Kindle Fire Ignites Security Concerns

With Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet shipping today, many consumers are talking about the tablet's hyped features and low price tag. While I'm sure that the Fire will bomb the market as a low cost iPad alternative, and e-reader on steroids, what's far more interesting to me are the many security and privacy concerns integral to the tablet's new Silk web browser.

In the words of Steve Vaughan-Nichols over at ZDNet "Silk looks to be very fast and about as private as a bathroom stall without a door."

Social Media Propaganda

Satire at its best-looking, enjoy this collection of social media propaganda from Aaron Wood.

Dystopian alternate history, or slick social commentary? You decide.

Now go do your duty, comrade! Like! Plus!

And remember, RE-TWEET IS NEVER AN OPTION.

via Design Milk

A Rant about Hands and iPads

I recently caved and sort-of joined Twitter. (I'm sorry, self-respect).

It was almost worth selling my soul, though, to find a tweet from landscape architect/good friend @bethanyrydmark. She shared an excellent essay with her followers by Bret Victor, titled "A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design." (Link to full piece below).

Victor puts into words a sentiment that I've felt for a long time, but lacked language to express. Contemporary visions of the future (he highlights a particular ad campaign) portray the future of interactive design as a world where humans manipulate images under glass.

The problem? "...This vision, from an interaction perspective, is not visionary. It's a timid increment from the status quo, and the status quo, from an interaction perspective, is actually rather terrible."

Low Tech Education in Silicon Valley

 

A recent piece in the New York Times highlights a Waldorf School in Los Altos, CA. Like other educational institutions and philosophies that share values with the Waldorf system, the vast majority of learning methods and resources are low tech, and low profile. Hands on learning is facilitated by a wide variety of methods. Ideas are captured on paper with old fashioned pens by students, on blackboards by teachers. There is a marked absence of computers.

So should it surprise us that top executives and other employees from eBay, HP, Google, Apple, and Yahoo send their kids here? In fact, 3/4 of parents work in the tech industry.  It feels like it should.

Mike Richtel from the Times comments:

"Schools nationwide have rushed to supply their classrooms with computers, and many policy makers say it is foolish to do otherwise. But the contrarian point of view can be found at the epicenter of the tech economy, where some parents and educators have a message: computers and schools don’t mix."

Top 3 Most Invasive "Patriot Act" Provisions

10 years after the passing of the Patriot Act, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has put together a "Greatest Hits" collection of the Act's most invasive and dangerous elements.

In case you've been living in a bunker since 2001, the Patriot Act is a collection of

"...decidedly unpatriotic principles barred by the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution. Provisions of the PATRIOT Act have been used to target innocent Americans and are widely used in investigations that have nothing to do with national security."

Take the time to read the full article at EFF.

Via BoingBoing

Coffee Break Commentary: Human powered transit... and water filter?

Today's Coffee Break Commentary is a human powered combination of transit and water filtration.

Wait... what???

The "Aquaduct" is a well thought out vehicle intended for third world use to decease the time and energy needed to carry and store water, and increase the drink-ability of that water.

Though I'm unconvinced that this is going to solve- or even perceptibly ease- the global water crisis, it's a great idea, that even has myriad first and second world applications. I will be interested to see how the units perform under real world stresses (especially rough roads under the weight of a lot of H2O).

I also hope that people keep getting great ideas like this to the ground - and into the drinking cups - of those who can most benefit from creative solutions to perennial problems.

Tossing Rocks in the Digital Cave

Up on the web was a lonely goatherd...

Google's partnership with the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum is making the Dead Sea Scrolls available to scholars and the public in a groundbreaking new way.

Realizing that the physical copies of these manuscripts from the Qumran community have a limited shelf life, the team is digitally archiving the collection. This is itself is important, and impressive. Their project is about much more than simple storage, though.

What makes this so exciting from the perspective of a biblical student and text critic is the fact that it the end result (according to the project's website)"gives users access to searchable, fast-loading, high-resolution images of the scrolls..."

In the era of Project Gutenberg, searchable pdf files, and advanced web crawling, this may not seem so impressive. Don't yawn though. This is a really, really big deal.

What this means is that texts that previously even the most respected scholars could never have dreamt of handling or studying for themselves are available - for free - to the general public. These texts are now fully searchable, and offer translation directly tied to the image being studied. This is a big deal.

Play around with the Great Isaiah Scroll for a sense of the project.

Part of my fascination with the scriptures has to do with the vulnerable, messy way that they have come to us. The story of the bible's development rambles and winds through millenia, through myriad ethnic and religious communities, across barriers of language, culture, race, and belief. We hold flaps of papyrus, bits of parchment and vellum as evidence of its antiquity, and use these to carefully compare to what we have today, to faithfully interpret the meaning of those texts.

This careful criticism holds profound implications for how we study, exegete, translate, and teach the scriptures. The Dead Sea Scrolls are a key part of that study.

Now that they are archived in the cultural and scholarly "commons" means that any student of the Bible's text and story can directly interact with these manuscripts for themselves, compare their conclusions with those of the wider community, and bring that story a bit closer to the narrative of their own lives.

It's my sincere hope that this project is a vision of "things to come" in ancient text criticism. Though the real beauty - and danger - lies in the interpretation of the manuscripts, having them within easy reach of anyone whose heart lies in the letters on that old paper is a really, really good idea.

And though they might not say it, the desert hermits of the Qumran community would probably be a bit jealous.


(Photo credit)

Click Click! Gotcha!

It's been said that the Internet is written in pen, not pencil.

If you're online, you've probably experienced the "oops-I-clicked-send/post/poke-before-I-was-ready-and-now-that-poorly-written-email-exists forever-in-cyberspace" syndrome. We've all watched Anthony Weiner recently roast his promising career with a few ill chosen snapshots...pics that now digitally exist FOREVER.
The permanency of digital communication is something we're all still adjusting to, and it can be uncomfortable.

Odds are though, that we have more to worry about than just a mis-sent missal, or even a breach of our bank accounts or "identity".
As our world becomes digitized, especially  through ubiquitous social media,  it's likely that every single one of us will wish within our lifetime that we had read that "Privacy" policy a little bit closer when we signed up to connect to... whatever.

It's worth taking 5 minutes to watch the BBC's story about facial recognition and the end of anonymity.
Though I've heard (mostly on Boing Boing and Motherboard) the big pieces of the story before, it's a succinct, street level summary of the reasons why YOU SHOULD BE SCARED SCREAMING OUT OF YOUR EVERLOVING WITS EVERY TIME ANYONE PUTS YOUR FACE ANYWHERE ON THE INTERNET.

With my simmering paranoia and hysteria out of the way, let me comment briefly on a couple things as you go watch the video:

1) I started with this, but the Internet is here to stay--and what you do on it is permanent. Like it or not, (I mostly don't), it's a fact that has few exceptions.

2) Our ability to do things has so outstripped our ability to ask the "why's", "ought's", and "should's", that even well meaning people, websites, and organizations should be considered risky. Perspective comes slowly to us mutants. We may need to wait a little while to really understand the implications of our technology on society, community and individual civil liberties.

3) Don't feel funny about stepping back sometimes from the "cutting edge". As someone who spent several years on Facebook before deleting my account to focus on my physical neighbors and community, I speak from experience. Our friends and family have been very understanding and cooperative with our sometime humorous requests to not post/tag pics of me, my wife, or our daughter online.Trust me, you won't lose out if you take a deep breath and thoughtfully examine your digital life. It may be time to cancel, unsubscribe, delete, purge, or even spend some time unplugged.

Odds are that we will never be chased by a fascist government, have our identities stolen by Uzbek hackers, or stalked by a serial killer from down the block because of our tagged social media photos. But it should give us pause. We need to examine why we're online, why we're sharing intimate life details on a public platform, why we feel the need to be more than a name or an IP address in the digital community.  I am not a Luddite. There are compelling reasons to share one's life with others online. But we need to do so intentionally, with perspective, and as choosing and dignified human beings.

We're more than faces in a crowd, more than ghosts in the machine. We're people, and we need to guard that humanity very, very carefully. We do that by thinking sharply, choosing wisely, and always being ready to meet our neighbors with a smile.

But cameras aren't neighbors.