Technology

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Benrik’s “Situationist” iPhone App

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on March 11, 2011 by admin in Technology

Friday, March 11th, 2011

Part guerrilla theatre, part social object, the new iPhone app called “Situationist” could change your life.

As a terminal punk with a lifelong love of experimental theater, culture jamming, and relative disregard for social convention, how could I not love the new iPhone app Situationist? Or at least the idea behind it anyway – I don’t own an iPhone, and have previously explained why I probably won’t. The concept behind the app is awesome though;  a little like guerilla theater meets social object. In the developers’ own words:  It alerts members to each others’ proximity and gets them to interact in random “situations”. These situations vary from the friendly “Hug me for 5 seconds exactly” or “Compliment me on my haircut”, to the subversive “Help me rouse everyone around us into revolutionary fervour and storm the nearest TV station”. The developers are Benrik, which is a portmanteau of Ben Carey and Henrik Delehag, who are performance artists, world remodelers, and culture jammers themselves. And if you’re wondering if the app is in reference to the international socio-political art revolutionaries of the 50′s and 60′s known as Situationist International (whom we’ve discussed before) the answer is a definitive “yes”. I love the added layer of irony that in order to engage in this anti-capitalist inspired activity, you have to have purchased an iPhone. Benrik’s previous adventures have included things like their “This Diary Will Change Your Life” series, the best of which has been compiled in the book This Book Will Change Your Life. We’ve included a few examples from the 2005 diary below to demonstrate just how much the diary could change your life. Of course, the Situationist app itself could be pretty life-changing, but as we said, it has that little iPhone barrier to ease of consumption. Learn more about Benrik on their site . There’s much more to them than an iPhone app and some cult books.

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The Internet Of Things & Augmented Reality

[ Comments Off ]Posted on March 5, 2011 by admin in Technology

Saturday, March 5th, 2011

Your first life wasn’t enough, so they created Second Life. Apparently that wasn’t enough for you either. No worries, soon you can augment your reality and live in your “Internet of Things”.


Having trouble recognizing
reality? There’s an app for that.

Reality just not real enough for you lately? Having a hard time identifying the objects around you? Well, no worries. There’s an app for that. Or at least there will be before too long. We’ve talked about Augmented Reality before, but another concept is gaining traction as the next big thing. It’s called the Internet of Things . It’s based on the idea that since the coming IPv6 addressing system for the web will make it possible to encode 50 to 100 trillion objects, well heck, we just might as well. And since the average person only has about 1000 to 5000 objects around them, we’ll just give all of them addresses so we can attach information to them, since there are plenty of URL’s for everyone! We jest of course. In (ahem) reality, these technologies make some amazing stuff possible. One implementation of the idea that has gotten some press is Green Goose, an activity monitoring system that uses green, egg-shaped sensors to track your activities and help you to reach goals that you select. Their tagline is “Play Real Life”. ReadWriteWeb covered the start-up in February of last year and again this year,  if you’d like to learn more. Personally, I’m already busy enough living my life that I don’t feel a need to do it twice. But the system points to interesting possibilities. We’ve already seen some of the cool tools made possible by object or environment analysis and universal connectivity. The song recognition app SoundHound and Quest Visual’s instant translator app Word Lens are two popular examples. But in the future, we may be able to access information about nearly anything around us, with tools similar to the “terminator vision” used in T2: Judgment Day. Let’s just hope this stuff works better than autocorrect. Below is just one example of the possibilities of having detailed information about the things and people around you with point and shoot simplicity. Just make sure you keep that antivirus software updated! Read the rest of this entry »

Get Your MojoWijo On With Ubisoft’s “We Dare”

[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 25, 2011 by admin in Technology

Friday, February 25th, 2011

Sex toys for the Wii? Not really my speed, but I imagine there’s a wiimote possibility that I have a FRIEND who’s a customer. C’mon and ‘fess up with a product review.

Look, I’m no prude. I mean, not only did I go to a progressive grade school where we received exceptionally explicit sex ed in first grade, but I was also a teen in the era when your folks were considered puritanical freaks if there wasn’t a copy of The Joy of Sex casually but strategically placed on the coffee table along with a copy of I’m Ok, You’re Ok and Jonathan Livingston Seagull. But in spite of this – or perhaps, to be more honest – because of this, I’ve never really understood the desire to introduce a lot of gadgets into the lovemaking experience. Especially the kinds we’ve featured as scary holiday workplace gifts. I mean, if one puts their existing digits, limbs, and lips to good use, the possibilities are quite extensive. And sure, the occasional oil, restraint device, or provocative apparel is a no-brainer. But will someone please explain to me who the people are in the target market for the Wii controllers and games Mojowijo and We Dare? I’m sure this customer is silently lurking amongst my friends;  a couple of years ago I was amused to discover that an otherwise rather conservative female friend was staging regular sex toy parties and was into bondage. No biggie. Just kind of funny, to be frank. If you haven’t heard of them, Mojowijo is a controller that sends the gesture from your device to a remote recipient. Or wiimote wiicipient, as the case may be. And We Dare (it took me a while to get the “Wii Dare” pun) is a complete multiplayer game. A game that the developer Ubisoft apparently deemed too sexy for the prudish American market. Something that they’re so adamant about that as of this writing, they block the ability to even view the ad on YouTube in the states. We managed to embed it below anyway, thanks to IGN.com. To tell you the truth, at first we thought it was just a viral campaign; there’s no reference to the game on their main site. But here it is on their UK site . And about that “MojoWijo” device: Is it just me, or does it look more like a tool for alien probing or dental work than a sex toy (see below)? If you’re a Wii sex toy enthusiast, feel free to explain yourself in the comments. Wii won’t judge you. Wii just don’t get it. MojoWijo image and We Dare clip below. Read the rest of this entry »

On The Internet, Nobody Knows You Are A Personality Management Software

[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 19, 2011 by admin in Technology

Saturday, February 19th, 2011

The US government is actively soliciting online persona management software to manipulate consensus.


What if all your friends were
really chatbots and spies?

If you bother following tech news at all, it’s really no wonder that tinfoil hats are so fashionable these days. We recently talked about the takedown of security firm HBGary by the internet activist group Anonymous, but I didn’t bother mentioning one amusing thought that kept occurring to me, and frankly should occur to anyone who applies any thought to whistleblowing, reputation management, and disinformation strategies. Which is: what if HBGary was just a sort of honey trap for hacktivists? What better way to infiltrate your opponent than allowing them to think they’d infiltrated you, and made off with 4GB of sensitive internal e-mails? Four gigabytes of e-mails loaded with discussions about security exploits, with file attachments that were themselves exploits? What a great Trojan Horse to deliver to your enemy! And while perhaps I’m being a bit flip suggesting such a thing, you should find the reality of what has been revealed by perusing the HBGary e-mails even more disturbing. I personally have a lot of friends that I rarely see but often banter with online, and often joke that I’m just a sophisticated chatbot. Which for now of course is an absurd notion; in spite of supercomputers beating humans at Jeopardy, the average chatbot is still in the “conversation with a dullard” phase of development. But ponder this: so are most humans who spend their time commenting all over the internet. So here’s the disturbing bit. By now you should be familiar with things like political astroturfing and internet sockpuppets, but this DailyKos piece discusses what may be an even more disturbing concept that HBGary was working on – “persona management” software that allows the user of the software to appear online as an army of commenters to manipulate opinion and erode online trust, much like Digg Patriots.  It’s questionable how effective the tool would be at this point in terms of creating credible personas, but what is actually more worrying about this kind of tool is the latter notion. We’re already bombarded daily by various forms of phishing attempts, but what if all our social network interactions, blog commenting, and Twitter/RSS feeds were partially tainted by an intelligently-crafted stream of consensus manipulation, as that DailyKos piece suggests? Oh, and by the way. The US government is an interested customer. I look forward to your comments, even if you ARE just a piece of sentiment-manipulating software.

Internet Doomsday? There’s An App For That.

[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 12, 2011 by admin in Technology

Saturday, February 12th, 2011

Researchers think they know how the entire internet could be taken down. Fortunately the only people who have the resources to do it right now are happy with their existing criminal enterprises.

I’ve always joked that the only way we’ll ever see civil unrest in America is if someone figures out how to shut down all television programming for about twenty four hours. But given the explosive growth in the number of web users in the states – according to this source the number has nearly doubled in ten years – I think the same result could be achieved by depriving people of their ability to upload their kids’ photos as their profile picture on Facebook or struggling to get the barcode reader to work on their smartphone at the grocery store. The recent internet shutdown in Egypt was probably the first time that people became aware that the web could be shut down on a large scale. Since most users don’t understand the first thing about how it works, they tend to take it for granted, like running water. But would it be possible to shut down the ENTIRE internet? According to this NewScientist piece, yes. But it wouldn’t be easy, requiring at least 250,000 computers to do it. But wait. Wouldn’t a cybercrime group like the amusingly-named Russian Business Network have these kind of resources? Of course they would. But much like the Doomsday device in Dr. Strangelove, what would be the point? If all your income is derived from selling hacking tools, serving up child porn, and hiring yourself out as a political “DOS gun for hire”, why would you want to shut off the internet? At least ALL of it, anyway. Besides, if you REALLY want to shut off the internet, you can just cut some wires. Here’s a map. Now all you’ll need is some deep sea equipment and the ability to get it to dozens of locations around the globe simultaneously, and voila! No intranets. So I think we may be okay for a while. Read the rest of this entry »

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