This was covered in the London papers, but Popular Mechanics has better pictures and more links–I’m writing of course about Qinetic’s firefighting robots. “When you have money to burn, robots are the best kind of first responders: the disposable kind. Bomb-squad bots are already a common tool for local law enforcement agencies and the military, but remote-controlled firefighters are just now making it into the field. A team of robots built by London-based Qinetiq has recently started responding to a very specific threat: fires involving Acetylene gas.”

“The Roomba’s inventors over at iRobot have also explored this territory, claiming that its upcoming Warrior X700, which is due next year, could be used to fight fires.”

On the military side, “When robot-maker Foster-Miller strapped machine guns onto a trio of bomb-disposal bots and sent them to Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007, the company created the first armed robots to be deployed in a war zone. Still, no robot has ever actually fired a shot in combat. “Weaponized robots represent a new technology that is only in the developmental stages,” says Duane Gotvald, a deputy at the Pentagon’s Robotic Systems Joint Project Office.” Er, I have heard that shots have been fired in anger by robots… maybe not theirs…

From the information assurance point of view, the key quote is this: “One thing that won’t change is who decides to pull the trigger. MAARS doesn’t have a mind of its own: A soldier commands the bot through a video-and-map-enabled remote control.”

This generation of robots could be categorized as ‘longer nozzles’ for firefighting equipment or ‘longer barrels’ for the military. They should pose little or no IA issues. It’s when we start programming them that we need to concern ourselves with information security and assurance–but wouldn’t it be better if we were planning for that now?

The Economist’s Quarterly Technology Review is out today, and there are lots of Blindsidey nuggets to chew over.

They note progress being made in using virtual worlds for training and simulations, have a nice article on how DNA samples can be pickled (well use a briney process) for longer storage, and have two articles that I personally hope will be related in the near future: one about how corrective eye surgery is progressing and another about how head-mounted displays (HMDs) are creating a world of augmented reality.

Location-based services gets an article about Bluetooth enabling mobile dating, and another that makes me wonder if anybody is considering the information assurance issues about clustering volunteer computers to look for alien life and cures for cancer.

Surveillance in the stores gets an article–makes me hope this stays in the stores. But it won’t…

Larry Lessig of the EFF gets a nice write-up. Corrupt politicians (at least in the U.S.) should really start evaluating career alternatives.

But the piece I was waiting for, about Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is a real dud–unless you want the history. The present is much more interesting. Maybe they just ran out of space.

Now I have to wait three more months…

The Promise: “We will start with air cards and an in-building modem, then embedded devices will begin to appear in laptops and ultramobile PCs. But then imagine camcorders that display footage on monitors without wires or send files to social networking sites such as YouTube and MySpace; car navigation systems that get Internet access and rear-seat entertainment; Internet video; public safety surveillance. Think Internet tablets, gaming devices, DVD players. You get the idea.” Certainly Sony and Nintendo must be salivating at the possibility of extending online play to future DS and PSP gaming systems.”

The Potential: “That means a potential end to the minute model, and perhaps an end to the cellphone as we know it, since VoIP could be built into anything with a Web browser, speaker and microphone. Earlier this year, Apple gave us the phone that also was a music player, camera and on down the line. But WiMAX may give us the camera or other connected device that is also a phone. Heady stuff.”

Background: Broadband is still patchy in the U.S., and Sprint is trying to use a variant of WiMax (called Xohm) to remedy this. It’s already gotten one CEO fired for being focussed on WiMax instead of traditional subscribers, but they have 10,000 base stations ready to launch. If it works, it will impact a lot of mobile services, enable location-based services and increase the potential of mobile, pervasive and wearable devices.

The story is from the senior tech editor of Popular Mechanics. You can read it here.

This could be smoke–but if it fails, it will be because something better comes along that does the same thing.

Americans like to think of American football as a proxy for war, with strategy, tactics, heroics and planned, scheduled feats of athletic derring do. The British have a slightly different opinion of American football… but let’s not go there.

Technology and information flows have played a large part in American football, from signalling to recording action to radio communication. And a lot of time and money has been spent on protective gear for the footballers.

Welcome to the world of HITs (Helmet Impact Telemetry).

Check out this video and tell me if resource tracking and monitoring in unconventional spaces (like battlefields, fire scenes and hostage situations) has not just received a real asset boost from the Yank football scene. A helmet that monitors impacts and relays information wirelessly to a central source for analysis. Yeah, that sounds useful.

Hard to believe we didn’t blog this on October 9th, when ‘Two European scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics for what might be called the grandfathering of the iPod—a process that helps hard drives physically shrink, while still increasing storage capacity. In 1988, Frenchman Albert Fert and German Peter Grunberg each arrived at the same conclusion that changes to the magnetic field of a hard disk can be interpreted as the ones and zeros that form the basis for all electronic data.’

I mention it now because ‘Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (GST) announced that it expects to be shipping 4TB desktop and 1TB laptop drives by 2011. Meeting that news was a chorus of yawns all around from the techno-bloggers (”Hitachi announced 4TB HDDs by 2011. So?” read the headline on Ubergizmo), who instantly went back to obsessing about iPhone hacks and Japanese robots.’

The significance is that Kryder’s Law (which is to memory storage what Moore’s Law is to transistor density) is now enabled to continue at its logarhythmic pace. This in turns allows the next wave of innovation in wearable computing and more conventional gizmos to continue on the assumption that ever smaller devices will have sufficient memory for purpose.

I personally cannot believe the lack of attention that accompanied the commercial availability of 1-terabyte storage last month. it essentially means the table is set for the future.

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.’

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.

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.

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