If you carry a phone, your location is being recorded every minute of every day

Después de leer esta nota, me queda claro que la palabra “privacidad” muy pronto quedará en desuso, al menos como se acostumbra utilizar actualmente en cuestiones de propiedades digitales. Si seguimos igual, la vigilancia pronto podría ser perfectamente sistematizada. Esperemos que este big brother sea más benévolo que el del relato Orwelianao…

How’s this for synchronicity: Google Glass started shipping on the same week that CISPA passed the House, 3DRobotics unveiled their new site, and 4chan and Reddit pored over surveillance photos trying to crowdsource the identity of the Boston bombers.

Cameras on phones. Cameras on drones. Cameras on glasses. Cameras atop stores, in ATMs, on the street, on lapels, up high in the sky. Modern cars log detailed data their manufacturers can access if they so desire. Oh, and “if you carry a phone, your location is being recorded every minute of every day.”

In 1999, Sun CEO Scott McNealy said: “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” Sadly, that sounds more prophetic every week.

I’ve been arguing for years that “Soon enough, pseudonymity and anonymity will only exist online; in the real world…they’ll be more or less extinct.” The hunt for the Boston bombers is to the coming world of surveillance as a 1980s PC is to a modern server farm. Facial recognition, gait recognition, drones the size of dragonflies — all here already. Just imagine twenty years from now. Every step you take outside will automatically be tracked, indexed, and correlated to all of your previous activity ever…

http://tcrn.ch/10UbrNx

Pinterest porno

Vaya, hasta que alguien hace algo interesante con el formato de Pinterest: la herramienta de photo-blogging, que originalmente estaba plagada de fotitos ñoñas (vestidos de novia y gatitos, mainly) es ahora tambien un agradable sitio porno através del URL sex.com. Así sea…

Our network administrators in AOL’s Broadway office have consistently flagged you on your assigned computer for repeatedly and openly viewing a pornographic website, sex.com, that currently bills itself as a Pinterest for sex.

Furthermore, you were viewing the said content in a conference room on the fourth floor in clear view of passersby including a group of Tibetan monks brought in by the Huffington Post to clear the fourth floor video studio of evil Gyalpo spirits.

This is not the first time you have been seen visiting sex.com and your claim that it was entirely for research does not explain why you’ve used it every hour, nearly on the hour, for the past three days. Your statement “sex.com is the most expensive URL in the world and this is an important pivot for them,” is no longer acceptable. Also, pointing to this post by former writer Robin Wauters is also insufficient explanation…

sex.com – a Pinterest for porn – http://tcrn.ch/JSj8Hk

Pinterest porno

Facedrink

“It gives you social energy. It gives you taste of friendship.” It’s Facedrink! And you better go buy some because it will be sued out of existence any minute now.

Following in the footsteps of the unofficial Mark Zuckerberg action figure, some
dude named Barry Moustapha (ROFLCOPTER) has created a lawyer-magnet energy drink. It’s themed with Facebook colors and proudly displays an “Add as Friend” button on the label. I’d be suspicious this was a hoax, but there’s a photo of a real bottle and reviewers confirm it leave a worse taste in your mouth than getting Poked by your dad…

http://tcrn.ch/u7sMhe

Facedrink

Voxer goes viral

@Voxer: para qué tener un Smart-phone, si se puede tener un Walkie Talkie. Algunas cosas del pasado se reviven fácilmente, sobre cuando alguien se da cuenta que aún tienen algo de vida…

A small startup has been climbing up the iTunes App Store and Android Market charges over the last few days. Called Voxer, it provides a walkie talkie push-to-talk voice service reminiscent of Nextel. Or, in modern parlance, it’s sort of like text messages but with voice instead of text. It’s basically a direct competitor to another startup, HeyTell, that we’ve covered, as well as TalkBox… and getting to be more of a competitor every day, judging by its recent trajectory.

The app has gone from #40 to #6 within the past week in the social networking category of the United States App Store, following its rise earlier this year in random other countries like Brazil and Saudi Arabia. It’s now a trend among many Twitter users, too. (Yeah, the social networking category isn’t especially big once you get past the leading web services, but this much growth for this type of app is unusual.)

To use Voxer, you simply download it from either store (iTunes here, Android here), create a new identity or log in with Facebook, sync it with your phone’s address book and/or Facebook, then start chatting with other individual friends, or groups that you join or create. The interface shows a text message style interface. You hold a talk button to record a quick message for the other party, although there’s also an option to listen live to an incoming message that a friend is recording. You can also send text messages within the flow of correspondence…

http://tcrn.ch/spxRjT

Voxer goes viral

Omni-touch

Interfaces de luz. Presiento que cuando este tipo de tecnología (llamada Omni-Touch) sea asimilada y aplicable en todos nuestros gadgets y dispositivos, vamos a pasar por toda una nueva revolución tecnológica, caracterizada -a diferencia de la actual- no por cambiar cómo nos comunicamos entre personas, sino cómo nos podemos comunicar entre personas y máquinas…

Soon you, too, will be able to talk to the hand. A new interface created jointly by Microsoft and the Carnegie Mellon Human Computer Interaction Institute allows for interfaces to be displayed on any surface, including notebooks, body parts, and tables. The UI is completely multitouch and the “shoulder-worn” system will locate the surface you’re working on in 3D space, ensuring the UI is always accessible. It uses a picoprojector and a 3D scanner similar to the Kinect. The product is called OmniTouch and it supports “clicking” with a finger on any surface as well as controls that sense finger position while hovering a hand over a surface. Unlike the Microsoft Surface, the project needs no special, bulky hardware – unless you a consider a little parrot-like Kinect sensor on your shoulder bulky. While obviously obtrusive, the project is a proof-of-concept right now and could be made smaller in the future…

http://tcrn.ch/npq3K5

Omni-touch

iPhone Siri demo

Como ya comenté hace no muchos posts, una de las cosas que más llamaron la atención del ultimo iPhone 4S es este sistemita de comandos de voz (SIRI), que promete convertir el teléfono en un asistente personal. Bueno pues aquí hay un video donde se ve el sistema en acción. A varios geeks les gustará verlo. Comparto liga…

If the iPhone 4S has one standout feature, it is the Siri personal assistant. You ask Siri to do things by speaking to it, and it can call anyone in your contact list, send them a text message or email, set up a meeting, play a song, set up a reminder for yourself, get directions, or just ask a question. It is a conversation starter in more ways than one. Siri is the kind of feature that makes you want to whip out your phone to show a friend or a total stranger. John Biggs and I covered Siri in yesterday’s Fly or Die episode on the iPhone 4S, but I taped this extra video to go into more depth. It’s just better to see Siri in action that to read about it. Siri isn’t perfect. Sometimes it runs into network issues, picks up background noise, or gets the wrong question because your instinct is to start talking before it is ready. But it is the most impressive voice-computer interface out there right now…

http://tcrn.ch/oJO2Gd

iPhone Siri demo

No quality content

Cuando decimos que internet es un invento informativamente revolucionario, que puede ofrecer gratis contenidos de calidad para todos, estamos hablando de un potencial, no de algo ya siempre viable ni mucho menos rentable. Seamos honestos, actualmente este medio vive de la publicidad (como muchos otros). Las cosas se mueven por dinero, los contenidos son algo que cuesta caro (cuando son generados y de buena calidad), y además la gente es feliz consumiendo basura. El internet tampoco es el santo grial del conocimiento, el redentor de la cultura o el emisario de la educación de masas. Sólo es un reflejo de las sociedades que lo crearon, y como tal replica todos los errores y problemas de un periodismo que es tan corrupto dentro como fuera de línea, y con todo los vicios y carencias que eso conlleva…

The blunt truth is, online advertising is a numbers game. And, even on niche sites, the number of salable page impressions required to even break even is huge. There are just too many pages of content being produced for advertising to remain a viable long-term business model. The New York Times can’t make money online, the Guardian can’t, Slate can’t and Salon barely can. As Bercovici points out, even Slate’s attempts to launch verticals aimed at business readers, and women, were relative failures.

There are maybe two general-interest publications which can reasonably claim to have cracked the free content code: The Daily Mail and the Huffington Post. But in truth the only way those publications can afford to pay their growing armies of real, grown-up editors is by selling millions of pages of animal stories and celebrity fluff, churned out by underpaid hacks. One day I want to produce a HuffPost slideshow of the best Daily Mail celebrity slideshows – it’ll clean up.

AND YET. It’s easy to wail and moan about how the Internet is killing journalism, but that dystopian future only exists if we assume that the Internet is the only place that editorial content can possibly live. In fact, over the next five years or so what we’re likely to see is a bifurcation in digital content.

On one side, those content producers who choose to stay on the free-and-open web will be forced into making more and more ethically dubious decisions to stay profitable. Out will go professional writers and church-and-state separation of content and commerce; in will come more Groupon-style “reader offers”, affiliate links behind every keyword and an Idiocracy of dumber and dumber linkbait. Ten ways to make extra income with Lady Gaga Sony Porn – Kittens!…

http://tcrn.ch/nnfsPB

No quality content

DOS turns 30

nevver:

Look familiar? Then you must be old enough to have used DOS, perhaps the best-known command-line-based OS in popular computing history. I’m proud to have done so myself, though a few years later and I would likely have missed out altogether.

The history of the OS is well-documented around the web, and perusing it is a nice reminder of the way things used to be. It came into its own in the early mid eighties (after being bought by Microsoft in 1981), mirroring the rise of the personal PC. Though the many developers that read this blog likely have a more varied personal OS history, DOS is something we can probably all look back on semi-fondly. I have fond memories of booting our 486 into 3.1 and immediately navigating to the games directory to launch Commander Keen for some 16-color alien-blasting.

The legacy of DOS is still present today. DOS-compatible computing is the reason system drives start at C (A and B were floppies), and why many of our file extensions are the way they are. And I still feel the effects of DOS’s 8-character limita~1 today…

http://t.co/JRyYm82