ideometric

I thought about making a ‘cyberculture’ category for my postings, but is there really any point to distinguishing online from offline culture now that ‘cyberculture’ is mainstream? Is the line between the two, to the extent that it exists, largely irrelevant?

IT staff routinely snoop on users, riffling through their e-mails and personal files, a newly released survey has found.

Few ordinary users realize that one in three of their IT work colleagues are snooping through company systems, peeking at confidential information such as your private files, wage data, personal e-mails, and HR background, using admin privileges.

Source

The interface design for Google’s new live stock market app is pretty slick. All kinds of information convergence happening. Notice the way it links to news stories on top of the graph of the stock price.

I’m planning to build a cafe racer over the summer. This is an animated mock up I made. I took the photo of the stock bike and painted over it in photoshop to show what I want to do to it (bigger version here).

I think the bike will cost around $1500, plus another ~$500 to pick up a cafe style seat and new exhaust, etc.

With gas prices set to tick past $5/gallon, a 40+mpg bike sounds good to me.

After browsing through random food blogs, I feel compelled to meticulously and artistically document every mundane detail of life.

Plus photography is like instant gratification. Drawing or painting takes forever. This is like click click click - maybe a little processing in Photoshop - and bam, finished. Atleast that’s the plan… so now I’m saving for a D40.

Cold War era ekranoplans. Gotta love the Soviets.Check out 8:30 in, where they decide that adding missiles would be a good idea. Naturally.

NYT Magazine is featuring an article on Jan Chipchase, who has my dream job and whose “Future Perfect” blog is always worth a visit. He’s an anthropologist of sorts, a “human-behavior researcher” or “user anthropologist” employed by Nokia to roam the globe in order to identify how people, especially in emerging markets (i.e. developing countries), are actually using technologies; their social and environmental improvisations (sharing a phone with several people or dealing with lack of electricity), unique needs and wants, etc., in order to design new/better products and services.

The NYT article uses his job to highlight the wider role and potential of the cellphone in globalization and economic growth in the developing world.

“A 2005 London Business School study extrapolated […] that for every additional 10 mobile phones per 100 people, a country’s G.D.P. rises 0.5 percent.”

“A cellphone in the hands of an Indian fisherman who uses it to grow his business — which presumably gives him more resources to feed, clothe, educate and safeguard his family — represents a textbook case of bottom-up economic development, a way of empowering individuals by encouraging entrepreneurship as opposed to more traditional top-down approaches in which aid money must filter through a bureaucratic chain before reaching its beneficiaries, who by virtue of the process are rendered passive recipients.”

This Ugandan improvisation for sending remittances through cellphones shows how people improvise with technology, and illustrates the need/market for virtual banking infrastructure in the developing world:

Someone working in Kampala, for instance, who wishes to send the equivalent of $5 back to his mother in a village will buy a $5 prepaid airtime card, but rather than entering the code into his own phone, he will call the village phone operator (“phone ladies” often run their businesses from small kiosks) and read the code to her. She then uses the airtime for her phone and completes the transaction by giving the man’s mother the money, minus a small commission.

Good read.

This graph from the NYT is interesting. Why do information and communications technologies tend to be adopted more quickly than, say,washing machines? Is one a luxury and the other a necessity? One is single purpose, the other  multipurpose? Higher value? Moore’s law? What of the lag in telephone adoption, versus the rapid spread of radio, way back when?

CNN running a story on consumer electronics infected with viruses from the factory…

In most cases, Chinese factories — where many companies have turned to keep prices low — are the source.

So far, the virus problem appears to come from lax quality control, perhaps a careless worker plugging an infected music player into a factory computer used for testing, rather than organized sabotage by hackers or the Chinese factories.

Funny that Naver, a huge Yahoo style portal site in Korea, has a new “Simple Experience” that mimics Googles pared-down aesthetic.

Google, on the other hand, is using Flash buttons on their localized Google.co.kr site - the only Google country site that differs in style from their main US design.

I’ve never been a Mac fan. Proprietary systems and high prices are not cool. But now that you can run Windows on the new Intel based Macbooks, and given OSX’s Unix base, I am pretty much sold. The 2.5ghz core duo Macbook Pro is looking more and more appealing, especially as I type away on my 4 year old Dell.

TechShop is a fully equipped workshop opened to the public on a pay-per-day, or monthly membership basis. It gives ordinary people - hackers, artists, hobbyists, crafters, students, tinkerers, etc. - access to high end equipment, and the knowledge required to use it.

” TechShop is a fully-equipped open-access workshop and creative environment that lets you drop in any time and work on your own projects at your own pace. It is like a health club with tools and equipment instead of exercise equipment…or a Kinko’s for geeks.”

“The TechShop workshop provides a wide variety of machinery and tools for the open and unlimited use of its members, including milling machines and lathes, welding stations and plasma cutters, sheet metal working equipment, drill presses and band saws, industrial sewing machines, hand tools, plastic working equipment, electronics design and fabrication facilities, tubing and metal bending machines, electrical supplies and tools, and pretty much everything you’d ever need to make just about anything all by yourself.”

The best part is that they have a ton of classes to spread the knowledge required to use the various tools, with a low $30 pricepoint that makes it pretty accessible. They’re expanding to LA this summer too.

Amputee May Hold an Unfair Advantage

Track and field’s world governing body is expected to announce that Oscar Pistorius is ineligible to race against able-bodied athletes because his prosthetics give him an unfair advantage.

Just a little ironic. The NYT article doesn’t get too analytical, but it does say that this has caused “debate over what constitutes disabled and able-bodied and how limits should be placed on technology to balance fair play with the right to compete.”

On a somewhat related note, a Nature article about professors using drugs like ritalin to get an edge. The world seems more like a cheesy cyberpunk novel every day.

An interesting story in Wired about life behind China’s “Golden Shield” aka the Great Firewall. Here’s a clipping.

For all its ambition, the gears of the giant surveillance machine keep getting fouled with sand. On one side of the Great Firewall, a small industry is sprouting up, dedicated to evading blocks and monitors. Libertarian software engineers, enterprising students, banned religious groups, and regular for-profit companies compete with one another to launch new downloadable tools that outfox the censors. They exploit proxy servers, deploy encryption technology, and ferret out holes in the wall. I have spent many afternoons in the Internet cafés of Beijing’s Haidian University district, learning from the students who live in this world. For a dollar an hour, they will help anyone hack the system: set up secure SSH and VPN connections, use a circumvention tool called UltraSurf developed by the banned Falun Gong group, access unregulated Chinese peer-to-peer networks. Their techniques confirm John Gilmore’s adage: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

Makes me wonder how high a priority enforcing the firewall is, if kids can hang out in a cafe offering these services. Maybe authorities are just resigned to the futility of enforcement except in cases that they perceive as threatening?  What type of people subvert the firewall, and for what purposes? To access, or to publish? Is this a trivial thing for the average person meeting their information needs, or does it constitute a radical act? What are these “unregulated Chinese peer-to-peer networks”? I need to read up on UltraSurf too.

Sources: Wired Article /BoingBoing

An interesting article from a CIA publication about the use of the internet in North Korea. I wonder how the internet  is used by the (presumably few and priveliged) who have access. The article brings up points about how computers are easier, in some ways, to control than other technologies that have been repurposed with revolutionary intent inside totalitarian regimes. North Korea is an extreme case, and China’s leaky firewall is probably a more easily generalized case study on censorship, activism, and the net (my guess, anyway).

 ” While allowing researchers to use the Internet to keep current with global trends in science and technology, P’yongyang has been able to retain control over unwelcome political information. The government can promote scientific exploration while keeping researchers in country and under surveillance. Computers conducting Internet searches are more readily monitored than the photocopying machines that served to spread forbidden political tracts in the former Soviet Union. With Internet searches easily tracked and the penalties for political dissent grave, it is difficult to imagine scientists straying from technology sites. The same applies to the domestic Intranet, where technicians exchanging e-mail messages on political issues would run a serious risk of late-night knocks on the door by members of the security forces.”

Source: Mercado, Stephen. Hermit Surfers of Pyongyang. CIA Studies in Intelligence, VOL. 48, NO. 1, 2004 Unclassified Edition. Online version.