On most mornings a stack of amNY – one of two competitive free dailies – sits outside the entrance to my local subway stop. A few times a week I’ll grab one off the cheap wire rack for my ride to the office; yesterday’s edition came annotated…
It’s common commuter habit to pull newspapers from the untouched, unsoiled center of the stack, typically leaving a chafed & crusty top-copy for a gust of wind or a late-riser. This annotated edition, left on top, was passed up by a number of unimpressed commuters before I got my chance at it. continue reading »
And I’m back; blog vacation is over. Lots to catch up on. Let’s start with…
It’s been a few weeks since Usain Bolt’s celebratory 9.69 second jog, the Olympics are well and done, but I still find myself fascinated by the he’s-either-on-steroids-or-everything-we-thought-we-knew-about-sprinting-is-wrong 100m world record. I catch myself watching the final once or twice a day (I have the video on my phone); it probably won’t cease to amaze me until he finds a tenth of a second in his busy schedule to surpass it.
I, like the large majority of Americans, did not get to watch Bolt’s run live that Saturday morning as exclusive television rights kept major competitions off the air until NBC’s nightly primetime broadcast. That’s not to say I waited until 9pm; I waited about 15 minutes. continue reading »
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’m partial to the rainbow cable – but that might just be 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… continue reading »
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?
Pete Conrad runs in Skylab [
RSS
1 comment »