, through a network of nodes hosted by volunteers around the world before delivering it to its destination. The traffic is encrypted enroute through every node except the final one, and the end point cannot see where the traffic or message originated. Theoretically, nobody spying on the traffic can identify the source.
It’s often painfully slow and not terribly easy to use, however. Perhaps the app I linked will help stimulate some interest in overcoming that.
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Looks like NASA is contracting out resupply of the International Space Station to two private operators. While part of me is pleased to see an operator like SpaceX get some stability through this, I can’t help but wonder if it’s a significant step down the path of placing the space program (and tech) entirely in private hands. The problem I have with that is massive public spending on R&D that will only end up being locked up for private benefit.
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Consider the possiblities of this published research:
Rapid and selective erasures of certain types of memories in the brain would be desirable under certain clinical circumstances. By employing an inducible and reversible chemical-genetic technique, we find that transient CaMKII overexpression at the time of recall impairs the retrieval of both newly formed one-hour object recognition memory and fear memories, as well as 1-month-old fear memories. Systematic analyses suggest that excessive CaMKII activity-induced recall deficits are not caused by disrupting the retrieval access to the stored information but are, rather, due to the active erasure of the stored memories. Further experiments show that the recall-induced erasure of fear memories is highly restricted to the memory being retrieved while leaving other memories intact. Therefore, our study reveals a molecular genetic paradigm through which a given memory, such as new or old fear memory, can be rapidly and specifically erased in a controlled and inducible manner in the brain.
Well.
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Open source once against illustrates the dangers of putting our elections in the hands of Diebold and other black box voting technology companies:
“Ballot Browser, an open source Python program developed by Mitch Trachtenberg (yours truly) as part of the all-volunteer Humboldt County Election Transparency Project, was instrumental in revealing that Diebold counting software had dropped 197 ballots from Humboldt County, California’s official election results. Despite a top-to-bottom review by the California Secretary of State’s office, it appears that Diebold had not informed that office of the four-year-old bug.
Shocked!
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I spent no small amount of time this year revising and improving my shot-to-publication workflow for my photo coverage of pro cycling races. It’s an enormously time consuming process, and I’m still looking to improve it. Reading this (recent) history of pro photog filing systems makes me rather thankful for today’s tech.
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Speaking of photo tech – Polaroid is done making instant film today.
Almost 60 years after Polaroid introduced its iconic instant camera, the company will stop manufacturing the film Dec. 31. Remaining film supplies are expected to dry up sometime next year.
“Shake it like a what?”, the kids ask.