CIA’s plans for the IoT →

Earlier this month, Petraeus mused about the emergence of an “Internet of Things” — that is, wired devices — at a summit for In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm. “‘Transformational’ is an overused word, but I do believe it properly applies to these technologies,” Petraeus enthused, “particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft.”

All those new online devices are a treasure trove of data if you’re a “person of interest” to the spy community. Once upon a time, spies had to place a bug in your chandelier to hear your conversation. With the rise of the “smart home,” you’d be sending tagged, geolocated data that a spy agency can intercept in real time when you use the lighting app on your phone to adjust your living room’s ambiance.

At least he’s forthcoming about it.

Yiannopoulos on Start-Ups →

But the greatest technology entrepreneurs are those who smile as they’re stabbing you; those who cheerfully pump out cutesy iPhone apps designed to help you “connect to your friends” while uploading your address books silently in the background. In Europe we’re too paralysed by manners and constricted by conscience. Too encumbered by genteel European ideals about privacy. Growing up on a socialist continent has crippled us; blinded us to the virtues of unbridled capitalism. We are hampered by virtue. As a consequence, I don’t see fire in the eyes of European founders like I do in Silicon Valley. And their ideas, for whatever reason, simply aren’t as ambitious.

A little exercise: Exchange Entrepreneur/Start-Up for Bankers/Banks and see whether you’d still agree.

I think it’s a dangerous to follow the path which is laid out by the biggest assholes in the industry. Be hungry? Yes, please. But you don’t have to fuck everyone over while satisfying your hunger.

JuiceControl →

A really nice concept for an Energy Consumption dashboard.

With smart meters, a bunch of intelligent devices and a sleak interface design, energy controlling could be so much easier. JuiceControl is an iPad and iPhone app who could just do those things for and with us.

Obviously, this is a design study. It’s nice to see interface designers concerned with such issues, though. Especially since, as I’ve argued before, usability remains one of the main obstacles to a wider deployment of smart energy savings applications.

Particle Accelerator enables cheaper solar panels →

I kid you not. A company called Twin Creeks came out with a new offering of Solar Panels today:

Twin Creeks, a solar power startup that emerged from hiding today, has developed a way of creating photovoltaic cells that are half the price of today’s cheapest cells, and thus within reach of challenging the fossil fuel hegemony. The best bit: Twin Creeks’ photovoltaic cells are created using a hydrogen ion particle accelerator.

[…]it is promising a cost of around 40 cents per watt, about half the cost of panels currently coming out of China.

I’m not too sure about the tech right now, especially since all reporting only works with the press release of Twin Creeks, but here’s hoping that this actually works.

Raspberry Pi: the unmet demand →

Jonathan Beckmann on the Raspberry Pi and the danger of drastically underestimating demand.

If you do manage to get one, I fear it will be just that. One or two. Only then, after a few weeks of back-ordered uncertainty. There’s magic in a $25 linux computer, but the magic only works if you can repeat it. It doesn’t matter how cool the $25 thing you can make with your RasPi is if you can only make one. I can make one with my $99 SheevaPlug, it costs more but I don’t have to wait weeks to get one. My novelty only cost $74 more. If you can keep making them and everyone else can too, it goes from novelty to revolution. Communities can be supported and the awesome things that can be done will grow daily.

The RasPi platform shares a great deal in common with Arduino. Its openness and community focus are very exciting. There is however one aspect that is different. The design is still essentially closed. If the Raspberry Pi foundation can’t meet the demand, no one will in the short term. The temptation will be enormous for them make a few at a time, congratulate themselves on their success as they sell out over and over, and leave most of the demand unmet. They are a non-profit but it is also possible that when they realize how much unmet demand there is they will be tempted to raise the price. That would be sad indeed. By the time the price doubles, the magic will be gone. It would be easy to use flagging demand at that point to declare the product a flop and stop producing altogether.

I’m hugely optimistic about this project, and believe it could change how a lot of things are done. A full-blown, £35 Linux box changes a lot about how things are done. Many projects suddenly become feasible, and we could see how the world changes in conditions of increasingly cheap computation and connectivity. Alas, I, like a lot of others, couldn’t get my hands on one when they sold out in a matter of minutes on Wednesday.

If you create, you can’t see the creation, but only the process of creating →

Andrew Chen, telling of a tour of the Pixar Offices:

There, I asked Matt a casual question that had an answer I remember well, a year later:

Me: “What’s your favorite Pixar movie?”

Matt: SIGH

Me: “Haha! Why the sigh?”

Matt: “This is such a tough question, because they are all good. And yet at the same time, it can be hard to watch one that you’ve worked on, because you spend so many hours on it. You know all the little choices you made, and all the shortcuts that were taken. And you remember the riskier things you could have tried but ended up not, because you couldn’t risk the schedule. And so when you are watching the movie, you can see all the flaws, and it isn’t until you see the faces of your friends and family that you start to forget them.”

That’s why you have to expose your creations to the world. If you don’t, you’ll always be too critical of them, and never be able to step back and look at the creation itself, and not the process that has created it.

And ultimately, if you don’t force yourself to step back that bit, you’ll end up stifling your creativity.

Spies and Drones →

Talking of Drones, the old-school spy-stories are evolving around this topic, as well. Apparently, the plans for a French-British drone collaboration have been stolen at Gare du Nord station in Paris:

The unnamed man briefly left his case unattended after his female colleague was “hassled” by a stranger, said a Paris Judicial Police source. Documents in the case were marked “Defence – Confidential” and contained details of a “joint Franco-British drone”, a legal source close to the case told Le Parisien newspaper.

FP: some facts about drones →

Foreign Policy magazine, in there recent “War” issue, have an amusing list of drone-related info fast food.

Could you guess, for instance, the name and scope of Iran’s main drone in development?

Iran has also touted its program, including the armed “Ambassador of Death” drone, which President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad unveiled by declaring: “Its main message is peace and friendship.”

Another interesting fact is the sheer scope of human involvement that is necessary to operate those vehicles.

Some 168 people are required to keep a Predator drone aloft — and 180 for its larger cousin, the Reaper — compared with roughly 100 people for an F-16 fighter jet.

Reddit’s Free Internet Act →

The Reddit community has posted a proposed piece of legislation they call The Free Internet Act on Google Docs.

Just last week I was wondering where Github for legislation was. This week, the Reddit community published a collaboratively drafted¹ “Free Internet Act’.

I haven’t read the document in whole yet, so I don’t have a clear opinion on it yet. It’s a nice stunt, however, and might change the conversation we have about net regulation.

Book about digital literacy – victim of Amazon’s pricing bots →

Carlos Bueno wrote a children’s book about digital literacy. From the description it reads like the kids book version of Douglas Rushkoff’s “Program or be Programmed.”

What happens next is beyond mere irony — Amazon’s prizing bots take over:

The plot of my book is about how un­derstand­ing com­put­ers is the first step to tak­ing con­trol of your life in the 21st cen­tu­ry. Now I don’t know what to be­lieve.

It’s pos­sible that the opt­im­al price of Laur­en Ipsum is, in fact, ten dol­lars and seventy-six cents and I should just relax and trust the tat­tooed hipst­er who wrote Amazon’s pric­ing al­gorithm. After all, I have no choice.

A very amusing account of happenstance that sounds all but too much like straight out of a Kevin Slavin talk.