Media Technology

A Fox News cameraman was about 20 blocks away when the New York small-plane crash occurred last week, so he broadcast live via his Palm Treo smart-phone. (Thanks to Jamey for the link.)

You’ve probably already heard about the cell phone that screams after it’s reported as stolen. My friend GirlPurple has suggested the perfect add-on market: Custom Scream Tones.

From a NYT article on the efforts of credit card companies to cut out child-pornography sites from their networks:

Among purveyors of child pornography, Mr. Christenson said, there is a “growing trend toward steering visitors of these sites to various alternative payment methods.”

Mr. Christie said one of those methods involved granting access to Web sites in return for explicit photographs of children. “That phenomenon is something that we are very concerned about,” Mr. Christie said.

Tim May’s original BlackNet concept warned that modern crypto can make illegal trafficking in pure information nearly impossible to trace. The main obstacle to making BlackNet-like networks a reality at a consumer level has been handling payment: anonymous e-cash systems never really got traction, and non-anonynmous financial services leave a trail right to a criminal’s door.

What remains is a system of barter, or “CryptoCredits” as the BlackNet post describes them. Back when it was written digital information wasn’t all that fungible: there were a limited number of things that one could exchange in pure-digital form, and the BlackNet post mostly described a market for high-stakes digital goods like trade secrets and business intelligence. But bits have become much more fungible in the past thirteen years, and nowadays an illegal info-trader can find pure-digital goods at all levels of illegality. He might trade kiddie porn for digital movies, blackmail info for stolen credit card numbers, control over zombied PCs for World of Warcraft gold, or passwords to porn sites for validated spam addresses. He might even contract for specific services, ranging from mundane transcription of documents to decoding of CAPTCHAs to obtaining the phone records of an HP board member.

Engadget has the dish on the new “Amazon Kindle” eBook reader being developed by Amazon, complete with wireless for instant eBook purchases and what looks like an eInk display. (Let’s hear it for people who regularly troll for new FCC Filings reports!)

This may be old hat to some of you, but it was new to me — I just got an email spam that includes subliminals. The whole ad is an animated GIF designed such that the word BUY! flashes over the email for a split second every 30 seconds (including briefly as the email loads). I doubt this’ll actually make the spam any more effective (and in this case it’s a stock-push-scam, so the spammer-scammer won’t know either), but it’s interesting to see what they’re up to these days.

From a blog post by Google’s Picasa Product Manager:

Neven Vision comes to Google with deep technology and expertise around automatically extracting information from a photo. It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects. This technology just may make it a lot easier for you to organize and find the photos you care about. We don’t have any specific features to show off today, but we’re looking forward to having more to share with you soon.

Neven Vision’s page now redirects to the Google blog post, but a cached copy in The Wayback Machine indicates they’ve been focusing on face recognition technology of late, and C|NET mentions their iScout software for mobile phones that uses images shot with a camera phone to access additional content. (Link via John Battelle’s Searchblog, with some nice extra info at SearchEngineWatch.)

Each year IBM Almaden hosts the New Paradigms in Using Computers workshop. This year’s theme was Web 2.0, which in this case roughly meant the mix of community sites, blogs and wikis that make up the supposed “next wave” of the Net.

Below the cut are my notes on this year’s meeting. They’re still in rough form (and of course are just based on my own recollection and what I managed to type as I was listening), but please enjoy!

Technorati tag: npuc2005

At IBM’s NPUC workshop yesterday, Ross Mayfield announced that his company has released an Open Source distribution of Socialtext, their flagship wiki software, under a Mozilla Public License (MPL 1.1). I wasn’t all that pleased with any wikis I’ve tried in the past (including SocialText when I played with it over a year ago)… might be time for me to give it another try and see how it looks.

Socialtext Open can be downloaded from Sourceforge.

My friends Bill & Amy have set up a page for their Personal Aura Device, a set of sound-reactive LED poi and clothing they’re designing and building for Burning Man this year. Seeing them in action is amazing — they have one controller with a microphone that wirelessly controls boards fitted with with extremely bright red, green and blue LEDs. The main music mode ties intensity of each color to a different frequency band in the audio, so base and drums beat in the blues, mid-tones in the greens and vocalists and guitar are followed by the red. It’s pretty hypnotic to watch, especially when they’ve got two sets of poi plus costuming all pulsing in unison to the music.

Interesting: Livejournal has just launched a Jabber server, and are developing integrated features like posting via Jabber and of course integrated Friends and Buddy lists. And they’ll be federating, so you’ll be able to talk to other Jabber-enabled systems (like GMail/GTalk) without the usual mucking about in monopoly-space (you know, like you do with AIM, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, and all the other dark-age services that still wish it was 1990).

(Thanks to Sunyata__ for the link!)