Narus: Data-Mining IP

Who creates the software for real-time IP traffic monitoring? Narus is a company named in a Wired story about Whistle-Blower Outs NSA Spy Room. The page about NarusInsight says they provide,

CALEA- and ETSI-compliant modules for lawful intercept featuring a robust warrant management system. Capabilities include playback of streaming media (for example, VoIP), rendering of Web pages, examination of e-mails and the ability to analyze the payload/attachments of e-mail or file transfer protocols.

The Wired story is about an EFF Class-Action Lawsuit Against AT&T that accuses “the telecom giant of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in its massive and illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans’ communications.”

Quaero: French Google Challenger

According to Guardian Unlimited story, Does France really need its own search engine?, by Bobbie Johnson (April 27, 2006), France is backing a Franco-German challenger to Google called Quaero. If they build it will users switch? How could Quaero duplicate the success of Baidu.com in challenging Google in China? I’m guessing that if Google’s search techniques is based on features of English, Quaero could compete by handling French searches better. The Wikipedia article on Quaero says they will focus on multimedia search.

Dick Hardt on Identity 2.0

What is identity? The OSCON 2005 Keynote – Identity 2.0 by Dick Hardt of Sxip Identity is a neat and short presentation on identity on the web. The presentation is obviously aimed at promoting SXIP (Simple eXtensible Identity Protocol) technologies, but still is an amusing and short intro to identity 2.0 (online identity for the web 2.0). The presentation is interesting in a number of ways:

  • The presentation style and use of lots of simple slides that flip rapidly is engaging. I’m not sure I could perform the way Dick Hardt does without losing the synchronization of slides and text.
  • It presents a clear case for how identity should work online – how it should work like using a driver’s license to prove age at a liquor store. At the moment each site from Amazon to iTunes has its own identity directory. I have to get an account on each one. Identity 2.0 should allow me to get identities from different providers and use them for different services. Thus I could get one from a bank that covers my financial identity and then use it for buying things. (I think that’s the idea.)
  • The presentation also presents a pragmatic view of what identity is in general – who you think you are, what others think of you, and what you can prove using trusted identity providers like the government.

Thanks to Shawn for this.

Do we need a public gaming corporation?

David Rejeski in Why We Need a Corporation for Public Gaming argues that the USA needs the gaming equivalent to PBS.

However, serious games, like serious TV, are likely to remain a sidebar in the history of mass media. Non-commercial television floundered, despite millions of dollars of investment by the Ford Foundation, until the government stepped in and created a viable and long-lasting alternative. With similar vision and foresight, and a relatively small amount of funding, this could happen with video and computer games.

Interesting idea. What would the Canadian equivalent be? The “Canadian Gaming Corporation”?

Roboethics: Are we ready to debate this?

Humanist just had an intriguing post about The First International Symposium on Roboethics. This is being hosted by the Home > Benvenuti” href=”http://www.scuoladirobotica.it/”>Scuola di Robotica (School of Robotics) in Genoa which describes itself as a “CyberSchool. I wouldn’t have thought robotics and ethics were mature enough as an area for a symposium, but the section on the site on Roboethics Debate changed my mind. Since Kurzweil published The Age of Spritual Machines the debate has shifted from science fiction circles (Azimov’s 3 + 1 rules) to academic circles.

I should note that the Debate section of the Roboethics site, while interesting, has some inaccuracies. I don’t think Ray Kurzweil was “one of the develop of the Java programming language”. That would be Bill Joy.

Indexical Inscription of the Acoustic

The Indexical Inscription of the Acoustic by John Puterbaugh, is a short “preliminary investigation into memory and its role in technologies used to reproduce sound.” It has one of the best short descriptions of transcription, inscription and acoustic technologies. The investigation leads to the interesting idea of how neural nets might be explored as a form of associative memory device for recording sound which would be closer to how we remember acoustic events than how a CD is a memory of an event.

Would we want recordings that were associative rather than “soley indexical”? Would we want memory technologies that were interpretative rather than literal? I’m not sure I know what that would mean except that it would be the difference between depending on my memory as a record of information (lets say of a conversation) and a transcription to a text file.

How would one use a computer that used associative memory? Imagine calling up a paper and finding it subtly different at each recall the way your partner’s memory of a conversation drifts differently than yours.

Sterne: The Audible Past

When was the modern listener turned? Johathan Sterne in his book The Audible Past introduces an image of the Ear Phonoautograph developed by Alexander Graham Bell and Clarence Blake in 1874 as an emblem of the shift from voice automata to tympanic technologies. The ear phonoautograph used an actual ear attached to a stylus to trace sound – it illustrates the shift from technologies that tried to reproduce voice to technologies based on the ear, in this case literally.

Automata priviledged speech and the human voice; they took particular instances of sound production and attempted to re-create them. Tympanic machines treated hearing and sound as general problems and were oriented toward the human ear. (p. 71)

Sterne goes on to write about how audile technologies like the stethoscope and telegraph led to the development of the disciplined and professional listener (doctor and telegraph operator.)
Continue reading Sterne: The Audible Past

Digital Ethnography: Know Ourselves

How can digital communication tools extend research? Digital Ethnography is a catchy idea for doing cheap ethnography where rather than embedding the researcher into the community, the participants use digital cameras, cell phones, and the web to document and send in their impressions. The idea, as described by Davis Masten and Tim Plowman of Cheskin
Strategic Consulting and Market Research, seems half fulfilled. The real potential of digital communication is for communities to understand themselves through ethnography. Suppose volunteers in a community documents facets of their experience AND interpreted it together?

TPM Online: Battleground God

god.jpgIs a belief in God rationally consistent? Battleground God by TPM (The Philosopher’s Magazine) is a set of (presumably) branching questions designed to test how consistent your belief in God is. I got caught in a contradiction around justifying belief based on inner conviction (how can inner conviction be a source of belief if madmen are so convinced) which demonstrates how such a hypertext can be thought provoking and annoying.

What is strange about the “battleground” is the that contradiction is represented as “health.” Since when is consistency healthy?

Alltogether a good example of interactivity for philosophy, something rare indeed.