Tag Archives: Hardware

Kill your phone

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Apple and Google aim to track users’ phones with GPS and W-Fi trangulation.

Photo: CC/husin.sani

Google’s new service, Latitude, lets people spy on each other, by tracking their target’ GPS receivers. Now Apple is rumored to be adding Wi-Fi triangulation to the Mac OS.

OS X Snow Leopard to get WiFi triangulation, more multitouch control? – SlashGear

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard could introduce WiFi triangulation, used to estimate geographical location, in a crossover of the technology from the iPhone to the MacBook range. The system- which is part of the CoreLocation framework in the iPhone SDK – will presumably be used to give general location information to navigation software such as Google Maps, as the first-generation iPhone did to compensate for its lack of true GPS.

More to Middle Earth than imagined – The Boston Globe

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Mines of Moria, from Westwood, Mass.-based Turbine

Image: LOTR: Mines of Moria, from Westwood, Mass.-based Turbine

In my Boston Globe column today, I embrace the latest Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, and note the growth of a Middle Earth MMO. Both products are from Massachusetts-based companies.

Please take a moment to read the column, and comment at Boston.com!

Just in time for Great Depression 2.0:

Westwood-based Turbine (it’s at www.turbine.com) last week launched a game that will keep you busy for as long as you can keep the lights on.

The Lord of the Rings Online: Mines of Moria is the first expansion pack for Turbine’s massively multiplayer online game about hobbits, wizards, and whatnot.

LOTRO: Mines of Moria shows there is even more to Middle Earth than MMO players could have imagined.

via More to Middle Earth than imagined – The Boston Globe

Blow on your iPhone

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First good frackin’ thing I have seen for the iPhone. This application, like several I have seen for the Nintendo DS, responds to the force of your breath against the device’s mic.

Smule’s new iPhone app, Ocarina turns your iPhone into a fully-functional musical wind instrument. This amazing little application works very much like the real deal, combining touch, tilt, gestures and human breath to create ethereal sounds which bring out your inner Zelda.

via iphone ocarina: go blow (into your iphone) on [technabob]

Headsets getting some cachet

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From my Boston Globe column last week: Smaller, better-looking video eyewear (for watching vids, checking in on your Second Life, etc.),

Headsets getting some cachet – The Boston Globe
By Mark Baard
May 12, 2008

digital eyewear
Digital eyewear is slowly becoming suitable for public viewing. In other words, headsets such as the Myvu Crystal are slim and colorful enough that they might be taken for a pair of over-the-top Gaultier frames instead of an assistive device.
more stories like this

The ear buds hanging from the arms of the Crystal are a dead giveaway that something “smart” is going on behind those shades.

Like the original, less sexy looking Myvu models, the Crystal (about $300 at myvu.com, starting next week) creates a single image you can see inside the translucent lenses.

San Fran wireless plans getting spooky

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Only the nodes will know your secrets. The red-hot mesh networking startup Meraki can now claim intel connections. “Free the Net” is a Meraki promotion.

Investors with ties to the CIA, Bechtel and the bin Laden family are restoring the hopes some San Franciscans once held for low-cost, citywide wireless internet access.

Meraki Networks, a company run by two college kids on a break from their MIT studies, recently announced it will receive $20 million in funding to support its plans for expansion in San Francisco.

Meraki will sell and distribute its radio relay devices to homeowners and apartment dwellers, who can stick the devices in their windows to form neighborhood wireless networks that automatically configure themselves.

As with muni Wi-Fi, Meraki’s mesh networks offer the promise of free, unfettered access to the internet for the poor.

But the startup’s new investors also have a taste for intrigue.

Some of Meraki’s new capital, for example, will come from DAG Ventures, a firm co-founded by former investment partners from Bechtel. Their division, formerly known as Bechtel Investments, is now partly owned by the bin Laden family. (The new investment firm, San Francisco-based Fremont Group, remains largely in the hands of the Bechtel family.)

As parallelnormal readers well know, San Francisco’s original muni Wi-Fi scheme had a whiff of corruption about it. The city’s plans eventually proved too expensive for its business partners, particularly Earthlink, which recently abandoned the project.

Google’s offer to tack surveillance cameras on light posts, while installing Wi-Fi routers around town, was also poorly received by West Coast privacy watchdogs.

Some will are likely to ask whether DAG’s support for wireless networks will come with strings attached.

DAG is also backing, along with the CIA, the San Francisco-based camera surveillance and intelligence gathering company, 3VR Security.

But DAG’s ties to the intel community run deeper than a handful of startups. Continue reading →

Human-computer interfaces: Device tracks free-hand movements

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The point is that it’s contactless. (Photo: Gesturetek.)

From my Boston Globe column this week, another step toward into the “contactless” future.

Humans hardly touch each other as it is. (We’re being taught that touching is a “high-risk” behavior.) Machines have become an intermediary.

Now, you don’t have to touch the machine:

Think Minority Report: A new device from Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Gesturetek lets you point at any screen to manipulate images and objects, just as Tom Cruise did in the mesmerizing film adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story.

Gesturetek’s AirPoint System requires no tracking glove or remote control, as many tracking systems do. The company envisions its camera-based technology in hands-free (and thus germ-free) ATMs, and other contactless applications.

Also: Zoombak will track your wayward pooch with a combination of GPS and cell tower proximity readings–said to be better than using either technique on its own.

Dog, trackedZoombak alerts you when its water-resistant gadget, hanging from your dog’s collar, crosses over the boundaries you designate around your home. The service signals you via text message or e-mail of the escape.

Zoombak also offers a slightly more expensive car locator kit for tracking teens and the other high-risk drivers in your family.

Report: Travelers love being scanned

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Happy to help: The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Continental Airlines tell USA Today that customers can aid the fight against terrorism by allowing security personnel to scan their mobile phones. Continental says travelers love “the convenience.”

The Transportation Security Administration’s scheme to scan mobile phones instead of boarding passes strikes me as highly hackable.

More significantly, it provides Homeland Security an excuse to point scanners at travelers’ mobile devices, which often contain their personal, and sensitive, private information.

Mark my words: this three-month pilot project (see below) is just the first of many that Homeland Security will launch to gain further access to the contents of mobile phones, even to commandeer them for intelligence and data gathering.

From USA Today, today:

The two-dimensional bar code, a jumble of squares and rectangles, stores the passenger’s name and flight information. A TSA screener will confirm the bar code’s authenticity with a handheld scanner. Passengers still need to show photo identification. The electronic boarding pass also works at airport gates.

My question is: What else can that handheld TSA scanner scan?

–  Mark Baard

clipped from www.usatoday.com
Cellphone could be boarding pass, too

By Barbara De Lollis, USA TODAY

Continental Airlines passengers in Houston will be able to board flights using just a cellphone or personal-digital assistant instead of a regular boarding pass in a three-month test program launched Tuesday at Bush Intercontinental Airport. The program could expand to airlines and airports nationwide.

Scientists prep mind reading device

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Screaming to be heard: Boston University claims its mind-reading device can get inside the heads of paralyzed patients.

by Mark Baard

New Scientist magazine, cited by the Beeb in this report (link and excerpt, below), often exaggerates the nature of scientific findings and discoveries.

That’s why I am just a bit dubious of the claim that electrodes implanted in the brain of a speechless man are unlocking his thoughts, and relaying them to a voice synthesizer.

But if the scientists at Boston University can indeed guess the guy’s thoughts accurately 80 percent of the time, that would be impressive.

Once they take this technology wireless, calling our thoughts our own might prove impossible.

news.bbc.co.uk
Scientists say they may be on the brink of translating the thoughts of a man who can no longer speak into words after a pioneering experiment.

Electrodes have been implanted in the brain of Eric Ramsay, who has been “locked in” – conscious but paralysed – since a car crash eight years ago.

These have been recording pulses in the areas of the brain involved in speech.

Now, New Scientist magazine reports, they are to use the signals he generates to create speech software.

Although the data is still being analysed, researchers at Boston University believe they can correctly identify the sound Mr Ramsay’s brain is imagining some 80% of the time
In the next few weeks, a computer will start the task of translating his thoughts into sounds.
“It’s very exciting that we are starting to be able to translate some basic thoughts, but we are lot further away from a universal mind reading machine than some people hoped – or feared – we may be five years ago.”

New York Times: Let computers think for us

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David Brooks (left) argues in his latest New York Times column that people should let cell phones, media players and personal computers do our thinking for us.

Such devices, Brooks says, tongue-in-cheek, can lighten our cognitive loads, by cultivating our media tastes for us.

Internet services such as Google can also fill the gaps in the memories of both the young and old, which have already been compromised by technology.

In the “The Outsourced Brain,” Brooks, tongue-in-cheek, describes a “romantic attachment” to his car’s Global Positioning System navigation device, which eliminates the need for him to remember directions.

Brooks is making a satirical cultural observation–that individuals are routinely tapping artificially intelligent agents and databases (such as the notoriously corrupt, and inaccurate, Wikipedia) to compensate for their memory lapses, even their lack of creativity.

So-called internet “music discovery services,” for example, suggest new songs for your library, based upon the contents of your computer hard drive. (I have written about some of these services in my Boston Globe column.)

Outsourcing our brains to the digital “external mind” could damage our original grey matter, which transhumanists clinically refer to as our “wetware,” some neuroscientists believe.

Brooks presents his piece as satire. But his advertising industry contacts clearly expect to benefit from the wetware-to-hardware migration.

Those contacts include brand managers for several mobile phone companies. Their aim: to turn consumers “brand fanatics”–people who are addicted to particular products and services. Continue reading →

Muni Wi-Fi sinking under mishandling and corruption

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Very proud: Former Philadelphia CIO Dianah Neff (pictured here in 2004) now works for the Wi-Fi consultancy she hired on behalf of the city.

As city officials from San Francisco and Philadelphia head to the consultancy they hired with taxpayer dollars, Earthlink is pulling its plans to provide free and cheap wireless internet access to some cities, saying they are asking too much.

This article (link, below) does an excellent job describing the cities’ poor planning. But it does not mention the company that may be responsible for much of this mess: Civitium.

Civitium is the consultancy now employing San Francisco’s former deputy CIO Denise Brady, and Philadelphia’s former CIO Dianah Neff. The cities paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for Civitium’s advise, before each of these officials left their posts to join the company.

clipped from abcnews.go.com
Municipal Wi-Fi Faces Financial Hurdles
Huff informed San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom that EarthLink was rescinding a proposal to cover the estimated $14 million to $17 million cost of building the city’s Wi-Fi network.
Had the San Francisco system been built, EarthLink planned to charge about $20 per month for Wi-Fi access that would have been three to four times faster than a free service subsidized by ads sold by Google Inc.