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« Older Entries | Newer Entries »Your Robot Sucks Less
[ Comments Off ]Posted on November 3, 2011 by admin in Technology
Thursday, November 3rd, 2011But the human race is probably not prepared to surrender to its Robot Overlords just YET.
 The Kondo KHR-3HV pleads to get its bike back after having it taken away for violating curfew. |
It has been more than a year since we last pointed out why your robot sucks, so we thought it was time for an update, as there have been a few interesting new developments. First though, we want to point out that we haven’t ALWAYS been so down on the state of robots; in spite of the fact that he walked like he just crapped his pants and looked like a dwarf in an astronaut suit, we never criticized Honda’s Asimo much. He was the first really sophisticated bipedal robot, and as an old Laurie Anderson song pointed out, walking – although it seems relatively simple for MOST humans – is an incredibly elaborate process of falling and not falling. But let’s face it, your robot still sucks, it just sucks less. I blame my cynicism on guys like Ray Kurzweil, who has been promising some kind of exponential growth in bio-robotic convergence for over a decade (something I’ve complained about before), or Ridley Scott, who made lifelike robots seem so plausible by the year 2019 in the movie Blade Runner
This Is Not The Droid You’re Looking For
[ Comments Off ]Posted on October 11, 2011 by admin in Technology
Tuesday, October 11th, 2011The iPhone 4s. Why talk to your friends when you can talk to your phone?
 This is not the Droid I’m looking for. |
I have tremendous admiration for parts of the ethos, and many of the devices that are Steve Job’s legacy. But every time I manage to convince myself that he was just a demanding eccentric genius, and not a total d-bag, I end up learning something new. Like today, when I learned that he used his wealth to (much like the tech royalty in the William Gibson novel Neuromancer
Google Introduces “GMail Motion”
[ Comments Off ]Posted on April 1, 2011 by admin in Technology
Friday, April 1st, 2011If your laptop has a built in camera, Google’s new GMail Motion adds a gestural interface to your computer, partially freeing you of the mouse and control pad.
We’ve talked a lot about the disappointing state of the user interface before; in fact we’re still a little underwhelmed by the iPad. Which is why we’re so excited about the new Gmail feature (still in beta) called GMail Motion. It adds an intuitive, gesture-based functionality to your computer, requiring only a camera, now pretty much a standard feature on laptops. We probably will continue to hem and haw about Google’s escapades, especially after the hilarious story circulating yesterday about how when Google cleaned up their content farm search spam problem, they wiped out their own content briefly, i.e. Google Places. The follow up was even funnier, when, after denying they were in bed with content farm Demand Media, Google execs partied on the Demand Media CEO’s yacht, named – no joke – The Adsense. CEO Dick Rosenblatt’s followup call was even funnier, with his “dude, don’t talk about my yacht” demand. No wonder they call it Demand Media. But we digress. This new Google Motion tool is pretty cool, you can see how it works and sign up here, or just watch the vid below.
Internet Insecurity
[ Comments Off ]Posted on March 24, 2011 by admin in Technology
Thursday, March 24th, 2011After the recent breaches of ultimate, top-level security resources like RSA and Comodo, giving sites like Facebook twice as much info for “enhanced security” seems like a faulty strategy.
Earlier today I had an experience that reminded me that – like many of us – I should really get more on top of managing my various internet accounts and their passwords better than I do. I was trying to log in to my YouTube “Director” account, and YouTube was trying to link the account to a Google acccount. I wouldn’t have minded this, except when I tried to link the Google account and the YouTube account – which had the same username, by the way – YouTube would tell me that the account was already linked to another Google account, which it wasn’t. After twenty minutes of password resets and cookie deletions, I finally managed to log in to my own account. And then GMail suggested I add additional user information as part of Google’s interpretation of Two-factor authentication. I opted not to do so. Why? Because I simply don’t believe that either Google or Facebook (which is trying to do the same thing by asking for your phone number as part of your account verification) is enacting these programs strictly for security purposes. Both Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Eric Schmidt of Google are on record as saying that they don’t believe that privacy is in your future, that anonymity is intrinsically bad (Zuckerberg has hilariously said “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity”), and that we all need a verified identity on the web. This would make a lot of sense if you could in fact trust any web service to absolutely protect the information you gave them, but you can’t. In just the past week, two of the web’s ultimate sources of security verification – RSA and Comodo – have been hacked, a breach that Comodo’s own CEO Melih Abdulhayoglu likened to a web version of the September 11 attacks. And this of course is all hot on the tail of the well-publicized “Anonymous” attack of security firm HBGary. I’m no security expert, but I’m perfectly capable of thinking like a criminal. And my criminal mind tells me that giving twice as much information to an entity I can’t trust – i.e. any web-based service – really leaves me twice as vulnerable in the event that the entity is compromised. Which it almost certainly will be some day. I have made a casual but consistent effort to keep my online identity usefully accessible, without sharing my entire identity in one place, and will continue to do so. Common sense tells me that one-point interactions with services like Google, Facebook, banks, and other services, with a variety of e-mail accounts and varied passwords, is a decent strategy. But I think I need to ramp things up a bit. This article about password usage on Lifehacker – while screaming with irony because Lifehacker was one of the sites hacked when Anonymous went after Gawker – does hit on some key points. The author says he has 90+ accounts to manage. I’d put my number closer to 30, although if I add the accounts of clients, it may be more like 50 or 60. I’m beginning to do a bad job of managing them all, but plan to tighten things up where I can. At least I don’t use any of the 500 most common passwords. What about you? Do you trust sites like Google and Facebook with your full name, phone number, and other personal details? Or do you keep things closer to the chest?
Internet Contracts New TLD With XXX Domains
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on March 18, 2011 by admin in Technology
Friday, March 18th, 2011Is there any sense in a top level domain dedicated to pornographic content?
 ICM’s logo, created by M&C Saatchi |
No, a TLD is not a disease, though some might argue that it is on moral grounds. It’s a top level domain , like .com, .net, and .org. We’ve all become more familiar with domains like .info, .biz, and .tv, but when was the last time you recall typing one of them into the address bar? Most users’ web activity is driven almost entirely by searches on their preferred search engine, and a lot of clicking. So maybe you’ll see an ad or marketing piece with one of these TLD’s, but – and I base this statement on a LOT of observation as a web consultant – there’s a good chance that you will still type it into a search box. Which is just one of many reasons I think the fact that ICANN approved the top level domain .xxx today serves little purpose other than to make a lot of money for ICM Registry and its CEO, Stuart Lawley, the party awarded the role of managing the domains. 213,000 domains were allowed to be pre-registered, and Lawley believes that by this summer he can sell as many as 500,000. And at the insane price of 60-70 dollars each (most “regular” domains are usually around ten bucks), that’s easily over $30 million dollars in revenue. And to what end? The established porn industry has never been behind the idea and is already protesting it; they claim it marginalizes their content, and puts it at risk of being completely censored, as well as adding cost burdens to their business. The “casual porn enthusiast” (whatever I mean by that) also won’t like it, because sex, nudity, and porn is so stigmatized in our culture that this kind of user is probably happy to have the content they’re seeking available in normal searches, to maintain some plausible deniability if they fail to “clean their tracks” and get found out by a spouse or parent. And it won’t “clean up the web”, because nothing about the plan dictates that such content can’t appear on existing TLD’s. In fact, it’s just sort of reverse censorship; the domains will only be available to the adult entertainment industry, so all that ICANN has done is carved up an open system (the internet addressing system) and censored the rest of the web from using it. I mean, how cool would it be if you could register “YourName.xxx”? Well, unless you actually are a porn star, you probably can’t. Or can you? I don’t imagine issues like this have been sorted out yet. The International Foundation for Online Responsibility (IFFOR) will make these decisions. This should turn out to be interesting indeed. How sexual will be sexual enough? What do the words “adult” and “erotic” really mean? And if I can’t register IanGray.xxx, can I prevent some adult film company from doing so? I could go on, and probably will revisit the topic soon. But what do you think? Should there be a domain specifically dedicated to adult content?