Presenting the fact and fiction of tomorrow since 2001
Godless communists pick the penguin and use Linux “to guarantee technological independence”. Remember folks - only the continued purchasing of bloated proprietary operating systems can keep the pinkos at bay. [via Ken MacLeod, image by factor_]
Email and comment spam is one of those constant low-grade annoyances that simply becomes part of the furniture if you spend a lot of time on the ‘net, as are the CAPTCHA puzzles you have to take to prove you’re a human. [image from Wikimedia Commons]
Signs are that they won’t be much use much longer, though; a UK researcher has been using the ‘twisted letters’ type of CAPTCHA to train his visual recognition algorithms, while a chap at Palo Alto has a program that can correctly identify cats and dogs 83% of the time - which, lets face it, is probably a better success rate than the average YouTube user can manage.
Sadly, training algorithms against Turing test spam-traps is no more likely to produce a recognisably intelligent piece of software than the Loebner Artificial Intelligence Prize is. But maybe one day we’ll be able to combine all the pieces… if they don’t beat us to it and combine themselves, of course. 
In Spring 2006, I spent a week in Berlin with some friends from university. As part of a city tour highlighting the Berlin’s Cold War heritage, the guide made a passing reference to plans for the digital reconstruction of files shredded by East German secret police.
As this project entered its pilot stage in May 2007, Germany’s Spiegel Online reported on the finer details;
[W]ith the looming collapse of the Communist regime becoming increasingly evident [in 1989], agents of the East German Staatssicherheitsdienst … feverishly plowed millions of active files through paper shredders, or just tore them up by hand.
Rights activists interrupted the project and rescued a total of 16,250 garbage bags full of scraps. But rescuing the history on those sheets of paper amounted to an absurdly difficult jigsaw puzzle. By 2000, no more than 323 sacks were legible again — reconstructed by a team of 15 people working in Nuremburg — leaving 15,927 to go. So the German government promised money to any group that could plausibly deal with the remaining tons of paper.
The Fraunhofer Institute won the contract in 2003 … Four hundred sacks of scraps will be scanned, front and back, and newly-refined software will try to arrange the digitized fragments according to shape, texture, ink color, handwriting style and recognizable official stamps.
This week, as the pilot phase of the project reached completion, the BBC’s radio programme Digital Planet picked up on the story;
“It will be a long job - but that’s the interesting part,” said the Fraunhofer’s Jan Schneider.
“First we have to digitise all the pieces from the bags. This is done by a special high-speed scanning device.
“The next step is to segment the image itself from the raw scan - we need the outline of the pieces, pixel-wise, to perform the reconstruction process after that.“Then all digitised pieces of paper are stored in the database. After that we reconstruct a lot of the descriptive features of the pieces.”
However, at the former Stasi prison Hohenschonhausen, the main place political prisoners were held and subjected to torture, there are criticisms that the process has already taken too long.
“I think it comes a little bit late,” said Hubertus Knabe, director of the memorial at the site, which is also a museum.
“Nearly 20 years after the fall of the Wall we start to reconstruct these Stasi files, which are really important: the most important files were the ones they destroyed.
“I am happy that now it is going forward, but it is late.”
[2nd story via the BBC]
Via m1k3y of grinding.be I hear the rumour that US mobile telco Verizon will begin offering cellphone handsets based on Linux operating systems alongside the usual proprietary offerings next year.
Though it may not be immediately apparent, that’s good news for more than just the OS-OS wonks. Why? Because it opens up the cellphone software market to those unable or unwilling to buy an API licence for a proprietary system, and allows people to build on a reliable platform. [image by khedara]
It’s not a perfect situation, of course - individual carriers and handset makers will be able to control the operating system’s capabilities. But hey, if the iPhone got hacked that quick, a Linux-based handset is going to crack like an eggshell …
Sven Johnson returns to Futurismic for another instalment of Future Imperfect.
Cyberpunk literature mirrored its era by speaking of the the fetishism of hardware; Sven takes a look at the state of play today, where what were once tools are now toys, and where complex design modeling software is available at the click of a mouse to anyone who wants it … as part of a video game. Continue reading “Toys of the Trade”
I think we’ve got an early candidate for futurist talking-point of the week right here: researchers from New York’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed artificial intelligence software that appears to possess a rudimentary “theory of mind” - a cognitive ability not manifest in human children until the age of four or five. [image from NewWorldNotes]
The researchers are using the software to control a Second Life avatar called Eddie:
“Two avatars controlled by humans stand with Eddie next to one red and one green suitcase. One human avatar then leaves and while they are gone the remaining human avatar moves the gun from the red suitcase into the green one.
Eddie is then asked where the character that left would look for the gun. The AI software correctly realises they will look in the red suitcase.”
Doesn’t sound too impressive at first, but it’s being hailed as a significant advance in the capabilities of artificially intelligent software by some - though others are less impressed, as Eddie’s reasoning engine has to be seeded with a simple logical statement before he can pass the test.
Even so, the Rensselaer guys reckon it’ll be great for making games with more realistic computer-controlled enemies … but I imagine there’s a number of people in the assorted military-industrial complexes of the globe thinking waaaay bigger than that right now.
Despite being used for nefarious purposes, “worm” viruses are clever little bits of self-distributing code. Microsoft researchers here in the UK are considering fighting fire with fire, and using the same replication methods deployed by malicious viruses to spread software patches.
It’s an interesting approach - using the weapons of the enemy against them, so to speak. But one wonders whether the effort wouldn’t be just as well spent on, y’know, making sure the software had less holes in need of patching before it got released?
Just a thought.
[Guess who's been helping a friend clean viruses off their computer this week ...]
A group of UK based psychology researchers were interested in seeing how Second Life users reacted to invasions of personal space within the virtual world. So, they developed a way around the built-in limitations that Linden Lab put in place to prevent software-controlled avatars being deployed, enabling them to send an avatar on autopilot to interact with other residents and record their reactions.
To which your response might be "so what?" - especially if you’re skeptical about Second Life to start with, which is not an uncommon stance. But as the heads-up on SlashDot points out, what can be done by psychology researchers in the name of science could just as easily be done by spammers seeking a automated method of advertising in the metaverse … which would seem to reinforce the adage that no platform will ever remain completely immune to spam techniques. Still, at least in SL you can always teleport away from an annoying avatar, which is more than you can do when confronted by a Scientologist or insurance hawker in the high street … [Image by PsychoAl]
Ah, dammit … there’s a song on my hard-drive that I really want to listen to, but I can’t remember what it’s called or who it’s by. It’d be so much easier if I could just sing a few bars and have a program search the tune out for me.
If there’s one thing that everyone (even the most enthusiastic) has to say about Second Life, it’s that the software is ferociously resource-hungry and more bug-ridden than a hobo’s sleeping bag. Numerous projects are running toward the goal of a more user-friendly interface based on open source code, and one of them has just become the darling of the SL blogosphere by creating an AJAX-based text-only version of the client software - in non-geek language, that means it can run in your web browser. Which is pretty good going for a fifteen year old.
