Email death?

This is an interesting blog post on the BBC's dot.maggie discussing the recent proclamation from Chief Operating Officer at Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, that the humble '@' is doomed. Her logic seems reasonable: that if you look at teenagers few of them use email compared to facebook and similar.

She may be right on that count but I think she's over looked one fatal flaw. Ubiquity, everyone has email (well everyone online) fewer have facebook, you need an email account to set up facebook, and buy things, and sign on to many websites. While the good 'ole boys at facebook would love to replace email it's not imminent and frankly I think their track record isn't good enough to convince enough people to use them such that they become all encompassing enough to remove email, I certainly hope they don't.

I think we'll have email for a while yet if for no other reason than it's a standard not controlled by any one group, it's by no means perfect but equally if you dislike your provider you can switch and lose very little, you don't need to convince all your friends to jump ship with you, or set up ghost accounts (like I'm thinking of doing with FB), or fake things you can simply change you email: gmail boring you? try hotmail, or yahoo, or just use a gorilla mail account that goes after 1 hour.

I think there is a secondary element she has forgetten as well which is that the Internet is no longer just about the up-and-coming teens its about everyone; email may be old but it's known,  it's used a by professionals, O.A.Ps, primary school kids and teenagers. Yes, lots of people chat on facebook but I doubt many people use it or twitter to distribute minutes for a meeting or arrange how a problem is going to be tackled, and even if they did what happens if they need to leaise with someone on bebo?

I'm sure she's right, that in the long run email will die, but I expect that will only happen when something completely replaces it. Google tried with wave but failed at the same fatal flaw she missed - everyone has to use it and not realise they are using it, it has to be ubiquitous. What ever replaces email needs to be the next phone number, the next email - most likely a universal id you can pick up and put down but will always find you be it email, phone call, video call or what ever; this is not an advocacy for ID card style thing, I'm talking of a phone number (or email address or what ever) that everything is routed through. We're nearly there as this already happens on most smart phones but using a variety of different addresses (your email, your twitter, your facebook your phone all have separate accounts) the next big thing will be a combination account for at least phone, email, and probably video calls. The problem with this is that it will probably require a big chance: tele companies giving up and becoming purely supply of data while people move themselves around separately to their distributor within the Internet (I won't call it the cloud because I don't think that's what it'll be, maybe cloud 2).

Who seizes what?

There have been a couple of interesting internet developments recently: firstly facebook has continued it's slide from useful social website to yourDetailsForSale.com (which is why I have deleted my account on it) and secondly there is a further excitement about cloud computing (new about 5 years ago so new for business today). Google Enterprise is getting ever bigger; next week Microsoft launch their latest iteration of Office (with shiny online connectivity) and Ubuntu have released their latest offering complete with Ubuntu one: a 2Gb online file server (basically Dropbox).

This made me realise something: what happens when the police want to seize your computer to check it for evidence and you don't have a hard drive? I've been using Dropbox and Google Docs for about the last 2~3 years to keep a lot of my most important work backed up, but what if I was using them to keep less savoury things stored outside of my home? While at some point obviously these files would be present on my local system there are ways of making sure they never really leave any trace and so the police storming my house at 3am in the morning to take away my hard drive and decrypt it won't really do anything: the data just isn't there any more, they have to chase it to some far flung server farm.

Now while the obvious case in an individuals situation would be that the police would write to the server company and ask them to release the data and no doubt they would get emailed a nice data stream of the contents of that area. What happens, though, when it's a company they're investigating? If an entire company's data was hosted on the cloud then that's a lot of information to work through. You may only want one persons but it's no longer a case of separating out a few physical hard drives: you will have to stream however many hundreds of Gbytes of data that they could have accessed. This, of course, all assumes that you can trust the hosts and the other people in the company: if you need to get the info before anything can happen to it you may need to be a bit faster. Otherwise the hard drives you want will might not exist. The information  won't be on one or two single drives either, it is likely part of a huge array somewhere in a warehouse that may not even be in the same country as the company, you or anyone else who may help. That data may also mixed in with all sorts of other information from companies you're not interested in.

My point is that if the government thought it had problems with the music industry and copyright fighting technology it hasn't seen anything. When people start leaving their important incriminating files on computers that don't even exist in any physical way run on servers in other countries that may be closely guarded by people not friendly to your cause. 


Anyway as I hope I have demonstrated there should be lots of fun technology debates coming soon to a governing body near you!

mmmmm retinal projection...

This is insanely cool. Near real time translations subtitled and beamed onto your retina. Who doesn't want one? while I get the impression this will (initially) be like the voice recognition software of the late 90's (ie requires a fair bit of work for 50/50 results) it has several features that are very significant.

The actual translation system is the not too surprising amalgamation of voice recognition and translation software. While both these technologies have been around in vague forms for the last 10 or so years it has only been in the last 5 years that they have become truly viable. Voice recognition interfaces are pretty common now on dial in services (eg for national rail) and while they do get it wrong from time to time they are pretty good. The same goes for translation, most things can be translated by, for example, google translate; it may have some interesting turns of phrase but the fundamental message gets through and this is a free, web-based tool.

The most exciting feature of this though is the retinal projection, this is something that has been slowly emerging of the last year or so (either as micro screens or direct projection) and is one of the last technologies needed to achieve complete augmented reality. We nearly have complete internet data coverage (it may not be fast but there are fewer and fewer places where I can't get some sort of net) and with technologies like 4G, BT openWorld (all BT customers can jump onto free open net connections from BT) or the cloud all poised to become very common it shouldn't be too long before people are wondering how they coped without being able to access wikipedia while walking down a street.

Augmented reality is a while off yet (and still limited by battery life) but as more technologies start to use it (see the phone app layers) it is fast becoming reality. I would say that within the next 10 years at the latest people will have augmented reality headsets (most likely glasses) and that they will be common within 15 years. As a technology I suspect that it will be similar to voice recognition in that for the next year or so everyone will be claiming to use it with no actual utility. After that, and especially with things like the translator specs, it will start to re-emerge as general utility, to steal an idea from Charles Stross: wouldn't it be cool to have a map of the city your in over-laid on your vision and then be able to watch the progress of your bus towards you?

This is, I think, the most significant part of these glasses: not so much what they can do (which is very cool) but that they represent a protrusion of what so far as been a fun toy in labs into useful utility.

Smoking up a storm

yes ok I'll stop with the bad titles, this is the last one, maybe.

On to the actual purpose of this post: it appears that the government of our dear island has sacked Prof. Nutt from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD). The reason? saying that by changing the classification of drugs to "scare" people from them you were "devaluing" the evidence. The BBC report on the sacking can be read here and the report on his comments here.

My main gripe with this is the lack of respect that politicians (of all parties) seem to have for the people who advise them. If you are employed to offer advice on a policy your agreement with that policy shouldn't be a contingent of your employment.

In this case I think that the Prof. Nutt has a very good point: we allow the use of alcohol and tobacco (which can cause, among other, things cancer and cirrhosis) but ban the use of cannabis (a chance of developing psychosis or other neurological problems).

Moving on from this to a more general outlook this seems to highlight one of the main problems currently experienced by the scientific community: our expert advice (a few dozen years studying a small field) is routinely being over thrown based on 'gut-instinct' and anecdotes. There is a distinct distrust at all levels of society of those with expertise. This would be less worrying if it wasn't for the fact that often this expertise is replaced by much more dubious sources of information: how many people now will take the advice of someone who uses 20 minutes at the university of google to discover that vaccines are bad over someone who has spent a greater portion of their life researching and studying exactly how vaccines work.

I think this is more than just a new anti-intellectualism (which it is), I think it's the beginning of global future-shock. As technology and knowledge moves on people are becoming increasing terrified by the change and looking for simpler explanations of how the world works. The continued inability of science to do what people expect of it (why do we still have AIDS why isn't my car flying yet) has given people the impression that as a group scientists are detached from the concerns of pretty much everyone else.

This leads me back to the reports on the BBC: people no longer want experts. They don't want people who are willing to tell them that we don't have all the answers yet, to tell them that actually drug abuse is endemic in pretty much all societies and has been for years. People are actually losing a lot of the rationality that drove us to where we are now. I'm not saying that we are going to back-slide, just that we might move sideways a bit. As this century progresses the number of new technologies in people's lives will drive many to consider it magic. People won't want to be told that the nanotech injection they just received is very carefully molded to them specifically they will want to just know that the magic juice will cure their cancer.

Science has raised us so much higher than we have ever been before and now most people cannot see the difference between it and magic. It's a shame but for many people I think that the 21st century will be one of magic and will miss out on the wonder that we can create.

how habitable is the earth?

If you have any interest in futurism and possible extra-solar habitation (ie living on other planets) this is an excellent post by an excellent author

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/10/how_habitable_is_the_earth.html

The obligatory late post

Hello again! I'm back (well while I remember this anyway). Various things to report: firstly I'm heading into a PhD so back to uni very soon (which is just awesome!) Also in a new flat (that's my excuse for lack of posts anyway) and finally loving the iPhone - if you use the net a lot while on the go get one.

Anyway on to something slightly less egotistical: interesting developments. The main thing of interest to me at the moment has been the prospect of building a CNC Milling machine (basically a computer controlled router - the type for carving). This is a project between me and a friend and we're hoping to start on it very soon. This will mean I should have access to an amazing carving machine: essentially plug in the information for what you want to build and it will (so long as it can be carved from a block of whatever).

Other cool gubbins that has been circling is that I've recently finished Iain Bank's "Crow Road" this is an amazing book if quite sad. Well worth a read.

Anyway looks like I can't think of much else to post and I'm ready to install Dawn of War II so I'm off to enjoy that

Lit-bots and Comp-scripts: how the world is getting faster...

I saw this while on holiday published in the International Herald Tribune I was going to blog about it then decided not to becuase it was an isolated case, well I thought it was then I read this about half way down Ben describes this:

"Professional complaints followed in May, mostly about individual chiropractors’ claims. Then, in June, blogger Simon Perry found the BCA database of 1,029 members online, containing 400 website URLs. He wrote a quick computer program to automatically identify all the chiropractors in the UK claiming to treat colic, locate their local Trading Standards office, and report them (more than 500 in total) automatically, followed up with printed letters."

This made me look up. If you haven't read the links here is my main interest in these reasonable disparate stories: they both use simple bots within a legal framework to spam requests. Respectivly one spams buy orders (buy for 1cent more and get a lot of money) the other spams legal letters requests for investigation. This has been online for a while in the form of trawling take down letters, these are simple bots that look for things that may be copyrighted material posted illegally and then spam the ISP of the concerned website with cease and disist letters. My main interest in this is that this sort of thing will produce an arms race, already this is the case on the stock exchange where groups are trying to out do each other with faster systems and smarter algorithms, legally similar systems are likely to evolve: clouds of company bots that exist to absorb the flak of other's take down bots and simlar...

for more ideas read accelerando by charles stross

anyway just thought I'd flag that up as it interests me

DNA databases, Charlie and Ben

This is going to be a pretty short post as there isn't much to add to this discussion other than what is said in these two reports: first Ben Goldacre on the bad evidence used to justify long term retention (ie 24 years retetion) of DNA data taken from those who are arrested but not convicted or cautioned. Second is this article by Charles Stross on the odds of being a false positive in a government database check (in this case CRB check and why he doesn't give school readings of his books).

The only thing really that I want to add to the debate on a database of our DNA etc run by the government is that the risk in terms of security of a database that will ultimately link ALL your information in one place if breached is pretty horrible. I'll briefly expand this: the DNA database would be likely allowed to expand (through ID cards etc) to cover everyone and be multi-use, ie your medical history would be there you NI number what ever. Even if this doesn't happen a single source of information would make identity theft a utterly crippling crime, especially as it would be most likely a random person who would be used to act as a patsy for someone else. Although this is less likely given the current technological state it is likely only a matter of time before the current DNA system starts leaking.

Cool stuff

Frstly: the Chap Olympiad, a very daft but fun event recently held in London here's a link to an ITN report on it.

Secondly: big news in engineering and opto-electronics (if it gets off the ground) scientists have set up 'circuits' such that light can be used to open and close gates. This is important as it means that fully controlable gates can be made either way here is the report.

Sorry about the lazy reporting feeling tired and working on a programming project. Will probably update some information on it soon

Nextgen screens.

I've been recently reading 'Halting state' which is an amazing book by Charles Stross on the what will happen as the Internet becomes more and more ubiquitous. Among the technologies he uses in the plot is continuous Internet as a HUD (heads up display) this sort of HUD would be projected onto what you see from a pair of glasses giving you anything from the best route to your destination (think an iPhone whose screen you see all the time).

Most of this technology already exists (see the sixth sense prototype), iPhones supply constant GPS capabilities, 3G phone systems allow for some degree of Internet access almost anywhere (the newer 4G will improve this massively). Things like the cloud and the grid give constant wifi connections. MMORPGs (Massively-Multiplayer-Online-RolePlaying-Games like World of Warcraft) are becoming mainstream and as they become less esoteric and video games become a common media more MMORPGs will crop up. Urban gaming is already appearing with examples such as geocaching or the more paranoia inducing StreetWars.

In terms of non-existent technology only the ability to create overlays onto the real world are missing and this has moved a lot closer to reality with the creation of a .97" screen by the American company Kopin the big thing about this is that at less than an inch they have created a fully functioning 1280x1024 screen (that's the same resolution as a standard 19" monitor). While an inch screen sounds like the ultimate in eye-strain-o-vision at the distance of a glasses lens it is reasonable to view.

At most much of this technology will happen within the next 10 years or so, the full overlay technology may take a little longer but if nothing else we are now (pretty much) fully capable of hooking a good webcam to a pair of glasses and running the lens as screens. Of course what happens if someone hacks this would be pretty horrible.

UPDATE 1340 03/07/09: this news just broke. The theft was via standard abuse of privileges (something that is not punishable in eve although the subsequent sale of the kredits is) while the value of the theft was ~£3,000 and technically hard to punish legally it will be more and more common and is only a matter of time before someone starts testing this legally.

nanowin and biofutures!

This is a short video of a carbon nanotube muscle, it is very cool. This sort of technology can be used for all sorts of interesting micro motors, engine parts and other machinery such as very manipulatable arms for robots (search and rescue anyone with a cam mounted on one of those to look inside the rubble).

Next is this interesting article on grown organs, so far a bladder, bone marrow and a rat's heart have been made with the bladder having been successfully transplanted into a patient. This is the future of medicine: constant refreshment of organs as and when they are needed. Neat huh?

This would be funny if it weren't so true

This article sums up the onion pretty well. It's funny. It's accurate. And painfully true.

I don't know if it's just my tinfoil hat blocking my ears but when you see stuff like the Simon Singh case the various insanities that are always about (ie creationism and vaccine quackary) it just seems that anti-science is on the rise (ironicly often helped by the 'net).

This is a problem on a number of fronts. Firstly anti-science generally goes hand-in-hand with loss of critical thinking which is not what you want in a democracy - even more so given the current economic and political climate (hello BNP, anyone?) The second reason is that in the increasing technical age that we live in loss of scientific thinking doesn't help anyone. Our current knowledge is close to pushing science far beyond anything we've previously seen: both nanotech and biotech have the potential to fundamentally change how we live beyond even what the internet has done. This will not be helped if half the population are unable to think critically and more importantly unable to get hold of the information that will help with this.

Now more than ever we need GOOD science writers and a GOOD flow of information. Here's hoping it happens

viva la revolution!

Well ok maybe not revolution but this is a excellent article on the affect that the internet is having upon the world.

More precisly it explores the emerging digital socialism that the internet has helped breed. More and more systems are being developed collaborativly (linux, wikipedia etc) and for free.

I won't go on because right now my brain is hungover and I can't form thoughts properly but to quote my friend

"You're foolin' yourself mate, we're living in an ad-hocracy. Come and see the meritocracy inherent in the system!"

Age of obession

This is an idea that I've been bouncing around for a while and still keep coming back to so I'm going to inflict it upon you (who ever you are).

The premise is simple, over the last few hundred years society has changed drastically (in case you've been in hibernation or something). A few hundred years ago we were mainly rural family/village centred, with the industrial revolution we became urban but remained locally focused (either about jobs or just road/church what ever). As last century progressed the focus has changed again from job to friends who may be much more spread out than previous networks. With the advent of the internet this has become global and based much more upon common interests, for example I could go to most major cities of the world and have crash space through friends I've made juggling.

This is the age of obsession, a lot of people now meet via the internet, its no longer taboo to meet someone from online or even date/marry someone met via IRC or WoW. Now more than ever we can group with people not because we have to but because we want to through common interests.

These groups form a double edged sword on the one hand its utterly possible to realise your not freak for liking Bavarian folk music as played by chinchillas on the other hand the same is true for being a fascist or snuff-film enthusiast. Hopefully the internet will still help people account for this and experience the lovely corrective glow of peer pressure.

While often labeled a bad thing peer pressure is vital, it acts as a normaliser, I'm all for weird but when it is considered normal your get into trouble. This is where peer pressure comes in, those dirty little habits you have don't get worse because of peer pressure - unfortunately it is also through peer pressure that shame for normal things can occur - for example enjoying that most dirty of acts - sex. It still amazes me that people are more worried about sex than seemingly any other act that humans perform on one another.

Anyway I would be very interested to ear whether people think that this new 'Age of the obsessive' will be good bad or indifferent. Personally I think it will be for the better as it will allow people passion that has until recently been frowned upon, I'm sick of hearing "you have too much time on your hands - how else do you do all this fun stuff?" most of the time the answer is simple - I'd rather be messing about learning to program than watching 99% of whats on TV.

Roll on the age of the geek where passion for the strange is respected!

4chan iz in ur mainstream, corruptin ur yoof!

This made me smile this morning. 4chan (for those of you sane enough to avoid it) is the internet cess-pit. All those mind searing images? those terrifying memes? They come from 4chan (and a few similar sites).

I've been wondering how long before it was mentioned by name in the main stream news for a while. Whats interesting is that obliquely 4chan and its ilk are mentioned often - normally confused with the 'terrorist group' anonymous. This is explicitly wrong. Anonymous is not a group - it is the outward affect of the anarchy of 4chan and co. These are the places that have no rules and upon which anything goes.

The reason anonymous isn't a terrorist group is that it is not organised, Project Chanology was a meme. Lots of people thought it would be fun or interesting or agreed - so it happened.

This is the new face of protest: flash memes that spread across the internet in a matter of days and then die or explode. Two other good examples are the circle line pub crawl last year (spread via facebook) and the G20 protests this year (spread via facebook and twitter). These are the early sightings of the net truly showing its power - not just breaking news faster and better but impacting upon the world.

The original version of these phenomena were flash mobs - these were light hearted displays of surreality. They have changed and become a method of demonstration as well as a method of anarchy. Which is the only way to describe a lot of the internet.

Stories like the one on the bbc today are just a way of showing how powerful peoples urges and mob mentality can be and online a mob can be huge (4chan's /b section has several million hits a day and managed to get its founder posted as the Time magazine's number one person in the top 100 as a prank as well as a proper interview).

It's things like this that make it easy to see why so many people want to control the internet. It also makes it pretty clear why they will fail. The music industry tried to stop napster and got winMX and so on - these got shut down and we got bittorrents if these die more dark nets will occur (invite only networks for p2p file sharing). The same is happening more generally with content. A lot of the reactions to this story on the bbc page were "why doesn't every youtube video get checked" and "how can this be allowed to happen". This kind of thinking doesn't work online. The responsibility is for the person to stop things to moderate themselves.

Big brother may be watching you online but can't really stop anything - only the people online can change the internet. This doesn't mean that 4chan will be stopped - but it does mean that people need to take things into their own hands and moderate, mark down and report.

oh and supervise their kids online if they don't want them to see porn.

worth reading

Charles Stross is a dude - near future sci-fi is a) VERY interesting and b) not often done well. He pulls it off - if your interested I highly recommend accelerando.

Either way this is his keynote speech from a recent MMO conference - which doesn't have too much to do with MMO's but a lot to do with the future of the internet and computing in general.

The concept that I think is most interesting and already semi-visible within current high-end gadgets (ie the iphone) is the dissolution of the net-space/meat-space boundary (ie internet becoming part of the real world rather than something on the other-side of a screen). This is something that will be most likely the next paradigm shift (the advent of the 'net was the last one). Moving to a society that treats information and the access of it as a basic human right. Currently its only the hard-core netizens (ie me) that get annoyed when they are cut off from internet access but this is rapidly changing.

The business and academic worlds have accepted email as the standard method of communication, Twitter and its blogging brethren are becoming the accepted methods of breaking news (see swine flu and the Mumbai bombings). While much of the populous consider the internet a hobby or something to use to send the odd email it is rapidly (for people under 30) becoming the only method of communication and research.

In my case more and more of my 'luxury' purchases (ie DVDs) come from online and using google maps on my phone has saved me several times (can't wait to get my iPhone once i can afford it). With things like the sixth-sense in development and pushing more of the internet into the real world.

Going back to the speech I think one of the most interesting aspects of this is that it is predicted within the next 20 years - with e-readers and similar already hitting the market as well as the iPhone considered the bench mark for next-gen mobiles I wonder if a lot of this won't be here sooner. It's also interesting to see how the rate at which we lose the ability to predict the future is lessening. In the 1900's people thought they could see clearly to about now. Now people are un-willing to bet beyond the next 5-years let alone several decades.

rantidote - just so Cool

As an antidote to my rant on science journalism here is a 4 min video ABOUT ROBOT PENGUINS!

As far as I know this isn't a spoof here is a New Scientist report on the penguins and here is the link to the learning bionics network.

Interestingly I think one of the most important bits of the video is hidden away towards the end when they discuss how they're pushing for home matter printers. If this can happen (in a significant way ie circuitry printing) it will be as big a shift as the internet.

Either way

SO COOL!

UPDATE 11:27 23-04-09: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxPzodKQays is equally cool - air manta ray

UPDATE 11:38 23-04-09 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSTJVnf5nyA robo - jelly fish!

interesting the mechanical engineering (ie moving bits) for a lot of these seem reasonably simple a lot of the elegance seems to stem from using very clever materials that flow and bend in a very natural and useful way.

Here's to riding around on manta ray dirigibles or using an air jelly fish rather than a lift!

Genuis!

Real terrorism...

This will soon be terrorism, 6 wires and an entire city was stranded - luckily they coped well but this sort of thing could soon be the face of terror.

Very interesting read and worth thinking about

Future history of Windows

This is a nice opinion piece on the possible future of computing under the "good enough revolution" in which (apparently) people will realise that they don't need all the gunk and extras that windows and new pcs offer and in fact buy to replace not upgrade.

This seems plausible as a general idea. The market share for Linux, while still not huge (less that 1% I think), is still slowwly growing. With netbooks making good use of the free and lighter running Linux it is possible that they will carve a niche for themselves. That being said the soon to be released Windows 7 marks is specifically targetted at netbooks and with most computers still pre-installed with windows I think 2025 quoted is a little optimistic for Microsoft's death.

Amusingly this is a rare time in which this is published from XP (I refuse to run F/Vista) although 7 does look nice. Every time I log back onto windows it annoys me now - in fact the only use I have for it now is gaming and I'm hoping that with some summer work I can shift to wine for this.

All in all the next 10 years may be make or break for Linux as a major OS (ie greater than 1%). One way or another it will continue but if it can't make it big during a recession its going to be a wait for the stranglehold of microsoft to lessen; which would be a nice thing if only because a computer hegemony is one reason viruses happen.