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The Searchable Life
oni writes "Here's a story on wired about a Pentagon project called LifeLog. It seeks to record every bit of information that can be had, index it by name, or SSN, or even location, and make the database searchable. Furthermore, '[LifeLog adds] physical information (like how we feel) and media data (like what we read) to this transactional data.'" If you think you can build such a system, apply for a grant. There's also a current AP story about Total Information Awareness.
That our government wants to do *completley* evil things that make dystopian futures depicted in movies like Brazil and 1984 look pleasant ?
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
1) Make such a system. Run it for a few years so it's full of goodies.
2) Make it open to the public.
Suddenly, it becomes quite clear that innocence is a fiction, and everyone does things that we persecute each other for. Faced with such such evidence, either tolerance or societal implosion must result.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
The more we centralize things, the more vulnerable we are to a single point of failure with absolutely catastrophic consequences.
Historically, the core value behind the second amendment was not the right to go deer hunting, but the idea that we needed to reserve to the states and to the people enough power to protect itself if the federal government seemed overpowerful or out of control.
As information becomes more and more literally a form of armament in modern society, perhaps we need to ask the Supreme Court to start to construe control of information as covered under the second amendment, and to say that the unfettered protection of private information by the states and by individuals is Constitutionally protected. I've seen the courts look to the 4th and then 9th amendments for privacy protection, and having trouble finding it. Maybe they're just looking in the wrong place.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
which suggest that a chafing scheme could be used to mess with the logs on my web usage.
for example, I have perl script that continously goes to random web sites and pretends to browse web pages 24/7. My own usage is potentially lost. and by random chance I will of course visit al queda web pages, child porn sites, and many other dark alleys of the internet and thus launder them at the same time. Of course this idea sucks for its impact on web bandwidth but I suspect that by the time it becomes possible to track everyones's moves in a data base there will be lots of bandwidth available too.
Another schema is of course Anonymizing things via encryption and bitTorrent like peer-to-peer access to pages.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The year: 2045. A grandfather, not long for this world, is handing over the family server to his children.
"Son, this here Petabyte array is the digital recording of my entire life. I've been building it, expanding it, adding to it and migrating data onto it since 1996, when it started out as a single 200Mb disk in a Win95 box running dbaseII. Thankfully it survived those dark days, those hard times. Now, it contains every digital photo I've ever took, every file I've ever downloaded, every mp3, avi, and mov I have seen. The entire family financial history in on there, including the papers from when William almost had to file for chapter 11 protection in 2021. All your baby pictures, all my grandchildren's schoolwork are stored in the hierarchy somewhere, those I've recently reviewed on are fresh on disk, those I haven't seen in 20 years are archived in the tape library. Every plane flight booked, every libraray book checked out, every speeding ticket, it's all there. Now, Son, I give you the key to the tape library and the root password. Promise me you won't let the UPS batteries fail, and check the RAMArray for cell errors periodically. If you do these things diligently, may your life's image merge into the family database tree, and when the time comes you will join me in cyberspace as your children tend the server farm. Bless you.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
The current storage technology can't dream of keeping up with such a program. So for now, I'm not terribly worried. But that probably means there will be new funding for storage and database research, which will advance the state of the art for the rest of us so at least we can all do the same thing too.
Failing some major political shift concerning privacy, the only hope we have is to shove as much invalid data as possible at them until it makes the results so useless that the entire concept will be scrapped.
Cue Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie: The Privacy Song...
I once talked with one who was able to tell me a lot about my hobbies, my political beliefs, religion and personal life based on three or four simple questions about alcohol, music, and color preferences.
:)
Wow. Fascinating. What were the questions? Is there a web page I could browse? Or is this a demographer's state secret?
This could be better than "What's your sign?" for gathering information about people.
Danke tres mucho, tovarishch.
Geez, it seems like every story that shows up under the "Your Rights Online" should really be under the category of "No Rights Online." (And the "Online" part is really moot, except that it makes a way to connect the topics to the tech-news theme.)
I have always been annoyed by data harvesting, either from the private sector (credit report, etc) or by the governement (this Life thingy, Echelon, etc). It is pretty much granted that this trend will not revert since the public is apathic and legislators (governements) have a vested interest in these mega DB. Unless you live like an hermit thousands of miles from civilization, it is almost guaranteed that your personnal data will be collected somehow. The only way I can think to fight back (beside complaining to legislator, which have a razor thin chance of changing something) is to somehow find a way to inject bogus data in these collection systems, thus making the whole DB less accurate and reliable. So far, I have not come up with an efficient and legal way to do that. Certainly, there is somebody smarter than I that have tought about it. So, what is your way of fighting back ?
:wq
It's kind of funny because his talk of paying rent, gas, food, and tuition really just affirms your assertion that one no longer owns anything. I have long had a beef with the progession from a ownership based society (the American dream of owning a house and a chicken in every pot) to a disposable service based society. Even though ownership of land and property can be usurped by the government (hence there really is no ownership beyond what they allow) the idea of the traditional American dream has been replaced with that of a consumer driven economy and a dumbed down society where your life is rented from blockbuster and true American grit has taken a back seat to couch-ass complacency.
I'd like to contradict what the kid said as for America not needing you. We do need you. We need people just like you in America to continue to think freely and express their opinions, however radical. That is what being American is all about. So I say stay and fight in your own way, only run when your actual _life_ is on the line. That's what I intend to do.
You might want to reconsider whether or not that camera can tell how you feel...
Emotion Recognition Using a Cauchy Naive Bayes Classifier
Facial features detection and face emotion recognition
How would they backup such a monstrous amount of data anyhow? If the place housing the data goes away, what would happen to the data? the only way i can think of backing it up is to have a huge offsite backup drive farm. i don't think tapes would be an option.
OK, but only if ALL public servants submit to it first, for a test period of 5 years, where every gov't official has his/her life exposed to all of us in the name of open government.