Heading Into A Digital Dark Age

One of the million or so pieces of cuneiform writing awaiting someone to decipher it.

Google V.P. Vint Cerf - often tagged as one of the Internet's founders - warned of a coming lost century since digitized information fades fast as technology and software change.

"Ancient civilizations suffered no such problems, because histories written in cuneiform on baked clay tablets, or rolled papyrus scrolls, needed only eyes to read them. To study today’s culture, future scholars would be faced with PDFs, Word documents, and hundreds of other file types that can only be interpreted with dedicated software and sometimes hardware too.

"The problem is already here. In the 1980s, it was routine to save documents on floppy disks, upload Jet Set Willy from cassette to the ZX spectrum, slaughter aliens with a Quickfire II joystick, and have Atari games cartridges in the attic. Even if the disks and cassettes are in good condition, the equipment needed to run them is mostly found only in museums.

"The rise of gaming has its own place in the story of digital culture, but Cerf warns that important political and historical documents will also be lost to bit rot. In 2005, American historian Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote Team of Rivals: the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, describing how Lincoln hired those who ran against him for presidency. She went to libraries around the US, found the physical letters of the people involved, and reconstructed their conversations. “In today’s world those letters would be emails and the chances of finding them will be vanishingly small 100 years from now,” said Cerf."

Full article is here.

Meanwhile, some folks are thinking and working on the structure of a 10,000 year memory structure. Meet the Long Now Foundation.

History no longer belongs to those who write of it - it belongs to those who know how to archive and access it across thousands of years.

Smartphones Can't Be Searched Without Warrants, Except When They Are

I suppose I'm a Debbie Downer today, but the Supreme Court ruling yesterday giving privacy protections to smartphones and requiring warrants to search them ... seems just a little hollow and a whole lot of ironic.

Despite the ruling's support for privacy protections, there's a telling phrase in Justice Roberts majority opinion:

" These cases do not implicate the question of whether the collection or inspection of aggregated digital information amounts to a search under other circumstances."

Well. With reports that computer and mobile devices can be delivered with components which provide agencies access to every action, warrants may be moot. Then there's the commercial agencies which have provided spying tools worldwide:

"The new components target Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry users and are part of Hacking Team’s larger suite of tools used for targeting desktop computers and laptops. But the iOS and Android modules provide cops and spooks with a robust menu of features to give them complete dominion over targeted phones.

They allow, for example, for covert collection of emails, text messages, call history and address books, and they can be used to log keystrokes and obtain search history data. They can take screenshots, record audio from the phones to monitor calls or ambient conversations, hijack the phone’s camera to snap pictures or piggyback on the phone’s GPS system to monitor the user’s location. The Android version can also enable the phone’s Wi-Fi function to siphon data from the phone wirelessly instead of using the cell network to transmit it. The latter would incur data charges and raise the phone owner’s suspicion."

The court seemed to indicate the larger issue of warrantless data collection will have to be taken up by Congress and policymakers rather than decided by lawsuits.

Still, the court's ruling is welcome - but enormous questions about privacy and security, for the individual and the nation, remain unanswered.

China Lands On Moon, Deploys Rover

This morning China became the third nation (after the U.S. and USSR) to safely land a craft on the moon's surface, touching down in the Bay of Rainbows.

Space.com has pics of the landing and details of the mission of the robotic rover to be deployed.

China's ambitious plans for robotic and human exploration of the lunar surface comes as the nation is also expanding their claims on air and land on Earth. 

Full coverage of the historic event here.

Xbox Workers Threaten Mass Suicide

Conflicting accounts are beginning to get media attention about a group of possibly hundreds of workers at a plant in China who threatened to commit mass suicide over a pay dispute. Workers for Foxconn - which makes parts for the Xbox, iPhone, iPad, Kindle, Wii, and the PS3 - apparently took to the roof of one of the company dormitories and made the threat.

A report via Kotaku says the event followed an employee request for a raise, but were told they could either keep their jobs with no increase or quit and get severance pay. Other reports say the company told the employees their Xbox production line was being shut down and some would be transferred and the rest simply fired. As for the number of those who made the suicide threat, reports range from a few dozen to as many as 300. (More pictures here.)

Foxconn is the world's largest maker of electronic components, and is also the largest private employer in China. In 2010, one worker did commit suicide at one plant, which prompted the company to install 'suicide prevention netting' at some of their plants. Recent investigations at the some of the plants showed near-military like conditions for workers who are under constant surveillance as they work and live at the factory dorms.

Microsoft did issue a statement about the incident -

"Microsoft is one of many companies that contracts with Foxconn to manufacture hardware. Upon learning of the labor protest in Wuhan, we immediately conducted an independent investigation of this issue.

After talking with workers and management, it is our understanding that the worker protest was related to staffing assignments and transfer policies, not working conditions. Due to regular production adjustments, Foxconn offered the workers the option of being transferred to alternative production lines or resigning and receiving all salary and bonuses due, according to length of service. After the protest, the majority of workers chose to return to work. A smaller portion of those employees elected to resign.

Microsoft takes working conditions in the factories that manufacture its products very seriously. We have a stringent Vendor Code of Conduct that spells out our expectations, and we monitor working conditions closely on an ongoing basis and address issues as they emerge. Microsoft is committed to the fair treatment and safety of workers employed by our vendors and to ensuring conformance with Microsoft policy."

The radio show "This American Life" aired an episode on Jan. 6, 2012 about working in the electronics factories in China and for Foxconn.

The company's full list of customers is available here.

Pentagon Spy Drones For Home Users

Flying spy drones are making the move from military/police applications to home use. At the ongoing Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, exhibitors are teasing the sale of these items for just about anyone to use.

"Like the HD video cameras now included in the livestreamers’ cellphones, aerial surveillance drones have progressed from ultra-expensive professional gear to impulse-buy items. What was once in the Pentagon budget is now at Toys “R” Us – in a simple form, at least.
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"Introduced in 2010, the one-pound styrofoam craft has four rotors and a plethora of sensors to keep it stable and navigable. In some ways, it resembles an iPhone, with accelerometers and a gyroscope to measure movement and location, for example. Parrot says that it can fly 50 feet high, up to 11 miles per hour and stay aloft for about 12 minutes on a charge.

"Built-in Wi-Fi allows control from an iPhone or Android phone. The Wi-Fi also beams back moderate-resolution (640-by-480-pixel) video to the phone.

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Rapid advances in this new spy tech are already underway:

"This updated version, due out in the second quarter of 2012 for a list price of $299, offers a better HD camera at 1280x720 resolution, as well as the ability to recognize and interact with shapes and colors for an augmented reality (AR) “gaming mode,” which layers digital drone obstacles and enemies atop the camera’s actual view of the real world.

"The new 2.0 AR.Drone also offers pilots a “traveling” mode, allowing them to set the drone to automatically move and record in specific directions for maximum stability and image quality. As in the case with the Wi-Spi drones, the recorded video can be uploaded directly to the Web."

Every Twitter Ever Made Is Now In The Library of Congress

The Library of Congress has announced that they have acquired every Twitter archive, every single Twitter post anyone has made or will make - an announcement they made via Twitter, naturally.

The NYTimes reports:

"Academic researchers seem pleased as well. For hundreds of years, they say, the historical record has tended to be somewhat elitist because of its selectivity. In books, magazines and newspapers, they say, it is the prominent and the infamous who are written about most frequently."

Take that, you darn elitist books which apparently only some East coast genius can comprehend.

The Library has been actively gathering an immense amount of digital information in recent years, according to their own blog:

"... if you think the Library of Congress is “just books,” think of this: The Library has been collecting materials from the web since it began harvesting congressional and presidential campaign websites in 2000. Today we hold more than 167 terabytes of web-based information, including legal blogs, websites of candidates for national office, and websites of Members of Congress.

We also operate the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program www.digitalpreservation.gov, which is pursuing a national strategy to collect, preserve and make available significant digital content, especially information that is created in digital form only, for current and future generations."

If the idea seems irrational, just consider the most minuscule scraps we already spend countless days and years collecting - time-frozen footprints, shards of pottery, crude marks on cave walls, ancient accounting logs, and practically any bit of human history. Now we're adding a moment-by-moment historical record of just plain folk, along with more notable twitterings such as those which emerged online during the upheaval in Iran during their last so-called "election".

If you're a Tweeter or Twitterer or whatever you chose to identify yourself, and you think "hey, my privacy is being violated", then you're forgetting the basic nature of writing and posting online. You already abdicated your desire for privacy.

Here in the modern age your Tweet of "OMG! I just ate some bacon ice!" will now reside along the writings of Thomas Jefferson or Mark Twain. Forget Andy Warhol's claim that in the future, everyone would be famous for 15 minutes - your fame could last centuries (assuming someone bothers to keep the technological machinery needed to peruse your random commentaries).

All this brings to mind a few lines from the movie "The Incredibles", when the mother tells her son "Everyone is special", and her son replies "Which is another way of saying no one is."

Not much is excluded, really, or ever has been when it comes to historical analysis. Perhaps it's all just taking place faster and faster.

And speaking of that, here's a way for you to view every single painting on display at the Museum of Modern Art ... in two minutes. And it's set to music, and naturally, it's on YouTube.

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