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Thursday, February 13, 2003 |
Sony's new handheld WiFi server. From Gadgetwatch:
 "You'll be tempted to tuck the FSV-PGX1 into your coat pocket as you leave the office, since it looks a lot like a PDA or Pocket PC, but, if you do, you may well stuff up your boss' plans for an evening of high level meetings with the lawyers. That's because the FSV-PGX1 is, in fact, a wireless handheld file server from Sony -- not an electronic diary at all. Stick it in the middle of a meeting table, have everyone sit around it with their laptops, and the FSV-PGX1 will act as a file distributor -- kinda like a blackjack dealer -- tossing out the files to anyone who needs to take a peek. There's a 20GB internal hard disk for storage and it uses the IEEE 802.11b (Wi-Fi) standard for file transfer at speeds of up to 11Mbps. Shunning your regular Windows OS flavors, the PGX1 runs on the Linux 2.4.20 operating system but can, of course, route any file system from any computer OS. There's a back-up battery, effectively providing UPS capability if the power goes down via the AC adapter and a neat little cradle with built-in Ethernet for sale separately."
Link Discuss (Thanks, Mark!)
[Boing Boing Blog]
6:33:18 PM 
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GPS as Stalking Weapon. Connie Adams found it impossible to escape her ex-boyfriend.
He would follow her as she drove to work or ran errands. He would inexplicably pull up next to her at stoplights and once tried to run her off the highway, authorities said.
When he showed up at a bar she was visiting for the first time, on a date, Adams began to suspect Paul Seidler wasn't operating on instinct alone.
He wasn't _ Seidler had installed a satellite tracking device in Adams' car, according to police in Kenosha, Wis., 30 miles south of Milwaukee.
"He told me no matter where I went or what I did, he would know where I was," Adams testified at a recent court hearing.
Police say Adams' case and several others across the country herald an incipient danger _ high-tech stalking.
Just as the global satellite positioning system can help save lives, so can its abuse endanger them, advocates of stalking victims say.
"As technology advances, it's going to be almost impossible for victims to flee and get to safety," said Cindy Southworth, director of technology at the National Network to End Domestic Violence in Washington. [Smart Mobs]
5:19:09 PM
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Ming comes through ;-).
Flemming Funch: My Email wish list. Brilliant. [Ming the Mechanic] via [Seb's Open Research] Here's the original post:
- I need to keep track of my correspondence with different people. It should be easy to immediately see all prior incoming and outgoing messages in chronological order between me and a certain other person.
- I shouldn't have to create special mailboxes and filters to do that.
- Some people have several e-mail addresses, and I might have several e-mail addresses. I still want to be able to see my conversations with one person in one place, no matter what address we used, and no matter how we spelled our name that day.
- When I get a message, my e-mail program should know whether this is somebody I know or not. Certainly it should know right away whether it is somebody I've ever exchanged e-mails with, and it should tell me somehow.
- It should preferably also know if it is a known member of some group I'm in. There are 7000 people in the NCN directory. I'd like my e-mail program to recognize one of those people if they write to me, even if we didn't exchange e-mail before.
- I'd like my e-mail program to have a reasonable assurance that an e-mail really is from the person it says it is. The SMTP protocol allows anybody to enter whatever they like as sender, so I need some kind of ID mechanism built in here.
- I need SPAM recognition that I can train, like Apple's Mail program. I don't want centralized anti-SPAM blacklists, because they work badly and block things that shouldn't be blocked.
- Any message that isn't from somebody I probably know, and that doesn't have proper digital ID, should go into a totally different place than messages that are from real people.
- I need to be able to put a given message into any number of folders at the same time, without creating several copies. I need more dimensions. I want to always remember that a certain message was sent or received, so in principle it shouldn't actually leave my outbox or inbox, but at the same time I might want to file it under several different subjects, and give it various flags, and find it according to any of those keys.
- I want statistics. How many messages do I get per day, how many did I answer, how many did I send, etc.
None of those things are overly hard. Hardest part is probably the digital ID. The rest I could probably program myself, if I had a few weeks with nothing else to do, which isn't very likely. I need similar things for my Instant Messager programs. Actually I want continuity in my conversations across several different applications and platforms. Has anybody solved these things well in a program I don't know about?
[ Technology | 2003-02-12 18:01 |  ]
I am, at this moment working on exactly these blocks of functionality. I turned to my aggregator to find this article as my prototype was ripping my mail.app, eudora mailboxes, and my Address Book vcards into my sparkly new database.
Keep the faith Ming. It's coming ;-) It's coming soon.
And thank you for posting this. [The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty]
5:08:55 PM
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Wacky eBay auction du jour: $16.8K "Carrot with a vagina". I guess it's sort of like seeing Jesus in a tortilla, or the Virgen de Guadalupe in a tree. Only, it's imaginary food porn. Anyway, there's an eBay auction under way for a "Totally bizarre carrot with a vagina !!!!!!". Current high bid: $16,800 and rising. Perhaps there's something about the egregious use!!!! of exclamation!!! points!!!! that just puts bidders in the mood to feign willingness to part with very large sums of cash for stupid, ordinary objects. The seller says:
 "This carrot is totally bizarre dug it up last week could not believe my eyes a carrot with a vagina. It is approximately six inches long. I believe to be life size. [T]otally freak out Your friends and neighbors with this carrot. OK this auction has obviously gone completely out of control. Obviously many of the bids are apparently a joke.... Any legitimate bid that goes over $100,000 I will personally deliver the carrot see my other auctions!!!!!"
Link!!!!!!! Discuss!!!!!!! (Thanks, Litza!!!!!!!!)
[Boing Boing Blog]
5:14:58 AM
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DIY duck-and-cover-and-tremble. ABC's Home Improvement show is featuring a DIY segment on "terrorism-proofing" your home. Nothing like a bunch of free-floating axiety and some feel-good/do-nothing measures to whip up the nation into an uncritical, writhing blob of fear-crazed yahoos. I hear that major metropolitan areas are selling out of duct tape.
After Hazelton and the Kozakianwiczs looked through every room in their home, they decided the laundry room would provide the best safe haven for the family.
"FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] says the ideal room would be an interior room with no windows," Hazelton said.
Hazelton suggests filling a bag with your essentials and leaving it inside your designated emergency room, whether it's your laundry room or your bedroom. It should include the items recommended by the federal government.
In case of an emergency, Hazelton suggests sealing the door of your holding room with plastic sheeting which has been sized and pre-cut in preparation for a disaster. Then, cover the door and use duct tape to secure it on the wall surrounding your door. Don't use clear tape, electrical tape or anything else because it won't hold. Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]
5:08:03 AM
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Crazy manga-inspired Flash site. Tokyo Plastic is an impressively well-designed and graphically/acousticaly interesting Japanese Flash site. The transitions are amazing, but they ultimately can't disguise the fact that the site is mostly transition -- all frame, no picture. Link Discuss (Thanks, Dave!) [Boing Boing Blog]
5:07:14 AM
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"Match" -- Wireless, Location-Based Dating Service. Match Mobile, a new service to be launched on Wednesday by Match.com and AT&T Wireless, provides dating and matching for AT&T Wireless customers via their mobile phones.
"Wireless will be a hugely important technology for the future for our industry, which is to connect people for the purpose of dating," said Tim Sullivan, president of Match.com, a unit of USA Interactive and the biggest online dating site in the United States.
Sullivan said one of the benefits of going mobile for Match is that the new service will have the ability to pair members based on location.
Initially, matches will be made based on ZIP codes, but in coming months the service will be enhanced with technology so people can locate matches within an approximate geographical location by using their wireless phones.
The search engine will never reveal actual physical locations, but simply allow customers to chat only with matches within a specified radius. [Smart Mobs]
5:06:14 AM
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Why social networks are more robust than computer networks. Clive sez: "An academic recently studied the topology of human, social networks, and compared it to the Net. His conclusion? Though we love to talk about the similarities between social behavior and our computer networks, they're quite different. In real life, highly social people gravitate towards other highly social people. But on the Net, highly-connected computers are connected to zillions of dead ends. Online, computers don't really care who they're hooked up with -- but humans? We want to hang with the cool crowd, heh.
This epiphany has some really interesting implications for security:
"In social networks, where popular people are friends with other popular people, diseases spread easily, said Newman. At the same time, however, this type of network has a small central set of people that the disease can actually reach. 'They support epidemics easily, but... the epidemic is limited in who it can reach,' he said.
The opposite is true for the Internet, the Web and biological networks, said Newman. This makes these types of networks more vulnerable to attack than social networks are." Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]
5:06:00 AM
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Ecosystem of Networks.
My post on Distribution of Choice was a little long winded, so let me sum up:
- Not all links are created equal
- Conversational relationships are not scale-free
- Applying these principles reveals a Network Ecosystem Model that helps us understand the political economy of weblogs
| Network |
Size |
Description |
Distribution |
| Political Network |
~1000s |
Blogs as mass media |
Power-law (scale-free) |
| Social Network |
~150 |
Blogging Classic |
Bell-curve (random) |
| Creative Network |
~12 |
Blogs as dinner conversation |
Dense (equal) |
A link to a site you read isnt the same as a link to someone you know through their blog or someone you actively collaborate with.
After reviewing data of work relationships, information flows and knowledge exchanges from hundreds of consulting assignments inside Fortune 2000 organizations Valdis Krebs did not see much evidence of power laws in this data. His data is of confirmed ties [both persons agreed/recognized their mutual interactions/flows/relationships] from a worldwide pool of clients dating back to 1988. Of course he found some people were better connected than others, but the extreme hubs found in power law networks just were not evident.
Adapting a famous line from the movie "Blazing Saddles" Valdis concluded: "Power Law? There ain't no stinkin' power law in this data!"
This conclusion fits well with Duncan Watts observation that the more you ratchet up the requirements for a link, recognized connections diminish, and the less you see power laws.
Which makes all the noise about Power-laws off target. I had the pleasure of having a dinner conversation with Clay last night. Yes, he should start a weblog, but he has his own reasons for not doing so yet, which I'll let him explain for himself. But studying the structure of the weblog ecosystem does not have to be an anthropological exercise. Its a wonderful testament to the energy of blogspace that Dave Sifry created a new index to reveal the neglected tail of the Power-law distribution of a Political Network. But we don't have to screw the Power-law or use statistical techniques to reveal a different distribution. This approach has tremendous value in allowing new cream to arise to the top. Both innovations are still attempting to filter the wrong set of data and to generalize all of blogspace. What matters isnt breaking these laws, but the perspective that weblogs, aside from the Political Network publishing dynamics, are communication tools for group forming in Social Networks and Creative Networks. Meg asks the right question: what if these tools can expand our capacities? What if 12 and 150 become averages instead of limits?
Other people are thinking in similar terms from an anthropological perspective as participants. The Social and Creative Networks are where the new and valuable interpersonal connections are being made.
In the coming days I will build upon the Network Ecosystem Model to explain the Distribution of Influence and Distribution of Social Capital. My head hurts, but this is getting interesting. [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]
5:04:39 AM
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Retro Item of the Week.
"For 80s buffs looking to recall the heyday of the brain, the beauty, the jock, and the rebel, Universal Studios has introduced a line of shirts inspired by Brat Pack flicks The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles - 'two classics that teens still love today,' notes Universal marketing's Tim Rothwell. Emblazoned with such images as Anthony Michael Hall pleading with Molly Ringwald, 'Can I borrow your underpants for ten minutes?' the tops (at Hot Topic stores and hottopic.com, $19) have attracted nostalgia-loving celebs such as Juliette Lewis and Brooke Burke. Next up: Back to the Future shirts. Go, McFly!" [Entertainment Weekly, 2/14/03 issue, p.18]
Hot Topic also has shirts for Farmer Ted, Alf, and The Goonies, plus Simpsons thongs, Thundercats Floor Mats, and other fun items. [The Shifted Librarian]
5:00:35 AM
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Another Way to Get RSS Feeds on Your PDA!.
FOAF
"The newsreader NewsMonster has the ability to use Friend of a Friend data. It also provides for export to PDA's and reads all versions of RSS. Interesting, I'll have to download it and play with it a bit when I have some time.
As for FOAF, I think the idea has some potential uses. However, as I understand it, FOAF metadata should be stored as a separate file. I'd like the ability to place it in the HEAD section of a document, as well as pointing to another file." [Catalogablog]
This is what I'm talking about! I really believe that RSS news aggregators are a much better way to keep up with your favorite sites on the go, especially on small devices. The overhead is much less, even in a 3G or WiFi environment. I'm snowed under at work for the next week, but I really want to try NewsMonster on my Clie! [The Shifted Librarian]
4:58:58 AM
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Mesh Less Cost of Wireless. A group of wireless enthusiasts provide a town in western England with Internet access at a fraction of the usual cost. They use a device that supplies hundreds of users with broadband piped from a single connection. By Elisa Batista. [Wired News]
4:54:08 AM
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Surveillance & Society Homepage.
Surveillance & Society is a part of a new international initiative to bring surveillance studies to wider attention, within academia and beyond. It is online for maximum accessibility, and because we hope to encourage submissions that could not be published in conventional paper journals such as photographic and video work. All submissions will be fully peer-reviewed to the most rigorous quality standards. [Privacy Digest]
4:49:41 AM
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Old Europe - or old America. Nice article by Graham E. Fuller.
"Think about it. France and Germany have put five centuries of wars behind them, including two devastating world wars, to form a new union with shared currency and desires to forge a broad common foreign policy. Such a step is revolutionary among ancient nation-state rivals with different cultures.But it doesn't stop there. The European Union is a remarkable experiment - the first time in history when states have been willing to give up real hunks of their own national sovereignty in order to join a new civilizational project. Turks, Bulgarians and Latvians are begging to pay the considerable admission fee to be let in.The reigning premises of the Union are that states must be truly democratic, they must protect human rights and civil liberties, and that war among its members should be an unthinkable option. These states see themselves as a gradually expanding community, acquiring ever new members and geographical spread - but only after they meet strict criteria. They aspire to form a new force in the world - and are well on the way. This is the first time we have witnessed the emergence of an "empire" built on consensus and common desire rather than power and conquest - hardly the stuff of the "Old Europe."It is America that represents the "Old World." This is not a pejorative aspersion. The United States now sees itself as the benign hegemon - or policeman - of the world, undercutting any and all efforts by potential rivals, friendly or not, to cast a shadow over overwhelming U.S. power." Good points. Europe is moving towards more consensus, collaboration, democracy, human rights and civil liberties. The United States is currently moving towards domination through force and intimidation, and the opposite of democracy, etc. [Ming the Mechanic]
4:48:25 AM
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“It's the economy, stupid!”.
Although completely suppressed in the U.S. media, the answer to the Iraq enigma is simple yet shocking—it is an oil currency war. The real reason for this upcoming war is this administration's goal of preventing further Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) momentum towards the euro as an oil transaction currency standard. However, in order to pre-empt OPEC, they need to gain geo-strategic control of Iraq along with its 2nd largest proven oil reserves. This lengthy essay will discuss the macroeconomics of the “petro-dollar” and the unpublicized but real threat to U.S. economic hegemony from the euro as an alternative oil transaction currency.
Via Robot Wisdom, The Real Reasons for the Upcoming War With Iraq: A Macroeconomic and Geostrategic Analysis of the Unspoken Truth
Interesting take on the reasons we're so gung-ho to go into Iraq. It seems that the Caspian Sea oil fields aren't quite as big or as pure as first thought so the oil pipe through Afghanistan isn't economically viable at this time. And the Iraqi switching from dollars to the euro in November of 2000 is certainly interesting (I suppose to piss off the newly (non?) elected President). So our little excursion into Iraq may not only be for the oil, but to save our economy as we know it.
Nice … [The Boston Diaries]
4:39:14 AM
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© Copyright 2003 Mark Oeltjenbruns.
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What we first documented 
