Category: Web/Tech
Probably not good news markets in everything
For US$249 a company in the United States is promising to send curious and competitive players of computer games an unusual headset. The device, the company claims, will convert electronic gamers into electronic-gamers. At the touch of a button, the headset will send a surge of electricity through their prefrontal cortex. It promises to increase brain plasticity and make synapses fire faster, to help gamers repel more space invaders and raid more tombs. And, according to the publicity shots on the website, it comes in a choice of red or black.
The company is accepting orders, but says that it will not ship its first headsets to customers until next month. Some are unwilling to wait. Videos on the Internet already show people who have cobbled together their own version with a 9-volt battery and some electrical wire. If you are not fussy about the colour scheme, other online firms already promise to supply the components and instructions you need to make your own. Or you could rummage around in the garage.
Here is more, with further interesting points, via Michelle Dawson.
India to send the world’s last telegram on July 14th
At the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), India‘s state-owned telecom company, a message emerges from a dot matrix printer addressing a soldier’s Army unit in Delhi. “GRANDMOTHER SERIOUS. 15 DAYS LEAVE EXTENSION,” it reads. It’s one of about 5,000 such missives still being sent every day by telegram – a format favored for its “sense of urgency and authenticity,” explains a BSNL official.
But the days of such communication are numbered: The world’s last telegram message will be sent somewhere in India on July 14.
That missive will come 144 years after Samuel Morse sent the first telegram in Washington, and seven years after Western Union shuttered its services in the United States. In India, telegraph services were introduced by William O’Shaughnessy, a British doctor and inventor who used a different code for the first time in 1850 to send a message.
The BSNL board, after dilly-dallying for two years, decided to shut down the service as it was no longer commercially viable.
“We were incurring losses of over $23 million a year because SMS and smartphones have rendered this service redundant,” Shamim Akhtar, general manager of BSNL’s telegraph services, told the Monitor.
And for a little bit of history:
At their peak in 1985, 60 million telegrams were being sent and received a year in India from 45,000 offices. Today, only 75 offices exist, though they are located in each of India’s 671 districts through franchises. And an industry that once employed 12,500 people, today has only 998 workers.
By the way:
Sixty-five percent of daily telegrams are sent by the government.
The full story is here, and the pointer is from Michael Clemens.
Sentences to ponder
While the ethics behind holograms of deceased celebrities might be questionable (in the words of a parody Twitter account called Aaliyah’s Ghost, “The best duets imo are the ones where both artists are alive & agreed to work together”), copyright permissions and objections from various estates, in addition to the high costs, have so far prevented “resurrections” from becoming a more widespread trend. For its closing ceremony, the London Olympics scrimped on costs, reviving Freddie Mercury for a duet with Jessie J by broadcasting his image on a flat screen rather than a hologram body. It is hard to imagine the Tupac hologram moving forward without permission from his mother Afeni Shakur. The Marilyn Monroe estate, on the other hand, contested plans for a “Virtual Marilyn” concert organised by Musion partner Digicon Media.
Here is more, from the always interesting Joanne McNeil.
A simple public choice theory of universal surveillance
Let’s say that everything is known about everybody, or can be known with some effort. The people who have the most to lose are powerful people who have committed some wrongdoing, or who have done something which can be presented as wrongdoing, whether or not it is. Derelicts with poor credit ratings should, in relative terms, flourish or at least hold steady at the margin.
It is not obvious that the President, Congress, and Supreme Court should welcome such an arrangement. Nor should top business elites. More power is given to the NSA, or to those who can access NSA and related sources, and how many interest groups favor that?
Therein lies a chance for reform.
Where this all is leading
I.B.M.’s Watson, the supercomputing technology that defeated human Jeopardy! champions in 2011, is a prime example of the power of data-intensive artificial intelligence.
Watson-style computing, analysts said, is precisely the technology that would make the ambitious data-collection program of the N.S.A. seem practical. Computers could instantly sift through the mass of Internet communications data, see patterns of suspicious online behavior and thus narrow the hunt for terrorists.
Both the N.S.A. and the Central Intelligence Agency have been testing Watson in the last two years, said a consultant who has advised the government and asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak.
There is more here, pointer is from Claudia Sahm.
Do U.S. tech companies now have legal troubles in the EU?
Laws in this area can be tricky to interpret, so digest this caution, but I found this analysis from Bloomberg BusinessWeek of interest:
The Safe Harbor scheme (not recognized by the Germans, incidentally) allows U.S. tech firms such as Google to self-certify, to say that they conform to EU-style data protection standards even if their country’s laws do not. It’s not quite that simple—these companies really do need to jump through some hoops before they claim compliance; just ask Heroku—but it does largely come down to trust.
EU data protection regulators have already called for the system to be toughened up through the introduction of third-party audits, but frankly it now looks like the whole system is in tatters. U.S. companies claiming Safe Harbor compliance include Google, Yahoo, Microsoft (MSFT), Facebook, and AOL (AOL), all of which now appear to be part (willingly or otherwise) of the NSA’s PRISM scheme.
As EU data protection rules don’t say it’s OK for foreign military units to record or monitor the communications of European citizens—heck, even local governments aren’t supposed to be doing that—the Safe Harbor program now looks questionable to say the least. A lot of people have already pointed to the U.S. Patriot Act as a threat, and now the effects of that legislation are plain to see.
The update at the beginning of the article reads:
I’ll admit I am shocked to have received this response from the European Commission’s Home Affairs department to my request for comment, with particular regard to the impact on EU citizens’ privacy: “We do not have any comments. This is an internal U.S. matter.”
I don’t see kicking U.S. tech companies out of Europe as a promising way of starting U.S./EU free trade negotiations. One possible legal “out” is discussed here. If anyone is going to drive this issue forward, it is likely the European public, who of course still can insist on tougher standards. Here is one description of Safe Harbor policies. The tech companies themselves may fear a loss of international competitiveness, or that Safe Harbor standards will be toughened, you will find a discussion of commercial worries and their potential impact here.
Our government will end up thwarting tech innovation and balkanizing the web
…Google Glass + NSA PRISM essentially amounts to a vision in which a foreign country is suddenly going to be flooded with American spy cameras. It seems easy to imagine any number of foreign governments having a problem with that idea. More broadly, Google is already facing a variety of anti-trust issues in Europe where basic economic nationalism is mixing with competition policy concerns. Basically various European mapping and comparison and shopping firms don’t want to be crushed by Google, and European officials are naturally sympathetic to the idea of not letting local firms be crushed by California-based ones. Legitimate concern that US tech companies are essentially a giant periscope for American intelligence agencies seem like they’d be a very powerful new weapon in the hands of European companies that want to persuade EU authorities to shackle American firms. Imagine if it had come out in the 1980s that Japanese intelligence agencies were tracking the location of ever Toyota and Honda vehicle, and then the big response from the Japanese government was to reassure people that Japanese citizens weren’t being spied upon this way. There would have been—legitimately—massive political pressure to get Japanese cars out of foreign markets.
The intelligence community obviously views America’s dominance in the high-tech sector as a strategic asset that should be exploited in its own quest for universal knowledge. But American dominance in the high-tech sector is first and foremost a source of national economic advantage, one that could be undone by excessive security involvement.
That is from Matt Yglesias.
The Washington Post is on a roll
Here is one excerpt from their latest investigation:
It is possible that the conflict between the PRISM slides and the company spokesmen is the result of imprecision on the part of the NSA author. In another classified report obtained by The Post, the arrangement is described as allowing “collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,” rather than directly to company servers.
Government officials and the document itself made clear that the NSA regarded the identities of its private partners as PRISM’s most sensitive secret, fearing that the companies would withdraw from the program if exposed. “98 percent of PRISM production is based on Yahoo, Google and Microsoft; we need to make sure we don’t harm these sources,” the briefing’s author wrote in his speaker’s notes.
An internal presentation of 41 briefing slides on PRISM, dated April 2013 and intended for senior analysts in the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, described the new tool as the most prolific contributor to the President’s Daily Brief, which cited PRISM data in 1,477 items last year. According to the slides and other supporting materials obtained by The Post, “NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” as its leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports.
Edward Luce is what I call “prescient plus”
A few days ago he wrote this subtitle in the FT:
Self-interest guides the Big Data companies, and the same is often true of the White House
And this:
Big data’s agenda is not confined to immigration reform. Among other areas, it has a deep interest in shaping what Washington does on privacy, online education, the school system, the internet, corporate tax reform, cyber security and even cyber warfare. Big data is also likely to be influential in the US-European trade partnership talks, which start this month. Whether the sector becomes a thorn in the side of the process remains to be seen. Either way, Americans should be relieved someone is making the case for privacy.
He closes with this:
A century ago, Theodore Roosevelt pushed back against the power of the rail barons and oil titans – the great technological disrupters of his day. Mr Obama should pay closer heed to history. And he should become wary of geeks bearing gifts.
Don’t forget this line:
One of the geekocracy’s main characteristics is a serene faith in its own good motives.
The general problem is the unholy government and tech alliance, based on a mix of plutocracy, information-sharing, and a joint understanding of the importance of information for future elections. Which current politician wouldn’t want to court the support of tech, and which major tech company can today stand above politics?
I will add this: if you were surprised by today’s revelations, shame on you!
It is “loose paywall” time at The Washington Post
Ezra explains, Matt offers some analysis. I am very happy to pay full price, noting that I live around here, but in any case I plan to do so until the very end, for either them or me. I do however see this as a further sign that the golden age of free links is over, forever. Bloggers take note. From what I understand of the paywall, Twitter connections will be free and this, along with other developments, will raise the relative import of Twitter. Perhaps at some point Twitter will become so important that this is no longer price discrimination and Twitter cannot be allowed as a free way in. But we remain far from that point, it seems to me.
Astro Teller
Dennis is not more likely to be a dentist. Nevertheless, are you surprised that the head of Google[x] lab–the lab bringing you electronically chauffeured vehicles and googles–is called Astro Teller? I kid you not. Named Eric Teller at birth, he has been called Astro since high school. Would you also be surprised to learn that Astro’s grandfathers both made notable contributions? The first grandfather you have probably already guessed, physicist Edward Teller. The second? Gerard Debreu.
What technology exists that most people probably don’t know about & would totally blow their minds?
That is the title of a new Reddit thread, reproduced here. Overall I am not blown away by the nominations and I find few of them in my own everyday life. Here is one example:
ALON – transparent aluminium, you can have a window that don’t break!!!
Here is further information, with photos. Cool enough, but not as good as cheap quality education and health care. And it costs 20k per square meter, at least according to that article.
I’m ready to call the great stagnation over when driverless cars are in the hands of the middle class, but that’s still a while away. Steady deflation for education and health care expenditures would do it too, and I can see this will come for education but not for health care. As for Google Glass, I will review it once they sell me one. I’d also claim the end of stagnation if we saw a 2% yearly rise in the median real wage on a sustained basis, say most of the years out of a ten-year period.
In the meantime, here is a robot which pours you a beer.
For the pointer I thank Max Roser.
How much do narcissists benefit from recent technological advances?
Michael Makowsky writes me an email about a conference he was invited to:
Predictably, the lineup of speakers are people who no one cares about, but tickets remain $45. This is analogous to something in stand-up comedy and music called a “bringer show” i.e. you can perform if you sell X tickets, thus “bringing” a crowd. At least, this is my suspicion.
But it got me thinking about your various “benefit to infovores” theories of recent advances in technology. I think you have underplayed the other side of that coin – that recent advances are also especially valuable to *narcissists*. You can foster a sense that a people are watching/care about you much easier than 30 years ago. The market for enabling narcissism is…substantial. I actually expect TedX and similar bricks and mortar portings to lose money. But that is besides the point. Vanity presses and the such have existed on the periphery forever. The internet is a vanity press upped several orders of magnitude. My point is that this is, I think, a near perfect inversion of the “infovore” concept, but with the identical result. It’s an advance that yields tons of consumer surplus, but little additional opportunity to increase anyone’s marginal product, i.e. help the labor market.
There is something almost recursive about an academic building a theory around the demand for enabling narcissism.
The virtual therapist
The virtual therapist sits in a big armchair, shuffling slightly and blinking naturally, apparently waiting for me to get comfortable in front of the screen.
“Hi, I’m Ellie,” she says. “Thanks for coming in today.”
She laughs when I say I find her a little bit creepy, and then goes straight into questions about where I’m from and where I studied.
“I’m not a therapist, but I’m here to learn about people and would love to learn about you,” she asks. “Is that OK?”
Ellie’s voice is soft and calming, and as her questions grow more and more personal I quickly slip into answering as if there were a real person in the room rather than a computer-generated image.
…With every answer I’m being watched and studied in minute detail by a simple gaming sensor and a webcam.
How I smile, which direction I look, the tone of my voice, and my body language are all being precisely recorded and analysed by the computer system, which then tells Ellie how best to interact with me.
Right now there are two assistants guiding the avatar, in essence standing behind a screen, but that will not always be the case:
Real people come in to answer Ellie’s questions every day as part of the research, and the computer is gradually learning how to react in every situation.
It is being taught how to be human, and to respond as a doctor would to the patients’ cues.
Soon Ellie will be able to go it alone.
The full article is here, and for the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.