Relativity, Anyone?
on
The Forever War
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Having read the review, I'm rather surprised that no mention was made of the relativistic effects which were the underpinning of the book.
See, the reason that it's the Forever War is that everyone who's sent to the frontlines to fight travel on ships that accelerate to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. The narrator of the story thus spends hundreds of "objective" years fighting the war for a few years of his subjective time. The result? The soldiers who are asked to fight in this war find themselves more and more estranged from human culture, which changes at the usual rate of one year per yer. The soldiers are anachronisms, and as the war drags on and society and the rules of engagement change, the soldiers find themselves cut off from society.
This review glossed over what was for me the most fascinating theme of the book: faith and loyalty. Yes, there is a well-developed religious system, but more importantly the book portrays this system's effect (or, on occasion, lack thereof) on the characters.
What does it mean to give yourself totally to a higher power or cause? What are the ramifications of such a dangerous promise, whether given to a physical instantiation (a queen or lord) or spiritual one (a god)? Cazaril in particular is forced to deal with these questions. Given how many fantasy books treat religion either as a source of hot-and-cold-running spells or as a system divorced from the everyday life of a world's inhabitants, I found the approach Bujold took in Curse of Chalion to be a refreshing change.
Hi. I'm the competition organizer for this year. I suspect the competition web server is going to get hammered, so I'll give a rundown of what's going on and what you can do to enter.
First, you'll need interpreters, since most of the games are written for specific interactive fiction virtual machines. I'm guessing plenty of you have Linux boxes; I'll try to get my old article on Linux interpreters up at my personal IF site, Bras Lantern, later today. It should have more bandwidth than the competition site.
Second, the games. This directory on the IF Archive has all of the games, either unpacked or in a big.zip file.
Third, choosing which games to play. You only have to play five of them to judge. If you think you'll only be able to play a handful of games, I ask that you play a random selection. There's a front-end to the competition, Comp01.z5, which is structured like a text adventure. It will randomize the list of games, sorted by which ones you can play, and even give you a nice voting form to fill out if you're so inclined.
Fourth, judge. You can play games for a maximum of two hours before giving it a rating. Note that you don't have to play for two hours. We only set a maximum play time, not a minimum one. To rate a game, give it a score from 1 to 10. 10 is good. 1 is not good. Use whatever criteria you wish.
Fifth, vote. You can mail your votes to the competition vote-counter or visit the web site to record your votes there.
If I was a constituent of their state (i.e., I could vote for them) to please respond with my mailing address in their state (I did include my snail-mail address and I do not live in their states) and they would get back to me.
Of course, the impression I got after all of this, was that if I couldn't vote against them in an upcoming election, they didn't care about my opinion.
This isn't really surprising. Representatives and Senators are elected to represent their constituents. If you aren't in their district -- if indeed you can't vote against them -- then your opinion carries less weight.
Clearly this has problems when members of Congress are dealing with issues that can affect everyone. That's where spreading the word can help. Get the people who are in those members' districts to write, call, email, and fax.
It's long been held that what killed Infocom was their work on Cornerstone, their relational database which used their parsing technology to make a nice user-friendly interface. They sunk a lot of money into it, only to have it flounder in the face of dBase and the rise of SQL, which made their own non-SQL interface somewhat moot.
But this paper goes further into detail, about the mistakes Infocom made that *were* within their control. The two-culture phenomenon was evidently really pronounced. It's a good read for any programmers who have to deal with business types and vice versa, if only as a cautionary tale.
There are a couple of things they're doing new this year. They're selling t-shirts and CDs with all the games at cost -- not bad for a completely fan-run competition. To participate, all you have to do is download the games, play five or more before November 15th, and then rate them on a whole-number scale from 1 to 10, 10 being best. You can record your scores on the actual site, assuming the site isn't Slashdotted then. Afterwards there's a lot of discussion about all of the games, with plenty of feedback to the people who wrote the games.
But what if you do what a lot of people do: download a whole batch of songs, then don't get around to listening to them for a while? In the meantime, people will be downloading the song-with-ad; they in turn may be passing that song on without checking it.
Mmm, quantum mechanics isn't guaranteed to keep us from continuing to shrink circuitry. For one thing, quantum mechanics is probabilistic. It's unpredictable in that you can't know what, say, one particle is exactly going to do, but you can know the statistics well enough to know what thousands of particles will do.
The problems is that current circuitry is not designed with quantum mechanical effects in mind. You need something like the quantum mechanical transistor that a lot of people are working on, including a research team at Sandia National Labs -- devices which are designed with QM effects in mind, and are optimized to take advantage of those effects.
The difference, near as I can tell, is that these games will be playable *online* from Bedouin's servers, and will be available on cell phones and the like. In other words, you won't have to download the games to play them.
You can still download them to play them on your Palm or whatever. In fact, the article says Bedouin is planning on publicizing this fact on their web page, probably in the hopes of getting more people hooked on the games.
This certainly has some intriguing possibilities, though their mention of people "achieving teleportation" is a little wacky, since quantum teleportation isn't true matter teleportation. I wonder if they'll do any work on stratosphere elevators.
However, that's neither here nor there. Clearly we need to band together and donate money for them to work on a Ringworld.
Early this morning, in response to the virus, the AP had the following report about Microsoft:
--
SEATTLE (AP) -- In response to the "ILOVEYOU" virus, Microsoft has announced that they are changing the name of their popular e-mail program to "Microsoft Lookout!"
"Really, what else could we do?" said Steve Ballmer, president of Microsoft. "I mean, first the Melissa virus, and then this. Sure, we probably should plug these security holes in Outlook -- whoops, make that Lookout! -- but we felt the name change was the most proactive step we could take short of releasing better programs."
"At least the virus didn't say 'BILLGATESLOVEYOU'," he added. "Geez, that could've been bad."
This has been something of an issue here at Duke for a little while. For years there has been a tradition of Duke students camping out on the front lawn of the athletics building for admission into the men's basketball games. Duke has just completed some additional construction to the athletics complex. While they were at it, they ran cabling everywhere and have added ethernet jacks at the base of all lamp posts on that lawn so students who are camping out can be on the network.
It was also interesting to read how universities are trying to deal with students trading illegal MP3s and the like. Duke administrators have been struggling with this issue as well, especially after the recent crackdown at Carnegie-Mellon.
It's a shame no one else has noticed the second article Wired posted a little while later...
They Published from Outer Space AP
3:15 a.m. 13.Jan.2000 PST The same astronomers who reported on Wednesday they had found a tough but peaceful pair of bacteria that might have been able to survive the arduous trip from Mars, back when the Red Planet could have supported life, have also discovered that a paper copy of Wired magazine is also capable of surviving the trip. From this they theorize that Wired is from Mars, or possibly Uranus.
The Silicon Valley News article touched on the debatable morality of taking advantage of a loophole like this. Personally, as much as Microsoft irritates me, and as much as I'd like to see Microsoft in a less dominant position in the marketplace, screwing them out of money this way ain't gonna make things right.
Yeah, I know, the company's worth gazillions, they can afford this mistake, and it is their own mistake. But I don't see how exploiting this loophole does anything other than steal money from them. One of the things I like about the open-source movement and Linux as an alternative to Microsoft's products is that, in the open source world, things take place in the light of day. This, though -- this is the kind of act I'd be embarassed to tell people about.
Imagine that, instead of a discount loophole, this was a security hole in an open-source program. Morally, I'd want to report it rather than exploit it.
It's too bad press releases don't have to follow the FDA's labelling guidelines for truthful content. Otherwise, I imagine the release would have read something like this:
--
FAIRFAX, Va., Dec. 14/PRNewswire/ -- Xybernaut Corporation (Nasdaq: XYBR - news), the leader in wearable computing by virtue of there being so few companies in the field, today announced the occasional availability and initial sales of its Mobile Assistant® IV (MA IV(TM)) running the Linux operating system. Linux has become increasingly popular as a robust operating system and contender for the server, enterprise and Internet markets.
Edward G. Newman, president and chief executive officer of Xybernaut, commented, ``We are pleased by the addition of these Linux-based systems to our product lineup. Our initial Linux sales to major companies in the automotive, shipping and aerospace industries have been -- oh, who are we kidding. The only big upside to this announcement is that we should get plenty of attention from Slashdot.'' He then added, ``Geez, I hope our servers are up to this. We don't want to end up being poster children for that stupid IBM commercial where the guy's in an AA-like meeting and talks about his web site going down.''
Dr. Edwin Vogt, executive vice president for Xybernaut's European Operations added, ``We have successfully integrated hardware and software into a mobile device whose geekiness is unrivalled, even by the popular pocket protector.''
He is completely out of touch with the teenage population, and however old he is, he needs to be a teenager now in order to understand how teenagers these days work.
I hear this a lot in different contexts. "You can't know someone until you've walked a mile in their shoes."
Perhaps. If I'm not in your situation, if I'm not a part of your age/race/gender group, I won't have a perfect understanding of what it's like. But to say that you must be a part of whatever cohort to understand it at all is to deny our ability to empathize and learn about each other.
The logical endpoint for such an argument is a solipistic world in which none of us ever try to understand each other because, hey, I'm not you and you're not me. It means that I might as well not care about gender equality because I'm male and can't ever understand what it's like to be a woman.
Our empathy is part of what makes us human. Let's not stifle it just when we're making progress at using it.
It's already a self-regulating system. The damages awarded in libel and slander cases is proportionate to the damge caused. If someone's words cause more damage because they were able to spread faster, then the reward to the victim would be greater as well.
There is no reason to loose anonymous speech just because the audience is larger.
Ah, but that's not what I'm arguing. I'm saying that some of the issues that this paper brushes aside aren't so easily ignored. Yes, libel and slander laws are to some extent self-regulating, but there are different standards for libel than for slander because of the differences of the mediums that are used. I'm saying that the same should hold true for the Internet.
There's a lot of distance between saying "There should be reasonable limits to anonymity" and "There should be no anonymous speech." If I believed the latter, I wouldn't be on/.
I almost feel as if my reply should be attributed to Anonymous Coward....
These two viewpoints, while each has obvious merit and obvious failings when taken to extremes, need to be met with some kind of compromise. As it stands now, the only compromise is that the technically savvy can have anonymity and the technically ignorant masses get to have their privacy violated.
However, this position paper seems to rule out the idea of compromise where anonymity is concerned, claiming that most any limit you could place would abridge free speech.
I think this claim is on somewhat shaky grounds. Social dampers have been placed on free speech before; you cannot yell "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, to borrow a cliche.
The fact is that speed of transmission and ease of duplication do have bearing on how speech is regulated. The greater the potential impact of my words, and the more they can affect things for good or ill, the more responsibility I must bear -- why else have laws for libel and slander? And the impact I can have increases the faster I can spread the word and the larger my audience. At some point, anonymity cannot hold.
The question is, where do we strike the balance? The paper makes a strong case for anonymity as an important part of free speech. There's a tug-of-war between the two extremes of total anonymity and total accountability.
It's an issue we need to pay attention to. As the net becomes more commercialized, companies will continue to push to have us tracked. The less we can be anonymous, the more data about us can be amassed and correlated. The old adage to follow the money holds here, and if we turn a blind eye to what's going on, we run the risk of having no such protections later on.
Radar surveillance of driver brought about the radar detector. Phone tapping brought about tap detectors and scramblers. I wouldn't be surprised if technological countermeasures to these new types of surveillance were also developed.
That sort of back-and-forthing is pretty much going to happen, as you point out. I wonder, though, how many counter-measures will be active ones instead of passive ones. Imagine equipping drivers with a radar emitter instead of a detector, so that you could swamp a cop's radar gun with spurious signals. The trouble with active counter-measures is that they're much more aggressive than passive ones. H/K MEMS alert the people doing the surveilling, while detector MEMS would let you know when you're being watched and adjust your behavior accordingly, as with a radar detector.
In the long run, you reach a dynamic equillibrium point, a technological zero-sum game. Only the outliers, the wild, temporary swings in one direction or another, end up giving advantage to one side or the other and hurting people in the process. I think Brin is trying to suggest a way to leapfrog over this eternal game of move and counter-move by making the tools of boths sides available to everyone.
More importantly, how long before some enterprising cracker attempts to hack these things? In the future, when little robot vacuum cleaners become common and can sense when the floor is dirty and needs to be cleaned, will I see articles like the following:
--
NEW YORK (AP) -- In what authorities are calling "the worst attack by pro-clutter hackers yet," thousands of Dyson DC17 robot vacuum cleaners burned out today when a swarm of dirt-dumping robots was released into the city. The dirtbots, as the FBI is calling them, invaded homes and left trails of dirt across carpets. While the DC17s attempted to vacuum up the dirt, the dirtbots continued making tracks until the DC17s lost power or their motors burnt out....
--
Alternatively, given their Mood indicator light (patent pending), will these be to the next decade what mood rings were to the 70's?
Alot of the sins that people are about to complain about aren't really ascribable to this automated system--yes, you can track many more people, but the bottom line is that if you accept surveilance at all--video, armed guard, or whatnot--everything from doing cartwheels to loitering with some friends is being monitored.
This does indeed seem to be where societies are headed: towards greater and greater surveillance, towards more and more people watching what we're doing.
Is this bad? More importantly, can this be avoided if we do decide it's bad? The technology for pervasive monitoring of the population exists; how long will it be until it's used? Technological genies seldom fit back in their bottles.
A while back, David Brin wrote a book called "The Transparent Society" in which he talked about these issues. His point of view was that such monitoring is inevitable, and once put in place, won't vanish. He argues that we should accept this and instead work to ensure that, if such public monitoring is available to anyone, that it be available to all. If the police can watch cameras mounted on street corners, then the average citizen should be able to see the images from those cameras as well -- and should be able to see the view from cameras mounted in the police station to see what the police are doing. This will make everyone accountable to everyone else, or so the theory goes.
The table of contents and first chapter of "The Transparent Society" are available at Brin's site, for those who'd like to read more.
Regardless, as scientists and engineers begin mounting tiny cameras on little MEMS that can crawl under doorways and through cracks in walls, these kinds of issues will become more and more important.
Slashdot Mirror
Having read the review, I'm rather surprised that no mention was made of the relativistic effects which were the underpinning of the book.
See, the reason that it's the Forever War is that everyone who's sent to the frontlines to fight travel on ships that accelerate to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. The narrator of the story thus spends hundreds of "objective" years fighting the war for a few years of his subjective time. The result? The soldiers who are asked to fight in this war find themselves more and more estranged from human culture, which changes at the usual rate of one year per yer. The soldiers are anachronisms, and as the war drags on and society and the rules of engagement change, the soldiers find themselves cut off from society.
This review glossed over what was for me the most fascinating theme of the book: faith and loyalty. Yes, there is a well-developed religious system, but more importantly the book portrays this system's effect (or, on occasion, lack thereof) on the characters.
What does it mean to give yourself totally to a higher power or cause? What are the ramifications of such a dangerous promise, whether given to a physical instantiation (a queen or lord) or spiritual one (a god)? Cazaril in particular is forced to deal with these questions. Given how many fantasy books treat religion either as a source of hot-and-cold-running spells or as a system divorced from the everyday life of a world's inhabitants, I found the approach Bujold took in Curse of Chalion to be a refreshing change.
Hi. I'm the competition organizer for this year. I suspect the competition web server is going to get hammered, so I'll give a rundown of what's going on and what you can do to enter.
Zeroth, your source for most everything I'm going to talk about is the IF Archive. Reach it at http://ifarchive.org, or at the mirror http://mirror.ifarchive.org.
First, you'll need interpreters, since most of the games are written for specific interactive fiction virtual machines. I'm guessing plenty of you have Linux boxes; I'll try to get my old article on Linux interpreters up at my personal IF site, Bras Lantern, later today. It should have more bandwidth than the competition site.
Second, the games. This directory on the IF Archive has all of the games, either unpacked or in a big .zip file.
Third, choosing which games to play. You only have to play five of them to judge. If you think you'll only be able to play a handful of games, I ask that you play a random selection. There's a front-end to the competition, Comp01.z5, which is structured like a text adventure. It will randomize the list of games, sorted by which ones you can play, and even give you a nice voting form to fill out if you're so inclined.
Fourth, judge. You can play games for a maximum of two hours before giving it a rating. Note that you don't have to play for two hours. We only set a maximum play time, not a minimum one. To rate a game, give it a score from 1 to 10. 10 is good. 1 is not good. Use whatever criteria you wish.
Fifth, vote. You can mail your votes to the competition vote-counter or visit the web site to record your votes there.
Sixth, and optional, we've got competition t-shirts for your wearing pleasure.
All of this is detailed in the README which comes with the competition games packages. Enjoy.
"The two responses I was able to receive were:
Of course, the impression I got after all of this, was that if I couldn't vote against them in an upcoming election, they didn't care about my opinion.
This isn't really surprising. Representatives and Senators are elected to represent their constituents. If you aren't in their district -- if indeed you can't vote against them -- then your opinion carries less weight.
Clearly this has problems when members of Congress are dealing with issues that can affect everyone. That's where spreading the word can help. Get the people who are in those members' districts to write, call, email, and fax.
But this paper goes further into detail, about the mistakes Infocom made that *were* within their control. The two-culture phenomenon was evidently really pronounced. It's a good read for any programmers who have to deal with business types and vice versa, if only as a cautionary tale.
There are a couple of things they're doing new this year. They're selling t-shirts and CDs with all the games at cost -- not bad for a completely fan-run competition. To participate, all you have to do is download the games, play five or more before November 15th, and then rate them on a whole-number scale from 1 to 10, 10 being best. You can record your scores on the actual site, assuming the site isn't Slashdotted then. Afterwards there's a lot of discussion about all of the games, with plenty of feedback to the people who wrote the games.
Sargent
But what if you do what a lot of people do: download a whole batch of songs, then don't get around to listening to them for a while? In the meantime, people will be downloading the song-with-ad; they in turn may be passing that song on without checking it.
Sargent
Mmm, quantum mechanics isn't guaranteed to keep us from continuing to shrink circuitry. For one thing, quantum mechanics is probabilistic. It's unpredictable in that you can't know what, say, one particle is exactly going to do, but you can know the statistics well enough to know what thousands of particles will do.
The problems is that current circuitry is not designed with quantum mechanical effects in mind. You need something like the quantum mechanical transistor that a lot of people are working on, including a research team at Sandia National Labs -- devices which are designed with QM effects in mind, and are optimized to take advantage of those effects.
Sargent
The difference, near as I can tell, is that these games will be playable *online* from Bedouin's servers, and will be available on cell phones and the like. In other words, you won't have to download the games to play them.
You can still download them to play them on your Palm or whatever. In fact, the article says Bedouin is planning on publicizing this fact on their web page, probably in the hopes of getting more people hooked on the games.
This certainly has some intriguing possibilities, though their mention of people "achieving teleportation" is a little wacky, since quantum teleportation isn't true matter teleportation. I wonder if they'll do any work on stratosphere elevators.
However, that's neither here nor there. Clearly we need to band together and donate money for them to work on a Ringworld.
Sargent
Early this morning, in response to the virus, the AP had the following report about Microsoft:
--
SEATTLE (AP) -- In response to the "ILOVEYOU" virus, Microsoft has announced that they are changing the name of their popular e-mail program to "Microsoft Lookout!"
"Really, what else could we do?" said Steve Ballmer, president of Microsoft. "I mean, first the Melissa virus, and then this. Sure, we probably should plug these security holes in Outlook -- whoops, make that Lookout! -- but we felt the name change was the most proactive step we could take short of releasing better programs."
"At least the virus didn't say 'BILLGATESLOVEYOU'," he added. "Geez, that could've been bad."
--
Sargent
Clearly, this topic needs to be further explored. I propose that some Slashdot folks duplicate the effort using Logo, or perhaps INTERCAL.
Stephen
This has been something of an issue here at Duke for a little while. For years there has been a tradition of Duke students camping out on the front lawn of the athletics building for admission into the men's basketball games. Duke has just completed some additional construction to the athletics complex. While they were at it, they ran cabling everywhere and have added ethernet jacks at the base of all lamp posts on that lawn so students who are camping out can be on the network.
It was also interesting to read how universities are trying to deal with students trading illegal MP3s and the like. Duke administrators have been struggling with this issue as well, especially after the recent crackdown at Carnegie-Mellon.
Sargent
It's a shame no one else has noticed the second article Wired posted a little while later...
They Published from Outer Space
AP
3:15 a.m. 13.Jan.2000 PST
The same astronomers who reported on Wednesday they had found a tough but peaceful pair of bacteria that might have been able to survive the arduous trip from Mars, back when the Red Planet could have supported life, have also discovered that a paper copy of Wired magazine is also capable of surviving the trip. From this they theorize that Wired is from Mars, or possibly Uranus.
Sargent
The Silicon Valley News article touched on the debatable morality of taking advantage of a loophole like this. Personally, as much as Microsoft irritates me, and as much as I'd like to see Microsoft in a less dominant position in the marketplace, screwing them out of money this way ain't gonna make things right.
Yeah, I know, the company's worth gazillions, they can afford this mistake, and it is their own mistake. But I don't see how exploiting this loophole does anything other than steal money from them. One of the things I like about the open-source movement and Linux as an alternative to Microsoft's products is that, in the open source world, things take place in the light of day. This, though -- this is the kind of act I'd be embarassed to tell people about.
Imagine that, instead of a discount loophole, this was a security hole in an open-source program. Morally, I'd want to report it rather than exploit it.
Sargent
Pentium IV? What happens when we get past Pentium V? Will Intel's numbering system keep adding on digits?
Does this mean that by 2010 people will be running Pentium V Penta Five 3's?
Sargent
It's too bad press releases don't have to follow the FDA's labelling guidelines for truthful content. Otherwise, I imagine the release would have read something like this:
/PRNewswire/ -- Xybernaut Corporation (Nasdaq: XYBR - news), the leader in wearable computing by virtue of there being so few companies in the field, today announced the occasional availability and initial sales of its Mobile Assistant® IV (MA IV(TM)) running the Linux operating system. Linux has become increasingly popular as a robust operating system and contender for the server, enterprise and Internet
--
FAIRFAX, Va., Dec. 14
markets.
Edward G. Newman, president and chief executive officer of Xybernaut, commented, ``We are pleased by the addition of these Linux-based systems to our product lineup. Our initial Linux sales to major companies in the automotive, shipping and aerospace industries have been -- oh, who are we kidding. The only big upside to this announcement is that we should get plenty of attention from Slashdot.'' He then added, ``Geez, I hope our servers are up to this. We don't want to end up being poster children for that stupid IBM commercial where the guy's in an AA-like meeting and talks about his web site going down.''
Dr. Edwin Vogt, executive vice president for Xybernaut's European Operations added, ``We have successfully integrated hardware and software into a mobile device whose geekiness is unrivalled, even by the popular pocket protector.''
--
Sargent
I hear this a lot in different contexts. "You can't know someone until you've walked a mile in their shoes."
Perhaps. If I'm not in your situation, if I'm not a part of your age/race/gender group, I won't have a perfect understanding of what it's like. But to say that you must be a part of whatever cohort to understand it at all is to deny our ability to empathize and learn about each other.
The logical endpoint for such an argument is a solipistic world in which none of us ever try to understand each other because, hey, I'm not you and you're not me. It means that I might as well not care about gender equality because I'm male and can't ever understand what it's like to be a woman.
Our empathy is part of what makes us human. Let's not stifle it just when we're making progress at using it.
Sargent
There is no reason to loose anonymous speech just because the audience is larger.
Ah, but that's not what I'm arguing. I'm saying that some of the issues that this paper brushes aside aren't so easily ignored. Yes, libel and slander laws are to some extent self-regulating, but there are different standards for libel than for slander because of the differences of the mediums that are used. I'm saying that the same should hold true for the Internet.
There's a lot of distance between saying "There should be reasonable limits to anonymity" and "There should be no anonymous speech." If I believed the latter, I wouldn't be on /.
Sargent
I almost feel as if my reply should be attributed to Anonymous Coward....
These two viewpoints, while each has obvious merit and obvious failings when taken to extremes, need to be met with some kind of compromise. As it stands now, the only compromise is that the technically savvy can have anonymity and the technically ignorant masses get to have their privacy violated.
However, this position paper seems to rule out the idea of compromise where anonymity is concerned, claiming that most any limit you could place would abridge free speech.
I think this claim is on somewhat shaky grounds. Social dampers have been placed on free speech before; you cannot yell "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, to borrow a cliche.
The fact is that speed of transmission and ease of duplication do have bearing on how speech is regulated. The greater the potential impact of my words, and the more they can affect things for good or ill, the more responsibility I must bear -- why else have laws for libel and slander? And the impact I can have increases the faster I can spread the word and the larger my audience. At some point, anonymity cannot hold.
The question is, where do we strike the balance? The paper makes a strong case for anonymity as an important part of free speech. There's a tug-of-war between the two extremes of total anonymity and total accountability.
It's an issue we need to pay attention to. As the net becomes more commercialized, companies will continue to push to have us tracked. The less we can be anonymous, the more data about us can be amassed and correlated. The old adage to follow the money holds here, and if we turn a blind eye to what's going on, we run the risk of having no such protections later on.
Sargent
Radar surveillance of driver brought about the radar detector. Phone tapping brought about tap detectors and scramblers. I wouldn't be surprised if technological countermeasures to these new types of surveillance were also developed.
That sort of back-and-forthing is pretty much going to happen, as you point out. I wonder, though, how many counter-measures will be active ones instead of passive ones. Imagine equipping drivers with a radar emitter instead of a detector, so that you could swamp a cop's radar gun with spurious signals. The trouble with active counter-measures is that they're much more aggressive than passive ones. H/K MEMS alert the people doing the surveilling, while detector MEMS would let you know when you're being watched and adjust your behavior accordingly, as with a radar detector.
In the long run, you reach a dynamic equillibrium point, a technological zero-sum game. Only the outliers, the wild, temporary swings in one direction or another, end up giving advantage to one side or the other and hurting people in the process. I think Brin is trying to suggest a way to leapfrog over this eternal game of move and counter-move by making the tools of boths sides available to everyone.
Sargent
More importantly, how long before some enterprising cracker attempts to hack these things? In the future, when little robot vacuum cleaners become common and can sense when the floor is dirty and needs to be cleaned, will I see articles like the following:
--
NEW YORK (AP) -- In what authorities are calling "the worst attack by pro-clutter hackers yet," thousands of Dyson DC17 robot vacuum cleaners burned out today when a swarm of dirt-dumping robots was released into the city. The dirtbots, as the FBI is calling them, invaded homes and left trails of dirt across carpets. While the DC17s attempted to vacuum up the dirt, the dirtbots continued making tracks until the DC17s lost power or their motors burnt out....
--
Alternatively, given their Mood indicator light (patent pending), will these be to the next decade what mood rings were to the 70's?
Sargent
This does indeed seem to be where societies are headed: towards greater and greater surveillance, towards more and more people watching what we're doing.
Is this bad? More importantly, can this be avoided if we do decide it's bad? The technology for pervasive monitoring of the population exists; how long will it be until it's used? Technological genies seldom fit back in their bottles.
A while back, David Brin wrote a book called "The Transparent Society" in which he talked about these issues. His point of view was that such monitoring is inevitable, and once put in place, won't vanish. He argues that we should accept this and instead work to ensure that, if such public monitoring is available to anyone, that it be available to all. If the police can watch cameras mounted on street corners, then the average citizen should be able to see the images from those cameras as well -- and should be able to see the view from cameras mounted in the police station to see what the police are doing. This will make everyone accountable to everyone else, or so the theory goes.
The table of contents and first chapter of "The Transparent Society" are available at Brin's site, for those who'd like to read more.
Regardless, as scientists and engineers begin mounting tiny cameras on little MEMS that can crawl under doorways and through cracks in walls, these kinds of issues will become more and more important.
Sargent