GENOMICON

Isn’t virtual reality brilliant? It’s just like reality, but you wear a hat.

I’m not sure if they’ve actually built the thing yet, but they’ve got a grant to develop it etc. I expect at some point they’ll do a TED talk, get a standing ovation, then we’ll never see them ever again. That’s what usually happens.

Quite interesting those EEG hats though. If I was a whole lot richer I’d get one and use it to control an army of insects.

Anyway, that’s enough cynicism for the moment.

I have a feeling this eeg stuff could be the blind-side technology that totally changes the shape of… things. If it ever becomes good enough. To start with it will probably be used for completely useless things like controlling your phone, or closing the curtains… so you’ll be constantly having broken-down curtains that are always running out of batteries etc… but the possibility of being able to shrink interfaces to sub-finger level could be a little too tempting to pass over.

The reason voice->text never caught on is that you can’t talk and think at the same time. If you’re typing you can kindof think ahead… you just leave your fingers to get on with it. Whether you can think and think at the same time remains to be seen – but if I were you, I’d leave well alone. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Go back to using a biro. A Quill and Ink. At least they don’t BSD on you.

Don’t know what this guy is doing

Looks like The Big Lebowski dance… although at one point he does apologize for being a fat guy with a bad hair cut that makes me feel so sorry for him that I just want to lie down and go to sleep for 1000 years. It’s ok dude. It’s ok.

I like this guy – if everyone in the whole world was like this, we wouldn’t get more done necessarily, but we’d probably fuck things up less.

Told you so

Little robot that reacts to SMS emoticons… among other things.

Pretty cool – one day someone will figure out something that’s actually useful to do with this – absolutely inevitable… the fact that there’s a camera, microphone, speakers, sense-of-balance etc in these things gives it an incredible amount of scope. I would have thought. A detachable head, as I’ve pointed out before.

There’s a potentially interesting sci-fi angle in cellphones using genetic algorithms to “learn to walk”… not just with a purpose-built bit of hardware, but any bit of hard-ware. A cellphone could take over an electric toothbrush or an electric carving-knife and use it to scuttle across the floor.

There are a bunch of videos about using genetic algorithms to learn to walk… I’ll try to find the Ted one… hang on…

there you go.

This is actually fairly cool in a funny sort of way.

Someone’s made a mechano centrifuge to see if a lava-lamp will work on Jupiter. Because that’s the sort of thing you do.

And much to everyone’s surprise…

Note use of Android phone to measure G-force. I tell yer – the smartphone is the breakout device for the internet of things. It’s the Intel Outside.

This is something that’ll happen more and more – cellphones as brains for physical objects.

I think this photo is kindof neat as well – it’s an unbelievable miracle of technology, powering a cart made out of corrugated cardboard – rubbish basically. And… you know? In five years time, the phone will probably be as worthless as the cardboard – ie: it’ll just be chucked out.

And 5 years after that, it will be regarded as a quaint retro-curio, and 10 years after that, it’s former-owner will wish that he hadn’t ditched it, because now it has value as an historical artifact.

It will be 2030. All bets are off.

(edit)

Although to be honest, I was envisaging something a little more like this

“Eastman Kodak claims that Apple Computers and Research in Motion are guilty of infringement of patents. Kodak has taken the step to request the U.S. International Trade Commission prevent both companies from importing their smart phones into the United States. Nokia filed a similar complaint in December 2009.” – from bettertrades.com

I can’t tell if this is satire or not… but that’s the nature of the beast. Intellectual Property enforcement has become so weird and extreme that… well, it is actually hard to tell if some things are satire or not.

It must be as clear as day by now that the entire system is unworkable, and either needs to be rolled back to the more sane system that existed about 250 years ago… or just scrapped completely. There seems to be (well actually, there IS) and entire parasitic economy based upon swooping on anything successful and suing for breach of IP. Avatar had loads of them.

There have been two particularly farcical incidents Down-Under recently, when use of a would-be national flag has been stopped because some deeply unenlightened person somewhere owns the IP on it. One was the Aboriginal flag vs Google – the other was in NZ, involving some kerfuffle with an MP and a clash of interests.

I really do hope that iPhone imports (I thought they were already American?) get blocked – in the vain hope that it might wake people to the idea that THE main thing “chilling” innovation is this ludicrous system of laws we have – to protect micro-monopolies on the utterly uncontainable.

The law is fucking wrong. It needs to be got rid of.

(via)

I’ve been ranting on about this quietly to myself for so long not that to me (at least) it seems like common sense – smartphones are detachable heads.

So this thing uses the camera (eyes) of a nokia, and the brain to control a lego machine to do a 4-rowed Rubiks Cube. I bet Mr Rubik would never have predicted this when he invented the thing back in 74. It’s a nice example of a… fad? that’s never gone away. It seems to be progressively reinvented – and I guess that for several generations now, it’s been (always was) a talisman for “geek-cleverer-than-everyone-else-hood”… it’s morphed into a type of turing test.

Back to Sony.

Remember the rootkit fiasco?

That was the one where Sony deliberately infected its customer’s machines with a rootkit virus – of the sort that hackers use to take total control of their victim’s machines – Sony did this to prevent people (you) from doing things that Sony didn’t like. They thought they had the right.

They should have gone to prison. If they were small-time hackers they would have… but apparently it’s ok to break the law if you’re a corporation and you’re only doing it for money.

Remember The Palladium Scare of the early 00s?

This one really, seriously put the shits up people who understand the web. It involved building a rootkit into the hardware of every computer – so then Microsoft (or other “trusted” parties) could spy on everything you did and prevent you from doing things it didn’t like – with the ability to completely disable your machine if they wanted… basically make you ask permission for everything you ran, and lock you into its proprietary formats. Forever.

You’d have to be a hacker to get round it, and you know… hackers go to prison.

In the same way that Microsoft could lock down Word documents to “trusted” applications, HP could just as easily force its printers to output low resolution documents if a genuine HP color cartridge was not used in the printer. This would certainly make some customers angry, but when you consider that HP makes its “printer” money on accessories, losing a customer who isn’t purchasing their brand of cartridges is not really losing that much.

Echoing Anderson’s sentiments, Bruce Schneier opined “this [Palladium] has nothing to do with security; it has everything to do with protectionism.” – from securityfocus.com 2002

So that was yesterday. Today is tomorrow already.

So welcome to the teenage years of the 21st Century. Much has changed, little has changed. “The Mobile Web” they say. “Smartphones: Platform of the future”… all that sort of thing, and tomorrow (or is today?) Apple are launching their new secret product that everybody already knows is a tablet PC. Whether it’s a tablet PC or a tablet iPhone remains to be seen… the only thing we know is It’s very new, It’s very tablet, And it’s Very Very Apple.

There will be a clamour of jackdaws. There will be videos of people on youtube unwrapping their first one. Personally I couldn’t give a toss, but that’s me. I’m casual. A bit over-casual actually. I’ve over-shot. It’s an issue – or would be if I gave a rats, which I don’t, so that’s ok then.

So anyway, back to Apple… or more specifically, back to the iPhone.

People often bitch about Microsoft nicking Apple’s ideas but this one goes the other way. Apple has created Palladium in the iPhone. You have to ask permission to run anything… which coming from a cellphone-angle is predictable enough, but if this is going to be a future platform of the web, then it’s a fairly serious problem.

Some people think that the App-Store is A Good Thing… developers can make a shitload of money they say. What it does however is lock in place the “Work once, get paid forever” model – which… well… it feels to me like it defies some sort of law of thermodynamics. You work once, then you extract value from your customers forever. I mean I’m all in favour of a diverse ecosystem of business models, but to enforce one particular model… THIS particular model, is profoundly counter-productive.

THIS particular model, is profoundly counter-productive…

… because it involves micro-monopolies. Each new innovation needs to be legally ringfenced to stop anyone else using it… which (as is plain to see) seriously chokes innovation. This is why in the end Open Source… anything, is going to piss all over proprietary anything. Which maybe (just maybe) is why Apple have enforced the “work once, get paid forever” model.

As an aside, if “work once, get paid forever” is set in stone as some moral imperative, then you’ve got the makings of one of the blindest evils that we humans manage to inflict on ourselves, and that’s Institutions who’s responsibility is to enforce the unenforceable. More on this later.

So I had a look at current state of play of Palladium… apparently MS changed the name (doubtless to distract the growing sea of ire that they were provoking)… to “Trusted Computing Platform” – which actually means “Untrusted Computer Customers” (that’s you)… and the Trusted Computing Group was formed, that seems to include everyone in the whole fucking world… except Apple.

Ironic as hell that they’ve managed to pull it off, on their own, with nary a complaint. Apart from people who’ve fallen foul of it already – had their apps rejected. You know… people like Google.

So is the tablet going to have an App Store? Who knows.

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(This post is one of four interlocking posts, the other three of which I haven’t started.)

Yea, so ok… Google have just launched their new Android phone, and everyone’s got an opinion.

Everyone except me. I don’t even have a cellphone. What do I know? (I’m not a late adopter… I had a cellphone back in the 80s. This is my mate Adi talking on it back in about 1990. See? That’s real. That’s reality the way it used to be)

Actually I have two cellphones – one for international, one for NZ… but I never use either of them. I don’t even charge them up. I hardly ever use a landline either. So what do I know? Here’s an advert:

And another thing about Google talk. Which looks quite useful:

If you use phones, but I don’t, so I probably wouldn’t find it that useful. It looks useful though.

vague thoughts:

Thought #1:

There seems to be a lot of talk about “Android” vs “iPhone” – which is a fair enough. I make that comparison myself… but as someone pointed out over here, that is not the real picture. This is the real picture:

Android isn’t competing with iPhone’s 1%, it’s competing with everyone else’s 99%.

Thought #2:

LOL. Have you seen this? It’s a thing about how Android will fit into “The Enterprise Environment“…

… and is basically an accidental treatise not on how Android won’t (or will) fit with Enterprise Culture, but on how Enterprise Culture won’t fit in with the 21st Century. Private Tyrannies that have crystalised out of an economic system that is failing… and the knots of legalese are becoming more and more constricting. It’s like they’re trying to maintain this vice-like grip over their inner-environments… not realising that increasingly, unstoppably… there is no difference between the inner and the outer environment any more. Borders are becoming ever more porous, irrelevant, and counter-productive.

Thought #3:

Ok – back to iPhone vs Android again, even though I said it was irrelevant in Thought #1.

Open vs closed… iPhone is closed, Android is open… and here is the fundamental reason why iPhone is destined to become “The Apple of iPhones”: It’s to do with killer apps.

There’s really only one killer app… when you get down to it, all killer apps (apart from fire and spears) are variations of The One Killer App. And that is…

… “Whatever Allows The Fastest Memetic Propagation”.

That’s it. That’s what it’s all about – every major Web 2.0 site has this at it’s core, the rise of the CD, the rise of PHP, the English Bible… all of it all comes back to this simple advantage. This can be rephrased as “Whatever is best at getting around obstacles”. And in the wonderful world of the 21st Century, the main obstacles we face are legal… to do with IP laws from the last century.

Android phones have a major advantage over iPhones in that Google doesn’t attempt to take control (and therefore responsibility) for the root… so people aren’t choked by IP law.

Breaking the law is a major killer-app – because the law is wrong. This ACTA bullshit that’s coming down the tubes… and all these pathetic 3-strikes manoeuvres are in essence, an attempt to turn the entire world into a set of private tyrannies. The same machinery (funnily enough) needed for a state tyranny.

Thought #4:

So get an Android-powered phone. Vote Open-Source, every single time.

There’s been a fair bit of this in the last couple of months… prosthetics controlled by thought etc. There was recently a load of excitement and fuss to do with brain-to-speech synthesis… which may or may not be tempered by the fact that it only did 3 vowel sounds, and required a bit of implanted hardware that neurons grew around. Oooh. Aaaah. etc.

Still that is a bit like saying “yea, my dog plays chess but he’s not that good”. A hello-world is a hello-world. The difference between 0 and 1 is MASSIVELY different to the difference between 1 and 2.

I went on about this sort of thing in Feb last year. There’s an Open-EEG community… or was… but here’s the thing: if you don’t have a blog, no one can tell if you’re alive. I guess I could join the mailing list, but I’m already overwhelmed with mailing lists, and I’m only on about 5.

Anyway… a couple of things turned up recently that are partly related.

Waking you up when you’re sleeping lightly thing for iPhone – although according to wikipedia, there is some dispute as to whether being woken when you’re sleeping lightly is the best way to be woken… personally, I’d tend to go for something like this

But anyway, I saw the waking up watch/iphone thing a while back and had a spot of bother finding it again… and found that there are actually loads of such devices out there – the sensory bit is called an Actigraph – which sounds a bit snake-oily to me… like any advert that contains the words “scientifically proven”. As far as I can gather, all it is is a piezo, which measures movement… often filtering out everything except the 2-3 hz range… which is about the speed of a normal, common, every-day case of DTs. How that correlates to sleep, I couldn’t say, but that is apparently what’s being measured.

I think though the real value of this isn’t being woken up when you’re sleeping lightly, but the fact that it forces you to pay attention to sleep over a long period – keeping a sleep diary etc… which will probably make you aware of just how much caffeine, alcohol, stress etc are messing you about.

It would be quite cool to have something like a system-monitor for your body/mind going all the time. So rather than being pulled this way and that by laziness, gluttony and random whims, you do actually get to run yourself like a well tuned machine. Do what works, rather than what feels good in the short term.

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Off at a tangent – or something that comes in at a different level, something that also turned up recently is this pedometer that has an LED flower on the side of it.

and if you don’t do loads of walking, it dies.

Utter genius – it’s a tamagotchi that makes you do something you want to do, but can’t be arsed with.

“Captology” – capitalising on people’s amazing powers of nurturing and anthropomorphism etc. This is kindof what I was on about in my open-source energy monitor idea – setting up the interface so it’s kindof pavlovian… but this is so much better.

There are so many applications of this – turn your iPhone into a Chumby-like creature that you have to look after. Like having a familiar… or one of those daemons off Golden Compass. iPhone as pet. Brilliant.

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PS:

And so it encroaches… this year (2009) is the year that iPhones started to get everywhere.

I think that will be its historical relevance. It was also the year that Obama did fuck all, apart from Not Be Bush… but that will be lost in the mists of time. Looking back (down the wrong end of the historical telescope), this will be the year that we failed to do anything about Climate Change, and the year that the dominant interface between Humanity and The Universal Mind took (like Kudzu in the Deep South) hold.

So… exhibit 1, not an iPhone exactly, but the principle remains:

A tool to help people not die when crossing the border from Mexico to the US

Which ought to have the nutjobs seeing red – but is at least a humanitarian antidote to their vigilante border-patrols. I can see this being quite a… thing. The ability for disenfranchised, dispossessed people just to have access to maps is a big deal… let alone the ability to have a reliable single point of contact… but the flipside of course is that they’re now trackable.

Exhibit 2:

From the other side of the wall, Aiders and Abettors of Murder and taxational parasites, Raytheon appear to be developing an iPhone “situational awareness application” which will “combine data from many sources to try and give an accurate picture of hotspots such as sniper hideouts and vantage points.”

The decision to use iPhones being due to “building software for the gadget is cheaper and simpler than some of the expensive options specifically designed for military use.”

Once more unto the breach – the very same reason for the proliferation of crossbows, guns, punk-rock, file-sharing etc etc. Still… I shouldn’t think it would make much of a dent in the million dollars a year that it costs the US to field a soldier in someone else’s country.

Exhibit 3:

Apropos of that, but not directly about iPhones…

Apparently people fighting to get the Americans out of Iraq and Afghanistan (note, both locations) have managed to hack into predator video feeds with a $26 bit of software called SkyGrabber.

The DIY drone commenters/community are suitably unimpressed, , but it does illustrate a general principle – the ill advisability of trying to maintain an asymmetric advantage based on wealth in the midst of a technological Cambrian explosion. We all win or we all lose.

But there it is… the seepage becoming a flood – cheap, throwaway tech getting into the bloodstream.

On a lighter note,

exhibit 4:

A nice bit of potential vapourware…

from Copenhagen (in fact called “The Copenhagen Wheel“) – a bike wheel that uses braking to charge a battery that can then be used when going up hills etc… which I’ll believe when I see to be honest, there’s a whole attention-industry in green “concepts” that never get made.

The interesting part to me though, isn’t the braking generator, but the way that an iPhone is used as a (really) smart dashboard. That’s doable – that has mileage – whereas I suspect quite strongly that the motor in the wheel won’t be strong enough to actually get you up the hills that you’d want help with.

Still, the iPhone is the ultimate in-car GPS-system killer.

(iPhone hackoff)

Ok… exhibit 5:

AT&T’s customers get so fucked off by them that they attempt to bring to down their network. – which to me seems like a brain attacking it’s own nervous-system… but… you know… we are at war with corporate control. No doubt about it – and my big prediction for 2010 is that this will escalate. 2010 will be the year when the gloves come off.