Coming to a world near you:

“Jefferson Y. Han likes big computer monitors. If a screen is large enough, four or five people can work at it together, rearranging blueprints, say, or editing photos. But they can’t do that if they’re taking turns at a keyboard and mouse. The answer, which Han demonstrates on a 3 x 8-ft. monitor in his lab at New York University, is multitouch input. It allows any number of users to lay hands on the screen as if they were manipulating real objects. On the monitor, recently dubbed the Media Wall, Han uses his hands to spin a virtual globe and then zoom into the canyons of Manhattan. “A mouse is an indirect pointing device,” Han says. “You’re working with an object that’s not on the screen. Multitouch computing is direct manipulation.” The mouse is dead?

Ab Fab: Picture a 3D inkjet printer that deposits droplets of plastic, layer by layer, gradually building up an object of any shape. Fabbers have been around for two decades, but they’ve always been the pricey playthings of high-tech labs—and could only use a single material. “To really let this robotic evolutionary process reach its full potential,” says Lipson, a Cornell University computer and engineering faculty member, “we need a machine that can fabricate anything, not just complex geometry, but also wires and motors and sensors and actuators.” Lipson and his grad student collaborators, Dan Periard (right) and Evan Malone, decided to put the problem to the people. They developed a low-cost, open-source fabbing system—Fab at Home—and encouraged experimentation by starting an online wiki for hobbyists. People report printing with everything from food (Easy Cheese, chocolate), to epoxy, to metal-powder-impregnated silicone to make conductive wires.

But can you twist them? “Most myoelectric prosthetic arms move in three ways—they bend at the elbow and rotate at the wrist, and a rudimentary hand clamps shut. The team’s initial Proto 1 device boosted that figure to seven. The Proto 2 allows for 27 different kinds of movement, including individual finger bending. While other myoelectric arms operate in response to muscle movements, the Proto 2 is wired directly to residual nerve fibers: One controls the device merely by thinking. Most remarkably, users can feel with the new arm—80 sensors in the fingertips and palm send signals racing back to the brain.”

See all of them here.

Check up on last year’s Breakthrough winners: Private spaceships, cheap hydrogen, using viruses to build nanomachines, lighting the world with LEDs, teaching a robotic dog to walk, growing replacement organs in the lab, and more.

This is the future we’re trying to prepare for. Yes, it’s here. Yes, it has implications for information awareness. More importantly, it has implications for prognosticators such as us (we?), in that these are innovations that will be on the market in improved versions in 5 years, not some distant future.

Is the integrity of a system using viruses to build nanomachines an information assurance issue, information security, or plain ol’ vanilla biology? We’d better decide on an answer….

GENEVA - A new “unbreakable” encryption method will be keep votes safe for citizens in the Swiss canton (state) of Geneva in the country’s upcoming national elections, officials said Thursday. The city-state will use quantum technology to encrypt election results as they are sent to the capital on Oct. 21, said Nicolas Gisin of the University of Geneva.

“If anyone tries to even read the message it will explode like a soap bubble,” said Gisin, the physics professor who led the team that developed the technology.

To paraphrase the immortal line from Poltergeist, ‘It’s heeeeeere.’

Happy Sunday morning to you all! Grab your tea and hit the links! (No, I’m not talking about golf…)

* ALDE wants patients to have access to medical care outside their home country (if in EU). Admirable. How will countries co-operate in providing patient records if this happens?

* Via Kable: Citizens are being excluded from e-government services because they don’t have the right software, an MP has warned. Liberal Democrat MP Dr John Pugh believes that the government is unwittingly creating a Microsoft monopoly in its delivery of online services because, in many cases, the public can only access them by using the US company’s Windows software. Speaking to GC News on 10 October 2007, Dr Pugh said: “Why can a Mac user not be able to apply for benefits online?”
“If a company built a road down which only a Ford car could go, there would be an outcry.”

* Also via Kable: “Patients and clinicians will be involved in an assessment of how access control technology can help the health service in Wales. Informing Healthcare, the multi-million pound programme to modernise health services across Wales, is to trial gateway technology to support its online patient services. ‘The aim is find out whether it can be used to ensure that the patient is ‘authenticated’ in both a secure and usable way so that they can access personal health services online,’ a spokesperson for Informing Healthcare told GC News on 11 October 2007.” Hope they report the results promptly.

* Kable again: “Passengers entering the UK are having their fingerprints checked against government records in a new trial at London’s Gatwick airport. The BioDev trial at Gatwick’s north terminal is part of a complete overhaul of the UK’s border security systems. Compulsory fingerprinting is now part of the UK visa application process in more than 100 countries worldwide.”

More later, I hope. Now back to your regularly scheduled orange juice.

“The General Register Office, which oversees the registration of births and deaths, is to become part of the Identity and Passport Service in a move that is likely to see sharply increased data sharing between the two bodies.”

This is, or should be, the story of the week.

“The government plans to give IPS staff online access to births and deaths information which could be cross checked with ID card or passport applications. Data sharing between the two bodies was given a legal basis in July by an order made under section 38 of the Identity Cards Act.”

In the story linked to above, Phil Booth of No2ID makes the badly needed points, and I doubt if he’ll mind if he’s quoted at length:

“But Phil Booth, national coordinator of the No2ID campaign monitoring the government’s ID card and data sharing plans, described the merger as “chilling.”

It was “deeply worrying” that the GRO, a “formerly independent agency should be subsumed in this way, with no debate and for no apparent reason other than bureaucratic convenience,’ he said.

Birth and death dates might form part of an individual’s official identity, but register offices also recorded other information such as details about parents, Booth pointed out.

“The ID program is insinuating itself deeper and deeper into people’s lives. This is not so much ‘feature creep’ as a blatant land-grab of personal identity.

“That an agency which until a little over a year ago was limited to issuing passports is now grabbing control of citizen data from cradle to grave, and openly talks about ‘registration of life events,’ confirms what NO2ID has said all along. It’s not about ID cards, but the creation of a detailed, lifelong government dossier on every person,” Booth said.

He added “And that this sits in the dysfunctional and acquisitive culture of the Home Office should certainly make people think twice.”

I should have been in Boston this week for a conference on wearable computing. The story details half a dozen applications well on their way to market, and a quick look at the conference agenda shows they talked about all the right subjects.

“BOSTON - From clothes riddled with sensors to name tags that detect our moods, computing’s next wave could unleash small devices that increasingly augment everyday activities with digital intelligence.” However, the key quote is at the end of the article: “The idea,” he said, “is to wear your remote, not to carry it.”

Wearable computing is important as it advances the concept of pervasive computing. Pervasive computing has real potential impacts on information assurance as it may multiply the number of nodes connected to a network, contribute greatly to network traffic, involve the constant transmission of data which may be sensitive (especially when combined with other data streams), and produce an unhealthy desire to increase monitoring of personal behaviour already far too evident in UK government. More about wearable computing can be found here.

It has wider implications for UK government, as it will enable services (many yet to be created, some that are currently delivered in other ways) that governments could rationally be expected to supply citizens.

Progress in wearable computing seemed stalled for a few years. It’s back.

I have a story in The Register today about new rules proposed by the TSA. The basis is that the operation of the no-fly and watch lists is supposed to transfer to the TSA from the airlines, so the TSA’s idea is that airlines would have to submit passengers’ names and identifying information 72 hours before the flight takes off, and each passenger will only be issued a boarding pass if the TSA comes back with an OK. There was a public hearing in DC on September 20, and I listened to the audio on the Web. Comments are still being accepted until October 22, and there are instructions on Ed Hasbrouck’s site about how to find the proposal and comment on it. The privacy objections to the proposals have to do with essential rights and freedoms, specifically the right to assemble, which is guaranteed under the First Amendment, plus concerns over the amount of data that’s going to be collected by the airlines, and retained by them as well as being forwarded to the TSA. (There’s a secondary issue wrt this data, which has been reported on by the Identity Project. The airline industry objections revolve around logistics: the cost to the industry, the feasibility of the schedule TSA has in mind. Qantas did ask why it was necessary, citing Australian practices that focus on preventing the wrong people from boarding the plane rather than receiving a boarding pass. The really key players - the computer reservations services who manage all the data for the airlines - did not testify in public.

While I was writing that piece for the Reg, it occurred to me that what the TSA wants to do is something the British ID card could also support: transform a default yes into a default no. Given the high-techery that will be present in the ID card, it’s easy to imagine the development of a permission-based society, especially since over time increasing amounts of checking versus the database can be done online (you don’t need to carry the card if everything is keyed to your name and fingerprint, or your number and fingerprint) - and this is what I wrote in net.wars.

While the TSA proposals are new to us, they weren’t any surprise to Ed Hasbrouck, who says that at last year’s ICAO meeting on machine-readable documents (which sounds like the event to catch if you want to find out what’s coming in travel security/practice) it was clear that this was the direction they wanted to go in. The conflict between this and the First Amendment and other laws seems not to have been considered.

wg

This is the first in a series of posts about other UK government groups that are looking at emerging technology and the future.
Yesterday, Chris Smith and I met with Dr. Harry Woodroof and Alun Rhydderch of the Horizon Scanning Centre.

Two programmes listed on the HSC website are immediately applicable to what we at Blindside are trying to do:

“Strategic Horizon Scans: two complementary scans looking ahead up to 50 years. The Sigma Scan covers future issues and trends across the full public policy agenda. The Delta Scan is an overview of future science and technology issues and trends

Wider Implications of Science and Technology (WIST): an expert and stakeholder appraisal combined with a public-facing engagement process, to explore the wider implications of new and emerging areas of science and technology.”

Another HSC feature that interests me, at least, is FAN, the Future Analysts Network, “a forum where those who have an interest in horizon scanning and futures analysis can meet to exchange new ideas, innovative thinking and good practice. Meetings, which are open to all, are held four times a year.”

The Strategic Horizons Scans are available at the websites maintained by the contractors who produced them: The Sigma Scan is available here and the Delta Scan is here.

If I understand correctly, the research output of WIST is fed through to government stakeholders and passed through to a website, Science Horizons.

I’ll have more to say about all of this later, after I’ve had a chance to read some of the material available. I urge you to do the same–many eyes, light work and all that. Comments, as always, most welcome.

“Google Inc. and IBM Corp. have teamed up to offer a curriculum and support for software development on large-scale distributed computing systems, with six universities signing up so far.

IBM and Google have created several resources for the program, including the following:

– A cluster of processors running an open-source version of Google’s published computing infrastructure, including MapReduce and GFS from Apache’s Hadoop project, a software platform that lets one easily write and run applications that process vast amounts of data.

– A Creative Commons-licensed curriculum on parallel computing developed by Google and the University of Washington.

– Open-source software designed by IBM to help students develop programs for clusters running Hadoop. The software works with Eclipse, an open-source development platform.”

Of course, more Internet-wide applications has… implications for network performance, but still…

…Go here and look at this video microcam recorder. Records 33 hours. Fits inside a pack of gum. One hundred pounds.

Via Kable, I learn that “A group of MPs has recommended that a senior official be appointed to lead a coordinated approach to tackle identity fraud. The All Party Identity Fraud Group published a report on 6 October 2007 calling on the government to appoint an identity fraud tsar. It says this would ensure a joined up approach to tackling the problem by creating a single point of contact across government, the police and private sector. In the last two years there have been three ministers with responsibility for identity fraud, and the group believes this has undermined efforts to create a coordinated approach to the threat. The report sees the secure sharing of data between the government and the private sector as a key way to tackle identity fraud, and suggests that a central shared database could be set up to allow financial institutions to verify identities and quickly establish cases of deceased fraud.”

Okay–government involved: check. Single government point of contact–er, check? (Kind of a big government…). Private industry involved: Check.

Er, excuse me? If you don’t involve the citizen you will not resolve the issue.