Posts tagged Lives
Google Glass: Our Lives Are Not Reality TV
Mar 4th
Even as many in the geek-o-sphere drool in anticipation for the onset of Google Glass, some technologists are starting to question the very real privacy issues entangled with the use of these wearable computers and cameras.
Predictably, the first concerns raised about Google Glass were about the user’s privacy: If I am transmitting all of this data to Google, it is going to know even more about me than ever! Or so the reasoning goes. I have to admit that this has been bugging me, but since I carry around an Android phone already, I’m pretty sure Google pretty much knows whatever it wants to know about me.
But then there’s the other half of the privacy problem, which not many in the community have yet voiced: What about the privacy of the people these devices are looking at?
Anonymous Cameras Everywhere
Being monitored by video cameras is nothing new, of course; it’s a risk we run every day. If I happen to absent-mindedly pick my nose in the seemingly empty frozen food aisle at Mega-Mart, it’s a pretty sure bet that my gross-out was captured on a video somewhere.
The advent of Google Glass supercharges the equation, because now the number of cameras increases – perhaps exponentially – and they’ll show up in ever more unexpected places owned by a much wider variety of people and organizations.
For now, there’s an implied trust that someone from the store won’t take that nose-picking video and put it on YouTube as part of a “Disgusting Things Journalists Do” montage. Sure, there’s nothing really stopping some bored Mega-Mart employee from scraping that video for whatever purpose. But, should they happen to post said video and I happen to see it, I will likely recognize my surroundings in the video and find someone to sue.
Now imagine the same situation, recorded not by the store’s cameras, but by someone wearing a Google Glass or similar device who happened to be standing unnoticed at the end of the aisle. Our voyeur records the incident, posts it on the Web anonymously, and -boom! – my reasonable expectation of privacy is violated. And I will likely never be able to find the culprit to take the video down.
The lesson here – beyond “don’t pick your nose” – is that if these devices do indeed take off, there is nothing to stop someone from monitoring and tagging me in photos, microblogs or videos – whether or not I know what’s going on.
There can be some positives out of this kind of citizen “Eye in the Sky.” If someone commits a crime, for instance, they might have been surreptitiously recorded in the act, with less obvious danger to the recorder than holding up a smartphone. Indeed, in his novel Earth, futurist David Brin outlines a near-future where citizens keep down random street-crime just by the existence of video recording equipment they wear.
But there’s a flip side to this, when a collection of Brin’s characters, a group of street punks, is befriended by an elderly man who seems to want to teach them about the Way Things Were. It all goes well, until after the senior man’s death, the gang discovers to their mortification that the man has been logging every conversation for use in a social-observation article about the state of youth in that society.
A little out there? Maybe so, but how long before Tumblr, Flickr and YouTube are filled with text and video content of embarrassing moments captured by Google Glass?
Anyone Can Be a Target
Beyond the voyeur problem, I keep coming back to how this technology can be abused – particularly this very scary scenario:
Imagine someone builds an app that lets you upload a photo of someone to your Google account and then uses facial-recognition software to process the face of every person you see. Sure, there are benign uses for such a tool, such as helping people remember the names of the people they meet.
But what if I was a member of an (alleged!) criminal organization who would love nothing better than to… talk… to the witness that’s going to testify in the trial that might prove my organization has done some pretty bad things. We’re innocent, of course, but it would be nice to… explain things… to this witness, who is currently ensconced in the U.S. Marshall’s Witness Protection program.
To find that witness today, I’d have to be incredibly lucky, hack the Marshall’s computer system or bribe (or threaten?) a corrupt law enforcement official. But in a Google Glass world, I could hire private detectives to be on the lookout for my target. Better yet, I could post an ad on Craigslist offering a reward to find “my long-lost cousin/uncle/aunt.” Now I have an entire community of people using facial-recognition software helping me find this person. Heck, you might not have to actively employ Google Glass users. Just periodically run a Google Image search of your target’s photo for “Images Like This.”
Now imagine you’re the witness in this scenario.
There are lots of times people don’t want to be found – spouses seeking to escape an abusive partner, victims trying to elude stalkers – any one of these types of people could run afoul of these cameras. The technology to do this kind of illicit activity is not quite ready for commercial shelves yet, but the day is soon coming.
But the implications are already disturbing: besides embarrassing videos taken in public, you can add tracking by jealous spouses, overprotective parents or insurance companies to the list. If you’re really paranoid, think about government surveillance of legitimate but unpopular activities.
Is this all too much? Maybe. But think about this, because as a father, I sure do: With Google Glass, what’s to stop anyone from recording images and audio of children? As a parent, the thought of anyone tracking minors for any reason without parents’ permission (unlike the kids in the image from the official Google video above) is abhorrent and potentially dangerous.
The technology itself makes this kind of subtle, continuous recording more likely. Unlike cellphone cameras, Google Glass is always on, always recording, capturing even the quick stuff you can’t anticipate. The upshot? Far fewer safe refuges where you’re not going to be recorded.
Ready For Your Close Up?
Plenty of others are worried about how Google Glass will destroy the expectation of privacy in our normal, not-made-for-TV daily lives. David Hurst at Creative Good writes (emphasis his):
“Google Glass is like one [Street View] camera car for each of the thousands, possibly millions, of people who will wear the device – every single day, everywhere they go – on sidewalks, into restaurants, up elevators, around your office, into your home. From now on, starting today, anywhere you go within range of a Google Glass device, everything you do could be recorded and uploaded to Google’s cloud, and stored there for the rest of your life. You won’t know if you’re being recorded or not; and even if you do, you’ll have no way to stop it.
“And that, my friends, is the experience that Google Glass creates. That is the experience we should be thinking about. The most important Google Glass experience is not the user experience – it’s the experience of everyone else. The experience of being a citizen, in public, is about to change.”
Whether we are just running errands, hanging out with friends or are on the lam from some really bad people, Google Glass has the capability to push our lives into reality of the television kind. But many of us aren’t ready for our close up, and never will be.
Images courtesy of Google.
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Sudden Site Shutdowns And The Perils Of Living Our Lives Online
Feb 28th
The other day, all of my memories were erased. Well, that’s how you’d describe it in the marketing parlance of Memolane, an excellent social history timeline service that shut down late last week. Just a few weeks prior, the always-useful crime stats and community updates from Everyblock stopped flowing into my Google Reader. What the hell, Internet?
As the Web matures, the possibility that our favorite services might suddenly and unexpectedly shut down always looms in the background. It may be unlikely, but it’s something to bear in mind as we spend more of digital lives in the cloud: This data isn’t ours. We’re handing it to some company that’s storing it on their servers. If we’re really lucky, they’ll let us click an “export” button at some point and take it with us.
This isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. Remember LaLa? The online music service was nearing Rdio-caliber levels of awesomeness before Apple bought it and shut it down. Since Larry Page took over as CEO, Google has been routinely cleaning house and closing less popular services while making the remaining ones more Google Plus-y.
Then you have the thankfully rare scenario that some unsuspecting Megaupload users were caught in last year when the feds shut down Kim Dotcom’s cyberlocker. More recently, Yahoo acquired Pinterest clone Snip.it and subsequently slammed the doors shut. To be fair, that site was nowhere near as popular as Delicious, the social bookmarking service that narrowly escaped the swing of Yahoo’s downsizing hatchet in 2011.
Expect More Startup Roadkill
Don’t be surprised if this sort of thing happens more frequently as the Web gets older. Startups will either fail or get acquired, and the giants will keep fine-tuning their products as their business priorities shift.
In many cases, few will mourn these shutdowns. Nobody wept when the curtain rang down on Google Wave (although some of us are still bitter about the loss of Google Reader’s sharing button).
But in some instances – see Everyblock – services with a substantial community can disappear overnight. When this sort of thing happens, it hopefully won’t always be as thoughtlessly bungled as NBC’s shutdown of Everyblock was. But happen it will.
Memolane, We Hardly Knew Ye
Memolane was not a hugely popular service, but loved it. The premise was simple: You plugged in your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare and SoundCloud accounts (among many others) and it built a nice-looking timeline of your social media updates and content, going all the way back to whenever you first started using Facebook or Flickr. Mine went back seven years, so it was pretty interesting to scroll through.
You could also plug in any RSS feed, so I kept an archive of my ReadWrite stories alongside my photos, check-ins, tweets and other social content. If you live online like I do, your Memolane timeline would be pretty thoroughly detailed.
My grandmother died in 1997, a few months before Larry Page and Sergey Brin registered the domain google.com. If I wanted to find out more about her life, I’d have to dig into old boxes or ask my mother. I can’t Google her. My grandchildren, on the other hand, will have as richly detailed a history as you can possibly imagine, right down to individual haircuts (thanks, Foursquare). Kids graduating high school this May will have an even more thorough digital biography awaiting future generations.
Tools like Memolane allow us to start aggregating all the content and updates we’re sprinkling across the Web, pulling them into a thorough and chronological timeline. Nobody cared about my Memolane but me. And even I didn’t look at it regularly. It was just interesting to go back every once and awhile and reminisce about things that were happening in my life four years ago.
I could imagine my grandchildren one day scrolling through my Memolane timeline, wondering what life was like before Internet-connected neural implants and laser-shooting eyeballs.
Memolane felt very personal. So when it shut down, it was a little weird. LaLa, Everyblock and other public services were one thing, but this was my history. I don’t even get an export button? Apparently not.
Fortunately, all Memolane was doing was aggregating content from other sources, all of which are still live. So I can at least partially recreate the experience on another service like TimeHop or Rememble. Easy enough.
Still, these recent shutdowns offer yet another sobering reminder of something we already knew: It’s not our Web, even when it feels like it is. So have fun and share as much as you please. But try not to get too attached.
Lead photo by Chris Gilson
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Seo In Guk to attempt variety for the first time in ‘When a Man Lives Alone’ – allkpop (blog)
Jan 29th
 allkpop (blog) |
Seo In Guk to attempt variety for the first time in 'When a Man Lives Alone'
allkpop (blog) Singer-turned-actor Seo In Guk will be attempting a variety show for the first time. Along with Lee Sung Jae, Lee Kwang Ki, and Kim Tae Won, Seo In Guk will be featured on the MBC lunar new year special 'When a Man Lives Alone'. 'When a Man Lives … |
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Small merchants in the fight of their lives against Homeplus – The Hankyoreh
Oct 12th
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Small merchants in the fight of their lives against Homeplus
The Hankyoreh During the past seven months, the life of Seo Jung-rae, a merchant in Seoul's Mapo district, has changed a lot. Seo, 50, now leads a fight of Mangwon traditional market merchants who are struggling against the threat to their livelihoods posed by a … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
SOPA Lives! New Bill Seeks to Resurrect Expansion of IP Enforcement Powers
Jul 10th
A new bill is about to be officially introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives that would resurrect some unsavory aspects of the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that sparked widespread protests last winter.
The bill, which the House Judiciary Committee is scheduled to mark up as soon as today, is titled the Intellectual Property Attaché Act (IPAA) and is primarily designed to expand the powers of so-called IP attachés within a new agency inside the Department of Commerce, even to the point of establishing a new Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property.
This is a very deliberate shift within the bureaucracy that’s designed to expand the powers of the intellectual property enforcement agents who work within the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The primary mission of these new IP attachés would be, according to the bill, “to achieve potential benefit by reducing intellectual property infringement in the United States market and globally.”
One way to interpret this mission? Giving members of the diplomatic corps more powers to enforce intellectual property violations around the world.
What’s the Problem This Time?
Given that IP violations are against the law, where’s the problem? Opponents of the SOPA and PIPA bills from late 2011 and early 2012 will recognize this expansion of powers as part of the SOPA act, though at the time the provision got very little attention.
Those bills gave a number of new powers to copyright holders who found content on a website that they believed infringed on their copyright:
- They could ask any vendor providing revenue to that site to stop. For instance, the request could go to advertising or credit card providers for the allegedly infringing site, and they would have five days to cut their ties with the site.
- The bills would have enabled the U.S. Attorney General to send court orders to DNS server operators ordering them to stop resolving the domain names of allegedly infringing sites to their matching IP addresses – making it impossible for Web browsers to reach the sites by name.
- Search engines would also be required to remove or block links to these sites.
Protesters were incensed, particularly because all of these actions could have been set in motion by private corporations, with no requirements for legal proof.
A copyright holder need only accuse a website of infringement, and the search engine, advertisement and payment systems would be cut off in five days. DNS filtering would need the involvement of the Department of Justice to get a court order, but again, there would be no need to prove anything to obtain such an order from a judge.
Rushing to Judgment?
This time, though, the primary author of IPAA, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) – the same Congressman who launched SOPA – has support even from those who opposed the original SOPA bill, including Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA). Other co-sponsors include Reps. Howard Berman (D-CA), Howard Coble (R-NC), Steve Chabot (R-OH), Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), Adam Schiff (D-CA), and Mel Watt (D-NC).
Clearly, Hollywood and other intellectual property holders would love to see IPAA passed: It actually expands on some aspects of SOPA/PIPA. And government agents with more power to enforce private intellectual property rights both domestically and globally is a taxpayer-funded dream for copyright holders.
The apparent rush to get IPAA in the pipeline could be intended to avoid the media scrutiny and protests that accompanied the attempts to pass SOPA and PIPA.
But that scrutiny is about to start. Opponents will soon be screaming that the new bill offers no exceptions or limitation on copyrights, and doesn’t even allow for other countries to deal with intellectual property issues in their own ways.
Hopefully, more public discussion will shed light on the true scope and powers of this bill.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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SEO Miracle and Adam’s Air Ambulance Found New Ways to Save Lives – Albany Times Union
Apr 18th
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SEO Miracle and Adam's Air Ambulance Found New Ways to Save Lives
Albany Times Union Adam's Air Ambulance and SEO Miracle discover new ways of saving patients. An air ambulance service is an emergency medical assistance provided in situations where a traditional ambulance cannot reach the scene or they simply don't have enough time. |
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SEO Miracle and Adam’s Air Ambulance Found New Ways to Save Lives – PR Web (press release)
Apr 18th
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SEO Miracle and Adam's Air Ambulance Found New Ways to Save Lives
PR Web (press release) Adam's Air Ambulance and SEO Miracle discover new ways of saving patients. An air ambulance service is an emergency medical assistance provided in situations where a traditional ambulance cannot reach the scene or they simply don't have enough time. |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Silverlight Lives On in New SQL Server 2012 Reporting Tool
Apr 4th
The Power View tool is meant to be run remotely, including from a service linked to a SQL Azure cloud-based database, so this is indeed a Web application. Technically, it may run from any browser that supports Silverlight. As with charting in Excel, you point Power View to your source and adapt the visualizations to best suit how that data may be explained to a viewer, and you do so without impacting the data itself.
One new tool called the slicer, added to the project during its public preview phase (proof that Microsoft can indeed incorporate good suggestions during a public preview), lets the user select a segment of data in a table to pull out and either highlight in the context of the bigger chart, or demonstrate within a separate graph. Then by creating what Power View calls cards, you can take a record about one of the items depicted in a chart – for example, one of the factors that the chart is comparing, like HP’s share price to Dell’s or Angus cattle prices compared to Hereford – and generate what Metro would call a “tile” for that item.
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The card can show a picture and some recent data about the item, and clicking on it can trigger the chart to “pivot” around it, showing either the highlight or the slice you created earlier.
The result might have you imagining producing your weekly meetings the way CNN’s John King dances around his big board on Election Night, poking on-screen cards by hand and watching the results zoom into the foreground.
History has demonstrated that if one of the teams at Microsoft believes so sincerely in their technology that they don’t want it to die, bestowing upon it the word “Power” gives it an almost magical ability to survive, and perhaps even thrive. During the development of Windows Server 2003, a truly revolutionary command line tool code-named Monad threatened to invalidate the need for a graphical operations management tool. In 2006, its developers managed to get its name changed to PowerShell, and though executives refused to enable it to ship with the server itself, the company agreed to distribute it for free from its Web site. It was a fateful decision; at a time when other companies had already discovered the tremendous power of free distribution, Microsoft decided to distribute PowerShell for free, perhaps with the intent of watching it dwindle and fade away.
The opposite happened, of course: Now the tool has become an integral part not only of Windows Server but of Exchange – indeed, the graphical Exchange operations are all built around PowerShell scripts. So now that Silverlight is being tucked away inside some data visualization tool – at a time when data visualization tools are becoming the axis of an entirely new ecosystem of the database and data storage industry – little ol’ Power View may breathe some new life yet into the technology. Indeed, we could be seeing a kind of architectural divergence, where “business Windows” based on the Desktop model thrives as “consumer Windows” on the Metro model goes its own direction.
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LinkedIn Eats Rapportive: Let’s Hope the Magic Lives On
Feb 7th
Several years ago, I spoke on a panel at an advertising industry conference with Om Malik and Michael Arrington. Arrington, my former employer, was bored by the conversation and mocked me throughout it. One of the last questions we were asked on the panel was what technology we were most excited about at the time. I said I was most excited by trends represented by a little startup called Rapportive, which sits in your Gmail sidebar and shows you aggregated information about whoever you are emailing.
Arrington laughed at me, just like he had laughed at me in the conference green room when I showed people photos on my phone of the chickens I was raising in my backyard. Just as I was vindicated when the TV show Portlandia later demonstrated that it is perfectly reasonable to raise chickens here in my home town, so too do I feel a little vindicated by the reported acquisition in the works of Rapportive by social network LinkedIn. Ok, so both are a little silly. But the point is: Rapportive is awesome and I was right.
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It wasn’t a big acquisition (TechCrunch was told around $15m) but it was some validation of some big ideas.
Rapportive is a simple thing, and yet it’s founded on some complex and potent technology trends. Trends like: identity as platform, harvesting of social network user data and APIs for cross-site functionality. One top of profile data and email adresses, you can build awesome tools.
Rapportive is magical; it’s one of the first things I show people when I am excited to show them something about the internet. Many people immediately see the value of it. When we first wrote about it here, we titled our post Stop What You Are Doing Right Now and Install This Browser Plug-in. No one objected, it was clearly awesome. (The line Stop What You Are Doing is something best reserved for when you can really back it up.)
Since that time, Rapportive has served as one of the most compelling elements in the still-unfullfilling ecosystem of CRM applications floating around the internet. None solve all your problems, most are hard to make the time to come back to. Not Rapportive, though. Not if you’re a Gmail user, anyway. It delivers relationship management value in almost every email you send and recieve.
Much of that value comes from the integration of 3rd party services. There’s a whole list of apps built on Rapportive. They sit in your email, look at who you’re corresponding with and then let you interact with that person or their content on other social networks. Twitter and LinkedIn have been the best in my experience, but enterprise Rapportive users may have prefered other apps on the platform.
Woe, woe to LinkedIn if they screw with this. If LinkedIn is to Rapportive as Twitter has been to Tweetdeck then I am going to be one unhappy user. If LinkedIn treats Rapportive as well as it has treated CardMunch (which is a miracle apps) then we’re in good shape.
LinkedIn may serve up less data in Rapportive under its watch simply because this is probably the definitive end of Rapportive’s relationship with the super-controversial social data mining service Rapleaf. Many people hate Rapleaf, but they love the Rapportive interface that serves up some of that information. Fortunately Rapportive does not surface some of the information Rapleaf makes available, like home and car ownership and family status.
Rapportive was the best example of what could be done with aggregated user data though! All too often, when you ask someone about aggregated social network user data they immediately say “I’m opposed to it!”
As a platform for the creation of products, services, new ways to relate to the people and the web arround us though – Rapportive is a beautiful example of what the future of the web could be. It’s not about apps like Path sucking your phone’s contact info into its servers without telling you; it’s not about services like Pinterest seruptitiously changing your shared URLs to capture affiliate revenue.
No, the future of user data as a platform, in its best form, is show you the faces of the people you’re meeting by email. It’s about helping you connect with them – hey, you might say, I see you sent me an email. I haven’t had a chance to reply yet, but you’ll notice that I just started following you on Twitter. (A person can also guess another person’s email by guessing at variations of their name @ their company domain.com too.)
I sure hope Rapportive can grow and thrive in its new home. And I hope that it will inspire whole new worlds of startups building
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