Field Notes

Said differently, Silicon Valley’s habit of acting outside or above capitalism as an essential part of their business model is the essence of anti-capitalism-capitalism. So: is this really a feature of a certain type of capitalism? Does Silicon Valley really operate by this logic very often?

— Silicon Valley’s Anti-Capitalism-Capitalism » Cyborgology

The song “Space Oddity” is under copyright protection in most countries, and the rights to it belong to Mr Bowie. But compulsory-licensing rights in many nations mean that any composition that has been released to the public (free or commercially) as an audio recording may be recorded again and sold by others for a statutorily defined fee, although it must be substantively the same music and lyrics as the original. But with the ISS circling the globe, which jurisdiction was Commander Hadfield in when he recorded the song and video?

— The Economist explains: How does copyright work in space? | The Economist

What’s the goal of the Programmable World anyway? Is it that all of us in the developed world (because, of course, whole swaths of the human population will take no part in this vision) get to sleepwalk through our lives, freed from as many decisions and actions as possible? Better yet, is it the perpetual passive documentation of an automated life which is algorithmically predicted and preformed for me by some future fusion of Google Now and the Programmable World. I’m fairly confident nothing quite so dark is really on the horizon for us, but I do wonder about the ideology driving this rhetoric and these imagined futures. What makes any of this attractive? What desires do these potential technologies answer to? For some people at least, the idea seems to be that when we are freed from these mundane and tedious activities, we will be free to finally tap the real potential of our humanity. It’s as if there were some abstract plane of human existence that no one had yet achieved because we were fettered by our need to be directly engaged with the material world. I suppose that makes this a kind of gnostic fantasy. When we no longer have to tend to the world, we can focus on … what exactly?

— The Programmable Island of Google Being | The Frailest Thing

justinpickard:

stoweboyd:

John Hendrix for the NYT.

A punch to the gut.

Isn’t it funny how all these attempts to make a better world turn out to be ways of making a more expedient workforce?

— A Utopia of One’s Own — Weird Future — Medium

When the last person leaves the SmartThings office, it locks itself up, shuts down the lights and thermostat, and activates an alarm system complete with siren, flashing lights, and auto-notifications, all coordinated through the Smart­Things system. With so much intelligence built into the structure, why would you ever pay ADT—or one of the other myriad firms that makes up that $20 billion market—just to duplicate that effort? For those rare situations when someone needs to come out to the premises, Hawkinson imagines a low-cost security service that will wed his simple sensors and notifications with an on-call platoon of off-duty cops—“an Uber for home protection,” as he puts it.

— In the Programmable World, All Our Objects Will Act as One | Gadget Lab | Wired.com

Think about a liquor cabinet that auto-populated your shopping list based on the levels in the bottles—but also locked automatically if your stock portfolio dropped more than 3 percent

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In the Programmable World, All Our Objects Will Act as One | Gadget Lab | Wired.com

wat?

fascinated:

Yesterday, Yandex exposed their ad targeting stats to each individual web user. By going to http://crypta.yandex.ru/, you can see what profile Yandex’s systems think you have (it doesn’t work well if you don’t browse many Russian sites, as only those would likely have Yandex tracking/ad code). In this screenshot, the targeting concluded I am a woman who browses the web early in the morning. Yandex also offers a more detailed description of what’s going on here [RU].

Would be cool to see Google, Facebook or other ad firms do the same, but I imagine this won’t make anyone any new friends, given the constant discussion of privacy issues (it seems to be a less popular conversation in Russia).

Often, Google Glass owners looked strange. Many were using their cellphones while wearing the glasses — defeating a declared purpose of the new gadget, to free you from having to look at your phone. Another man continually looked at his watch to check the time, even through the glasses display a clock right above your eye.

— At Google Conference, Cameras Even in the Bathroom - NYTimes.com

Four principles for Connected Homes: Design for homes, not domestic computers. Try not to start new arguments. Attention is precious: let the mundane remain unremarkable. Don’t assume people already know how to use the system you are replacing.

— LukeW | UX Lisbon: Designing for Connected Homes

In times like this I remember Howard Aiken’s advice: Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If it is original you will have to ram it down their throats.

— Four short links: 16 May 2013 - O’Reilly Radar

What happens: Amazon apply their genius for service oriented architecture (SOA) to Kindle’s Whispernet functionality, take advantage of their economies of scale, and provide wireless chips that any developer can use. Just as they SOA’d their storage requirements into S3, and their server farms into EC2 - now both services that are the tarmac of the modern web - they couple this SOA’d hardware connectivity with Amazon Web Services, and create the perfect platform for connected products. Of course Amazon also own an identity system with associated credit cards/payments platform. Plus they really get APIs. Amazon would own connected products. You wouldn’t build on anything else.

— How any of the Big 3 could own connected products (15 May., 2013, at Interconnected)

Some have called it the Internet of Things or the Internet of Everything or the Industrial Internet—despite the fact that most of these devices aren’t actually on the Internet directly but instead communicate through simple wireless protocols.

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In the Programmable World, All Our Objects Will Act as One | Gadget Lab | Wired.com

The internet? a network of networks. once one node of a network connects to another network, all nodes can.

TransferWise and hawala are simple and smart ways of getting money across borders without the hassles of dealing with banks’ labyrinthine rules and fees. But there is one significant difference. Hawala has no written records and is based entirely on community ties and personal trust. TransferWise on the other hand logs details of its customers and adheres to regulations. Its biggest problem at the moment is scale—the system is hard to make work when certain countries, such as Haiti or the Philippines, receive far more than they send.

— Facebook’s first funder just backed TransferWise, a startup that’s like an ancient Islamic money transfer system - Quartz

Every pixel is a real pixel captured by an camera in the sky. But it’s also completely synthetic.” The goal for the map is to capture roughly what the naked eye can see from space, but for an idealized cloudless planet trapped in eternal summer.

— A Cloudless Atlas — How MapBox Aims to Make ‘the Most Beautiful Map’ of the World | Wired Design | Wired.com