The Guardian reports on what some are suggesting may the first outbreak of official cyberwar between one country and another, after Russian hackers, official or not, have flooded Estonian websites with Denial of Service attacks (DDoS):
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Art, the Internet and the Rise of Symbiosis
Great piece from the NYT on the decline of mystery and the rise of symbiosis for artists, who find there’s a living of sorts to be made by engaging with fans online and allowing the community that emerges to choose the direction their musical careers take — even to the point of how much to charge for their creations. But it leaves some doubts:
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Anticipative Computing
Robert Vamosi of Webware quotes MIcrosoft’s research czar Craig Mundie as saying computers need to get smarter about what we do and use their CPU to do stuff before we sit down to work. I’m all for it, but shouldn’t we have already got here?
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The Connections Our Buttons Make
Once we create all that attention data, think of the whacky things we can do with it.
I’ve been banging on about attention data for a while now, and I apologise. (For an explanation and a bit of background, go here.) But I can’t help seeing stuff through that prism nowadays. Like this camera called Buttons that doesn’t take pictures but times, and then searches the Internet for photographs taken at that second:
It is a camera that will capture a moment at the press of a button. However, unlike a conventional analog or digital camera, this one doesn’t have any optical parts. It allows you to capture your moment but in doing so, it effectively seperates it from the subject. Instead, as you will memorize the moment, the camera memorizes only the time and starts to continuously search on the net for other photos that have been taken in the very same moment.
Basically the camera is a phone inside a sort of camera case. Press the button and the phone searches Flickr for photos taken at that moment. (Of course, this may take a little time.)
A lovely idea and a fascinating one. I seem to recall a photography project here where individuals were given cameras and told to take photos at the exact same moment around the city. Danged if I can remember what it was called. But as Tim O’Reilly points out in the comments on a post by Nikolaj Nyholm, it has even greater potential beyond the variable of time:
I imagine that with geolocation, you could potentially go one better. Imagine a camera that does take a picture, but also initiates a search for all other pictures taken at that same location (and optionally at the same time of day/year.)
Less poetic a vision than that of Sascha Pohflepp, creator of Buttons, but possibly more relevant to many users. I’d certainly love to see Google Earth etc use time more in their layers, so that it’s possible to get historical changes in a place (say 3D models of old buildings that no longer exist, or photos like those extraordinary collections created by the UNEP which depict changes in the environment.)
But the main idea here is to use the metadata embedded in attention streams (in this case, when or where a photo was taken) and match it with metadata from other streams. A bit like Last.fm, et al, where similarities are found between what music two quite separate people are listening to. The goal is as Sascha puts it, to subordinate the device to the bigger purpose of connecting people:
Even more so, it reduces the cameras to their networked buttons in order to create a link between two individuals.
The possibilities are endless, but it’s too early in the morning for me to think of any.
Citizen Monitors
I like the idea of this: Using ordinary folk to monitor elections, via SMS from their cellphone. And it seems to have worked.
Nigeria used a system called FrontlineSMS, developed by UK-based kiwanja.net to keep track of all of the texts. Some 54 trained associates recruited volunteers to invite as many people as possible via text message to participate in monitoring the elections.
Why might this work? Well, usually election monitors are highly visible, because they’re foreign, or they’re wearing clothes that mark them clearly as monitors, all of which may reduce fraud in front of them, but doesn’t help to actually identify fraud. As the report (no link available yet) from the Network of Mobile Election Monitors concludes:
Our monitoring is peculiar because people knew that if they try to rig the election there could be someone behind them that may send a text message reporting the incident.
In total over 10,000 messages were received covering reports of harassment, orderliness, stuffing of ballot boxes and poor voter turnout. The team concluded that there was extensive fraud and rigging in the election.
What I like about the system is that it’s not a typical election monitoring exercise, where monitors go in and view the process according to foreign templates and established norms. The free-form nature of the text messages received, and the ability of the monitoring team to ask follow up questions of participants revealed something more important than merely gauging whether the election was free and fair. It (apparently) revealed the underlying mood of the populace for peace and compromise. Asked for their reaction to the result
While about a fifth of our respondents wanted the results cancelled, the majority (about 80%) reacted that Nigeria could not afford cancellation and re-run.