All golden ages (if that is indeed what we are living through) have their dark sides. In the internet’s case, that dark side meant spam, phishing scams, child pornography, and more. But those are not driving the big change in internet.
The big change is this: the internet as a place where one could say, read and download anything, even if none of it is shockingly bad, will not be with us forever. Those freedoms are unlikely to remain unrestricted. Controls and curbs on what users can do, and the content users have access to, will only increase.
The tech-savvy among us will always find ways to get around such curbs. But it will get progressively more difficult, or even illegal, to do so. There are two forces driving this change. First, there are the shifts in the way we use the internet now, as compared to how we did a decade ago.
Second, regulators who wanted to close the arbitrage gap between online and offline worlds, ripping off content, or posting objectionable content is easier online, are getting more determined. So is Big Content (the entertainment industry, media), which has bled from the explosion in illegal downloading. Their attempt to gain control over online content may finally be succeeding, at least to an extent.
As more and more devices we buy are general-purpose hardware devices with custom software designed to make that hardware do certain things out of the box, that custom software that drives the device is also custom-izable software that lets the hardware be recoded and repurposed to do completely different things.
Shortly, we’ll see basically every industry trying to crack down on the freedom to tinker, to keep the products they sold us in the same state as they were before we owned them. This is exactly where we’re headed if the current trends continue.
The problem is that many people don’t understand what a general-purpose computer is. Legislators still think in terms of hardware: A cassette player can only play a cassette. Therefore, a music player today must only play music.
That’s wrong of course. A music player today can be recoded to play, stream, receive, remix, or do other things with music. Or, for that matter, it could probably be recoded to become a networked earthquake early-warning sensor instead, if its microphone was sensitive enough to sense the low-frequency sounds that forebode earthquakes.
This idea — that an off-the-shelf entertainment device can be repurposed to become an earthquake early-warning sensor with just the copying of a file — is mind-boggling to today’s legislators. It is just so far out it doesn’t reflect sunlight any more. And it is with this mindset that they legislate that breaking any DRM — repurposing devices that you own — should be punishable with jail time.
The internet has become one of life’s vital necessities
Online shopping will become more popular than offline shopping
Algorithms and business analytics will tell the shop owner exactly what his customers want
Electronic patient records will be called ‘medical dossiers’ and will be introduced whether governments want it or not
Your digital identity will be kept in The Cloud
The citizen will determine who will be able to access and use that identity
Only the government and law enforcement will be able to access your DNA passport
That DNA passport will be crucial in determining ‘good citizenship’
The formerly ‘parallel’ internet will now become an ‘integral’ part of our lives
Businesses will merge for them to be able to merge the databases they own
Nobody knows what will happen to their digital legacy after they’ve passed away
A GreenPeace activist will get to see a different internet than the manager of Shell whenever they search for ‘durable energy’ (without them realizing it). The response to information requests will become personalized and will ‘fit their profile’. The internet as such will become personalized
The introduction of a free and a paid internet is inevitable. People may pay to receive information that does NOT fit their profile. Or to see different products than service providers believe the consumers may like
Some will move away from the digital world
As technology has gone beyond ‘what’s good for us’, there will be a reintroduction of concepts such as ‘moral‘, ‘ethics‘ and ‘discrete‘
We will reassess (the use of) algorithms, datamining and business analytics
There will be a new hybrid digital future. It will also lead to ‘The End Of Privacy‘
The other day, my twin 15-year-old daughters came home from school hunched over, each engrossed in a Rubik’s Cube. Solving the Rubik’s Cube, they said, was a way to learn algorithms. They then explained that algorithms were “sequences of moves that have a desired effect” and were a very, very important concept in learning higher forms of math. http://www.thesunnews.com/2011/12/31/2572619/peter-mckay-kids-surging-ahead.html
High Frequency Trading
Jürgen Schmidhuber is director of the Swiss Artificial Intelligence Lab and professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Lugano, Switzerland. He is an expert on machine learning, financial data prediction, and mathematically optimal universal Artificial Intelligence (AI) among other topics. ”Currently we see a strong tendency to minimize the length of time and connection between the computers at the exchanges and those that do the trading. This of course creates an incentive to build ever closer and ever faster computers. This incentive is both hilarious and stupid because it helps the traders but it doesn’t help the market at large.” Instead, Schmidhuber advocates an auction scheme that doesn’t incentivize high frequency trading. “Right now [high frequency trading] is just a loophole that allows a few smart guys to make a profit at the expense of others and the broader market.”
High frequency trading (HFT), accounts for around 53% of all transactions in the U.S. stock market, up from just 26% in 2006, and it has reaped $12.9bn in profits over the last two years. It is a controversial topic for many traders and governments.
On Friday, the CME Group fined a trader $50,000 for using a high frequency trading strategy that malfunctioned and sent thousands of erroneous orders to the New York Mercantile Exchange and caused a $1 change in price to the price of oil. Currently, several governments are involved with assigning a concrete definition to the practice to determine what it is, how it should be monitored and what rules should govern its use.
Google has a problem in being both poacher and gamekeeper. It has to police its search results to make sure that evil, but otherwise hardworking publishers, don’t find a way to “spam” the search results that are placed in front of the innocent user, i.e. Google plays the good guy. However, at the same time most of the advertising on the web is sourced from Google and of course this isn’t spam – no really it isn’t, it’s helpful extra results in your search that you asked for, well you might have asked for given the option to opt in or out. This strange situation puts Google in a position where one part of it has to”fight spam” at the same time as Google’s business development team has to push to “make spam.”
The combination of these two actions, plus the changes to the fundamental search algorithm, have virtually made the value of a simple link equivalent to zero – or so says SEO Book. http://www.i-programmer.info/news/81-web-general/3526-how-google-made-linking-irrelevant.html
Google rolled out the new, unannounced News algorithm last week which drops “duplicate” content from the original articles. Google’s new algorithm favors large websites only, and here’s one tiny proof. http://popherald.com/news/googles-new-tricky-algorithm/14016/
We’ve always known content is king, even before all the 2011 algorithm enhancements, Google has always regarded highly websites with substantial amounts of content. With all these recent changes, Google is trying to put more emphasis on good content; not just a lot of content– but a lot of well written, unique content. 2012 will see a decent percentage of Google’s updates refining the Panda update, putting more and more significance on brands, with bigger brands getting more favourable results. http://www.living-streams.co.uk/news_article_name/search_engine_optimisation-403922-internet_business_ideas.aspx
A force for innovation and progress in the mobile advertising industry, LeadBolt today announced the latest advance in its exclusive suite of mobile advertising solutions. Designed to boost eCPMs and increase revenues for mobile app developers and advertisers, the frequency optimization component works with LeadBolt’s proprietary ad serving algorithm to deliver more relevant ads at ideal occurrences to consumers who install mobile applications. This increases revenues to LeadBolt clients and improves the overall experience for the end user of the application. http://www.benzinga.com/pressreleases/11/12/p2186514/leadbolts-new-advertising-algorithm-delivers-200-increase-in-ecpms-for-
For me, the only reason I’ve been selling on eBay for years was their traffic. I always chalked up their huge fees, hostile seller policies, and the out of control buyer behavior (and the continual escalation of all of these things) as the costs of accessing that traffic to make a living. I am so grateful for your site’s coverage of their new Cassini Project algorithm implementation 3 months ago. If it wasn’t for that information I would never have been able to figure out what happened and what to do about it. http://letters.auctionbytes.com/cgi-bin/blog/blog.pl?/comments/2011/12/1323747185.html
Spotify
Spotify Radio, the Pandora-like Internet radio service, launches today, but to make it work, the Stockholm online music service reached out to Somerville’s The Echo Nest. “They had 15 million songs, but no way to do music discovery. And music discovery is what we do at The Echo Nest,” said Brian Whitman, chief technology officer of the Davis Square-based MIT Media Lab spinout, which maintains an algorithm that can listen to and read about music online. http://www.bostonherald.com/jobfind/news/technology/view.bg?articleid=1388985
Crime
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have begun developing an algorithm that predicts which cars were most likely to run red lights. The algorithm detects the car’s deceleration rate and its distance from a light. Using this data, it determines which cars are most likely to obey traffic laws and which cars are most likely to disregard them. http://www.independentcollegian.com/algorithm-detects-fast-and-furious-1.2681565#.TwBtwrzKefE
Tagged CEO Greg Tseng said “we are a site about meeting new people. We use the same expertise [as Topicmarks], but look at user profiles and comments to extract meaning and match people together.” Tagged plans to incorporate the machine learning technology into its algorithm. “Facebook’s algorithm is about surfacing the best content from your friends. Facebook is a content-matching algorithm,” Tseng said. “Google is for web pages, Netflix is for movies, ours is for people. We call it internally a Pandora for people.” http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/12/08/businessinsiderboonsri-dickinson-ta.DTL
Photoshop gives you much power of editing photos. You might have enjoyed it heartily but it is only limited to 2D art. Harvard University researchers have successfully dealt with 3D aspect. The technology developed at Harvard can easily aid you in transplanting face itself in a video. The algorithm developed will help the low budget films to get special effects as that of any super hero film made in Hollywood. http://www.crazyengineers.com/digital-face-transplant-to-change-hollywoods-low-budget-films-1410/
NSA officials also define two suites of security algorithms: Suite A and Suite B. Suite A encryption, used for highly sensitive, national-security information, refers to “a specific set of classified cryptographic algorithms used for the protection of some categories of restricted mission-critical information,” according to the National Information Assurance Glossary. Suite B, applied to a majority of data and devices, is “a specific set of cryptographic algorithms suitable for protecting classified and unclassified national-security systems and information throughout the U.S. government and to support interoperability with allies and coalition partners.” http://www.militaryaerospace.com/articles/print/volume-22/issue-12/technology-focus/in-defense-of-data.html
The US Navy recently tested the autonomous system capabilities of an unmanned undersea glider as the military prepares to deploy squadrons of air, surface and undersea robotic vehicles later this decade. ”Using new algorithms, the vehicle has a greater ability to make its own decisions without requiring a human in the loop,” explained Marc Steinberg of the Office of Naval Research (ONR). http://www.tgdaily.com/security-features/60077-navy-wants-autonomous-undersea-bots
Gaming
As a bit of background, we’ve been seeing glitches and bugs (or even deliberate changes) in the in-game algorithm that determines how many citizens a players needs to add to their city before being allowed to expand for some time now. After the Halloween Monster event, which saw two separate populations becoming one, it was quickly apparent that something wasn’t quite right as player after player saw their population requirements go from 1,000 – 5,000 all of the way up to 10,000 or more in a single day. With a game as large as CityVille, it would be impossible for Zynga to please everyone, but it does seem like these outrageous numbers (in my own previous experience, I would have needed over 41,000 citizens for a single expansion) have been lowered, but what of those users on the forums that report increased figures? http://blog.games.com/2011/12/27/cityville-land-expansion-requirements-lower/
User Interfaces
International Business Machines Corp. announced its sixth annual “IBM 5 of 5″ technology report including the predictions our smartphones will be able to read our minds and we’ll no longer need passwords. With Apple’s Siri making waves this year, Big Blue’s predictions don’t seem as much science fiction. http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/will-computers-read-our-minds-in-five-years.html/
Neurotechnology, a provider of high-precision biometric identification technologies, today announced the availability of VeriLook Surveillance 2.0, a software development kit (SDK) for biometric face identification using live video streams from single or multiple high-resolution digital surveillance cameras. VeriLook Surveillance 2.0 provides real-time identification of faces and can be used in a wide range of surveillance systems for retail and commercial areas, entrance monitoring and counting, automated time-attendance systems, law enforcement applications and transportation security. The new, integrated face tracking algorithm in VeriLook Surveillance 2.0 includes a robust, dynamic face model which can adapt to visual appearance changes as subjects move across the scene. It continues tracking of subjects even when their faces briefly disappear from the frame or when they are partially blocked by other objects or even other faces (a common problem while tracking multiple faces). Because it can now simultaneously process video streams from multiple surveillance cameras, VeriLook Surveillance 2.0 is suitable for use in large surveillance systems. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/verilook-surveillance-20-sdk-advances-face-recognition-for-large-multi-camera-video-surveillance-systems-2011-12-21
Although the new method of matrix multiplication, an essential tool for solving problems in physics, economics and most areas of science, is not practical for use on today’s computers, it is a surprising theoretical leap that could one day have myriad applications. And it’s creating quite a splash on the mathematical blogosphere.
Although today’s computers can’t take advantage of this specific speed advance, Vassilevska-Williams has also created a mathematical framework that could allow for further theoretical improvements that might be practically useful for computing. “You can think of this as a new tool to be added to the toolbox,” she says
As the European Commission considers new rules to achieve its digital agenda targets, the European Competitive Telecommunications Authority (ECTA)’s annual conference will explore how different regulatory approaches and business models have shaped European and global telecoms markets. Between 28 and 30 November 2011, ECTA will convene a meeting in Brussels that might shape the EU regulatory framework of the online world for the years to come.
Notable speakers and moderators include Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission and Commissioner for the Digital Agenda; Ian Livingston, CEO of British Telecom Group; Gunnar Hökmark, MEP and Vice-Chair of the European People’s Party group; Chris Fonteijn, BEREC 2011 Chair and Chairman of Netherlands Competition Authority (NMa), Ed Richards, Chief Executive at Ofcom, Didier Casas of Bouygues Telecom, Marie-Françoise Marais, President of Hadopi and many more high level guests representing government agencies, IT companies and public interest groups.
In the years since the Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) was first first revealed by Homeland Security, the department has honed its ability to “collect, process, or retain information” on members of the public, in this case a subgroup of DHS employees. During this test, FAST program manager Robert Middleton, Jr., said “sensors will non-intrusively collect video images, audio recordings, and psychophysiological measurements from the employees.”
BBC interviewer is visibly shaken when market trader Alessio Rastani predicts that the “Market is Toast.” Apparently there is nothing Euro governments can do.
The BBC featured a version of this clip on their website. It includes a few seconds missing from the beginning, but ends before the newsreader describes the situation as a “Nightmare!” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsDjTbP7TS0
Of course, as Facebook, Twitter, and some others have shown, sometimes it’s Google that gets disrupted, but by and large Google spends more time in the vanguard.
