Future Commerce ~ Rebooting Money & Markets!

Together with Brian Forde from MIT’s new Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) and Media Lab colleagues Alex (Sandy) Pentland and David Shrier, we explore new financial innovations via our Future Commerce offering this Fall 2015 every Tuesday afternoon 1-2:30p starting September 15th. Participants learn how to build new businesses and translate ideas to impact, in collaboration with experienced fintech executives, entrepreneurs and thought leaders.

Students will explore emerging technologies that will disrupt existing marketplaces and financial services by spending a semester building new business models, products or technical concepts, resulting in a substantial deliverable at the end of the term.

Persistent Surveillance ~ Pre-Crime Panopticon...

NextBigFuture spotlights WashPo piece on Persistent Surveillance...

Iron Suits ~ SF Visualization of Protective Gear++

Tony Stark's various Iron Suits... Plus, of course, his Brass Rat...

Restore the Fourth ~ July 4th Anti-NSA Protests

What better way for Americans to celebrate Independence from an oppressive and intrusive regime than by protesting un-Constitutional oppressive and intrusive NSA spying and other grotesque violations of the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution. CNet's Dara Kerr writes that Reddit, Mozilla, EFF and more join July 4th anti-NSA protests...

"Rallying around the Fourth of July holiday, several Web sites have come together to take part in a nationwide protest over the National Security Agency's surveillance program. Organized by the nonprofit Fight for the Future, thousands of sites -- including some heavy-hitters like Mozilla, Reddit, WordPress.org, and 4chan -- will be staging online protests. Rather than going black, like many sites did during the 2012 protests of Congress' Stop Online Privacy Act, or SOPA, these sites will prominently display a Fourth Amendment banner. The banner will quote the text of the amendment, which says, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated."

Free & Equal ~ Hirsi Ali on Women's Rights...

Thanks to Friendly Athiest Hemant Mehta for spotting What Does It Really Mean for Women to be ‘Free & Equal’? A Talk by Ayaan Hirsi Ali who pulls no punches in condemning backwards cultures...

"It is a matter of principle that women are free and equal'. This means zero tolerance of cultural practices such as honour violence, forced marriage and female genital mutilation (FGM). In her talk, Hirsi Ali challenges the audience with questions such as whether multiculturalism is indifference disguised as tolerance, and what do Western feminists have to offer to the life and death problems of women from the developing world?"

Boston Bombs ~ Can Defense & Security Work?

Today more terrorist atrocities. Again wondering if US$Trillions spent on "defense" and "homeland security" and "central intelligence" are well-spent. Here's Boston bombing raw... Map of crimes... Locational infographic... Killer, bomb, victim pictured together...

Found in a Crowd ~ De-Anonymizing Mobile Data

MIT Media Lab colleagues Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye and Cesar Hidalgo plus collaborators write in their recent Scientific Reports paper Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility about the ease of de-anonymizing mobile data...

"We study fifteen months of human mobility data for one and a half million individuals and find that human mobility traces are highly unique. In fact, in a dataset where the location of an individual is specified hourly, and with a spatial resolution equal to that given by the carrier's antennas, four spatio-temporal points are enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals. [...] even coarse datasets provide little anonymity. These findings represent fundamental constraints to an individual's privacy and have important implications for the design of frameworks and institutions dedicated to protect the privacy of individuals."

Several nice pieces have explored the implications of this work, including the BBC's Science and technology reporter Jason Palmer's Mobile location data 'present anonymity risk' and MIT's own Larry Hardesty asking How hard is it to 'de-anonymize' cellphone data?

Stop The Cyborgs ~ Neo-Luddite Manifesto...

Neo-Luddite manifesto seeks to Stop The Cyborgs writes BBC in Privacy 'impossible' with Google Glass warn campaigners...

"The warning comes from a group called "Stop the Cyborgs" that wants limits put on when headsets can be used. It has produced posters so premises can warn wearers that the glasses are banned or recording is not permitted. [...] The limits that the Stop The Cyborg campaign wants placed on Google Glass and similar devices would involve a clear way to let people know when they are being recorded. "It's important for society and democracy that people can chat and live without fear that they might end up being published or prosecuted," [...] "We are not anti-technology, we just want people to realise that technology is a powerful cultural force which shapes our society and which we can also shape."

Internet Census 2012 ~ Spiegel Spots PC Botnet

Der Spiegel's Christian Stöcker and Judith Horchert write about Mapping the Internet: A Hacker's Secret Internet Census...

"Just how big is the Internet? An anonymous hacker claims to have answered the question via effective but illegal means. The result is a fascinating reflection of online usage around the world."

The resulting report Internet Census 2012: Port scanning /0 using insecure embedded devices by Carna Botnet who, in the end writes...

"I did not want to ask myself for the rest of my life how much fun it could have been or if the infrastructure I imagined in my head would have worked as expected. I saw the chance to really work on an Internet scale, command hundred thousands of devices with a click of my mouse, portscan and map the whole Internet in a way nobody had done before, basically have fun with computers and the Internet in a way very few people ever will. I decided it would be worth my time."

See here animated GIF showing night-to-day pulse of Internet use, colored red-to-blue, not including mobiles...

Warbots ~ MAVs and Other Skynet Terminators...

Charlie Brooker writes in the Guardian that I know in my bones that a robot is going to kill you -- the new micro-drones...

"Most of the flying robots carrying out those kill missions are eerie, windowless airborne hulks bristling with Hellfire missiles. Enormous winged battledicks. They're frightening, but visually silly somehow, which adds to the obscenity of it all. The smaller drones [are] potentially more deadly. Compared with the current models flying over Pakistan, they have fearsome advantages of stealth, agility -- and sheer number. Because there were swarms of the things. Some were the size of pigeons. In fact, they actively disguised themselves as pigeons: they landed on overhead phonelines and folded their wings around themselves so the folk down below wouldn't get too suspicious. Then they hovered around gathering surveillance information. At one point the video shows a company of multiple "bugbots", each the size of a Milky Way bar, spreading out to wirelessly compile a good overall view of an apparently hostile city. Then one of them sneaks past a guard, swoops down a corridor, flies through a doorway and shoots a bad guy in the head. [...] See? Precisely the sort of thing that'll definitely kill us all."

Here's the USAF's MAV warbot vision...

Room For The River ~ NL Protective Waterworks

Room For The River is Dutch initiative to avoid high-water flood calamities with layered defense and protective measures.

Strip-Search Society ~ 24x7 Surveillance Age...

National, State, Local and Private Security "concerns" are being used to rationalize creating the virtual-equivalent of a strip-search society where individuals are under constant biometric, infometric, and sociometric surveillance, our hard-won Constitutional rights to protection from arbitrary invasion, search, and seizure are forfeit, and we have no privacy and thus no real liberty. This is Orwellian Big Brother bullshit and is despicable. Who will lead the resistance?

Tunnel Plug ~ Avoiding or Minimizing Flooding...

In addition to the supreme lack-wisdom that lead NYC hospital designers to place emergency generators in basements (e.g. NYU Langone), other examples include tunnel owner-operators neglecting to deploy emergency closure mechanisms at a compelling scale. So check out the Tunnel Plug that Mike Ahlers spotlights in his CNN piece Huge plugs could have spared subways from flooding...

"Huge inflatable plugs -- now being developed by the federal government to protect subway tunnels from terrorist attacks -- likely could have saved some of New York's subway tunnels from storm-related flooding, according to plug developers, some of whom are wistful that development wasn't completed in time for Hurricane Sandy. [...] The plug -- simple in theory, but sophisticated in design -- inflates like a balloon to fit the contours of a tunnel, and can reduce leakage to amounts manageable by pumps. Placed on either end of some of the tunnels under New York's East River, the plugs could have prevented flooding, team members told CNN. But plugs would not have prevented water from infiltrating porous underground subway stations and other infrastructure, they said."

Razia Jan ~ Afghan Girls' Schoolteacher Heroine

CNN's Allie Torgan tells of girls' school founder-teacher Razia Jan in Acid attacks, poison: What Afghan girls risk going to school...

"There were at least 185 documented attacks on schools and hospitals in Afghanistan last year, according to the United Nations. The majority were attributed to armed groups opposed to girls' education. "It is heartbreaking to see the way these terrorists treat... women," said Jan, 68. [...] They are scared that when these girls get an education, they will become aware of their rights as women and as a human being." Despite the threat of violence, Jan continues to open the doors of her Zabuli Education Center, a two-story, 14-room building where 354 area girls are receiving a free education. [...] "My school is very small. It's nothing big. But for this to start here, I think it's like a fire. And I think it will grow," she said. "I hope that one day these girls... will come back and teach."

Private Military Companies ~ Security Services++

One additional element about the civil conflict in Sierra Leone caught my attention, namely the disproportionately effective role of Executive Outcomes -- a Private Military Company or PMC -- in defending civilians and pushing back the Revolutionary United Front (RUF)... There's much more to be said about such modern mercenaries. Shadow Company is a compelling documentary on the sector...

FirstLook ~ iRobot's Throwable, Drivable Spybot

Thanks to my MIT Media Lab colleague Birago Jones for spotting iRobot's FirstLook spybot via Engadget!

Gotham Defender ~ Theft-Resistant Bike Light!

MIT alums Slava and Brad are rockin' Kickstarter with their Gotham Defender, a theft-resistant bike light! Check out their promo video and back them!

Pig Moradi ~ Filthy Iranian Terrorist Scumbag...

The DailyMail helps us witness a religious wingnut and evil incarnate, the filthy Iranian terrorist pig Saedi Moradi who managed to blow off his own legs in a failed Bangkok bombing. He and his mad mullah minders are all scumbag swine -- impure, inhuman, unworthy... The only worse wingnuts are those who perpetuated the King David hotel massacre and their contemporary messianic missionary successors.

Fingerprints of Fraud ~ WSJ on Russia's "Votes"

Gregory White and Rob Barry write of Russia's Dubious Vote in the WSJournal and spotlight the many Fingerprints of Fraud...

"A comprehensive examination of the full results from Russia's nearly 100,000 voting precincts reveals statistical anomalies that experts say are consistent with widespread vote-rigging. These irregularities could cast doubt, by one rough measure, over as many as 14 million of the 65.7 million votes reportedly cast. [...] statistical analysis revealed phenomena that scholars who study vote data say are suggestive of vote-rigging.‬ "These are sometimes called the fingerprints of fraud," said Alberto Simpser, professor of political science at the University of Chicago. "If they all point in the same direction," he said, referring to statistical as well as observer and other evidence, "that's a very strong case."‬ The results are studded with groups of precincts that report exact round numbers for voter participation -- say, a turnout of 70%, 75% or 80%, up to 100%. Several groups of precincts also report similarly high round numbers of voters for United Russia. Such round figures occur significantly more frequently than nearby figures -- a phenomenon statisticians say is highly unlikely to come from a random distribution of numbers.‬"

Also includes explanation of methods and summary kleptographic...

Killed by Incompetence ~ Latest MIT Death...

Very sad to hear MIT alumnus Phyo Kyaw was slaughtered Tuesday 12/27/2011 by a criminally careless truck driver while riding his bicycle at Mass Ave and Vassar. While this death is quite tragic -- and ought to be a capital case against the truck driver and a bankrupting civil case against the liable owner -- it's also a direct consequence of gross incompetence and complete safety neglect on the part of urban planners, traffic engineers, lawless drivers, absent or uncaring police, AWOL lawmakers, and for those rare court cases, spineless judges. Specifically, we have in Cambridge and Massachusetts today...

• Unsafe and totally inadequate bicycle lanes;
• Hazardous & poorly designed intersections;
  
• Unenforced speeding, red light, & cross-walk rules;
• Minimalist punishment of traffic & safety violations;
• Total absence of driver safety culture;
• Rampant road-rage & driving-while-distracted;
• Missing traffic intersection video recording & tracking;
• Inadequately strict driver-fault liability rules;
• Too few indictments, scarce convictions, & liberal sentences;
  
• And more.

In a just world, those directly and indirectly responsible would all be held criminally culpable for this death -- and for the many other related and entirely avoidable safety incidents between motor vehicles and the bicyclists and pedestrians they threaten daily. Let's look at the evidence: the photos show the murder victim's bike is crushed under the wheels of the JP Noonan-owned truck which is completely on the wrong side of the road. That driver should get the electric chair and yet the latest press reports indicate he's not even being charged. Even worse, an MIT campus policeman told me yesterday -- with a completely straight face, mind you -- that the word is "the bicyclist just ran into the truck" and that's why he died. So this vicious murder by means of criminally negligent and reckless driving is actually either an unfortunate "accident" or it's really the victim's own fault. Are you F#CKing kidding me?! This is completely appalling.