The End of Cyberspace

Confusing the online and real worlds

A data point from my favorite new comic, Alien Loves Predator.

Technorati Tags: digital-physical, end of cyberspace, humor

Building forgetting into technologies

One of the consequences of pervasive computing that we're going to have to grapple with is the proliferation of devices that accidentally preserve confidential information about us. One example: photocopiers.

[M]ost digital copiers manufactured in the past five years have disk drives — the same kind of data-storage mechanism found in computers — to reproduce documents. As a result, the seemingly innocuous machines that are commonly used to spit out copies of tax returns for millions of Americans can retain the data being scanned.

If the data on the copier's disk aren't protected with encryption or an overwrite mechanism, and if someone with malicious motives gets access to the machine, industry experts say sensitive information from original documents could get into the wrong hands.

Some copier makers are now adding security features, but many of the digital machines already found in public venues or business offices are likely still open targets, said Ed McLaughlin, president of Sharp Document Solutions Company of America.

"You actually have a better chance at winning 10 straight rolls of roulette than getting those hard drives on copiers rewritten," he said....

Sharp was among the first to begin offering, a few years ago, a security kit for its machines to encrypt and overwrite the images being scanned, so that data aren't stored on the hard disks indefinitely. Xerox Corp. said in October it would start making a similar security feature standard across all of its digital copiers.

Technorati Tags: pervasive computing, privacy

Gestural communications: Sign language over low-bandwidth networks

From BBC News:

Deaf to sign via video handsets
Deaf people could soon be using video mobiles to chat with their friends using sign language.

Video compression tools made by US researchers make it possible to send live pictures of people signing across low bandwidth mobile networks....

[T]he system developed by [University of Washington computer scientist Richard] Prof Ladner and his co-workers only looks for hand, arm and face movements. In addition, it ensures that the face of a signer, where movements during signing are quite subtle, is presented in more detail.

"The large, slower movements of hands and arms can be picked up at low fidelity," said Prof Ladner. "The face needs higher fidelity because the movements are much smaller."

This approach also made sense, he said, because people interpreting sign language looked at the face of the signer 95% of the time.

This lets the peripheral vision pick up the gross movements of arms and hands while the fovea, the part of the retina capable of picking out detail, concentrates on the smaller facial actions.

Technorati Tags: communication, end of cyberspace, interface, mobility

links for 2007-03-07

• How one year's digital output would fill 161bn iPods | Technology | Guardian Unlimited Technology
  "Last year enough digital information - from emails and blogs to mobile phone calls, photos and TV signals - was generated to fill a dozen stacks of hardback books stretching from the earth to the sun, according to research published today."
  (tags: information)

links for 2007-03-06

• UK plans to cut CO2 doomed to fail - scientists | Climate change | Guardian Unlimited Environment
  "An independent scientific audit... predicts that the [British] government will fall well below its target of a 30% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2020 - which means that the country will not reach its 2020 milestone until 2050."
  (tags: climate environment policy UK)

Write Room

I know I'm highly susceptible to suggestion from my friends, but when Anthony raved about Write Room, I was skeptical. It looked to me like the computer equivalent of a 1950s retro diner: a loving recreation of an historical artifact that we shouldn't miss.

But I must say, I'm hooked. Maybe it's just the Hawthorne Effect, or the appeal of new devices; but I doubt it.

Basically, Write Room is a really simple writing interface. What it does is take whatever you're writing (so long as it's not Microsoft Word-- it doesn't work with Word), and put it in green text in a black window (that's the default anyway). Essentially, it's a piece of software that's a mode: call it IBM CRT display, ca. 1969. The only thing missing is the sound of each key clicking like an angry cicada.

But strangely, it works. The light text on black background is easier on the eyes, at least for a while, and might even be a bit calming. And there's something about all the menus, other open windows, etc. being invisible that helps one concentrate, at least a little.

The thing I really love about it, though, is the assumption that the way to achieve a Zen-like simplicity is to invoke an older kind of human-computer interaction. Write Room makes your computer screen look like something from the 1968 Engelbart demo-- or maybe a little earlier. To a generation of computer users who've grown up with color screens, ever-fancier transitions, cliipies, etc., this is simplicity. Or at least it's an interface that signifies simplicity, which works out to the same thing.

Of course, the other interesting thing is the spatial metaphor in the name. Write Room? Why a room? The idea, of course, is that you using the program is supposed to be like shutting yourself in some meditative room, where you're free from distractions and able to contemplate the Eternal Verities (or something). But there's nothing remotely spatial about it: it's as flat an interface as you cold imagine, and the transition into it isn't fancy at all; it's just a quick switch. For all it's amazing simplicity, the choice of the word "room" suggests just how powerful spatial metaphor remain in our thinking about computers and human-computer interaction.

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, interface, writing

Cyberpunk in the early 1990s

From a 1992 Boston Globe article on cyberpunk, a premonition that eventually cyberculture would disappear under the weight of its ubiquity:

It was nearly midnight deep inside Venus de Milo, a dark and sweaty Boston dance emporium. The Shamen, a British musical duo augmented by an assortment of digital gewgaws, was unleashing a storm of high-energy technopop that was cyberpunk through and through. "We can see tomorrow in each other's eyes," they sang at one point as the bouncing crowd raised its collective fist, presumably in the direction of cyberspace.

But what was most interesting about the 800 or so raving souls in attendance was that they didn't look like they'd stumbled in from the set of "Blade Runner." Instead, they were merely members of the Lansdowne Street night shift: postpunks, Eurokids, college students, young professionals, twentynothings, geeks, nerds, Rastas, slackers and even a few bodybuilders in tank tops who appeared to have taken a wrong turn coming off the Tobin Bridge. Considerably more beer was chugged than the high-nutrient "smart" drinks that are touted as the cyberpunk libation du jour.

So you are forgiven for wondering if cyberpunk is an authentic subculture or a media buzzword.

Actually, it's both.

Forget for a moment that it was born as a word to describe a dark, morbid, near-future science-fiction movement of the 1980's. "Cyberpunk" is now more commonly a handy term for combining the related cadres of techno- bohemians-primarily hackers, crackers and phreaks (see primer) - who populate the computer underground. But the word is also used to describe the trappings of this cantankerous, decentralized, and antiestablishment subset that have surfaced in popular culture. It is the hairy-eyed, obsessive wizards of today's computer netherworld who personify cyberpunk's foremost futuristic theme: the merging of man and machine.

For better or worse, the popularization of cyberpunk has made it analogous to surfing. A handful of computer jockeys have spawned a style and an attitude. It's no coincidence that Mondo 2000, a glossy quarterly magazine that trumpets the pop version of cyberpunk, likes to talk about "surfin' the new edge." Way cool.

And consider: Cyberpunk is only a corner of a much broader cyberculture- at-large, which includes an online worldwide population of middle-aged couch potatoes, wheezy academics, corporate pooh-bahs, govermnet drones, and on and one. "In the future it will be everywhere, but it won't be called cyberculture," says Stranger, a 17-year-old Miami high school senior who, like most hackers, prefers his computer handle to his real name. "It will just be called culture. A few years ago, people used to talk about 'the emerging TV cuture.' We no longer talk about a 'TV culture' today. It's a given. Somdeay soon, no one will talk about 'emerging cyberculture.' Because it will be a given, too."

Nathan Cobb, "Cyberpunk -- Terminal Chic?," originally published in the Boston Globe (24 November 1992, pp. 29, 32), now reprinted online in various places.

(Hat tip to my former student Josh Buhs)

Technorati Tags: cyberspace, digital culture, end of cyberspace