A meeting to determine how the internet should be governed is under way in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
The country's president, Dilma Rousseff, organised the two-day NetMundial event following allegations the US National Security Agency (NSA) had monitored her phone and emails.
Last month the US announced plans to give up its oversight of the way net addresses are distributed. But campaigners have warned the move could backfire.
The US currently determines who runs the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), the body responsible for regulating the internet's codes and numbering systems. But Washington now aims to pass the duty over to the “global multi-stakeholder community” by September 2015. Human rights group Article 19 supports that idea, but said there were potential pitfalls.
I read “How Google Screwed Up Google Glass.” The capitalist tool does not have its heart in the analysis. Here’s the tip off: “It really is a great idea.”
What exactly is great about a virtual reality headset? As I wrote in Information Today, I have two or three devices that connect on my shelves. What became of them? Not too much.
In my view, Glass is less about wearing crazy eye glasses and more about dragging red herrings across real journalists’ paths, than a different play. I a report I prepared for an investment bank, I focused on the technology which is used to create the headgear and the contact lens demonstration.
The key figure in this technology is a fellow named Dr. Amir Parviz (aka Babak Parvis, Babak Parviz, Babak Amirparviz, and other variations). He studied at the elbow of Dr. George Whitesides at Harvard. This dynamic duo has demonstrated some chemistry in their research and patents. The contact lens work has roots which reach back to Dr. Parviz’s days at the University of Washington and its research group.
I am not going to rehash the information presented in the Information Today article and the financial institution’s report. Suffice it to say that Glass is less about wearing wonky headgear and more about nanoengineering. Is this self assembly work related to robots. By the way, yummy photos of Google’s X Lab at http://read.bi/1hkHTKl do not include the biomedical facilities. Slight oversight or Loon misdirection?
Seeing through Glass is important. There are strong personal motivations for Google’s top dogs behind the biological engineering research. Maybe running a query on Glass will sharpen the focus?
The more search changes, the more it remains the same it seems. Come to think of it: Most of today’s vendors are following the scripts written for Fulcrum Technologies and Verity who stomped around the C suite in the 1980s. Is the search sector running an endless loop?
This story shares screenshots taken before and after the revelatory article was posted a couple days before. These images show Google’s Enterprise- Government page displaying lists of government partners. The second shows a page in perpetual-load mode.
It costs about 10 bucks to buy a weekly issue of The Economist, and about $1 billion a year to fund the secret operations of Australia’s intelligence agencies. Which source gives better value for money?
Bob Carr: “One must not be seduced by spies.”
This is the fascinating but as yet largely overlooked question to emerge from Bob Carr’s diary of his time as foreign minister. ‘‘Intelligence figures larger in the job than I would have imagined,’’ Carr writes, and describes the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, tucked in its crypt inside Foreign Affairs headquarters, as ‘‘My own little CIA, my own spies’’.
. . . . . . .
Nothing in the book appears to put any secret sources at risk, even though security types expecting strict control over information will doubtless squirm from the attention.
But for all Carr’s devouring of intelligence reports, he doesn’t seem overly impressed by the shadowy world from whence they emanate. ‘‘One must not be seduced by spies and their agenda,’’ he writes after meeting the CIA chief in Washington. At an earlier meeting, fresh in the job, Carr also spoke with CIA officers on topics ranging across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and China, and came away underwhelmed.
‘‘All this was solid but unexciting. Where were the revelations? Was there anything here one would not pick up from The Economist, let alone [diplomatic] cables? This thought stirred my instinctive scepticism about intelligence. How often do we get to relish the knockout revelation that we can whole-heartedly believe and on which we can base policy, taking our rivals altogether by surprise?’’
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Carr is not the first to doubt the value of intelligence, whose reputation is regularly burnished by Hollywood depictions of the all-seeing, all-knowing spies. He approvingly records a conversation with former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger who similarly reported having never been much surprised by intelligence reports.
Carr has a point. Open source material – the stuff of newspapers, academic journals or a chat with an expert – is often regarded as less worthy when placed alongside a report stamped ‘‘TOP SECRET’’ in big red letters. Yet the best answers are regularly to be found in plain sight.
He goes further, warning that spying for spying’s sake carries grave risk. Presumedly this is the ‘‘agenda’’ he worries over. He left the job before leaks by Edward Snowden exposed Australian bugs on the phones of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his wife, upending ties with Indonesia.
But Carr did see hints of trouble with Jakarta over spy operations emerge during his time. ‘‘The pursuit of intelligence of questionable value has got to be weighed,’’ he writes. ‘‘Weighed against the harm if the intelligence gathering is exposed.’’
This is a debate Australia should be having, rather than beating up on the ABC and other reporters for broadcasting the Snowden leaks. Are we happy to be the kind of nation that covertly listens in on other country’s leaders? Is there a genuine advantage?
(NaturalNews) Everything you and I are doing right now to try to save humanity and the planet probably won't matter in a hundred years. That's not my own conclusion; it's the conclusion of computer scientist Steve Omohundro, author of a new paper published in the Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence.
His paper, entitled Autonomous technology and the greater human good, opens with this ominous warning (1)
Military and economic pressures are driving the rapid development of autonomous systems. We show that these systems are likely to behave in anti-social and harmful ways unless they are very carefully designed. Designers will be motivated to create systems that act approximately rationally and rational systems exhibit universal drives towards self-protection, resource acquisition, replication and efficiency. The current computing infrastructure would be vulnerable to unconstrained systems with these drives.
The first is from folks who make their living cheerleading technology. The article “What Does the Recent Tech Stock Downturn Meant? The Truth Is Nobody Knows.” is an admission that the future of technology is—well—not too clear. With increasing class tension in the City by the Bay, I suppose some reflection is warranted. I sort of knew this when I was a wee lad. Apparently for those surfing technology, the notion that the fancy analytics systems with their clever predictive methods are clueless is interesting. I assume not even insider information is illuminating the dark corners of what seems to be a somewhat trivial issue compared with some of the national and international news.
The second is “We got Bookies to Predict the Future of Tech.” Crowdsourcing the future is not too interesting. I checked out the investment and threat markets and concluded that the Ivory Tower folks had time on their hands. This article contains a quote I noted. The comment is about Google Glass. Few items of headgear trigger assaults, so I was intrigued:
A new scientific report took into account 1,779 policy issues as well as many variables and found that the people of the United States have little, if any, say in the policies that impact them. You won't believe the rest.
