dessalles

Pete Conrad runs in Skylab [video]

This image of a so-called “Wii Spray” device, thesis project of a one Martin Lihs, has been making appearances on design and tech blogs lately. Discussion of the prototype has so far focused on heightened realism the controller would bring to a street-art videogame. Personally, I just think anything with rainbow cables looks cool - but that’s just me. Aesthetics of cordage aside, what I find most intriguing about the device isn’t it’s application as a gaming interface but the potential to repurpose it as a recording device. TiVo for graffiti, as it were. So lets put our Johnny Chung Lee hats on for a moment and think this through… read the rest of this entry »

That’s how the 7th season of American Idol ended for a handful of viewers who watched the finale recorded on their DVRs. The live broadcast, which extended a couple minutes beyond the scheduled end time, was cut off right as host Ryan Seacrest went to announce which David (Cook or Archuleta) had won this year’s competition. Brilliant.

When limited by a scarcity of storage resources, what parameters dictate what will and won’t be recorded? An assumption as to the temporal certainty of an event’s occurrence lead those who hadn’t accounted for any margin of error to miss the mark. And seeing how it was the television network, the thing being recorded, that supplied the erroneous information, we’re reminded yet again that distributing misinformation is an extremely effective means of resisting surveillance.

Which begs a few questions: First, in a future of truly pervasive and distributed computing, is it useful to extend the notion sousveillance to include all surveillance facilitated by information supplied by the entity being observed? And more importantly, did Fox intentionally let the broadcast run long to teach time-shifting freeloaders a lesson?

Hot on the heels of my post about Phorm, a company that’s partnered with ISPs to record every website a person visits, Adam Greenfield points us to Path Intelligence, a real-world counterpart to internet tracking. In short, Path Intelligence installs devices in shopping malls which triangulate mobile phones in order track the exact location and movement of shoppers. This “FootPath™” data is then used by mall and business owners to identify logistical faults and marketing opportunities: What areas are generating congestion? What stores do shoppers who frequent one store also regularly visit? What stores see more traffic on rainy days?

Looking at a demo of the Path Inelligence UI, I’m reminded of the heatmaps videogame developer Bungie produces with data gathered from online play of Halo 3. The heatmaps, which visualize the locations of kills and deaths by specific weapon types, are used by level designers to ensure playing fields are well balanced and kills are evenly distributed across the terrain (Does a map bias a certain weapon type? Does map asymmetry give one team an advantage?). What’s more interesting is that Bungie produces a heatmap of every players’ indivdual kills and deaths, and that data has proven to be an excellent strategic resource more serious competitors (Am I more accurate with the sniper rifle when firing from the tower or up on the hill? Should I be using the shotgun or rifle in narrow corridors?). But I digress… read the rest of this entry »

Over the last month or so, Phorm has faced quite a bit of scrutiny. The London-based company has partnered with a number of major British ISPs (British Telecom, Virgin Media and Talk Talk) to track the websites people visit in order to serve more precisely targeted ads. Of course, the digital privacy sirens were sounded full blast at first mention of this joint venture. Phorm argues their “technology doesn’t store any personally identifiable information or IP addresses”. Their site explains that a “random number” is assigned to each user and it’s impossible to connect that number back to a person’s identity. But we all know what happened to No. 4417749. If AOL’s fiasco taught us anything, it’s that the information being associated with these random numbers can frequently contain more information about an identity than the information being concealed by the random number in the first place.

Similar to the Phorm/BT partnership, Charter Communications, the fourth-largest cable operator in the US, announced this week that they’ll be tracking every site their customers visit and selling that data to ad-placement company NebuAd. What I think people find so objectionable with Phorm and NebuAd is they don’t seem to be offering anything of much value back to the consumer. If they were somehow enabling free/cheaper internet access (a la NetZero of the late-90s) or offering any sort of service of value that’s not strictly ad related, it might be a completely different story. But all they seem to be doing is introducing a privacy risk for what will most likely amount to a negligible increase in advertising relevance.

Anyhow, more interestingly, it’s time for me to ask my favorite question: What changes once a handful of ISPs begin tracking everything people look at online, when everything is recorded? The first behavioral response to Phorm’s technology has appeared in the form of software called AntiPhormLite… read the rest of this entry »