Monthly Archives: January 2011

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Hacker’s report says cyberwar fears misdirected

Not that I expect governments and military bureaucracies to change course in response to sensible thinking from qualified experts, the guy who penned (or rather keyed) The Hacker’s Handbook back in the day has co-authored a report that suggests the recently fashionable wing-flapping over “cyberwar” is counterproductive:

Published today, Reducing Systemic Cybersecurity Risk says that a true cyberwar would have the destructive effects of conventional war but be fought exclusively in cyberspace – and as such is a “highly unlikely” occurrence.

Cybersecurity is important because it protects all categories of data from theft and damage. This includes sensitive data, personally identifiable information (PII), protected health information (PHI), personal information, intellectual property, data, and governmental and industry information systems. To hire experts, we recommend to check https://www.sapphire.net/.

[…]

Controversially, the OECD advises nations against adopting the Pentagon’s idea of setting up a military division – as it has under the auspices of the US air force’s Space Command – to fight cyber-security threats. While vested interests may want to see taxpayers’ money spent on such ventures, says Sommer, the military can only defend its own networks, not the private-sector critical networks we all depend on for gas, water, electricity and banking.

Co-authored with computer scientist Ian Brown of the Oxford Internet Institute, UK, the report says online attacks are unlikely ever to have global significance on the scale of, say, a disease pandemic or a run on the banks. But they say “localised misery and loss” could be caused by a successful attack on the internet’s routing structure, which governments must ensure are defended with investment in cyber-security training.

Personally, I think the Pentagon’s bluster and chest-thumping over “cyberwar” is thrown into an interesting light by the increasingly inescapable conclusion that they played a large part in commissioning the Stuxnet worm; as Chairman Bruce puts it, “what’s worse, strategically: Stuxnet, or proliferating Iranian nuclear weapons? How about a world where you’ve got proliferating Stuxnets AND proliferating Iranian nuclear weapons?”

Pandora’s box strikes again; code is far easier and cheaper to reverse engineer than a nuke, and requires no expensive and/or dangerous physical contraband. Beware of starting a knife-fight in a downtown full of ninjas.

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36 years of weird: Boston’s Sci-Fi Film Festival

Love science fiction cinema? Live near Boston? Well, lucky you! Read this press release:

Although the final schedule for 2011’s Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival has not yet been announced, festival director Garen Daly has already noticed a jump in ticket sales. The festival, which began at the Orson Welles Cinemas, began as a 24 hour science fiction retrospective in 1976 and now stretches ten days, taking place at the Somerville Theater.

Like many other festivals, the Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival uses OpenFilm to collect submissions. The deadline this year is January 31st, but Assistant Curator Liz Pratt maintains that she and Daly will have plenty of time to finalize the selections. “We want to make sure we can receive as many submissions as possible,” she explained, “because this festival is a great jumping-off point for young directors and lower-budget films. And since we have so many hours to fill with the ‘Thon, we can always find room to fit in something great that we’ve found at the last minute.”

The festival has announced two official selections so far, the first being the original Battlestar Galactica. Daly has also acquired an extremely rare print of 2,000 Leagues Under the Sea, dated 1916/17 and directed by Stuart Patton. The film has not been shown in Boston since the 1920s and will be a one-in-a-lifetime chance for serious film fans. Director David Fincher has just announced he will be remaking the Jules Verne classic.

The tradition of the 24 hour ‘Thon, as it affectionately became to be called, remains. Although Daly admits that “sharing one room for 24 hours will do strange things,” loyal festival goers are expected to arrive from around the country to indulge in a marathon of all things science fiction. Many of them have attended every year of the festival, which includes feature films as well as animation, vintage movie trailers, and other unannounced surprises.

What does Daly say is the most important thing for attendees to remember? “As we like to say, we’re old enough to know better but young enough to stay up.” He continued, “Bring extra deodorant, mouthwash and a change of socks. We also suggest you bring some eye drops and your sense of awe.”

About the Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival…

The 2011 Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival describes itself as “the oldest genre film festival in the country (we think.)” The festival will be held from February 11 to February 21 at the Somerville Theater, 55 Davis Square, Somerville MA. The ‘Thon will begin on Sunday, February 20 and noon and will continue for 24 hours. Tickets and passes can be purchased at www.bostonsci-fi.com or at the theater. Friend them on Facebook or follow news and updates on the website.

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Comfortable in the world: ereaders vs. tablets

Tom Armitage at Berg compares the seductive gloss of the multipurpose iPad with the more homely functionality of the Kindle; an interesting (and user-centric) argument against technological convergence?

The iPad bursts into life, its backlight on, the blinking “slide to unlock” label hinting at the direction of the motion it wants you to make. That rich, vibrant screen craves attention.

The Kindle blinks – as if it’s remembering where it was – and then displays a screen that’s usually composed of text. The content of the screen changes, but the quality of it doesn’t. There’s no sudden change in brightness or contrast, no backlight. If you hadn’t witnessed the change, you might not think there was anything to pay attention to there.

[…]

Attention-seeking is something we often do when we’re uncomfortable, though – when we need to remind the world we’re still there. And the strongest feeling I get from my recently-acquired Kindle is that it’s comfortable in the world.

That matte, paper-like e-ink screen feels familiar, calm – as opposed to the glowing screens of so many devices that have no natural equivalents. The iPad seems natural enough when it’s off – it has a pleasant glass and metal aesthetic. But hit that home button and that glow reveals its alien insides.

Perhaps the Kindle’s comfort is down to its single-use nature. After all, it knows it already has your attention – when you come to it, you pick it up with the act of reading already in mind.

Provocative stuff… but in the interests of journalistic balance (yeah, right), here’s Jonah Lehrer anguishing over the observation that ereaders may be too easy to read:

I worry that this same impulse – making content easier and easier to see – could actually backfire with books. We will trade away understanding for perception. The words will shimmer on the screen, but the sentences will be quickly forgotten. Let me explain. Stanislas Dehaene, a neuroscientist at the College de France in Paris, has helped illuminate the neural anatomy of reading. It turns out that the literate brain contains two distinct pathways for making sense of words, which are activated in different contexts. One pathway is known as the ventral route, and it’s direct and efficient, accounting for the vast majority of our reading. The process goes like this: We see a group of letters, convert those letters into a word, and then directly grasp the word’s semantic meaning.

[…]

But the ventral route is not the only way to read. The second reading pathway – it’s known as the dorsal stream – is turned on whenever we’re forced to pay conscious attention to a sentence, perhaps because of an obscure word, or an awkward subclause, or bad handwriting.  (In his experiments, Dehaene activates this pathway in a variety of ways, such as rotating the letters or filling the prose with errant punctuation.) Although scientists had previously assumed that the dorsal route ceased to be active once we became literate, Deheane’s research demonstrates that even fluent adults are still forced to occasionally make sense of texts. We’re suddenly conscious of the words on the page; the automatic act has lost its automaticity.

This suggests that the act of reading observes a gradient of awareness. Familiar sentences printed in Helvetica and rendered on lucid e-ink screens are read quickly and effortlessly. Meanwhile, unusual sentences with complex clauses and smudged ink tend to require more conscious effort, which leads to more activation in the dorsal pathway. All the extra work – the slight cognitive frisson of having to decipher the words – wakes us up.

Someone email Nick Carr; I think we’ve found his next padawan. 😉

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Speculative entrepreneurship

Via Chairman Bruce, the next iteration of design fiction: fictional entrepreneurship.

Fictional Entrepreneurship is the use of design fiction to imagine businesses in order to discover what could be, creating things that are not impossible, but possible, often times derived from utopian, theoretical, and philosophical principles. Fictional entrepreneurship aims to author critical media through the creation of enterprises (imaginary, and real).

While reflecting on this definition, I have come to the conclusion that this concept is in no ways limited within the walls of academia, but can also be executed within a “practical,” corporate culture for the following reasons.

  1. Fictional Entrepreneurship is the design of business that begins with “what if…” in order to innovate the unimaginable.
  2. Fictional Entrepreneurship is an approach to business design which can serve as a tool for reaching new, almost impossible, demographics.
  3. Fictional Entrepreneurship is a a method that can be used by entrepreneurs to imagine the potential impact (good or bad) their business design can have on the world.
  4. Fictional Entrepreneurship is the ability to make the impractical practical.
  5. Fictional Entrepreneurship uses aspects of Design Fiction in order to work imaginatively while creating products and services that are not impossible, but possible.

I’m becoming increasingly convinced that science fiction isn’t dying at all; it’s metastasizing. When the world looks like an sf novel, sf is no longer novel.

Related: revisionist entrepreneurship. For instance, what would have happened if MySpace hadn’t been bought by Murdoch’s News Corp?

June 2005. Freston misses his flight. In the airport’s VIP lounge, he spots one of the News Corp M&A team. Freston tears back to his office and hand delivers the letter that completes the deal. Viacom, the owner of MTV, has just bought MySpace for $500m. The deal releases its co-founders, Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe, from Intermix, an unspectacular online retailer.

Viacom uses MySpace to redefine itself online. The site needs a complete engineering overhaul, and anything not related to music or entertainment is stripped out. MTV programming, bite-sized interviews, exclusive tracks and live shows are weaved throughout the site. “We want MySpace to keep its hacky, creative ethos,” executives might have said, “while making the site cleaner and less cluttered.”

A little Panglossian, perhaps – I think MySpace was already go-karting down into the trough of disillusionment at that point – but what you have there is a tech-biz journalist picking a comparatively recent and well-documented jonbar point and sketching an alternate history around it. See what I mean? Sf has metastasized; the cultural body is riddled with it, and it’s penetrating to the marrow.

And let’s not forget the increasing ubiquity – and ease of creation – of quasifictional characters, events, organisations, texts… Joanne McNeil of Tomorrow Museum looks at the Web of Misleading Things:

Remember the real reason for Friendster’s decline? It was the ban on “fakesters.” Friendster cracked down on user-created profiles for celebrities, places, and things, instead of embracing it as another slice of the bizarre in the spectacle of social networking. So people moved to Myspace, where non-person identities were encouraged. The site even provided space for bands and filmmakers to upload multimedia.

Now, everybody knew that’s not really Andy Warhol leaving testimonials on your page. But what about that person you know as tiny Twitter avatar? Robin Sage is a particularly interesting example (Quite a number of fictional online identities are in the image of attractive female hackers. I imagine this creates even more tension/skepticism toward women in these communities.)

[…]

So long as social media participation requires no public records or birth certificates, we are free to use these services to reinvent ourselves, regardless of what Mark Zuckerberg says.

Is there a more slippery term in the modern word than “real”?

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Building robots building robot buildings…

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Behold the potential future of building; construction workers, you may want to start training for your second career NOW.

Oh, so you’re not impressed by that? OK, so imagine large swarms of smaller versions of those quadrotor critters assembling constructions which themselves are autonomous, modular, quasi-sentient and self-repairing…

From BotJunkie, via George Dvorsky; cheers, George. 🙂