This is a pretty cool demo, and the robots are neat-looking but the part of this that’s the most interesting is the problem this is solving. Listen to how often they talk about “low self-weight” and “yielding to human operators”. The top feature of these things is that they can operate in the same area as human workers without tearing their arms off.

In other words, the top-selling feature is that they figured out how to make gentle robots.

Picking up on Monday’s panoptiswarm theme here’s this wonderful story from Wired’s Danger Room about how swarms of amateurs are cataloguing installations in North Korea. (Danger Room calls them “online spies” which is a pretty heady title for people scouring satellite photos.)

What are they finding? Secret underground airfields!

Sunchon appears to have a “1350 meter taxiway extend[ing] from the UGF [underground facility] to a point beyond the main parking aprons. This taxiway may in fact be an auxiliary runway, allowing aircraft to be prepared for flight while concealed within the UGF and then launched with little or no warning for a strike” against South Korea.

Noah Shachtman for Danger Room Online Spies Spot North Korea’s Underground Airfields

There’s a lot going on in the article.

For one thing, there is the glorious Thunderbirds/Voltron/Power Rangers (pick according to age and nostalgia) resonance.

For another, think about profoundly weird the balance between information and analysis has shifted in this arena. Instead of carefully hoarded classified satellite imagery, we have such a surfeit of data that it’s worthwhile to just let amateurs run amok.

This kind of searching isn’t just for military surveillance either. The world’s largest beaver dam was discovered using Google Earth imagery and then further analyzed by digging through historical aerial photography of the area.

In related news, amateurs are combing through the Toronto G20 videos, looking for evidence of agents provocateurs. They think they’ve found one. I don’t know what to think.

On June 5, Newsweek’s Julia Baird published an op-ed entitled The Front Line Is Online. In her subhead, she declares that “freedom should trump privacy.”

She spends some time reliving Neda Soltan’s death and some time talking about the growing consensus that access to the Internet should be a fundamental right. What follows is some depressingly muddy thinking about how to proceed.

photo credit: killerturnip

One in seven of those who do not use the Internet think they should have the right to if they want. Yet only half of those surveyed felt the Internet was a safe place to express their opinions, and more than half thought that it should never be regulated by the government. Which may suggest that some people are willing to accept some compromises to privacy to avoid the creeping censorship that too easily follows government intervention. The basic tenet of the Internet is openness: you don’t need to forfeit all privacy, but if you want to protect it, don’t post publicly.

The debate about quitting Facebook certainly takes on a different hue when exposure, not secrecy, becomes the critical fight. In the past few weeks, both Pakistan and Bangladesh shut down Facebook in response to the group Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, because it is considered blasphemous to create images of the prophet. Facebook has been slammed by clerics in Egypt and Syria for being a gateway to adultery; and a woman was shot in Saudi Arabia after her father discovered her chatting online with a man she met on the site.

Increasingly, the idea that everyone should be able to log on, publish, upload, download, update, or tweet at will—and whim—seems vital.

Julia Baird – Newsweek The Front Line Is Online (emphasis added)

Baird sets up a false opposition between freedom and privacy, and then undermines the argument with her own evidence. The key insight missing is that privacy isn’t in conflict with freedom, it’s a component of it.

Most liberal democracies have a whole pile of rights that recognize this. It’s the freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. It’s why the government can’t read our mail in most free countries. It’s why we get so upset when we learn that we’re getting wire-tapped.

When “if you want to protect it, don’t post publicly” holds sway, the woman in Baird’s last example has two choices: get shot for chatting with men or don’t talk to men at all. That’s not freedom. The thing that could have freed her from her father’s insane grip is secrecy; she lives and is free only insofar as she is able to keep her private life away from his murderous attention.

When social networks make it hard to keep your doings private, you put yourself at greater risk of discovery. We should have learned this lesson when Google Buzz exposed a woman to her abusive-ex. We should have learned this lesson when Evgeny Morozov pointed out that “once regimes used torture to get this kind of data; now it’s freely available on Facebook.” We should have learned this lesson when US activists used Twitter to wiretap themselves and megaphone it to the police.

A world where you can’t keep your list of friends hidden is a world where governments can figure out networks of dissidents. psychotic family members can find out you are talking to the wrong people, and the police know which door to kick in. Removing censorship makes posting easier – it doesn’t make it safer. Shielding from prying eyes does. That only happens with good, reliable privacy controls.

To have real freedom, we need both.

I’ve had a couple of great conversations today deriving from the BBC’s sensationalist First human ‘infected with computer virus’ headline.

photo credit: tozzer

Tabloid Science

Why do I say sensationalist? Adam Rothstein of the Interdome explains it best.

William Gibson used the term “Tabloid Science” the other day on Twitter, and this couldn’t be a better example (unless it also threatened to increase global warming, discover aliens, and involved robots becoming self-aware).

This story is, as I understand it, about a guy who figured out how to transmit a computer virus using RFID. And yet, we have this all-star headline, reposted everywhere from the BBC to Slashdot. It’s reminiscent of the back pages of popular science magazines (“enslave ants to grow all your woman-attractive pheromones, now only $2.99!”) except this is now science reporting, on the Internet: a domain supposedly rational and free of all that “headline” crap.

Adam Rothstein, private correspondence

From the perspective of the systems being compromised, there is no difference between an RFID attacker that’s moving around the world inside someone’s skin or on top of it. There’s no benefit to doing the implant part of the procedure except that it gets you headlines. Which, I guess, is a pretty big benefit.

There’s something hilariously hair-splitting about how a variation in placement of just a few millimeters – fundamentally cosmetic – makes all the difference in coverage. Malware RFID has been around for years. Here’s the BBC covering it in 2006.

We might be better off conceiving of Dr Gasson’s move as a sort of performance art intervention in the mediasphere.

Under my skin

The tone of coverage speaks directly to the conception of the self. Because the chip is under his skin, the BBC calls it a human infected with a computer virus (though couched in scare quotes) rather than a human wearing a device infected with a computer virus. Slashdot goes further.

Why? I have a much deeper and more integrated relationship with my smartphone than Gasson has with a chip that stays in his body for a few days. It’s like saying that someone with cheap earrings is the first human to rust.

Indeed, the chip as worn by Gasson is substantially less useful than if he’d just stuffed it in his pocket (aside from the “getting media coverage” utility, which we must not dismiss). For one thing, the one in his pocket can be thrown down the sewer when security notices him.

It reminds me of the perennial prediction that cellphone implants are imminent. No they aren’t. Cellphone contracts last 2-3 years and new phones come out even more frequently. Say what you will about the stuff that’s carried on you instead of in you, but at least it’s modular.

For it to be worth accepting implants, they have to offer significant benefits that carry-able items don’t. Medical prosthetics are one obvious category of this kind of thing (though even most of these are things that you wear). Devices or interfaces that give you new senses might be another.

Kevin Warwick’s Project Cyborg 2.0 is relevant here. Implants connected to his nerves allowed him to control a robot arm remotely and to exchange sensations with his wife wirelessly through a rig she also had implanted.

Further intervention

Moving away from hard realities of the current achievement, let’s take for granted for a moment that there will be abilities and senses worth having surgery for. Let’s allow for people with networked nervous systems, reaching far out beyond themselves to a whole host of new conveniences for the modern consumer. I’m thinking about flexible ego boundaries and an artist who replicates Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0, 1974 for the cyborg era.

In Rhythm 0, 2014 (2024?) the artist turns off her firewalls and publishes her personal IP and secret key. She is almost immediately compromised by the sea of ambient malware that’s just part of the background Internet. The participant/audience of the performance swoop in and begin a battle to take over and clean her system, while others attempt to reroute it for themselves.

The artist’s body goes haywire. She sometimes shouts the names of consumer pharmaceuticals along with other gibberish. She begins to develop a fever as all of her microcontrollers run at full tilt, generating dangerous amounts of heat. After an hour, her assistant intervenes. Her firmware must be wiped and restored. A great debate erupts in the art world about whether this is a success or a failure of the piece.

The debate is part of the performance.

I leave you with these words from Simon Bostock who pointed me to the BBC article in the first place.

I’m pretty sure the best depiction of flexible ego boundaries I’ve read is Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky, which, if you can get over the fact it’s a space opera about pirates using enforced-autism as a method of slavery and a war between a race of giant spiders, shows how we’ll probably accrete layers of tech and cyborg accoutrements until we all become reefs.

If we’re going to manage our future selves we’ll all have to get a grasp on what topology means.

Simon Bostock, private correpondence

Sturdy, printed books present the illusion of fact. Weightless, in-the-cloud PDFs present more as fiction.

John Maeda on Twitter

I can’t stop thinking about this. It reminds me of banks. To give the impression of security and longevity, they built in stone (now, they build in expensive real estate). They say: “We are not fly by night. We will be here tomorrow. We built this temple to permanence.”

Of course we know that the paper world is rife with disposable paperbacks and other futuretrash. It turns out it’s pretty cheap to make books. But it’s even cheaper to make a PDF.

I need to think about this more. This seems important.

Related: David Carr’s characterization of 48 HR magazine as “a testament to the proposition that even the most wired cohort of journalists in the country retains a fetish for the printed product” in the article about the recent legal troubles.