Monthly Archives: October 2008

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I for one, welcome our new robodog overlords…

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Obligatory shout-out to Pentagon boffins for their most recent bout of world-domineering mad-scientica. The Pentagon proposes to:

…develop a software/hardware suit that would enable a multi-robot team, together with a human operator, to search for and detect a non-cooperative human subject.

According to Prof Steve Wright of Leeds Metropolitan University:

“What we have here are the beginnings of something designed to enable robots to hunt down humans like a pack of dogs. Once the software is perfected we can reasonably anticipate that they will become autonomous and become armed.

We can also expect such systems to be equipped with human detection and tracking devices including sensors which detect human breath and the radio waves associated with a human heart beat. These are technologies already developed.”

Like a PACK OF DOGS I SAY! Muahahahahahaaa!

You gotta laugh, right? 😉

[from New Scientist, via KurzweilAI.net][image from this New Scientist blog post]

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Friday Free Fiction for 24th October

Friday rolls round once again, like some perpetually mobile ball-bearing in the supermarket aisle of life… so best grab onto a stack of free fiction to break your fall, eh? Let’s see what we’ve got…

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There’s a big batch of pulp-era classix at Feedbooks:

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AntipodeanSF‘s new issue has ten micro-flash stories waiting to be read.

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There’s a new issue of Behind the Wainscot, too:

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This week’s fictional offering from Strange Horizons: “Just After Midnight” by Christie Skipper Ritchotte.

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Tor.com are offering a free ebook version of Brian Francis Slattery‘s Spaceman Blues. The only catch is that you have to be a registered member of the site to get at them, but I imagine the bulk of you are already.

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Here’s a bit of a break from science fiction, if you fancy it, via a tip-off from Futurismic‘s own Tom Marcinko:

Literary agent Lucienne Diver declared “Urban Fantasy Week” and has posted some short stories by some of the series authors in her stable on her Livejournal.

Cheers, Tom!

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Via Nick Mamatas, the summer issue of Weird Tales is available as a free PDF download, for an unspecified limited period…

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Peter Watts has a snippet of fiction up at his blog that comes with spoiler warnings, the title of which appears to be “Good News for Modern Man“. Peter Watts being Peter Watts, it probably isn’t good news at all…

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Via the indispensable SF Signal, there’s an excerpt from Alastair Reynolds‘ The Six Directions of Space at Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist.

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The latest news from Subterranean Online:

The Fall 2008 issue is well under way, with the serialized “Celestial Empire” novelette by Chris Roberson now complete…

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More leather-slappin’ sharp-shootin’ fiction at SpaceWesterns.com:

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Jayme Lynn Blaschke is still dredging through a sea of Memory – here’s part 27.

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To close things off, here’s a handful of Friday Flash Fiction:

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And that’s about your lot, folks… for this week, anyway. Keep those tip-offs coming in; I need ’em before 1800 GMT if they’re to make the cut on Friday! In the meantime, have a great weekend.

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Exchanging mugshots to make crypto passwords

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recursive PDAA Romanian computer scientist has come up with a new way to generate secure communications pairing between devices like PDAs: get their owners to take photos of one another, and use the biometrics of their faces to generate the password. [image by James Jordan]

The PDA compares the two photos and generates a security code for making a safe connection. The users can then use this connection to exchange confidential information. The photos are stored as a template that contains the essential features for recognition.

I haven’t read the full paper, but it strikes me that there’s an obvious flaw here – in that anyone stealing one of the two devices can use the pre-generated connection key, meaning it’s still only as secure as whatever password or locking system its owner has installed on it (clever crypto types, please feel free to explain why I’m wrong about that). But even so, an interesting proof-of-concept.

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UK fan-fic writer on obscenity charge

In addition to the worry that their favourite author or franchise might try suing them for breach of copyright and intellectual property theft, UK writers of the more, ah, racey forms of fan-fiction have a new concern – being charged under the Obscene Publications laws.

The fan-fic in question is a kind of splatter-core horror-porn tribute to a British girl band who can’t sing in tune without digital processing, and Darryn Walker’s trial will be the first prosecution of written material under the relevant laws in twenty years. If the action against Walker is successful, it’s very bad news for slash fiction writers. [via TechDirt]

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Open-source DRM? WTF?

If there are two concepts in the computing world that could be more antithetical than Open Source and Digital Rights Management, I can’t imagine what they might be[1]. But it’s real: an outfit called Marlin say they’re ready to take on the software behemoths with DRM systems that “works in a way that doesn’t hold consumers hostage [… and] allows you to protect and share content in the home, in a way that people own the content, not the devices.”

Well, bravo to them for making the effort. I give it a maximum of two weeks of the system being out ‘in the wild’ before someone cracks it open like a seasonal hazelnut.

[ 1 – Unless you count ‘Apple’ and ‘Value For Money’, I guess… 😉 ]