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Atom jokes are fine, but the parent is the first interesting or informative comment on the whole thread.
The "making of" linked at the end of the movie is well made and stimulating. I particularly liked this comment from the director of the project:
"If I can do this and I can get a thousand kids join science, rather than go to law school, I would be super happy".
...then we are basically a cosmic cancer.
Quite right. Furthermore, and this is where I find difficult to follow Hawking's spiel, if we entertain the dream that we will eventually find another place to live, this will be used to keep the lid, the already quite heavy lid, on efforts to properly address environmental issues on planet earth.
So in a PC-less household, what happens when Junior brings home programming homework from school? Programming is something that smartphones and tablets have historically been bad at, especially with the application approval model used by Apple iDevices.
Raspberry Pi
The issue is not that they can tell which phone number you use, obviously. As I see it there are three problems with this kind of tracking technology:
Secondly, mass surveillance is not just about you as an individual. By looking at where you go when and how long you stay there and correlating this with who else goes there at the same time one can make deductions about social networks within society without ever looking at one person up close.
I am with you on abuse from repressive regimes. But when you say "with this technology", I fail to understand. All the uses and abuses you mention are already not only possible, but routinely done by repressive regimes, and some. "This technology" adds nothing to the equation, except perhaps marginal cases where they would want to track you "across devices".
In this regard, I can only find that the profound implications mentioned in the article are not so much profound as they are obscure.
Here's what it does mean.
With access to this data (even if its through an abstraction API), I could match back a profile created based on one device (using a device ID) with a new device owned by the same person.
So lets say I'm a retailer and I want to track your visits to my stores based on your device ID... with this abstracted "fingerprint" API I could conceivably request a match back for your new device against the database and get your old device ID in response, voila - anonymous transition of the profile to your new device. I can now continue tracking you with no lost history.
Mmmmh! You begin with the proviso: "With access to this data"...
Well if you have access to this data, you will not be a retailer...
Profound implications for privacy... The analogies are perplexing. Should I also worry about the fact that I have ten fingers with ten fingerprints at the end of them (not mentioning toes) means that it is impossible for me to have privacy? Recent research on 1.5 Million users shows that phone numbers uniquely identify subjects 100% of the time. That does not sound like this has profound implications for privacy, does it? Now admittedly, they talk about randomly chosen "spatio-temporal points", meaning, if you think of it, that you have a good chance at any time, of being either at home or at your place of work. But since your phone number already identifies you, the profound implications for privacy referred to in the article somehow escape me...
The company conducted a test in Tsukuba (Ibaraki Prefecture) within a roughly 18 km wide sidewalk. It can get to a speed of 6 km/h.
However, not only the video does not show it in operation in situ, but does not even show it running at all. The presentation instead consists of stills showing someone sitting in it and entering or exiting.
The story is interesting in that it shows a companies rushing to demonstrate the technology and how it can be used.
If the police officers and border guards were forced to wear them, they perhaps would have an incentive to treat you decently and not to violate your rights.
If worn by participants in a demonstration, also interesting, especially if streamed live.
The argument of equalizing the relation between the powerful and the powerless in surveillance does have merit. Especially when the NSA is currently building a 65 Megawatts datacenter, where they will have the possibility to trace everyone whereabouts.
From another commnent: yes a red LED will blink when recording.
The article stated makes it look like this is the initiative of Zuckerberg, and manages to misreport the scale of this prize.
See the foundations website: http://www.breakthroughprizeinlifesciences.org/
Not 11 prizes totalling 33 millions as reported, but 5 prizes of 3 M each.
Also the sponsors are listed, in that order,
Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan
Yuri Milner
I have mod points, but not finding anyone questioning this source... Have you RTFA? This is The Telegraph! There is no source cited AT ALL. You don't know who said what in which context. Nothing.
Microsoft has hired the CEO of Burton-Marsteller with the official function of spreading FUD on Google.
But frankly, this sounds more like this comes from The Onion... Nobody here questions sources anymore?
From the article:
Mr Baylis has been lobbying for the patent system to become more robust and to turn the theft of intellectual property into a white-collar crime that carries a prison sentence... Currently patent infringement is considered to be a civil matter in the UK rather than a criminal matter...
Mr Baylis is representing himself as the small guy (incorrectly claiming the invention of the crank radio), making the exact case that the big guys are currently lobbying the government for.
If Mr Baylis had been what he pretends he was, with the laws he is advocating for, he would have risked ending up in prison on top of losing his house.
'We exist to help donors promote liberty which we understand to be limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise,' says Whitney Ball, chief executive of the Donors Trust.
And don't forget the disinformation. We can't have all that freedom with an informed public.
Oh for that, when we achieve the goal of a "limited government", we can spend a bit again to institute a ministry of truth.
"UNIVERSITY students may have to scan their fingerprints in future — to prove they are not bunking off lectures.
... ... Newcastle Free Education Network has organised protests against the plans, claiming the scanners would "'turn universities into border checkpoints" and "reduce university to the attendance of lectures alone".
Let him choose out of my files, his projects to accomplish. -- Shakespeare, "Coriolanus"