Tag Archives: hacking

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Backyard biotech

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Lego DNAWe’ve mentioned garage-sized biotech start-ups before, but not everyone’s in it for the money. As the price barrier to genetic engineering falls, some folk are hacking genes in an attempt to make the world a better place – like Meredith Patterson, for example:

The 31-year-old ex-computer programmer and now biohacker is working on modifying jellyfish genes and adding them to yoghurt to detect the toxic chemical melamine, which was found in baby milk in China last year after causing a number of deaths, and kidney damage to thousands of infants. Her idea is to engineer yoghurt so that in the presence of the toxin it turns fluorescent green, warning the producer that the food is contaminated. If her experiment is successful, she will release the design into the public domain.

Great stuff… but as the article at The Guardian points out, easy-entry biohacking presents as many risks as it offers fixes:

… Helen Wallace of GeneWatch in the UK thinks biohacking could be dangerous. “It is increasingly easy to order genes by mail,” she says. “Something like smallpox is hard to get, but there are other organisms that could become harmful. If you change a living organism’s properties, you could also change its interactions with the environment or the human body.” She adds: “Scientists are notorious for not seeing the unintended consequences.”

“Where is the oversight?” asks another interviewee, and it’s a good point. Will a self-policing global community of genetic scientists emerge, keeping an eye on one another and sharing data in the hopes of collaborating their way to success? The tools are there to enable it, at least.

Of course, it would be easy for individuals to slip through the cracks if they really wanted to… but the same is true of the old system as well. Maybe the best way to make sure we don’t get wiped out by a rogue scientist is to do the best we can to avoid making them feel disenfranchised and unappreciated. [image by mknowles]

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The memory switch

MRI brain scanOur relentless mapping of our own grey matter continues, and here’s the latest result:

Researchers have found a telltale mental signature that predicts whether an experience will be remembered. Once deciphered, the signals could be used to help people know when their brains are primed to remember, perhaps using an iPhone app.

It doesn’t sound all that impressive, does it, even with the flippant mention of  JesusPhone compatibility further down the line – it’s easy to become blase about these stories when you collect them every day. Technology that monitors and interacts with the brain is becoming commonplace, but the real implications here are surely far bigger than having a PDA tell you when you’re primed for memory tricks.

Biofeedback, for example. Wire someone up to an EEG, and eventually they can consciously control the lines on the screen by watching them; so, with more complex monitoring systems, think of all the other stuff you could train a brain to do better. With memory as an example, perhaps you could train yourself to be in a highly receptive state at all times – that would be a pretty handy skill for spying without carrying any hardware.

But then there’s the flipside – you could train for forgetfulness too, which might make stories like Marissa’s “Erasing the Map” into reality. And the more we learn about the mind as a ‘black box’ system, the closer we come to being able to simulate one on non-biological hardware – which is one of the steps that Kurzweil and others claim are part of the road toward true Artificial Intelligence and brain uploading… [image by jsmjr]

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The Amish as hackers

Amish-rollerbladerThanks to movie clichés, we all know that the Amish eschew technological advances in favour of a minimalist pastoral lifestyle of horse-drawn buggies and water mills. But as with many of clichés, there’s a lot of falsehoods clustered around a grain of truth.

Kevin Kelly has been researching Amish customs, and it turns out that they’re much more pragmatic about technology than you might think. Kelly claims that the younger, less hardcore Amish can be seen as hackers, treating the framework of rules they inherit from their religion as a system to be tweaked in light of new developments:

Turns out the Amish make a distinction between using something and owning it. The Old Order won’t own a pickup truck, but they will ride in one. They won’t get a license, purchase an automobile, pay insurance, and become dependent on the automobile and the industrial-car complex, but they will call a taxi. Since there are more Amish men than farms, many men work at small factories and these guys will hire vans driven by outsiders to take them to and from work. So even the horse and buggy folk will use cars – under their own terms. (Very thrifty, too.)

Kelly makes the point that we could learn a lot from their frugal approach, by learning to say no to tech for tech’s own sake. As an example of sustainable living, the Amish probably rank pretty highly among Western communities.

But imagine for a moment that lots of small local communities decided to relinquish technology, but each to different degrees as they felt best befitted their circumstances. How disorientating would it be to arrive in a region where the cultural clock ran much slower or much faster? [via MetaFilter; image by Darcy Johnson]

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RFID wardrivers can ping your passport

Just in case you’ve not clocked this already, it’s time to break out the tinfoil: using equipment sourced from eBay, a bunch of hacker types have built a proof-of-concept system that can be used to scan the unique RFID number from the biometric passports of pedestrians… as they drive past them.

Come on kids, repeat after me: everything can – and will – be hacked. [story via grinding.be, among others]

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Gaza web-war: Jihadist hackers leave toxic e-graffiti; Israeli botnet recruiting volunteers

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row of computersThe current conflict in Palestine is highlighting the potential of the web to become a battlefront in wars both large and small. Internet Evolution reports that Jihadist hacker groups have been cracking and defacing websites all over the world, and that a website called “Help Israel Win” is offering a software download that adds your machine into a pro-Israel botnet, presumably to be deployed against Hamas-related targets in DDoS attacks. [image by Kevin Zollman]

Leaving the politics and ideology of the conflict in question entirely aside for the moment (there are plenty of other sites and threads where you can go and have that argument if you really want to*), it’s fascinating to see someone deploying a voluntary botnet… and it’s a sign of things to come, as it won’t take long for small globally-distributed pressure groups of all kinds to realise that the power of a linked network of computers can give them leverage against their targets. Remember the anti-vivisection hackers who sent a virus to MIT?

But it’s also sad to see that the internet – touted back in the glory days of the late nineties as the global village that would bring us all closer together – has become just another place for us to fight one another. Who’d have thought the lord of the flies would upload himself behind us? [story via SlashDot and Spiraltwist of the Whitechapel Massive]

[ * Seriously, I’m going to delete comments that are partisan to either side of the Gaza conflict, so don’t bother. Regardless of history, religion or politics, innocent people are dying in the dirt. Neither side can justify that. ]