Category Archives: technology

Posted on
by

A Manhattan Project of the Mind (or Brain Wars)
Sharon Weinberger, @weinbergersa, Columnist BBC.com/Future
Presentation at SXSW
#brainwars

·      Background
o   Do a weekly column called “Code Red”
o   Write about the Pentagon’s role in neuroscience
o   For ten years I’ve written about the technology the Pentagon chooses to fund.
o   About 6 years starting writing this articles.
o   After writing these articles, starting getting thousand of letters from people who claimed to be experimental test subjects.
§  Whether these people are right or wrong, they are googling what the Pentagon is doing, and finding out that in fact, the Pentagon does have technology to make voices in people’s heads.
o   This is partly about neuroscience as a weapon.
o   What are they really doing, and what are they not doing? What’s the hype and what’s the reality?
o   There’s some good science, and some bad science.
·      You can trace the Pentagon’s interest back to:
o    J.C.R. Licklider’s vision in 1960: a man-compuyter symbiosis.
§  Seems obvious today, but in 1960, the notion that a computer wouldn’t just crunch numbers, but would interact with you and help you make decisions.
§  The game Missile Command is similar to a real problem the air force had in the 1950s, and hence developed Sage, a system for monitoring and tracking incoming missiles.
o   Jacques Vidal’s “Toward direct brain-computer communication”
§  Got funding from DARPA as a basic science project to use observable electrical brain signals to control technology.
·      DARPA Director’s Vision 2002:
o   Imagine 25 years from now where old guys like me put on a pair of glasses or a helment and open our eyes. Somewhere there will be a robot that will open it’s eyes…
·      Duke University Medical Center in 2003
o   Taught rhesus monkeys to consciously control the movement of a robot arm in real time, using only signals from their brains.
o   Crude approximation, takes a lot of training.
o   But it works
·      Augmented Cognition (AugCog) 2003/2004:
o   Goal for order of magnitude increase in mental capacity.
o   Want to help soldiers manage cognitive overload.
o   Vision of Augmented Cognition 2005
§  Video showing how sensors can be used to detect overload by brain. When too many streams of information threaten to overload here, the user interface is streamlined to highlight certain elements and reduce others (e.g. maximize text, minimize images).
·      Neurotechnology for intelligence analysts
o   They look at hundreds of images each day, trying to glean information.
o   Scientists wanted to watch the P300 signal (object recognition), to see if they could help the analysts better spot things.
o   In theory, they could detect the signal faster than the consciousness can interpret it. There’s 300ms delay in the conscious brain.
§  We don’t totally understand why there is the delay.
·      In 2008, did project called “Luc’s binoculars”
o   Wanted to use binoculars and P300 signals to help identify objects of interest.
·      In 2012, actually have a system…soldier with EEG in the lab. But to actually develop technology to use in the field, it is much harder.
·      Neuroprosthetics: 2009
o   By 2004, 2005, and 2006, one of the biggest problems was roadside bombs. Lots of soldiers losing limbs.
o   Modern prosthetics are cable systems: you clench a muscle in your back, it is sensed, and moves a cable to move the arm.
o   It’s very, very hard.
o   Our understanding of which neurons do what is still crude…it’s probabilistic.
o   Mechanical arms are still more useful.
·      2013: Brain Net
o   brain-to-brain interface in rats
o   Same guys at Duke who did the rhesus monkey brain implant
o   They linked two rat brains… one is the encoder, and one is the decoder.
·      Other Directions: Narrative Networks
o   “neuroscience for propaganda”
·      Future Attributes Screening Technology
o   When you go through the airport, a subset of agents are trained to specifically look for suspicious behaviors: facial expressions, body language.
o   DHS want use remote sensors to look at physiological indicators: heart rate, sweating, blood flow in face, etc…
§  They want to identify “mal-intent”. Whether you harbor the intent to commit a crime.
o   See Homeland Security Youtube video
§  Future Attribute Screening Technology
§  Battelle / Farber
o   All sorts of issues: Why are people nervous? Because they are going to commit a crime? Or because they’re skipping work to go to an event? Or because they ate a ham sandwich?
§  Decades of research have shown we still can’t reliably detect lies.
§  We certainly can’t detect mal-intent.
·      Future Directions: Smart Drugs
o   No formal studies done.
o   Anecdotal reports: 25% of soldiers in field use a smart drug such as Ritalin or Adderall.
o   Should we test smart drugs?
o   Possibly the government is staying away from it because of the long history of problematic research done in the past (LSD experiments by CIA), plagued by ethical concerns.
·      President Obama’s Vision 2013
o   Unlocking and mapping the brain. Wants to flow billions of dollars into. If that happens, DARPA will be one of the major sources of funding.
·      Hype vs. Reality
o   Brain controlled drones?
§  The technique is slow. 10s of bits of information per minute, and subject to noise.
§  Not obvious that it can be used yet for field applications.
·      Where are we today?
o   Brain-computer interface already here in limited capacity: very limited, very crude, don’t work well.
o   Neuroprosthetics still years away.
o   Deception Detection: very little agreement, even on the basic science.
o   Mind-controlled drones: a generation away.
·      Implications
o   Technological: expands the battlefield through telepresence
o   Ethical: human testing questions…is it an even battlefield for augmented soldiers?
o   Do we have the right to brain privacy? Do soldiers?
o   It’s hard to have a serious debate about futuristic technology. (The giggle factor)
§  Will: interesting idea, given increasing pace of technology, we need to talk about the future, but it’s hard to do.
·      Was able to participate in experiment using FMRI to try to read associated brain activity
o   In two hour session, surrounded by ton of gear, had a difficult time being able to even detect what part of brain associated with tapping her finger.
o   If it was that hard to detect such a simple thing, then reading deeper thoughts, reading minds, is very far off, even if it is ever possible.

Posted on
by

The Future of 3D Printing
Alice Taylor, Founder/CEO Makie Lab, @wonderlandblog
Avi Reichental, CEO 3D Systems
Rich Brown, Senior Editor CNET, @Richard_H_Brown
Scott Summit, Founder/CTO 3D Systems/Bespoke Products, @BespokeInc
#FTR3DPRINT
·      Makie: Customized doll factory. Have an iPad app now.
·      Prosthetic Legs: Scan existing leg to make a new leg that makes the contours of existing.
·      3D Systems: range of printers from consumer end $1,300 Cube printer to many hundreds of thousands.
·      At the consumer end, can make entry level, basic plastic stuff.
·      The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
o   Everyone has a terminal in their house, and nanobots come flooding in and make whatever you want.
·      NASA using metal printing for a rocket to go to mars
·      Voxel printing: using multiple materials. Objects made of tiny parts.
·      Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing
o   Plug for this book
·      What are the opportunities for small businesses?
·      What are the IP related concerns?
·      What can we do with this?
·      What are the opportunities?
o   Reichental:
§  Endless
§  What is today…
·      Every hearing aid device is 3D printed
·      Many dental implants are planned
·      Many parts on drones are printed
·      Aircraft parts are being printed
o   Every F18 has about 90 printed parts
§  The possibilities
·      Localization of production
§  The gamechanger is that every company, from a garage startup to the biggest corporation, has access to the same level of 3d printing technology.
o   Taylor:
§  Started from videogame industry
§  Wanted to make video assets into products
§  First idea was to print avatars
o   Summit
§  The things that kill startups, compared to a big company are:
·      Time to market
·      Up front costs
·      Inventory costs
§  With a 3D printing business model, these costs become irrelevant.
§  Hardware plays become more like software plays. There’s just the time investment to build models. You can be more nimble.
o   Taylor:
§  It’s product on demand.
o   Reichental:
§  In addition to democratization
§  Printer doesn’t care if it is printing complex object versus simple product.
§  Almost no waste
§  Very little energy
§  Printed locally
§  Millions can design for themselves
·      Is it about consumer, medical, military – where’s the biggest use?
o   Reichental: We can’t even convince of all the opportunities ahead of us.
o   Summit:
§  We don’t think of ourselves as a medical company. We see ourselves as a fashion company, we just happen to make body parts.
§  Everything we do is a unique instantiation. Nothing is mass produced.
§  You can’t peg it as a medical product, as a fashion product. It’s a blurring of what exists.
·      Intellectual Property
o   Yoda is a copyrighted character.
o   But he’s up there on thingiverse for free.
o   Taylor: he’s a popular calibration item.
o   Is there a danger?
§  Taylor:
·      As Tim O’Reilly says, the biggest problem is obscurity, not piracy.
·      Is Disney’s bottom line adversely affected by someone printing a Yoda?
o   No
§  Summit:
·      In traditional manufacturing, as soon as you take your designs to Asia to be manufactured, you’ve lost your IP anyway.
§  Taylor:
·      People who are going to print stuff at home, they are creative. They make an ecosystem around a product.
·      When we make clothes for our dolls, we put the patterns up on the forum. Then our customers remix/improve them.
§  Summit:
·      It increases the engagement with the user.
§  Reichental:
·      The IP system today is antiquated. It doesn’t reflect the power of the crowd, or new monetization strategies, or what is possible today, or what new, nimble startups do.
·      Consumer 3D Printing
o   MakerBot 1: completely open source.
o   Failed kickstarter project to make a cheaper copy using open source plans.
o   MakerBot 2: using some closed source.
·      SLA: liquid, SLS: powder, FDM: extrusion. About 9 different mechanisms.
·      How do we move 3D printing forward?
o   Reichental
§  MakerBot came from the red rock project in Bristol. It started with the heart of democratization.
§  There are now 60 companies around the world making something like the original makerbot.
§  But that’s replication, not innovation.
·      They’re recreating what is, not insightfully rearranging, originating.
§  Innovative companies are not blocked by patents. They innovative around them, and come up with better products.
§  I sympathize with any projects for democratization, but I think we should design something innovative.
o   Taylor
§  Now we have 50 different FDM makers, and it’s bringing down price, and building up the ecosystems around the materials: sparkly plastics, wood filament, etc.
§  That’s for FDM, which was open source.
§  For SLA/SLS, which it is locked up by patents, we don’t see the same price and materials advantages.
§  The powder we use to print the dolls hasn’t been democratized. So we have 70 euros a kilo, whereas the ABS that goes into Makerbots is 5 euros a kilo.
·      Reichental: We’ll help you with that.
·      3D printing for social good
o   Solar powered printed that makes glass from sand.
o   Product to grind up plastic and turn it back into filament.
§  Happy meal toys and milk jugs go in the top, and useable raw material comes out the bottom.
o   On the flip side, the Defense Distributed people are making weapons.
§  They don’t want the government to regulate anything.
o   What do you guys think of this responsibility?
§  Taylor:
·      I’m a little ignorant of gun regulation, thanks to being British.
·      For at least a decade, it’s going to be easier to buy a gun than to print one. It’s not a practical threat in the next ten years. More practical threats is gun trading.
·      It’s a decoy in a way to get media riled up.
o   Modern Meadow: Wants to print leather and edible meat.
§  Environmental benefits.
o   Summit
§  This is a tool for a creative person to have their imagination come to life.
§  This is a basic good.
§  A parent can give their kid a 3D printer instead of a game system.
§  Kids will take this and learn this. They’ll going beyond the $300 printer into SLS and cloud printer, and they’ll be an amazing innovator by the time they are in college.
§  It could be a real rebirth of innovation.
o   Reichental
§  Let’s give kids the opportunity to be creative
§  For hundreds of years, publishing was under the control of a few.
§  Then the internet changed all that, and now anyone can communicate.
·      Q: Materials?
o   Taylor
§  Used off the shelf.
§  Not a lot available now.
§  It could take another 15 years before everything the science fiction writers say comes true
o   Reichental
§  We have more than 100 materials in our portfolio
·      Wax: for customization of jewelry
·      Biologically compatible materials
·      Compostics
·      6 different metal alloys
·      nylons and plastics
·      Q: 3D printing electronics?
o   Taylor:
§  Already happening in british universities, must be elsewhere.
§  Possible to print circuitry into the material, but still under development.
o   Reichental
§  Built an airplane without any flaps, with circuitry inside to change shape of wings.
§  4D printing will be 3D printing with functionality.
§  5D printing will be dynamic rearrangement of materials.
·       

Posted on
by
A Robot in Your Pocket
Jeff Bonforte, CEO Xobni, @bonforte
Amit Kapur, CEO Gravity, @amitk
#robotapps


·      Marvin Minsky
o   In the 50s, predicted robots would be everywhere in 5 years
o   In the 60s, it was 10 years
o   In the 70s, it was 20 years
o   In the 80s, it was 40 years
·      It’s a fine line between tools and robots
o   Robata is Czech for “hard work”
o   It’s a fine line between a tool and a point where it becomes something that works for you.
·      We think of robots as a hardware thing
o   We want R2D2, Rosie, and Six.
o   What we have are vacuum cleaners and industrial robots.
·      They’re here, and they’re software.
·      What’s changed in the last decade?
o   Data
o   Smaller and cheaper sensors.
o   The more things we measure, the more accurately we can respond.
o   Smartphones are a collection of sensors we carry with us all the time.
·      Software, too.
o   Natural Language Processing: Understanding semantically what something is about.
o   Machine Learning: Software can look at data, learn from it, do intelligence tasks.
o   Distinct Ontologies: Instead of a rigid taxonomy, … Humans don’t think in hierarchical structures. We think flexibly. An iRobot vacuum makes us think about things like chores, and how we don’t have time, and the cost of hiring a may.
§  Machines need to be able to understand and combine things.
·      More data than we know what to do with.
o   We start by measuring things we don’t know what to do with.
o   Will it rain today?
§  It’s a deterministic problem. Use barometer, wind conditions, etc.
§  Stochastic: Look at 10 million shoe selections of New Yorks, and you can figure out if it’s going to rain.
·      The point of stochastic is that one data point doesn’t matter. Whereas in a deterministic model, you could crash your model with a weird data point.
·      After 24 hours, shoe selection is not correlated to weather.
§  The point is, we can correlate surprising things.
o   Xobni does this with inboxes. The average inbox is a couple of megabytes. The Xobni inbox has 40 MB of data.
·      Explicit versus implicit data
o   “I’m here at this restaurant”, or “this is my favorite person”
o   vs.
o   We look at your data, and observe what you do. If you text a person 1,000 times to the same number, why does the phone still ask you which number to use?
o   Examples of implicit data:
§  Payment patterns from credit cards
§  Locations you pass when you drive, locations you stay a long time.
§  You express your preferences and patterns through what you do every day.
o   For example: let’s say I get a txt message from someone with a link. How often do I click on links from that person? If it’s high, then go fetch the page in the background, so that when I do click on it, the page is preloaded.
o   Implicit systems are much more accurate, because they are related to current behavior and actual actions, rather that what people think they are interested in, or what they explicitly said 2 years ago.
o   Features like circles in google are explicit and they cause high cognitive load.
·      Where giants tread
o   IBM’s Watson.
§  Smart AI can win Jeopardy.
§  Now diagnose cancer.
o   Google’s self-driving car.
§  Passes 300,000 miles driven.
o   Huge R&D budgets, years of efforts.
·      Startups coming into the equation
o   The cost of getting technology and processing data is going down
o   More tools are open source
·      Big R&D innovations feel like they’re five years away, but it’s usually 10 years.
o   Example of iDrive: cost and effort to do ($5.7M for 16 terabyte drive, $1.5M monthly bandwidth bill, write every component of systems) versus Dropbox ten years later (off the shelf components, cheap costs).
·      Progression
o   Analogy: Brakes
o   Digital: Antilock
o   Robot: Crash avoidance
·      Progression
o   Analog: thermostat
o   Digital: timer thermostat
o   Robotic: Nest
·      News
o   Analog: Newspapers.
o   Digital: Online representation.
o   Robot (gravity): Personalized experience based on their preferences, derived from their past behavior
·      Businesses
o   A: Yellow pages
o   D: Yelp
o   R: Ness
·      Information
o   A: Encyclopedia
o   D: Google Search
o   R: Google Now
·      Contacts
o   A: Address book
o   D: Contacts / Email
o   R: Xobni
·      Objectives
o   Learn
o   Adapt
o   Implicit
o   Proactive
o   Personalized
·      A spam filter that’s 95% accurate is totally unreliable. 0% adoption. At 98%, still bad. 99%, still bad. You need to get to 99.8% before you get adoption.
o   But for restaurant selection, 95% is great.
o   Different level of expected quality for different systems.
·      Gravity
o   Personalizing the Internet
o   Marissa Meyer saying that Yahoo is going to be very focused on personalization.
o   Surrounding ourselves with the experts in machine learning, natural language processing.
o   Mission: leverage the interest graph to personalize the internet
o   The more information that flows into a system, the harder it becomes to find great content. It’s the signal to noise ratio.
o   The history of the internet is of companies creating better filters to find great content.
o   Phases
§  Their web: directories, google.
§  Our web: use social graph, get content shared with us from friends
§  Your web: using technology to process data to understand the individual, and have adaptive, personalized experience.
o   Interest Graphing
§  Semantic analysis of webpage. Match against ontologies we’ve built.
§  Watch what people do, match against interests.
§  Then personalize what they see.
§  Show examples of how sites filled with links (New York Times, Huffington Post), Gravity will find the top articles you’d be interested in.
·      Xobni
o   Why who matters?
§  It starts with the idea of attaching files to email. You know the sender, the receiver, and the email. Instead of presenting all files on the computer for possible attachment, you can prefilter the list, and it’s a 3x reduction in possible files.
o   Super cool demo of voicemail.
§  Voicemail transcribes and hotlinks to contacts, doing things like resolving references to email (“see the address I emailed you”), and people (the venndiagram of people they know in common means they must be talking about this Chris), and vocabulary (this two people use words like “dude”, and “hey man”)
·      Future Applications
o   Trackers are digital. What’s the robot version? The equivalent of a check engine light for your health.
o   Education: the creation of personalized education and teaching.
o   Finance: help for your particular financial situation.
·      Often people are worried about privacy. Anytime you give people data, you have to worry to what are they going to do.
·       

Posted on
by

Industrial Revolution 3.0 & Future of 3D Printing
Mike Senese, Senior Editor at Wired
Peter Weijmarshausen, CEO and Co-Founder of 3D printing marketplace Shapeways
#Future3DP
·      Is 3D printing really a gamechanger?
o   For last hundred years, getting used to mass manufacturing
o   Very effective at making complicated products in a fast, efficient way.
o   The problem is that they’re all so similar.
o   As the enduser, we have no influence over those products. We can only choose to buy or not buy (and hence we have marketers to convince us to buy.)
o   But people like to customize their products.
o   We want to make products unique, customized to each person’s needs and wants, and still doing it fast and effectively.
o   The combination is so powerful, it’s the next industrial revolution.
·      You only sell what you need. This wouldn’t be possible without the Internet. With the internet, we have feedback loops very tight. WE can do design loops very quickly. One product a year is quite normal. But on Shapeways, we’ve seen 20 or 30 iterations in a month. That’s just impossible in traditional ways.
·      You can experiment: there’s no startup costs.
·      3D printing brings products on par with software. No startup costs, you can develop just intellectual property, and turn it into something you can sell.
·      There are mirrors to what digital did to the music industry. The industry existed in a certain way for a long time, it was an effective industry. Mass customization could allow consumers to have anything they want. How are big brands going to take advantage of this opportunity?
·      Replacements parts: if a knob falls of a stereo, now you can get the exact replacement piece.
o   Manufacturers have a problem: e.g. when they make a car, they need to keep enough spare parts on hand to have a 20 year supply of those parts. Their inventory is huge. The car is designed with CAD, so all the parts could be manufactured on demand, relieving the need to keep 20 years of inventory for every part for every car produced.
·      Nokia released a phone case design under Creative Commons license, and within hours, people were modifying and adding to the case: headphone wrappers, different bases.
·      Existing powerhouses often don’t get it disruptive change. So will the manufacturers of today be the ones to adopt 3D, or will new manufactuersemerge?
·      What are some really exciting things you see coming? And how will design change, as 3D printing enables new types of products that couldn’t exist before?
o   We’re going to see design driving companies, instead of it being an idea that kicks things off, and then design is something that happens at the end.
o   Having 3D allows people to amplify the integration of design at the front of the process.
o   We’ll see more cases of designers as the heads of companies.
o   It’s staggering to see the size and complexity of the design files to render these 3D objects. We’ve got the computers and infrastructure to work within this space.
·      Why is this happening now?
o   3D printing is as old as the internet.
o   It’s the coming together as:
§  3D printers are more mature. They are more reliable and the output is more meaningful.
§  We have to be able to create the designs, and not so long ago, CAD software was very expensive. Now the software is free, and we have millions of people using it.
§  And the computers have to be powerful enough.
§  The internet allows the exchange of these files.
§  And the internet allows the printers to be centralized, and distributed via mail.
§  It allows production to be localized again, by having the printers and equipment near where it needs to be.
§  NY was once a hub of manufacturing. We were excited to open a facility in NY, because it brings the manufacturing back close to where the designers are.
§  Local manufacturing is much better on the carbon footprint, brings back high tech jobs, and enables close-knit communities around this.
·      Will the 3d printing space get to a point where everyone is using?
o   Sometimes we’ll be using it without knowing it.
o   Boeing built the Dreamliner. Saves more fuel, has higher internal humidity. Some of the parts are 3D printed.
o   More and more products will pop up around us, we won’t realize they are they 3d printed.
o   People get upset if you take away their internet. They don’t understand how it works, but they don’t want it to go away. Right now, 3D printing is in the “this is cool technology” phase, but eventually it will be invisible.
o   We may print engines in the future, because making cooling channels can lead to better fuel efficiency, and current subtractive techniques only work to make straight channels. 3d printing can make a better engine. We won’t think it’s 3d printed, we’ll just think “oh, this is a better engine.”
o   Clothing is another great opportunity for printing. Today we use sizes, because we need to mass manufacturer. It’s always a compromise: too loose here, to short there, etc. With 3d printing, you could get clothes that are perfect. You can also have variation that is integral to the clothing: e.g. a stronger elbow or knee part, which seamlessly transitions into softer, lighter regions.
§  The machine is happy to make all the clothes slightly different.
·      We here a lot about the MakerBot model. As we move forward, what types of developments are we going to see?
o   Today, different ways to print. The machines we use at Shapeways are mostly based on nylon powder with lasers, and it’s deposited layer by layer, and fused together.
§  All based on one material and plastic.
o   In 2009, we found company that could make metal parts. We can print in titanium, stainless steel, and silver.
o   We can also do ceramic and glass.
o   The next generation of machines can do multiple materials. You can mix materials. You can dither materials: e.g. transparent and black, metal and plastic. We need a language to describe these new materials. We can do tough and soft together. We can design in where things should break, which is sometimes necessary.
o   The third generation is printing semiconductors. We can print LEDs and actuators and gears. In a few years, we can design devices and upload them.

Posted on
by

Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother, Makers, and many other other awesome books, came to Portland to promote his newest book Homeland. He spoke to a standing room only crowd at Powell’s Bookstore.

He started by asking if people wanted a reading or a presentation, and everyone picked the presentation. These are my raw notes from his talk. He is a fast talker, so these notes are unfortunately incomplete (especially when it comes to the names of people he was talking about), but they should give you the gist of his talk.

He was a passionate speaker, polite to the audience during questions, and emotional when talking about Aaron Swartz’s death.

Cory Doctorow
Homeland Reading at Powell’s Beaverton
  • “Show of hands: reading or presentation?”
    • all presentations
  • affluent school
    • all kids given macbook
    • they were the only computers allowed on the school
    • they had to be used for homework
    • student accused of taking drugs
    • he was actually eating candy
    • the laptops were equipped with software to covertly watch the student
    • they had taken thousands of pictures of students, awake and asleep, dressed and undressed.
  • thousands of school districts still use this software. they tell the students they will be covertly monitored.
  • group discovered the bulvarian government was infecting computers with software, and convert monitoring people; using camera, monitor, screenshots, read keystrokes.
    • the software was so badly secured it could be hijacked by anyone
  • carrier iq: installed on 141M phones
    • nominally used to discovered where there were weak spots in network
    • but it could be used to monitor where people were, their keystrokes, look at their photos.
    • eventually it was disabled, but only because people were able to investigate and discover what had happened.
  • laptop security software, under ftc investigation, admitted they used security software to monitor being having sex, to monitor confidential doctors conversations, recording their children having sex…
    • the ftc said “you must stop doing this… unless you disclose in the fine print that you are doing it, then it is fine”
  • us law made it a felony offense to violate authorized use on a computer; then prosecutors used that law to say that if anyone violate a EULA agreement or terms of service (which are usually absurdly one-sided), then you are violated authorizing use.
    • what would have merely been a breach of contract (a civil offense) then turned into a felony offense.
  • which brings us to Aaron Swartz
    • pacer
      • the system that holds case law (e.g. what judges have ruled)
      • which charges you 10 cents for every page.
      • the law itself is in the public domain.
      • there’s no copyright on it.
      • and the price comes from the days when computer time was expensive. not so today.
      • recap: is a web service and browser plugin
        • when someone used pacer to pay for case law, it made a legal copy, and put it in recap. 
        • when someone else requested a document already in recap, then it came from recap, saving them the money
    • jstore:
      • Aaron started to download lots and lots of documents from jstor.
      • aaron put a laptop into an open, unsecure closet (also used by a homeless person to store clothes), to download lots of documents
      • he was caught, released, and the process of law related to his case slowly ground on…
    • meanwhile, he went after a law called SOPA.
      • SOPA was a standard that nobody could rise to: if you ran a website that linked to Facebook, and anyone on Facebook shared something illegal, you’d be potentially libel. 
      • So Aaron went after SOPA with a series of activist moves…
    • Two years after being arrested, Aaron hung himself.
    • digital millenium copyright act: anticircumvention prevention. it’s a law that makes it illegal to change a device so that you access all of the programs and data on it.
      • if there’s software to limit access…
        • it’s against the law to disable that program
        • to give people the information to disable it
        • to help people disable it.
      • even if you own the device, you aren’t allowed to do what you want to do.
    • They revisit this every three years.
      • First they allowed phone unlocking
      • Then they revisited this, and decided not to allow unlocking phones
      • Now…
        • Five years or $500,000 penalty for first offense for unlocking your phone
        • Ten years or $1,000,000 penalty for second offense for unlocking your phone
      • It’s more illegal to change carriers than to make your phone into a bomb.
    • Barnaby Jones, security analyst…
      • Found a weakness in embedded heart devices with wireless access. Found that people could remotely access them, could potentially kill them, or distribute a virus to kill many people.
      • It’s vitally important to have a freedom to investigate and modify our own devices.
    • Cory asked Aaron Swartz how you would run an indie political campaign without being beholding to moneyed interests…
      • He replied back within an hour, with a whole design for how to do it.
  • Questions & Answers
    • Q: How the movie version of Little Brother going?
      • A: Hollywood is a black box. They say they want to make a movie right away. They mean it when they say it, they just say it about 100 more movies than they can really make. 
    • Q: What don’t people understand about Creative Commons licenses?
      • A: 
        • People tend to lump them all together into one, and that’s not true.
        • Other people also think that by merely doing that, it will be shared. But most stuff on the internet people don’t care enough to even pirate.
    • Q: Have you considered a collaboration with Neil Stephenson or Daniel Suarez?
      • I am doing a novella with Neil. Science fiction grounded in engineering that is plausible enough that people would try to build it.
    • Q: Is Facebook a paradigm shift or just another phenomenon?
      • A: Paraphrased comment from someone else: We made the internet very easy to read. But we didn’t make it very easy to write. And that was a mistake, because we let a man in a hoodie make an attack on all of humanity. 
      • It’s bad, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. All schools are violating students privacy, following them around, monitoring their keystrokes. When any step that a kid takes to protect their privacy is confounded by the software.
      • We tell kids: “you must protect your privacy, it’s like losing your virginity” –> but then we invade their privacy. we can’t teach them that their privacy is important if we show them we don’t give the privacy.
      • screening software isn’t perfect…
        • it will always let you see things you wish you hadn’t seen
        • and it will screen things that you should be able to see.
        • it’s particularly hard for kids to get access to sites for LGBT issues, sexual assault information, etc.
      • the solution we’re using to try to protect them is worse than doing nothing. we should just do nothing.
    • Q: In a world of creative commons, where everyone is participating in recreating books, but what if people start remixing works all the time, and the remixes diluted the value. how will you support your family?
      • A: I think the future will be weirder than that. Yes that will happen, but I’m more concerned about spywhere in our devices.
      • Artists already are on the edge…most can’t make it. What we have is a weird power law distribution, where a few people make most of the money. 
      • You bank a lot of karma, and hope that when the times comes, you can pay it forward.
    • Q: Are people organizing boycots for apple’s find my friends? 
      • A: Kevin Kelly: talks about being a technological gourmet vs. a technological glutton. don’t just shove it all in. be selective.
      • Amish communities are not techno-adverse. they are techno-selective. They have people in the community who are adventurish, who try out new things, and tell them how it makes them feel.
        • So they make a decision to have cell phones, but they keep it in the barn. because if they keep it in the house, they’ll always be listening for it. but in the barn, they can use it for a medical emergency or other issues.
      • we’re really good at understanding how things work, we’re less good at understanding how they fail. So we see the things that are good about Facebook, but not the ways that it hurts us.
    • Q: What are your thoughts on jailbreaking?
      • I don’t think it should be illegal to jailbreak a device.
      • The problem is that you don’t know what jailbreaking software is doing, because that software is illegal. 
      • We would be safer if jailbreaking was legal, because you wouldn’t have to go a weird, blackmarket place to get it.
      • it’s like cars: it’s legal to change your tires, and so tire shops are regulated. if changing car tires was illegal, you’d have to go to a shadowy, grey market and you wouldn’t know what your tires were made of.

Posted on
by

If you’ve read my blog, you know I’m a huge fan of Cory Doctorow. I’m thrilled that the sequel to Little Brother is coming out next week. It’s called Homeland, and here’s official description:

In Cory Doctorow’s wildly successful Little Brother, young Marcus Yallow was arbitrarily detained and brutalized by the government in the wake of a terrorist attack on San Francisco—an experience that led him to become a leader of the whole movement of technologically clued-in teenagers, fighting back against the tyrannical security state. 
A few years later, California’s economy collapses, but Marcus’s hacktivist past lands him a job as webmaster for a crusading politician who promises reform. Soon his former nemesis Masha emerges from the political underground to gift him with a thumbdrive containing a Wikileaks-style cable-dump of hard evidence of corporate and governmental perfidy. It’s incendiary stuff—and if Masha goes missing, Marcus is supposed to release it to the world. Then Marcus sees Masha being kidnapped by the same government agents who detained and tortured Marcus years earlier.

Marcus can leak the archive Masha gave him—but he can’t admit to being the leaker, because that will cost his employer the election. He’s surrounded by friends who remember what he did a few years ago and regard him as a hacker hero. He can’t even attend a demonstration without being dragged onstage and handed a mike. He’s not at all sure that just dumping the archive onto the Internet, before he’s gone through its millions of words, is the right thing to do.

Meanwhile, people are beginning to shadow him, people who look like they’re used to inflicting pain until they get the answers they want.

Fast-moving, passionate, and as current as next week, Homeland is every bit the equal of Little Brother—a paean to activism, to courage, to the drive to make the world a better place.

Go order a copy. I just did. I’ll post a review when I’ve read it.

Posted on
by

Look out ELOPe, you’ve got competition:

Via io9:

In what is the largest and most significant effort to re-create the human brain to date, an international group of researchers has secured $1.6 billion to fund the incredibly ambitious Human Brain Project. For the next ten years, scientists from various disciplines will seek to understand and map the network of over a hundred billion neuronal connections that illicit emotions, volitional thought, and even consciousness itself. And to do so, the researchers will be using a progressively scaled-up multilayered simulation running on a supercomputer.
And indeed, the project organizers are not thinking small. The entire team will consist of over 200 individual researchers in 80 different institutions across the globe. They’re even comparing it the Large Hadron Colllider in terms of scope and ambition, describing the Human Brain Project as “Cern for the brain.” The project, which will be based in Lausanne, Switzerland, is an initiative of the European Commission.

Read more at the Human Brain Project.

Posted on
by

The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win belongs to that rare category of books: a business novel. It’s written as fiction but it teaches us something serious. The most well known book in this category is The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt. The Goal is a long-term best selling business book and required reading for nearly every MBA student for the last twenty-five years.

What The Goal did for lean manufacturing, The Phoenix Project will do for managing IT.

Bill Palmer is the reluctant protagonist who is thrust into managing IT Operations. He inherits a world of hurt: new business innovation projects are so far behind that the corporation’s ability to remain competitive is threatened; standard business functions like payroll, data storage, and point of sale systems suffer from recurrent outages like lights flickering during a storm; and the whole IT organization is so buried firefighting that critical maintenance is neglected.

I immediately resonated with the situation. In fact, if you work in a business of any size, in IT or not, you’ll quickly find similarities.

In my day job, over the years I’ve found myself wondering why small startups can outcompete two hundred person strong development teams, why certain deployments are multi-day affairs that nearly always fail, why we must wait months for to release software, why the releases that do get to the light of day are nearly always missing key features, and why we seem incapable of fixing bugs so awful that we drive our customers away.

In The Phoenix Project, the protagonist Bill Palmer encounters all of this and more. It’s written as a fast-paced business thriller (I couldn’t put it down and spent much of Christmas day hiding from my kids to read — in fact, once I hit the halfway point, I literally did not stop reading it except for bathroom breaks.) But it’s also a serious business book about managing IT.

Through an enigmatic board member, Bill is forced to question his assumptions about IT. What is the role of IT Operations, and even all of IT? What are the four kinds of work that IT must do? What’s the silent killer of all planned work? What does the business need?

Through comparisons with how work is managed in a factory and examples from The Goal, authors Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford show how the time tested techniques of lean manufacturing (also the Toyota Production System) apply to IT work. By applying these principles, Bill Palmer is able to:

  • speed up the time it takes from implementation to deployment by reducing work in progress
  • increase the amount of useful work completed by reducing dependencies on key resource bottlenecks, whether those are people, hardware, or systems
  • reduce outages by addressing technical debt on fragile IT systems (such as old databases, tricky routers, etc.)
  • increase the IT contribution to the business by gaining a better understand of the business requirements, and focusing effort on those features that make the largest beneficial impact to the business.


One of the authors, Gene Kim, is the original creator of Tripwire, a widely used tool for managing IT changes; cofounder of the company by the same name; and author of The Visible Ops Handbook. I’ve seen him give talks on these concepts to a packed audience and receive a standing ovation.

For years, I’ve wanted to be able to bring these ideas back to my company because I’m convinced we could be ten or a hundred times more effective and delight our customers if only we could overcome our IT dysfunctions.

I’m thrilled to see them now in written form. If there was one book I’d want every employee of my company to read, it would be this one. You can get The Phoenix Project in kindle or hardcopy.

Posted on
by

I read an interesting comment on a blog recently, although I can’t remember where, that made the point that as the pace of technology accelerates, we’re going through massive shifts more and more quickly, such that it becomes exceedingly difficult to predict the future beyond a certain point, and that point is coming closer and closer as time progresses.

A writer in 1850 could easily imagine out 100 years. They might not be right about what society would be like, but they could imagine. Writers in the early 1900s were imagining out about 75 years, and midcentury writers 50 years, and so on.

I’m writing now, and I enjoy the act of grounding my society in hard predictions, and it’s hard to go out beyond about 25 years because pending changing in the technology landscape are so radical (artificial intelligence, nanotechnology) that it’s really hard to conceive of what life will be like in 50 or 100 years from now, and still have it be an extrapolation of current trends, rather than just wild-ass guesses, e.g. a fantasy of the future.

If it really is harder to extrapolate trends out any sort of meaningful distance, I wonder if that exerts a subtle effect on what people choose to write.

Posted on
by

Advertisements on apps and websites drive me crazy when they detract from using a website or application.

Earlier today, for example, I was trying to use evite to send a message to invitees to a party I held last summer. The user interface is so chock full of ads that it’s actually hard to make it from screen to screen and keep track of what I’m trying to do.

Popup ads on news sites are similarly frustrating: I want to read the content, not see a completely unrelated, intrusive ad.

I’m not opposed to paying for an ad-free experience.

I love Pandora, for example, and I’m delighted to pay for an annual subscription. I get a better product, no ads, and the feeling of supporting a company I love.

At the same time, it’s not practical to pay individually for each and every site I might visit, especially ones I use only occasionally (evite, wired.com) or once. As Chris Anderson talks about in Free, the transaction cost of paying even a small amount (the cognitive load of deciding to pay plus the mechanics of paying) vastly overwhelms the financial impact of the actual price of the product.

I think the solution is bundle or prix fixe pricing for websites.

What I imagine is something like this: As a user, I pay $X per month, or maybe $8*X per year. With this payment, I get access to a very large pool of content and websites: magazine articles, newspaper articles, and services like evite. It’s not coming from just one site or one company but from many different sites from many different companies.

When I go to sites to read, I’m identified via some common login system (like the way Facebook or Twitter authentication works). I read/use whatever I want, as much as I want. While I’m doing this, the websites are keeping track of my amount of usage, based on pageviews.

At the end of the month, the amount of my subscription is divided evenly among my pageviews. If I read one article, my $X goes to that. If I’ve read 50 articles and used 20 services, each gets 1/70th of the whole. This is done for every subscriber.

The end result is that there’s no transaction cost associated with each piece of premium content (because I’ve paid in advance), and yet there’s still a flow of dollars based on actual use. It’s a win for the customer who can now choose to conveniently get an ad-free experience without worrying about individual subscriptions, and it’s a win for web businesses, because they can now monetize their content without ads.

As a build upon the core idea, I can imagine different tiers as well:

  • At $10/month, I see no ads on content sites like the New York Times and occasional use services such as evite.
  • At $20/month, I see no ads on frequently used sites like Facebook or Pandora.
  • At $30/month, I can unlock premium, subscription only services.

This could also be a solution for the dilemma of newspapers: they could more effectively unlock revenue from customers in an age whether readers tend to read articles from everywhere.

Comments?