Ratchet Up

Paparazzi Buster

“Celebrities hounded by paparazzi may at last be able to emerge from behind their dark glasses without trepidation.

By wearing a specially designed electronic badge that jams electronic cameras, they will be able to prevent photographers from taking unwanted pictures.

The ”privacy protection system“ being developed by Hewlett-Packard will allow the publicity-shy to transmit an infrared signal to any nearby compatible camera. Once activated, the camera’s software will automatically blur beyond recognition the face of anybody wearing the badge, New Scientist magazine reports.

The threat of being caught on a concealed webcam may also be reduced with technology developed by the Japanese inventors Hiromi Someya and Toshiki Ishino of Kanagawa which fuzzes out anyone caught in the shot.

As a web surfer zooms in on a scene, intelligent face-recognition software identifies faces coming into range. The picture resolution of the faces is progressively reduced, so that individual mugshots are never clearly captured. When the lens zooms back out the clarity returns.

Although the technology will offer some comfort to those who are assailed by the press against their will, it will do nothing for hundreds of aspiring starlets to solve the opposite problem — not being photographed enough.

To this end, Nokia is developing a new Global Positioning System with which phonecam users will be able to invite paparazzi to take their picture. By clicking a ”celebrity mode“ button the camera sends out a Wi-Fi signal inviting anyone near by with a compatible camera to take a photograph.

Alongside its ”privacy protection system“, Hewlett-Packard is developing a camera activated by a brooch or a clipped-on earring which can take a picture of someone without their knowledge.

The earring contains an accelerometer that detects a flick of the head and sends a wireless trigger signal to the camera to take a picture.” [Times]

DreamHack: 6000+ People Bring Their Own Computers To Play In A Single Room

This is info [featuring their own translation into English] from DreamHack, the worlds largest LAN- and demo-party located in a town about 320 kilometers west of Stockholm. Before the mayhem, the hall looked like this. And once the lights were down and the adrenaline pumping, like this.

“About 6500 people come together and bring their own computers to play games, code, compete, surf the Internet, chatt and much more during four days. At the front of the hall the BigScreen is placed which shows information, movies, messages from the sponsors, game-finals and scene-contributions. There is also a massive soundsystem that can bring the sound to all the corners of the hall. Due to the shifting temperature near the gates at the front of the hall it's a good idea to bring a blanket or a sweater if your seat is near especially during the winter event. If your main purpose at DreamHack is to game you're adviced to choose a seat towards the rear of the hall to not be disturbed by the soundlevel.

We show reports, movies, information, ads and tournament finals and much more on our large projectorscreen. There are, of course, some really cool sound-gear attached aswell!

DreamHack have expanded with another hall for the participants this year, that's the hall that acted at sleeping hall previous events. In this hall there will be no large soundsystem as in the big hall, and Gamecrew is located here. So the C-hall is excelent for you who come to DreamHack to game and don't want to be disturbed by sounds.

Fast food are served in the kiosks in the DreamHack area. There are a couple pizzerias within walking distance, Cuccini, Alfredos and Shalom. Sibylla wich is closest doesn't sell pizzas anymore but still has burgers and kebabs. McDonald's is located downtown and at A6-center.

Jolt Cola is sold as usual by the Jolt Crew in the hall. 40 000 cans of Jolt is sold every event!

The power at DreamHack is dimensioned for a limit of 275W (1,25A) per seat. The specifications at the back of your computer (usually 350-400W) is the maximum that power supply can handle. This is not the actual effect! An ordinary computer with a monitor, a few harddrives, a good graphics-card and a decent CPU never gets close to 275W. It is prohibited to use equipment like a coffee-machine, waterboiler, microwave etc.

Each participant gets ONE port to the network with a speed of 10/100 Mbps. The switch is then uplinked to our backbone with a 1 Gbps-link. During the party a group of network-engineers constantly monitors the network on Dreamhack. The things we montior is the amount of traffic, response times, amount of viruses and suspected abuse of the network.

There's a couple of participants who has room in their car, you'll find them at the travel part of forumet.nu.”

[DreamHack]

Camera-Phone Futures

ast month at the sold-out Mobile Imaging Summit executive conference, 140 invited senior executives from more than 10 countries in North America, Europe and Asia peered into their crystal ball to discuss and define the future of the camera-phone.

“The first evolutionary path was defined as ”The Ubiquitous Camera.“ When a camera is embedded in most people's cell phone, they will in effect have it with them at all times, unlike traditional cameras (film or digital), which are only taken off the shelf in preparation for a picture-taking occasion (a vacation, a child's birthday, or some other special event). Having evaluated the performance of the one-megapixel camera-phones provided at the event by Nokia, and considering the recent introduction in Asia of three- and five-megapixel units, the majority of Summit attendees -- 65% -- declared the Ubiquitous Camera to be real today, an opinion shared broadly across all three industries represented. However, considering the weaknesses of today's camera-phones compared to ”pure“ cameras (including the absence of lens cover, the limitations of current optical zoom lenses and flash components on phones, and the difficulty in many cases of transferring images to a personal computer) significant minorities -- 16 and 19 percent, respectively -- opted for the more conservative one-year and three-year timeframes.

Overall sentiment was somewhat less bullish with respect to ”The Wireless Camera,“ a device that offloads the photos it takes directly to a storage location or recipient, effectively eliminating (or at least reducing) the need for storage cards or other portable media. While only a very small minority -- two percent -- deemed this unlikely to ever materialize, most attendees somewhat cautiously forecast the capability for either one year (33%) or three years (39%) down the road. However, a significant minority of 26% declared it ”here today,“ reflecting a difference of perception between the telecomm attendees, among which 56% of respondents expressed that opinion, and the photo-imaging attendees, 75% of whom were in the one- and three-year camp.

The third evolutionary path was defined as ”The Media Phone,“ a device that receives and displays high-quality still and video images (news, sports clips, maps and directions, and more). Here too, respondents from the telecommunications industry were most optimistic, with the majority of them declaring the capability ”here today,“ while photo imaging respondents were evenly split between today, one year, and three years. Computer industry respondents were primarily in the one-year and three-year camp. Overall, 37% of attendees voted for ”here today,“ 33% voted for ”one year,“ and 30% voted for ”three years.“

Next was ”The Visual Analyzer,“ a camera-phone that interprets patterns within an image -- either in the device itself or by calling on a remote server. Examples include taking a picture of a bar code on a product and initiating a transaction to purchase it, or reading an iris or thumbprint and passing on the results to request a security clearance. The majority of attendees -- 65%, spread fairly evenly across all three industry sectors -- were clearly in the three-year camp. Twenty-five percent of respondents believed one year will be sufficient to attain this level of performance, while small minorities -- seven percent and three percent, respectively -- believed that it is here today, or that it will never happen.

The most varied range of opinions was expressed with respect to ”The Visual Phone,“ a device which sends and receives both voice and images -- videoconference, real-time transmission of images, or both -- such that language and visuals are both fully utilized to deliver the most effective person-to-person communication. The majority of respondents -- 56 percent -- believe this capability will be available within three years. Significant minorities of 13 percent and 17 percent, respectively, believe it is here today or will be within a year, and another significant minority of 14 percent believe the Visual Phone to be an unrealistic vision.” [Marketwire]

Shocking Truth

o doubt you have heard of Stanley Milgram's experiment from 1963 that “was intended to measure the willingness of a participant to do someting may conflict with the participant's personal conscience.” He assigned roles of teachers and learners to unknowing participants. “The ”teacher“ is then told that the voltage is to be raised by 15 volts after each mistake.

[On the right a picture of his original shock machine.] In reality, there are no shocks being given to the actor – the actor is merely acting. At ”300 volts“ the actor bangs on the wall separating him from the subject. If, however, the subject indicates his desire to halt the experiment he is given a succession of verbal prods by the experimenter, such as: ”The experiment requires that you continue. Please go on.“ At 315 volts the actor bangs on the wall again and after that there is no further response from him and he stops giving answers to the memory questions [...]

Thomas Blass...has collected results from repeats of the experiment done at various times since, in the US and elsewhere, and found that the percentage of participants who are prepared to inflict fatal voltages remains remarkably constant, between 61% and 66%, regardless of time or location.” [Wikipedia]

As the long shadow of Abu Ghraib and “Gitmo” is cast across the land, this experiment is receiving renewed interest. British artist Rid Rickinson and others did a theatrical version of the experiments, and subsequently turned it into a [non-theatrical] film. They set the event--seeming more a performance piece than a traditional theatrical work--in a surprisingly, obsessively detailed reconstruction of the space.

Their site contains a host of fascinating documentation both about their piece and about Milgram's original work.

[Milgram Reenactment]

Vodaphone's Receiver Magazine

hoa. “Receiver” is a new magazine from European mobile phone biggie Vodaphone. It's devoted to smart academic papers on mobile telephony.

There are some great things here. It's definitely worth a bookmark and revisit. And don't miss their archive, which will no doubt swell in the future. This is a model for the way corporate technology firms can encourage―and benefit from―theorizing and thoughtful reflection.

And by the way, in an Arabic country divorce is as easy as notifying your wife three times, even with a minimal message such as SMS on a mobile phone.

The Computer of 2004 with Steering Wheel and Big Screen Display

“Scientists from the RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a 'home computer' could look like in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problems. With teletype interface and the Fortran language, the computer will be easy to use.”

[Popular Science, 1954. A gift .jpg of kangaroo computer driving gloves to Barb Donelan for sending this.]

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Fark Alert: Damned you, digital truth! A reader writes guessing that this is a Fark Job [if not Worth 1000], and the suggestion sets off a siren in my head that wails duck and cover. I'm not inclined to track this down like it's a Bruno Magli loafer in the O.J. Simpson case. But I DO care, since I long for a computer with a steering wheel. Honestly, the clues are right there in front of us. If this were real, the TV would have a moulded plastic pedestal. And the driver would never have printed his own output―he'd have his secretary do it.

Hunting by the Internet

ne of the earliest posts on Ratchet Up was about men hunting naked women with paint ball guns: “It's a new form of adult entertainment, and men are paying thousands of dollars to shoot naked women with paint ball guns...”I've done this three times,“ says Nicole, one of the three women allowing themselves to be shot at. ”I've done this seven times,“ says Skyler, another woman participating.” Quite an auspicious start, aye?

Well, Bambi turned out to be an elaborate hoax that snookered even CNN. So I am a little skeptical when it comes to the idea of hunting via the internet. On the other hand, the notion of “tele-robotics” isn't new and the practice of extending our visual-haptic senses via video has become common. Doctors do it. Video gamers do it. And so do artists.

“Hunters soon may be able to sit at their computers and blast away at animals on a Texas ranch via the Internet, a prospect that has state wildlife officials up in arms. A controversial Web site already offers target practice with a .22 caliber rifle and could soon let hunters shoot at deer, antelope and wild pigs, site creator John Underwood said on Tuesday. [...] Underwood, an estimator for a San Antonio, Texas auto body shop, has invested $10,000 to build a platform for a rifle and camera that can be remotely aimed on his 330-acre (133-hectare) southwest Texas ranch by anyone on the Internet anywhere in the world.

The idea came last year while viewing another Web site on which cameras posted in the wild are used to snap photos of animals.”We were looking at a beautiful white-tail buck and my friend said 'If you just had a gun for that.' A little light bulb went off in my head,“ he said.

Berger expressed reservations about remote control hunting, but noted that humans have always adopted new technologies to hunt. ”First it was rocks and clubs, then we sharpened it and put it on a stick. Then there was the bow and arrow, black powder, smokeless power and optics,“ Berger said. ”Maybe this is the next technological step out there.“ Underwood, 39, said he will offer animal hunting as soon as he gets a fast Internet connection to his remote ranch that will enable hunters to aim the rifle quickly at passing animals.”

[Reuters via Boing Boing]

Shelf Life

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Artist Chris Cobb and a raft of helpers rearranged about 20,000 books in San Francisco's Adobe Books. And after a week, they'll change it all back again. I'm floored.
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Prick Up Your Ears!

Two excellent audio programs on new media topics: Background Briefing's “Music of the Blogospheres” [On iPodding and internet radio, with transcript]

Benjamen Walker's “Creative Remix” [On re-mixing, cut-'n-paste & copyright]

Plus, a new lecture from Lawrence Lessig [Windows Media] which focuses on re-mixing as an integral part of the creative process.

10 X 10

10X10 is an automated image and word harvesting program. Each hour it collects the hundred “most important” images and associated international stories from Reuters, BBC and the New York Times. These are displayed in a grid with a neat navigation feature at the right that helps you index the images by word.

“Every hour, 10x10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour's most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10x10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input. [...]

The result is an often moving, sometimes shocking, occasionally frivolous, but always fitting snapshot of our world. Every hour, 10x10 collects the 100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale, and presents them as a single image, taken to encapsulate that moment in time. Over the course of days, months, and years, 10x10 leaves a trail of these hourly statements which, stitched together side by side, form a continuous patchwork tapestry of human life.”

Very cool.

[10X10]