full disclosure: I wrote the "Who Killed the Virtual Case File" story for Spectrum, which ran last September.
Here's some more food for thought about the "reporting" behind the FBI story:
What's the news angle that warrants front page attention in the Post? That the Post reporters obtained the "unreleased" Aerospace report? Not news: the report was released to Spectrum at the end of April after nine months of litigating a Freedom of Information Act Request.
All the Post reporters had to do was google "virtual case file" and voila! the story pops up as number 1, right there for them to rewrite!
But say they are too lazy to bother googling. They just want the summary. The Spectrum article is the basis for the Wikipedia Entry on the Virtual Case File and the only external link. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Case_File
The Spectrum article was the first and until the Post article, the only one to mention Matthew Patton, who was unearthed by dint of investigative reporting nowhere acknowledged in the Post article.
The Post article purports to turn a spotlight on SAIC, in part by quoting David Kay, the Iraq weapons inspector, who was a former SAIC VP--but who had absolutely no firsthand knowledge of the VCF project.
The Post article uncritcally takes FBI CIO Azmi's word that the follow up project Sentinel is on-budget and on-time, when other news outlets have recently reported about a growing sense within the FBI that this project is doomed to a fate similar to the VCF's.
The Vinge story is preceded by two articles in the IEEE Spectrum issue, the first called Sensors and Sensibility that puts forth the views of a number of traditional privacy advocates who respond to the technological trends--RFIDs, giant databases, government surveillance programs, etc. The next story, We Like to Watch, discusses in great detail Brin's views on a transparent society and tries to marry them to the zeitgeist. While Brin makes a fine contrarian, in his book he doesn't really say how we're all supposed to get our hands on the technology that would facilitate a reciprocally transparent society-- this article tries to explore the technological options that are out there and those emerging from the lab, that will give us all the eyes we need to keep tabs on each other. It also tries to chart the trajectory of social attitudes toward privacy, how they are changing--we're a more performative culture that likes watching reality TV shows and likes appearing on them--and how these attitudes could eventually lead us to open ourselves to the kind of world Vinge describes in Synthetic Serendipity.
I think it's more than plausible--the kind of e-textile wearables, sensor nets, augmented reality games, and even the retinal scanning displays he writes about in this story are either in the prototype stage or being commercially deployed TODAY.
Vinge is the author of two Hugo award winning novels: A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire Upon the Deep, as well as numerous short stories including True Names, which envisioned an avatar-based Internet in 1981, years before Gibson's cyberspace or more appropriately, Stephenson's Street of Snowcrash. He's also a former computer science professor at San Diego State, and someone who both knows the details of the technology he writes about, including pervasive sensors, search tools, game design, and wearable computers, and has the writing chops to make you care about his characters.
IEEE Spectrum magazine's Invention Department has been covering the patent backlog for the last few months, and the PTO's plans to do something about it. It's a matter of personnel--you have 3400 examiners looking at over 400 000 patents currently pending, with maybe a quarter million new ones coming in over the transom every year. The bloat of business method patents and software patents is particularly crippling, and the PTO's plan to out source prior art searches isn't going to solve the problem. David Kushner (author of the new Masters of Doom book on Romero and Carmack) visited the PTO to see what was going on in February. Scott Kariya wrote a piece on the proposed reforms in December 2002. Read on at:
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/careers/careerstemp la te.jsp?ArticleId=i040203
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/careers/careerstemp la te.jsp?ArticleId=i120202
Slashdot Mirror
full disclosure: I wrote the "Who Killed the Virtual Case File" story for Spectrum, which ran last September.
Here's some more food for thought about the "reporting" behind the FBI story:
What's the news angle that warrants front page attention in the Post? That the Post reporters obtained the "unreleased" Aerospace report? Not news: the report was released to Spectrum at the end of April after nine months of litigating a Freedom of Information Act Request.
All the Post reporters had to do was google "virtual case file" and voila! the story pops up as number 1, right there for them to rewrite!
But say they are too lazy to bother googling. They just want the summary. The Spectrum article is the basis for the Wikipedia Entry on the Virtual Case File and the only external link. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Case_File
The Spectrum article was the first and until the Post article, the only one to mention Matthew Patton, who was unearthed by dint of investigative reporting nowhere acknowledged in the Post article.
The Post article purports to turn a spotlight on SAIC, in part by quoting David Kay, the Iraq weapons inspector, who was a former SAIC VP--but who had absolutely no firsthand knowledge of the VCF project.
The Post article uncritcally takes FBI CIO Azmi's word that the follow up project Sentinel is on-budget and on-time, when other news outlets have recently reported about a growing sense within the FBI that this project is doomed to a fate similar to the VCF's.
The Vinge story is preceded by two articles in the IEEE Spectrum issue, the first called Sensors and Sensibility that puts forth the views of a number of traditional privacy advocates who respond to the technological trends--RFIDs, giant databases, government surveillance programs, etc. The next story, We Like to Watch, discusses in great detail Brin's views on a transparent society and tries to marry them to the zeitgeist. While Brin makes a fine contrarian, in his book he doesn't really say how we're all supposed to get our hands on the technology that would facilitate a reciprocally transparent society-- this article tries to explore the technological options that are out there and those emerging from the lab, that will give us all the eyes we need to keep tabs on each other. It also tries to chart the trajectory of social attitudes toward privacy, how they are changing--we're a more performative culture that likes watching reality TV shows and likes appearing on them--and how these attitudes could eventually lead us to open ourselves to the kind of world Vinge describes in Synthetic Serendipity.
I think it's more than plausible--the kind of e-textile wearables, sensor nets, augmented reality games, and even the retinal scanning displays he writes about in this story are either in the prototype stage or being commercially deployed TODAY.
"Synthetic Serendipity" is set at Fairmont High--I believe Rainbows End is the sequel to Fast Times.
Vinge is the author of two Hugo award winning novels: A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire Upon the Deep, as well as numerous short stories including True Names, which envisioned an avatar-based Internet in 1981, years before Gibson's cyberspace or more appropriately, Stephenson's Street of Snowcrash. He's also a former computer science professor at San Diego State, and someone who both knows the details of the technology he writes about, including pervasive sensors, search tools, game design, and wearable computers, and has the writing chops to make you care about his characters.
IEEE Spectrum magazine's Invention Department has been covering the patent backlog for the last few months, and the PTO's plans to do something about it. It's a matter of personnel--you have 3400 examiners looking at over 400 000 patents currently pending, with maybe a quarter million new ones coming in over the transom every year. The bloat of business method patents and software patents is particularly crippling, and the PTO's plan to out source prior art searches isn't going to solve the problem. David Kushner (author of the new Masters of Doom book on Romero and Carmack) visited the PTO to see what was going on in February. Scott Kariya wrote a piece on the proposed reforms in December 2002. Read on at:
p la te.jsp?ArticleId=i040203
p la te.jsp?ArticleId=i120202
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/careers/careerstem
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/careers/careerstem