Blog

I enjoy making the argument that the Baby Boom generation will be the first cyborg generation. I like making this argument because it connects their invention of youth culture with their political position to enjoy the benefits of emerging cyborg technology. Always easy for me to point to the artificial hip, artificial knee, laser surgery, to show how this technology is already around us.

Logically the next step would be the brain implant. Turns out researchers at Ohio State are working on just that.

They have successfully implanted a pacemaker into an alzheimer's patients brain which will use deep brain stimulation (DBS) to help normalize their cognitive activity. The research will monitor the patient to see if use of DBS will decrease the rate of cognitive degeneration if not improve it:

The United Nations has announced an investigations into the use of drones by military and intelligence agencies. Led by U.N. special rapporteur for human rights and counterterrorism Ben Emmerson, a U.K. based lawyer, the investigation will focus on US drone attacks in East Africa, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Israel's use of drones in Palestine.

The issue ironically enough comes down to the legalities of war, and whether use of drones, especially outside of Afghanistan (an area in which war is currently sanctioned by international law), are legal. Explicitly looking into whether use of drones for the purposes of killing constitutes a war crime.

Drones are de rigueur in 2013 as perhaps they begin to displace Zombies as the source of rational and irrational anxiety. I recall a decade and a half ago when it was aliens, that fear of the other, then zombies, fear of undead, and now drones, fear of robots that deliver flying death.

In the case of the latter there's quite a number of good reasons to be afraid. Especially if you live in parts of the world where drone attacks have become a regular part of life.

This is where Asher Kohn comes in with an architectural defense from drones:

An interesting solution to unwanted Robocalls and other telephone irritations has emerged in the form of the Banana Phone Project. Developed by Alex Ruiz using the ever versatile Raspberry Pi computer, he describes this as the evolution of caller id.

The device itself is not actually a phone that looks like a banana (I used to have one of those) but is instead a means of screening your calls to ensure that only worthy humans get through. It does this by playing an audio file to callers who have not been already been white-listed or approved as a human caller. The audio file is complicated enough to fool a machine, but the four letter code that is played on top of other noise is easy for the human ear/mind to pick up.

Today is Data Privacy Day and to honour it, the search engine DuckDuckGo has setup a nifty new site to help people reduce the tracking their are subject to while surfing the web.

FixTracking.com lists plugins and settings you can use for your browsers to limit the ways people can track you, and shift your surfing to secure sites when and where available.

DuckDuckGo is itself a search engine that tries to stand out by embracing privacy as a feature. Further they don't have the implicit customization that might foster a filter bubble of only showing you results that fall within a narrow world-view. As an alternative they certainly seem worth experimenting with when you want to compare and contrast search results or just find an alternative to the other near-monopoly.

The RCMP have begun to expand their use of drones. An article from the National Post details the efforts underway to secure more devices to be deployed across the country:

RCMP’s F Division in Saskatchewan, which has taken a lead role testing unmanned aircrafts for the force, just posted on a government-contracting website notice of its intent to acquire as many as three Qubes and related accessories for about $270,000.

“It’s starting to catch on more and more. Eventually, I think you’ll see (unmanned aerial vehicles) in almost all the provinces,” said RCMP Staff Sgt. Dave Domoney in Regina.

Twitter has recently introduced a new video feature to their service called Vine. With a limit of six seconds or less, it emulates the brevity of a tweet, and has the looping characteristics of a gif. The hope is similar to the way a 140 character limit has in some cases evoked a new poetic rhythm to the internet, perhaps six seconds of video will add a profound vision into our various lives.

As the rise of the surveillance society continues to spread into every nick and corner of our lives, fashion and technology respond to try and carve out a renewed sense of privacy. Two different but related developments recently caught my eye.

The first is the privacy visor, a goofy pair of goggles that seek to throw off the facial recognition software that is increasingly a feature of CCTV systems. The goggles are outfitted with near infrared LED lights that shine into any camera that tries to record you and distorts your face to prevent facial recognition.

Today I had a fantastic time at Humber College in North West Toronto. I was invited to give a talk as part of their President's Lecture Series.

The topic was supposed to be social media and privacy. While this is certainly what I spoke to, I didn't want to address the topic as if we are victims. I wanted it to be empowering, so I used my current frame of "Getting Paid in the Knowledge Economy".

Rather than expose yourself by blindly sharing personal information, construct a persona that you deliberately put out into the world.

We talked about the value of personal information, and how to protect one's privacy.

My friend and former professor Barry Wellman has a great blog post up on the site he shares with Lee Rainie promoting their book Networked.

In his book and in this blog post Barry talks about the rise of the networked individual, and how this person, i.e. us, is a by-product of a hybrid virtual and material existence. Increasingly our sense of self is the result of our constant immersion into virtual environments and the resulting interaction with our physical life in material reality.

These concepts are not mutually exclusive, and even further, tend to bleed into each other. As Barry and Lee argue, the emerging networked society is centred on individual connectivity. People function more as networked individuals and less as members of groups.