Google Investigated, Sued for Privacy Offenses
When it was revealed that software in Google‘s Street View photo cars gathered not just general information on Wi-Fi locations for Google Maps, but also private information such as photos and emails, all hell broke loose for the company.
In quick succession, the company was investigated by Germany, France, Spain, Australia, Canada, Italy, Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States and South Korea. Attorneys General from over two-thirds of the states in the U.S. even met to arrange concerted action against Google. Oh, and there were private suits too of course.
Google eventually agreed to start sharing information on their collection process and software. Although the U.K. found the company innocent of criminal wrong-doing, investigations led to the ability of Germans to opt out of inclusion in the mapping service.
And the global tug-of-war over privacy goes on.
Better. Stronger. Faster.
As much as technology is said to change and as operant as Moore’s law may be, the basic nuts and bolts of computing haven’t seemed radically different to the vast majority of users for who knows how long. If you put a iPad next to an ’84 Macintosh, sure, you can see a difference, but under the hood it’s basically the same.
Now, however, work is being done that is leading to, and in some cases has already led to, a whole different kettle of computational fish. First, there’s graphene and water. Some mad scientists created graphene using – my hand to G-d – some Scotch tape and a pencil. Now it’s the strongest, thinnest, most conducive material on earth. Its potential for exponentially speeding up computing centers on using (how am I not making this shit up?) water. Take a wafer of graphene and slap it onto one of silicon and silicon dioxide, then send water into the tiny space between the two; the water backs away from the silicon toward the graphene, de-conducting the water, and breaking the connection.
OK. Now, IBM has thrown the giant Frankenstein-switch on its Watson Research Center for a five-year quantum computing project. Using a superconducting material like rhenium or niobium and cooling it to absolute zero they create quickly burnt-out qubits for quantum computing. They use standard electronic manufacturing to create resonators that allow for the entanglement of qubits, creating much more computational force.
Finally, they are now making computers out of brains. A Columbia University group is using “cortically coupled computer vision” and an EEG cap to united those things the brain does better than a computer and those thing a computer does better than a human brain. It works.
In a generation, the inside of a computer may bear as much resemblance to those we use now as what’s under a car hood does to what’s beneath a horse’s ribcage.
The Ongoing Dialogue Between New Tech and Legacy Tech
The outcry when we published a story titled, “Oxford English Dictionary May Never Be Published Again” was profound from a group of techies probably reading the story on their brain implants. It was a microcosm of the back-and-forth between new ways of doing old things and the old ways of doing them. “As for the advantages of a paper version, they are undeniable but ultimately replicable,” said one reader, with another countering “Nothing beats a hardcopy backup.”
This dialogue even happens internally here. Richard MacManus, the founder and editor, wrote one post titled “5 Ways That eBooks Are Better Than Paper Books” and had to follow it up the next day with a post titled, “5 Ways That Paper Books Are Better Than eBooks.”
And when I canvassed all the “early adopters” I’m surrounded by here for a post called “The Truth About Legacy Technology” I discovered that almost every single one of them regularly used, and loved, both the very latest communications tech and absolute antiques – like pen and paper.
A lot of consciousness of web technologies was born to the gospel of “disruption.” That note is so strong it’s become our tonic. But it’s not the whole picture. There is always an impassioned conversation going on between the past and the future…in the present. And the present is where we live.
Social Media and Politics in the Developing World
Between the controversies surrounding Wikileaks and the perpetual cycle of arrests under repressive regimes, it’s easy to forgot what a tool the social web can be in the hands of people historically under-represented in the global discussion. Two examples this year of the latter are the Kenyan and Nigerian elections.
During this year’s Kenyan legislative elections mobile technologies and social media were used to bring a degree of transparency and peace in short supply during the previous elections. Journalists, polling observers and the men and women on the streets used a combination of online sites and mobile phones to follow the vote counts, and keep the participants honest. Kenyan voter Samuel Ochanji waxed rhapsodic when he spoke to ReadWriteWeb.
“It’s a revolution from our past shambles where votes were cast in the day and counted (read manipulated) in the night. The electoral system has been completely decentralized (which) minimizes chance for fraud and increases Kenyans’ trust in the electoral process!”
In Nigeria, acting president Goodluck Jonathan declared his candidacy for the nation’s highest office on Facebook, the first time such a thing had been done anywhere. Zuzeeko Abeng, a blogger from neighboring Cameroon thought the move was fantastic.
“Pundits would term the creation of a Facebook page a ‘tactic’ and an attempt to score political points, but without going into politics, permit me to reiterate that by creating a Facebook page, Goodluck Jonathan has demonstrated skills of good governance, leadership, transparency and accountability.”
YouTube Grows Up
It may seem like a rough thing to say, but it may be that a technology like photo-sharing can only be said to really grow when it comes face to face with the ugly realities of life. And no reality of life is uglier than death. And no death uglier than murder.
Last month, a drug gang from the Mexican state of Guerrero placed a video on YouTube showing members of a rival gang bound, confessing to the murders of a more than a dozen tourists from the neighboring state of Michoacan, whom they had mistaken for members of yet another gang. If a bunch of inbred criminal thugs know about you, yours is no longer a developing technology. It is a grown-up technology in a grown-up world that is too often every bit as ugly as it is beautiful. And it’s awfully beautiful.
The Culture of Technology
The culture of technology in 2010 has been an acting out of notion that “argument is the road to knowledge.’ Privacy has struggled with transparency, transparency with liberty, liberty with life and life with death.
If the thesis and antithesis in each encounter is fairly clear, the synthesis is not. The closest we may come as the year nears a close is the knowledge that tidy resolutions happen in fiction, not in real life. And technology is a part of real life. The American poet Walt Whitman spoke of the resolute untidiness of life with some hope.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself;
(I am large–I contain multitudes.)
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