Pictures and Vision by Robin Sloan, May 2012

the titanic showdown between Facebook and Google might not be the News Feed vs. Google+ after all. It might be Facebook Camera vs. Project Glass.

It might, in fact, be pictures vs. vision.

Facebook is the world’s largest photo-sharing site. Google’s new Project Glass augmented-reality specs are about sharing your vision.

Google is getting good, really good, at building things that see the world around them and actually understand what they’re seeing.

In this context, Google+ is not the company’s most strategic project. That distinction goes to Glass, to the self-driving cars, and to Google Maps, Street View, and Earth: Google’s detailed model of the real, physical world.

Maybe in twenty years we’ll think of Google primarily as a vision company—augmenting our vision, helping us share it—and, oh wow, did you realize they once, long ago, sold ads?

I am absolutely not going to mention the N** A******** here

What I like about Sloan’s piece is that it suggests an inversion of what Google Goggles is about. The usual approach has been to think about the glasses as an extra screen where Google can project information - augmented reality, but also omnipresent ads. Glasses as a means to serve more Google Stuff.

But what if Glasses are about looking over showing? What if they’re more observant than instructive? What if they’re about what you see? What if they put the user’s vision first? …& take all that the user sees and do a fuckton of processing up in the cloud and then use it for recommendations on all the other screens and devices where we’re more amenable to ads and suggestions rather than bombarding a thousand advertisements millimetres from our corneas…

…What if Google Glasses are more a camera than a display? It’s a much less aggressive user experience - feeling like one that’s built around you, the user, that helps you share moments in how you see the world (witness that second photo up top).

And that is a really fundamental human drive: this is how I see the world. This is who I am. Understand me. Sharing moments of vision is sharing a really personal kind of connection. Currently that’s mediated by cameras/phones - what if it comes from a device a centimetre from your eyeball, and what if viewers can see those images on a screen a centimetre away from their eyeballs?

Step closer to getting inside each others’ minds, innit.

Tarleton Gillespie explores the controversy over Twitter Trends and the algorithmic ‘censorship’ of #occupywallstreet.

[…]

The workings of these algorithms are political, an important terrain upon which political battles about visibility are being fought (Grimmelmann 2009). Much like taking over the privately owned Zuccotti Park in Manhattan in order to stage a public protest, more and more of our online public discourse is taking place on private communication platforms like Twitter. These providers offer complex algorithms to manage, curate, and organize these massive networks. But there is a tension between what we understand these algorithms to be, what we need them to be, and what they in fact are. We do not have a sufficient vocabulary for assessing the intervention of these algorithms. We’re not adept at appreciating what it takes to design a tool like Trends – one that appears to effortlessly identify what’s going on, yet also makes distinct and motivated choices. We don’t have a language for the unexpected associations algorithms make, beyond the intention (or even comprehension) of their designers (Ananny 2011). Most importantly, we have not fully recognized how these algorithms attempt to produce representations of the wants or concerns of the public, and as such, run into the classic problem of political representation: who claims to know the mind of the public, and how do they claim to know it?

Can An Algorithm be Wrong?
Tarleton Gillespie in Limn issue 2: Crowds and Clouds.

Also very much worth a read:
Data Reveals that Occupying Twitter Trending Topics is Harder Than It Looks by Gilad Lotan (@gilgul) on the SocialFlow blog, 12 October 2011.

Briar is competing for funding on the Knight News Challenge

newschallenge:

1. What do you propose to do?

To equip journalists, activists and civil society groups with easy-to-use, secure communication tools that work with or without internet access.

3. Describe the network with which you intend to build or work.

We will work with the emerging global network of citizen journalists, bloggers and activists in authoritarian countries who rely on digital media to make their voices heard, and with the support networks such as Telecomix that help them deal with threats to their freedom and safety online.

5. Who is working on it?

This is an open source project with one full-time contributor and several part-time contributors. Michael Rogers is a P2P software developer with a PhD in the design of censorship-resistant networks. Eleanor Saitta is a security analyst with a decade of experience in threat modeling who’s working on tools for social resilience and direct democracy. Along with other developers and security experts, we also have a user experience designer with a security-specific background.

The project’s source code and design documents are available at http://briar.sf.net, but we will not release a prebuilt application until we’re sure the software is safe to use.

6. What part of the project have you already built?

We’re approximately half way to a beta release, with 35,000 lines of code written so far, comprising most of the underlying security and communication components. The next task is to develop the user interface for the integrated messaging, blogging and discussion software.

We’ll shortly be running a requirements gathering workshop and a series of usability studies with activists in the UK. When we reach the beta stage we’ll ask contacts in several countries for help with translations and beta testing under safe conditions.

The communication protocol will be submitted to a peer-reviewed information security conference to ensure it’s safe to use.

A message from Michael:
Viral marketing doesn’t work, tell everyone you know‏
“It seems that as well as picking 100 entries themselves, the Knight News Challenge judges will be sending through to the next round the five entries that get the most likes and reblogs on Tumblr and mentions on Twitter.”

So dear Tumblr, any love you have to give it is much appreciated - just hit that reblog button or give it a tweet.

If you’re a coder / activist / UX or graphic designer / cryptographer / or otherwise think this might be something you’d like to hear more about or get involved in, the mailing list is at http://briar.sf.net or contact Michael at m—[at]gmx.us

The funding URL again: http://newschallenge.tumblr.com/post/19480700983/briar-a-secure-news-and-discussion-system

A new series City Of Sound (@cityofsound) are curating for Italian design magazine Domus, proposing a different kind of tech journalism that recognises technology as a cultural production - and, more than that, as the firmament of our culture.

A few years ago, in response to the usual diminished depiction of contemporary technology as simply “IT”, someone—I forget who—said something like “Is a 14 year-old girl updating her Facebook status from her mobile phone as she walks down the street ‘IT’?” Of course it is, but more importantly, it isn’t. It is more than that; contemporary technology is deeply cultural

. We might argue that all technology always has been “deeply cultural”, from the Stone Age axe onwards, but given that symbolic consumption and production—one definition of culture—is now actively and deliberately embedded in objects we design and build, and that these objects are embedded in the patterns, habits and rituals of everyday life—another definition of culture—we must now see technology for what it is.

So with Domus, Joseph Grima and I saw an opportunity to write in a different way about everyday technology. Domus has a long tradition of writing about such things, driven by the strong Italian heritage of post-war industrial design, covering Brionvega radios, Elica hoods, Vespa scooters, or Olivetti typewriters, for instance.

But as I suggest in my series opener (below), perhaps a culturally powerful contemporary equivalent of these things now exists in the form of social media, mobile phones, web services, information graphics, smart cards, personal informatics, robots, and so on.

It might be a stretch to suggest that these things are the equivalent of an Olivetti Valentine in a number of ways, but not in terms of the way such things now shape our lives. Yet the vast bulk of journalism concerning this everyday technology is dominated by the technology press, which is rarely critical in the sense that Domus is, rarely covers design aspects with any depth, and rarely attempts to place developments in a wider cultural context. While I have no problem with the likes of Engadget, Techcrunch, Wired and the rest—not that they’d notice either way if I did!—there did seem a gap in the market here.

Conversely, this was also a way to introduce discussion of the recent design disciplines of interaction design, experience design, service design and information design, to this more established strata of design media. For what it’s worth, my motive for doing this—discussing the technology in terms of culture, and discussing its design in the context of other design practices—is in order to try to understand it better; which is in turn in order to design it better, to realise it better, to procure it better.

A very exciting development - one I’m glad is freely available on the Domus website, and one I hope to learn from. As a social researcher by training, this type of “critical design” thinking is quite new to me - though dare I say it was something I was looking for and often found lacking while studying architectural theory during my Masters! (UCL, urbanism).

When back from SXSW I hope to read and absorb the first two articles more thoroughly:

1. Portable Cathedrals on the Nokia N9… and the hegemonic power of Apple, the importance of materials, tactility, sounds and ocularcentrism, European design history and entrepreneurship, and the skirmishes of licensing and logistics in the mobile phone market.

2. In Praise of Lost Time on Facebook Timeline… and “information design, social graphs, identity and representation, and so on —but also the broader context of a shared social memory, and how that might affect the way we forget and function.”

Serious stuff!

PayPal casts doubt on Near Field mobile payments systems
Juliette Garside at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, 28 Feb 2012.

Epic fail for confusing banks with payment providers in the first paragraph, but otherwise interesting despite being a press release. NFC has been struggling to get off the ground for a long time now, and mobile operators really need to look at other interfaces. Scanning a barcode looks really promising - two ways to implement both getting really good user feedback:

1. Starbucks app - scan barcode on smartphone screen to pay for coffee; money taken from pre-loaded credit

2. Apple Store app - use app to scan barcode of thing you want to buy; payment taken through your iTunes account (stored credit card).

Wonder which one will win out? But perhaps they both have strengths for low vs high value transactions.

Plus useful comment from modelportfolio2003:

it is an oversimplification to assume PayPal approach would be so much simpler for most merchants to incorporate. While a software update to an existing POS terminal sounds (ie front end) simpler than a complete replacement to the terminal (required for NFC payments), getting the back-end to successfully accept and settle a PayPal transaction requires additional resources by the merchant. This could deter smaller merchants (the huge numbers are smaller merchants) from implementing despite lower acceptance costs.

Interesting new start-up called Bundle which aims to provide an objective take on recommending where to shop.

Instead of relying on personal reviews, which suffer from various biases (fake reviews by shops; people more likely to comment when they’ve had a bad experience), Bundle uses anonymous - but demographically-tagged - credit card spend data from Citi.

It uses this to analyse measures of where people like to shop - e.g. how many repeat customers a business has, the amounts customers usually spend, what types of people go there, and what other places customers of an establishment frequent.

Tagline: Discover the REAL top places for everything in your city

When Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a China expert at the Brookings Institution, travels to that country, he follows a routine that seems straight from a spy film.

He leaves his cellphone and laptop at home and instead brings “loaner” devices, which he erases before he leaves the United States and wipes clean the minute he returns. In China, he disables Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, never lets his phone out of his sight and, in meetings, not only turns off his phone but also removes the battery, for fear his microphone could be turned on remotely. He connects to the Internet only through an encrypted, password-protected channel, and copies and pastes his password from a USB thumb drive. He never types in a password directly, because, he said, “the Chinese are very good at installing key-logging software on your laptop.”

What might have once sounded like the behavior of a paranoid is now standard operating procedure for officials at American government agencies, research groups and companies that do business in China and Russia — like Google, the State Department and the Internet security giant McAfee.

[…] McAfee, the security company, said that if any employee’s device was inspected at the Chinese border, it could never be plugged into McAfee’s network again. Ever. “We just wouldn’t take the risk,”

Is it the web or the internet? In mid-2009, usage switched. In the contemporary landscape of APIs and applications, what we are dealing with is the inter-network, not just web-pages.

Rob Horning (Marginal Utility, Popmatters) notes that Zuckerberg “intends to rewire the way sociality works in the world” in his “grandiose” IPO letter quoted above.

Obviously Eli Pariser’s “filter bubble” takes on Z’s “diverse perspectives” argument and argues it’s not necessarily substantiated - friends & family are mostly people a lot like us, so the information we get from them is not going to be diverse, quite the opposite.

I’d also question how far Facebook is “helping people form connections”, and how much it’s just a marking - a fixing, arguably a reterritorialisation - of connections we make very largely face-to-face in person. I’ve made friends online - thanks, Twitter! - but haven’t met anyone new through Facebook - and I think that’s very typical.

*

ETA: Interesting observation on this section in Tim Carmody’s annotated version of the IPO letter on WIRED:

“if there’s anything Zuck’s truly passionate about, it’s this: that there’s something broken about how we hide and mask ourselves with other people, and that our lives would be better if we were more open”

Gigaom’s Matthew Ingram notes:

“He doesn’t just want to enable these changes in society — on a fairly fundamental level, he wants to control them.”

And as Rob Horning (Marginal Utility, PopMatters) puts it:

“The message is: We will reprogram you to see privacy as some sort of despicable antisociality and corral you all into a kind of mandated intersbjectivity”

*

But what does criticism of Zuckerberg’s hyperbole really mean when this IPO is going to make him so very, very rich?

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Systems Association (UAVSA), a trade group that represents the drone industry to the UK government, has recommended drones deployed in Britain should be shown to “benefit mankind in general” be decorated with humanitarian-related advertisements, and be painted bright colours to distance them from those used in warzones.

Also worth noting that “There remains a high level of police interest in military-style drones, which, unlike small UAVs, can fly at heights of more than 20,000ft, making them invisible from the ground.”

In trying to understand what’s creepy about this, I think one nexus is the change in meaning of public space. Once upon a time, “in public” meant transparency and sousveillance were possible - anyone who could see or hear you, you could likewise see and hear - as we would often be anonymous.

Now, however, social networks, mobile and technology like these drones push us into an age we might call the “suprapublic”, where “in public” means visibility to countless strangers, and we are watched much beyond our own capability to watch back.

Meanwhile, the private sphere has also changed: much domestic behaviour - the music you’re listening to, the TV you’re watching - is broadcast out through social media, and the home is only private in the places where it’s unplugged.

Necessarily this must change the conditions of acceptable - and possible - behaviour in these new ultrapublic spaces.

If 2012 is the year of Big Data, it will likely be the year vendors and consultants start to over-promise, under-deliver, and put processes in motion that will generate insights and potential risks for years to come. […]

As Big Data becomes the next great savior of business and humanity, we need to remain skeptical of its promises as well as its applications and aspirations.

Existential Issues With Big Data
Determinism teaches that what will be, will be. Existentialism deals with a humanity in the throes of chaos. Big Data can be seen as either a lens through which determinism is revealed, or a tool for navigating an existential world. As a scenario planner, I take the existential position and see a number of existential threats to the success of Big Data and its applications.

To summarise and paraphrase the threats Rasmus perceives:

1. Overconfidence: most managers are overconfident and miscalibrated. In other words, they don’t recognize their own inability to forecast the future, nor do they recognize the inherent volatility of markets. Both of these traits portend big problems for Big Data as humans code their assumptions about the world into algorithms
2. When learning happens: “If organizations rely on Big Data to connect far-ranging databases [..] -who, it must be asked, will understand enough of the model to challenge its underlying assumptions, and re-craft those assumptions when the world, and the data that reflects it, changes?”
3. Complexity: Complex models reflect the worldviews & personal understandings of the people who’ve built them, and may not be easily transferable to new staff - or combinable with other models.
4. Feedback loops: Creating connections between datasets can amplify the impact of errors or incorrect assumptions
5. Algorithms & a lack of theory: for some fields of endeavour, there is no consensus theory about how they work. Consequently “data scientists can’t create a model because no reliable underlying logic exists that can be encoded into a model”
6. Confirmation bias: “Every model is based on historical assumptions and perceptual biases. Regardless of the sophistication of the science, we often create models that help us see what we want to see”
7. The world changes: “We must remember that all data is historical. There is no data from or about the future. Future context changes cannot be built into a model because they cannot be anticipated.”

The company that keeps getting mentioned as the one best able to handle the “fuzziness” of big data (i.e. different datasets having similar but not isometric categories) is Palantir, the slightly Orwellian firm focusing on post-9/11 security and government data. But here I find Rasmus’s comment particularly interesting:

“They have to be cautious about applying their ideas to different domains where underlying rules might not be so clear or data so well-defined.”

Indeed. Fuzziness is not trivial!

wildcat2030:

Knowmads, Infocology of the future

Growing up with the Internet gives today’s children a very unique view on the way the world works — one that is vastly different from that of older generations. These kids, the ‘digital natives,” are raised with modern technology deeply…

@machinestarts (Chris Baraniuk) commented, “I am not a fan of this research. Children 30 years ago would basically have said the same thing”.

Which suggests that before we jump to this conclusion we need to prove that “robots are human” is not an effect of either:

• the research design
• or the cognitive development of children surveyed (i.e. kids start off not understanding self/other, so it seems likely they’ll be pretty shaky on human/non-human until a certain age)

To examine only the first point:

The question posed was, “What would happen if robots were a part of your everyday life — at school and beyond?” Note that it’s a question about robots - which is a word in everyday English indicating a humanoid form, a general category including the advanced (and hard to distinguish from human “android”), but not hybrid and indistinguishable in the way of the “cyborg”. It’s a question framed to elicit commonalities - if the kids didn’t humanise robots, that would be the unexpected finding.

Second, Survey design 101: if your question’s about robots, to assume the answer tells you about attitudes to technology (a much wider category) is unjustified extrapolation.

Thirdly it doesn’t appear to test null hypotheses, two being (i) how children would imagine they’d react to cats in their everyday lives - would they humanise them too? I’d expect so; and (ii) how adults would imagine interacting with robots in their everyday lives - which likewise I would expect would come out. The idea that adults perceive robots as “separate to humanness” appears to be a cultural assumption of the researchers, nothing more.

But echt, press releases publicity lalala.

More information about the research process here.

(via stoweboyd)

I’m guessing you’re mostly here from the Tumblr Technology Spotlight. Thanks Tumblr! And thanks for following.

The 101:

Who: Jay Owens
What: social (media / research / anthropology / theory). Interested in what technology means and what it does to us psychologically and socially.
Especially: identity, privacy, big data.
Basically: social nerd.
Where: London, @hautepop and JayOh.net.
Weekdays 9-7: working at FACE

Two other of my favourite Tumblrs were also spotlighted, so I want to share the love and recommend:

1. Modern Im/Material Things // @CDennaoui
Social media strategist by day, critical theory nerd by night, and former anthropology student to boot. (Sounds familiar!) But Christina studied Middle Eastern politics and religion, and also makes abstract electronic music and digital collage.
[I’ll update with links to my favourite of her posts when her SOPA block comes down tomorrow ;)]

2. Stowe Boyd the Underpaid Genius // @stoweboyd
Stowe describes himself as a “Social anthropologist, clairvoyant, postfuturist. My work is social tools and their impact on media, business, and society.” He’s got an interest in social media tools for work (like Yammer and Basecamp) but envisioning a future where they’re (a) properly social and (b) change how we work.
But I’m recommending him because he also thinks a lot about political implications, economics and green issues.

There are enough people just writing about technology. What’s interesting is to leave the hype-y Silicon Alley bubble and really mash it up with the complexity of the whole wide world out there.

I was directed to this Ars Technica article by Aden Davies (banking innovation chap at HSBC), who pointed out the comments thread as rather more insightful than the article itself.

Indeed it was, and I’m just starting a new mobile payment project, so I wanted to aggregate the key points into one post for reference. What might actually be the solution to secure card payment?

First, the idea in the article: dynamic credit card numbers.

How much do you worry about your credit card information falling into the wrong hands, either due to online security breaches or a lost or stolen card? Dynamics Inc. is a company that claims to have the solution: a credit card that generates a one-time use code every time it is used, both for online and physical transactions. The company showed off a number of credit card options here at CES, including the ability to keep a single card for multiple accounts. The secret lies in the company’s innovative magnetic strip, which can be programmed in real time, and—more importantly—wiped clean just as quickly.

Some useful clarification from Syon (in comments): for this to be secure, what you want is both a hidden credit card number and also a dynamic one that changes for each use.

The advantage of this technology over other security measures is that it doesn’t require any change to merchant terminals or systems - dramatically decreasing cost of uptake. [It is of course this issue that’s holding back NFC.]

Looking at other security solutions, there’s a key thing I have to remember: The US (still) doesn’t have chip & PIN - they’re mag-stripe only. However a few years ago Amex Blue “*did* put a chip on the cards, and you could order a chip reader, plug the card into the reader, and then do chip & pin on your own PC.” [ZPrime]. What a faff - at least as bad as those little caclulator/dongle things UK banking customers have as an additional security layer for setting up new online transfers.

For one commenter, the “checkout” option is the obvious security fix:

IMO the solution to fraud online is to stop allowing sites to have any access to card details, and make all processing have to go thru third parties like paypal etc, IMO its time that anyone accepting online payments has to foward you offsite to an accredited processor, and get handed back to the merchant as paypal does.
[RichMS]

It’s interesting to see it advocated, because I’m pretty skeptical. I don’t feel this is an especially compelling offer, because most people are making online purchases relatively infrequently and mostly from the same set of big-name providers (Amazon, ASOS, etc). These brands are trusted as much as any check-out provider (Google, Amazon), and rather more than Paypal. So how much of a need is there? If I were regularly more under-the-counter Ritalin or fake designer handbags from China - I’d want this layer. Mostly though it seems an additional hassle to set up a new Google Checkout account rather than using my existing ASOS or Topshop one to pay…

A much more interesting idea: stop merchants being able to “pull” money off the customer’s card at all:

Why [are we] even bothering with this? [More secure credit cards] The basic enabler of fraud is the idea that random parties can at any time order a withdrawal from someone’s account. Why are we even doing “pull” transactions where the merchant orders the withdrawal from your account? Why aren’t we doing “push” transactions where the merchant tells *you* their receiving account number and a transaction code and you order your bank to send the payment to the merchant? For on-line purchases it should be easy enough. If you’ve got a cell phone you can do it via the Web or a text message or if all else fails a voice call to your bank
[Todd Knarr]

Now this is a really interesting idea, potentially a real game-changer. As stands setting up new payment recipients is quite a hassle in the UK at least (the joys of dongle verification), but for offline purchases there have to be ways to streamline it by using proximity in the verification mechanism - e.g. bump to confim? Enter a code on the other phone’s screen?

A more detailed walk-through of the security requirements for push transactions - anything connected to the internet is potentially hackable. So how to structure a system around that?

The ultimate thing is just a card that has private key in it and a keyboard so that you can type in a code and see how much you are being charged before pressing ok. If customer and bank have 100% control over the keys and the card there is no possible fraud as all the stuff in between is just there to allow the card to communicate with the bank servers.

Breaking public crypto is not going to be easy any time soon so danger of criminals doing anything is low or non existent. Sure the cards are a bit more expensive but it might be cheaper to go for a truly secure system as compared to snake oil stuff they are doing now.

[AxMi-24]

It’s even potentially a business-model disrupter:

“Interesting ideas. The thing about ‘push’ transactions like that is that they require both parties to be online. This is not really an issue - just build it into phones. However, once you’ve required everyone to be online there is a LOT you could do. e.g. You could then standardise the protocol so that money goes between the two banks directly - mastercard and visa can be dis-intermediated. I’d be very happy to remove those monopoly players.”
[Lliwynd]

But is this possible? “I’m afraid your plan won’t really work. In Europe alone, there are over 4000 issuers. Suggesting that each and every one of them makes a connection to 3999 others in order to have a workable payment service doesn’t make any sense. That’s why you have payment processors.” [mrsilver]

Still need to stop & note the consumer objection: “Sounds like a lot of work on the part of the consumer. I’d rather take the risk that my card be stolen then go to my bank’s website every time I want to make a purchase online.” [Eupfhoria]