Set in the near future where experimental technology allows two detectives to bring a murder victim back to life in a digital state in order to question him about his final moments.
Starring Paul Reubens, Janina Gavankar, Fay Masterson, Jon Sklaroff, and Pete Chekvala
Writer/Director/Producer: M.Francis Wilson
February 15, 2016
What VR could, should, and almost certainly will be within two years
If you got an Oculus Rift you can already try out some great VR experiences. Parking a massive truck with it feels natural as you can just stick your head out of the window and look backwards. If driving a truck is a bit too mundane for you, locking the guns of your spacecruiser on a target has become much easier because now you can kill with your looks. Ever felt like going to the movies with friends on the other side of the world? Try out a virtual theater! On the other hand, if you are afraid of heights and spiders crawling all over your face you might want to skip on The Pit and Don't Let Go. The worlds of games like Half-Life, Skyrim and many others are waiting for you to immerse yourself in them... and if you are feeling really adventurous you can even play sexy gender swap games with your partner! http://vimeo.com/84150219 (NSFW)
Although all these experiences are completely bonkers in a good way, they are only scratching the surface and according to Valve they are missing something crucial that will take the experience from totally bonkers to dangerously addictive.
Valve, the renowned software developer, has teamed up with Oculus, the developers of the rift Virtual Reality headset, and together they recently unleashed the Crystal Cove Prototype onto the world. Almost anyone who tried it on described it as "the future of entertainment". Is the age of VR finally upon us? Almost, but not quite yet says Valve. They see the CC prototype they developed with Oculus as a massive step in the right direction but they believe that we still have to wait a little bit longer for VR to truly go mainstream. At least one more year to be exact.
The last couple of years they've been developing their own state of the art and extremely costly VRD prototype and at the SteamDevDays they've finally shown it off. Keep in mind that they have no intention to bring this particular headset to market but will instead help Oculus to create something similarly specced at a more realistic price point that consumers can actually afford. They only built this costly one to showcase what is to come and to get both industry and consumers ready for the revolution they think is almost at hand. Hyperbole on their part? I don't think so. It really seems to be blowing people's minds.
David Hensley of Tripwire was particularly hyperbolic, and said that going back to his Oculus Rift would be like switching from an Xbox to an 8-bit Nintendo. "Valve’s VR demo at SteamDevDays felt like being in a lucid dream state and very much like a holo deck."
Johnathan Blow (developer of Braid & The Witness) explains that he was skeptical of VR technology based on what he'd seen so far but that Valve turned him around; "It's so much better than anything else I had used that I was instantly very excited by it." "Right away I could see games you might design for this system that had been impossible before."
One of Valve's brainiacs, Michael Abrash, regularly spreads words of wisdom from his blog; http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/ and he did the same at the SteamDevDays event where he delivered a very interesting talk on the future of VR in which he outlined the somewhat magical experience of presence in VR and pointed to 2015 as the year that it's likely to be achieved on consumer devices.
http://media.steampowered.com/apps/abrashblog/Abrash%20Dev%20Days%202014.pdf
"Once hardware that supports presence ships, we think it has the potential to cause a sea change in the entertainment industry. Not only could VR rapidly evolve into a major platform, but it could actually tip the balance of the entire industry from traditional media toward computer entertainment."
If you think that sounds like he's overselling it, you might want to think again because already the film industry is beginning to pay attention. The Oculus booth at the Sundance Film festival pulled in a huge crowd and Alfonso Cuaron, director of Children of Men & Gravity even stopped by Oculus' headquarters for an extensive try out... One can only imagine the kind of adrenaline rush you'd get from experiencing Gravity through a VRD.
Valve's research into Virtual Reality has allowed them to really explore the space and they've found that the key ingredient we need for VR to go mainstream is something they call "presence".
"Presence is hard to quantify, but our demos have shown that it is a very real and compelling phenomenon, one that hooks far deeper into the perceptual system than anything that’s come before, and it’s why we’re so excited about the future of VR. It’s our belief that great VR will be built on presence, because it engages you at a deeper, more visceral level than any other form of entertainment, and can only be experienced in VR. "
"Presence requires a wide field of view, adequate resolution, low pixel persistence, a high enough refresh rate, global display, specialized optics, rock solid tracking, low latency and fine tuned calibration. I want to emphasize that presence is not a property of any one of these elements; it’s a property that emerges when all of the elements are good enough. If the optics aren’t calibrated perfectly, then the scene will warp as you turn your head no matter how good everything else is. Likewise, no amount of fidelity will convince your visual system that a virtual scene is real if latency is too high. Presence can’t be induced if even one of the key elements is subpar. It's worth noting that inducing presence reduces motion sickness because what your eyes see will more closely respond with what your vestibular system reports.
According to Abrash presence requires the following minimum specs;
• 20 ms motion-to-last-photon latency
• 3 ms pixel persistence
• 95 Hz refresh
• 110-degree FOV
• 1k x 1k resolution per eye
• High quality, well calibrated optics
• Tracking
- millimeter accurate resolution translation
- quarter degree accurate rotation
- volume of 2 meters cubed
"This head-mounted display would support a powerful sense of presence and would have an excellent shot at widespread adoption. VR can certainly get much better yet down the road, but that’ll require time and major hardware R&D. In contrast, we believe everything on this slide is doable with relatively minor tweaks of existing technology; no breakthroughs or miracles are needed, just solid engineering."
Still, it's important to note these are the minimum specs to achieve presence. When these arrive in 2015 they will enable us to step into other worlds but there will still be A LOT of room for further improvement. "For one thing, presence would benefit from every one of the key elements getting better than what’s in our prototypes. We could literally use up to 100 times as many pixels, and a wider field of view, lower latency, and all the rest would also improve the experience; the optics in particular are far from optimal. Also getting per user lens positioning right is a challenge. As I mentioned, we think we’re close on head tracking, but we don’t have a shippable solution yet, and then there’s eye tracking, which could greatly enhance presence but is nowhere near solved. Going to a wireless connection and eliminating the tether would
be a big plus."
Full presentation;
http://media.steampowered.com/apps/abrashblog/Abrash%20Dev%20Days%202014.pdf
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2014/01/oculus-movies/
http://www.engadget.com/2014/01/09/the-oculus-rift-crystal-cove-prototype-is-2014s-best-of-c/
Virtual travel, think of the possibilities!
Athens Tech Demo Siggraph 2013
Virtual Reality pain relief
http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/vrpain/
AR-Rift: Stereo camera rig and augmented reality showcase
3D webcam mechanics with oculus
HydraDeck Humans (NSFW)
http://vimeo.com/79173606 (NSFW)
Omni in Skyrim - with Kinect 2 (head sensitivity adjusted)
Substituted Reality - https://plus.google.com/108487783243149848473/posts/NPJQvoRT5FS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality
Although all these experiences are completely bonkers in a good way, they are only scratching the surface and according to Valve they are missing something crucial that will take the experience from totally bonkers to dangerously addictive.
Valve, the renowned software developer, has teamed up with Oculus, the developers of the rift Virtual Reality headset, and together they recently unleashed the Crystal Cove Prototype onto the world. Almost anyone who tried it on described it as "the future of entertainment". Is the age of VR finally upon us? Almost, but not quite yet says Valve. They see the CC prototype they developed with Oculus as a massive step in the right direction but they believe that we still have to wait a little bit longer for VR to truly go mainstream. At least one more year to be exact.
The last couple of years they've been developing their own state of the art and extremely costly VRD prototype and at the SteamDevDays they've finally shown it off. Keep in mind that they have no intention to bring this particular headset to market but will instead help Oculus to create something similarly specced at a more realistic price point that consumers can actually afford. They only built this costly one to showcase what is to come and to get both industry and consumers ready for the revolution they think is almost at hand. Hyperbole on their part? I don't think so. It really seems to be blowing people's minds.
David Hensley of Tripwire was particularly hyperbolic, and said that going back to his Oculus Rift would be like switching from an Xbox to an 8-bit Nintendo. "Valve’s VR demo at SteamDevDays felt like being in a lucid dream state and very much like a holo deck."
Johnathan Blow (developer of Braid & The Witness) explains that he was skeptical of VR technology based on what he'd seen so far but that Valve turned him around; "It's so much better than anything else I had used that I was instantly very excited by it." "Right away I could see games you might design for this system that had been impossible before."
One of Valve's brainiacs, Michael Abrash, regularly spreads words of wisdom from his blog; http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/ and he did the same at the SteamDevDays event where he delivered a very interesting talk on the future of VR in which he outlined the somewhat magical experience of presence in VR and pointed to 2015 as the year that it's likely to be achieved on consumer devices.
http://media.steampowered.com/apps/abrashblog/Abrash%20Dev%20Days%202014.pdf
"Once hardware that supports presence ships, we think it has the potential to cause a sea change in the entertainment industry. Not only could VR rapidly evolve into a major platform, but it could actually tip the balance of the entire industry from traditional media toward computer entertainment."
If you think that sounds like he's overselling it, you might want to think again because already the film industry is beginning to pay attention. The Oculus booth at the Sundance Film festival pulled in a huge crowd and Alfonso Cuaron, director of Children of Men & Gravity even stopped by Oculus' headquarters for an extensive try out... One can only imagine the kind of adrenaline rush you'd get from experiencing Gravity through a VRD.
Valve's research into Virtual Reality has allowed them to really explore the space and they've found that the key ingredient we need for VR to go mainstream is something they call "presence".
"Presence is hard to quantify, but our demos have shown that it is a very real and compelling phenomenon, one that hooks far deeper into the perceptual system than anything that’s come before, and it’s why we’re so excited about the future of VR. It’s our belief that great VR will be built on presence, because it engages you at a deeper, more visceral level than any other form of entertainment, and can only be experienced in VR. "
"Presence requires a wide field of view, adequate resolution, low pixel persistence, a high enough refresh rate, global display, specialized optics, rock solid tracking, low latency and fine tuned calibration. I want to emphasize that presence is not a property of any one of these elements; it’s a property that emerges when all of the elements are good enough. If the optics aren’t calibrated perfectly, then the scene will warp as you turn your head no matter how good everything else is. Likewise, no amount of fidelity will convince your visual system that a virtual scene is real if latency is too high. Presence can’t be induced if even one of the key elements is subpar. It's worth noting that inducing presence reduces motion sickness because what your eyes see will more closely respond with what your vestibular system reports.
According to Abrash presence requires the following minimum specs;
• 20 ms motion-to-last-photon latency
• 3 ms pixel persistence
• 95 Hz refresh
• 110-degree FOV
• 1k x 1k resolution per eye
• High quality, well calibrated optics
• Tracking
- millimeter accurate resolution translation
- quarter degree accurate rotation
- volume of 2 meters cubed
"This head-mounted display would support a powerful sense of presence and would have an excellent shot at widespread adoption. VR can certainly get much better yet down the road, but that’ll require time and major hardware R&D. In contrast, we believe everything on this slide is doable with relatively minor tweaks of existing technology; no breakthroughs or miracles are needed, just solid engineering."
Still, it's important to note these are the minimum specs to achieve presence. When these arrive in 2015 they will enable us to step into other worlds but there will still be A LOT of room for further improvement. "For one thing, presence would benefit from every one of the key elements getting better than what’s in our prototypes. We could literally use up to 100 times as many pixels, and a wider field of view, lower latency, and all the rest would also improve the experience; the optics in particular are far from optimal. Also getting per user lens positioning right is a challenge. As I mentioned, we think we’re close on head tracking, but we don’t have a shippable solution yet, and then there’s eye tracking, which could greatly enhance presence but is nowhere near solved. Going to a wireless connection and eliminating the tether would
be a big plus."
Full presentation;
http://media.steampowered.com/apps/abrashblog/Abrash%20Dev%20Days%202014.pdf
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2014/01/oculus-movies/
http://www.engadget.com/2014/01/09/the-oculus-rift-crystal-cove-prototype-is-2014s-best-of-c/
Virtual travel, think of the possibilities!
Athens Tech Demo Siggraph 2013
Virtual Reality pain relief
http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/vrpain/
AR-Rift: Stereo camera rig and augmented reality showcase
3D webcam mechanics with oculus
HydraDeck Humans (NSFW)
http://vimeo.com/79173606 (NSFW)
Omni in Skyrim - with Kinect 2 (head sensitivity adjusted)
Substituted Reality - https://plus.google.com/108487783243149848473/posts/NPJQvoRT5FS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality
Something so hot it's cool to touch
Light up your day with this video demonstration of a space shuttle thermal protection tile! These tiles dissipate heat so quickly, it can be safely picked up immediately after being removed from a 2200°F (1204°C | 1478K ) oven, despite still being red-hot.
The Thermal Protection System covered essentially the entire shuttle surface and consisted of seven different materials in varying locations. Each type of TPS had specific heat protection, impact resistance, and weight characteristics. Ceck out this pdf for a very detailed look at the space shuttle's TPS. http://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/pdf/584728main_Wings-ch4b-pgs182-199.pdf
How can something this hot be cold enough to touch?
Misconceptions About Temperature - Veritasium Youtube
spoiler; When you touch something you are actually feeling the heat flux: how fast that thing is heating you up, not the temperature itself. Because the material used for these tiles conducts heat extremely poorly it won't burn your fingers.
Space Shuttle Thermal Tile Demonstration
The Thermal Protection System covered essentially the entire shuttle surface and consisted of seven different materials in varying locations. Each type of TPS had specific heat protection, impact resistance, and weight characteristics. Ceck out this pdf for a very detailed look at the space shuttle's TPS. http://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/pdf/584728main_Wings-ch4b-pgs182-199.pdf
How can something this hot be cold enough to touch?
Misconceptions About Temperature - Veritasium Youtube
spoiler; When you touch something you are actually feeling the heat flux: how fast that thing is heating you up, not the temperature itself. Because the material used for these tiles conducts heat extremely poorly it won't burn your fingers.
Space Shuttle Thermal Tile Demonstration
The Program
The filmmaker Laura Poitras profiles William Binney, a 32-year veteran of the NSA who helped design top-secret surveillance software.
New York Times docu: The Program
New York Times docu: The Program
A hidden world, feeding on big data, growing beyond control
"Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine.” -Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president at Gartner
And just like oil, data too can be applied for both good and evil. I Previously talked about how big data will change our world for the better; http://goo.gl/oisdt - today I'll talk about its downside.
"Torture the data, and it will confess to anything" -Ronald Coase, Economics, Nobel Prize Laureate
Big data means Big errors - http://www.wired.com/2013/02/big-data-means-big-errors-people/
We’re more fooled by noise than ever before. With big data, researchers have brought cherry-picking to an industrial level. Modernity provides too many variables, but too little data per variable. So the spurious relationships grow much, much faster than real information. In other words: Big data may mean more information, but it also means more false information.
Although researchers have to learn how to deal with big data; they need to be made aware of its pitfalls and start making use of new analysis techniques that put a halt to cherry-picking, society as a whole is going to need to step up its game. We will have to steer legislature, the judiciary system and law enforcement in their use of big data. They are testing the waters, checking out how far they can go and so far, we, the people, have remained surprisingly silent. Surprising because we are very vocal about our privacy rights when it comes to corporations and what they can and can not do with our data but perhaps there is less concern about government because most are unaware of the government's big data plans which are playing out below radar?
Top Secret America - http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/
Did you know that the US Intelligence Community consists of 16 separate government agencies? Most of you will know about the FBI, the CIA and the NSA but have you ever heard of DIA, NGA, ONI, INR, INSCOM, ... ? According to the Washington Post there are 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies in 10,000 locations in the United States that are working on counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence, and that the intelligence community as a whole includes 854,000 people who hold top-secret clearances.
CIA: Big Data is the future and we own it - http://www.businessinsider.com/cia-presentation-on-big-data-2013-3
"You're already a walking sensor platform," Hunt said, referring to all of the information captured by smartphones. "You are aware of the fact that somebody can know where you are at all times because you carry a mobile device, even if that mobile device is turned off.
"Since you can't connect dots you don't have, it drives us into a mode of, we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever," Hunt said. "It is really very nearly within our grasp to be able to compute on all human generated information."
He ends with comments about how the "inanimate is becoming sentient," how cognitive machines (e.g. Watson) are going to "explode upon us," and how technology is moving faster than governments, legal systems, and even individuals can keep up.
Room 641 A - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Room 641A is a telecommunication interception facility operated by AT&T for the U.S. National Security Agency that commenced operations in 2003 and was exposed in 2006. Room 641A is located in the SBC Communications building at 611 Folsom Street, San Francisco, The room is fed by fiber optic lines from beam splitters installed in fiber optic trunks carrying Internet backbone traffic and, as analyzed by J. Scott Marcus, a former CTO for GTE and a former adviser to the FCC, has access to all Internet traffic that passes through the building, and therefore "the capability to enable surveillance and analysis of internet content on a massive scale, including both overseas and purely domestic traffic." Former director of the NSA’s World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group, William Binney, has estimated that 10 to 20 such facilities have been installed throughout the nation.
ECHELON - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
Echelon is a globe spanning signals intelligence collection and analysis system. Its capabilities and political implications were investigated by a committee of the European Parliament during 2000 and 2001 with a report published in 2001. In this report the European Parliament stated that on the basis of information presented, ECHELON was capable of interception and content inspection of telephone calls, fax, e-mail and other data traffic globally through the interception of communication bearers including satellite transmission, public switched telephone networks and microwave links.
AI could help in terrorist investigations - https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23403-ai-could-help-investigation-of-boston-marathon-bombing
Machine vision techniques are on the verge of being able to slash the manpower needed for such investigations, and surveillance systems are starting to get a handle on real-time analyses which could even prevent some attacks from happening in the first place. Once trained, a surveillance system can flag up behaviour which falls outside of established norms.
ARGUS - 1.8 gigapixel ARGUS-IS. World's highest resolution video surveillance platform by DARPA
The ARGUS-IS, or Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System, together with a new generation of solar powered airplanes that can stay in the air indefinitely could enable all seeing eyes patrolling our sky 24/7. This gives people in power access to a time machine that allows them to dig into anyone's past for dirt they can use to stay in power.
Palantir - The War on Terror's Secret Weapon
Palantir is a piece of software made by Palantir Technologies, a Silicon Valley company that’s become the darling of the intelligence and law enforcement communities. Palantir’s name refers to the “seeing stones” in Lord of the Rings that provide a window into other parts of Middle-earth. What Palantir does, says Avivah Litan, an analyst at Gartner (IT), is “make it really easy to mine these big data sets.” The company’s software pulls off one of the great computer science feats of the era: It combs through all available databases, identifying related pieces of information, and puts everything together in one place. Most of Palantir’s government work remains classified
NSA is building a massive datacenter - http://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/
A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.”
When the chief tech officer of the CIA says; "It is really very nearly within our grasp to be able to compute on all human generated information." this should raise eyebrows and spark public debate. Do we really want governments, corporations, anyone, to be able to keep track of our position, our spending, our interests, our friends, our history, our genes, perhaps in time even our thoughts when Brain Computer Interfaces become common place? I think not. They are spending your money on new buildings to house datacenters and supercomputers to keep on top of the ever growing data mountain that you generate to keep you safe. Are you okay with that? What happened to warrants and innocent until proven guilty? What kinda of security measures are in place to prevent others from accessing it? What guarantees are there that this massive pile of data won't be abused in the future?
The US gov is not just trying to get their hands on data you generate directly, it's also hoping to gain access to all the data that corporations have on you. They hope to gain this power through CISPA, a proposed law that recently passed the house, it would force various technology and manufacturing companies to share their data. These are big issueas and there are no easy answers but I believe that part of the solutions lies in sousveillance. As they keep tabs on us, so we have to keep tabs on them. This means more transparency from the gov's side but the public too needs to get more involved. Don't want CISPA to pass? Check which way your representative voted and give him a call to make him change his mind or to thank him for his common sense. http://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/113-2013/h117
"With great data comes great responsibility."- Data analyst's uncle
Big Brother is WWWatching You - feat. George Orwell [RAP NEWS 15]
And just like oil, data too can be applied for both good and evil. I Previously talked about how big data will change our world for the better; http://goo.gl/oisdt - today I'll talk about its downside.
"Torture the data, and it will confess to anything" -Ronald Coase, Economics, Nobel Prize Laureate
Big data means Big errors - http://www.wired.com/2013/02/big-data-means-big-errors-people/
We’re more fooled by noise than ever before. With big data, researchers have brought cherry-picking to an industrial level. Modernity provides too many variables, but too little data per variable. So the spurious relationships grow much, much faster than real information. In other words: Big data may mean more information, but it also means more false information.
Although researchers have to learn how to deal with big data; they need to be made aware of its pitfalls and start making use of new analysis techniques that put a halt to cherry-picking, society as a whole is going to need to step up its game. We will have to steer legislature, the judiciary system and law enforcement in their use of big data. They are testing the waters, checking out how far they can go and so far, we, the people, have remained surprisingly silent. Surprising because we are very vocal about our privacy rights when it comes to corporations and what they can and can not do with our data but perhaps there is less concern about government because most are unaware of the government's big data plans which are playing out below radar?
Top Secret America - http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/
Did you know that the US Intelligence Community consists of 16 separate government agencies? Most of you will know about the FBI, the CIA and the NSA but have you ever heard of DIA, NGA, ONI, INR, INSCOM, ... ? According to the Washington Post there are 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies in 10,000 locations in the United States that are working on counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence, and that the intelligence community as a whole includes 854,000 people who hold top-secret clearances.
CIA: Big Data is the future and we own it - http://www.businessinsider.com/cia-presentation-on-big-data-2013-3
"You're already a walking sensor platform," Hunt said, referring to all of the information captured by smartphones. "You are aware of the fact that somebody can know where you are at all times because you carry a mobile device, even if that mobile device is turned off.
"Since you can't connect dots you don't have, it drives us into a mode of, we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever," Hunt said. "It is really very nearly within our grasp to be able to compute on all human generated information."
He ends with comments about how the "inanimate is becoming sentient," how cognitive machines (e.g. Watson) are going to "explode upon us," and how technology is moving faster than governments, legal systems, and even individuals can keep up.
Room 641 A - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Room 641A is a telecommunication interception facility operated by AT&T for the U.S. National Security Agency that commenced operations in 2003 and was exposed in 2006. Room 641A is located in the SBC Communications building at 611 Folsom Street, San Francisco, The room is fed by fiber optic lines from beam splitters installed in fiber optic trunks carrying Internet backbone traffic and, as analyzed by J. Scott Marcus, a former CTO for GTE and a former adviser to the FCC, has access to all Internet traffic that passes through the building, and therefore "the capability to enable surveillance and analysis of internet content on a massive scale, including both overseas and purely domestic traffic." Former director of the NSA’s World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group, William Binney, has estimated that 10 to 20 such facilities have been installed throughout the nation.
ECHELON - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
Echelon is a globe spanning signals intelligence collection and analysis system. Its capabilities and political implications were investigated by a committee of the European Parliament during 2000 and 2001 with a report published in 2001. In this report the European Parliament stated that on the basis of information presented, ECHELON was capable of interception and content inspection of telephone calls, fax, e-mail and other data traffic globally through the interception of communication bearers including satellite transmission, public switched telephone networks and microwave links.
AI could help in terrorist investigations - https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23403-ai-could-help-investigation-of-boston-marathon-bombing
Machine vision techniques are on the verge of being able to slash the manpower needed for such investigations, and surveillance systems are starting to get a handle on real-time analyses which could even prevent some attacks from happening in the first place. Once trained, a surveillance system can flag up behaviour which falls outside of established norms.
ARGUS - 1.8 gigapixel ARGUS-IS. World's highest resolution video surveillance platform by DARPA
The ARGUS-IS, or Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System, together with a new generation of solar powered airplanes that can stay in the air indefinitely could enable all seeing eyes patrolling our sky 24/7. This gives people in power access to a time machine that allows them to dig into anyone's past for dirt they can use to stay in power.
Palantir - The War on Terror's Secret Weapon
Palantir is a piece of software made by Palantir Technologies, a Silicon Valley company that’s become the darling of the intelligence and law enforcement communities. Palantir’s name refers to the “seeing stones” in Lord of the Rings that provide a window into other parts of Middle-earth. What Palantir does, says Avivah Litan, an analyst at Gartner (IT), is “make it really easy to mine these big data sets.” The company’s software pulls off one of the great computer science feats of the era: It combs through all available databases, identifying related pieces of information, and puts everything together in one place. Most of Palantir’s government work remains classified
NSA is building a massive datacenter - http://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/
A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.”
When the chief tech officer of the CIA says; "It is really very nearly within our grasp to be able to compute on all human generated information." this should raise eyebrows and spark public debate. Do we really want governments, corporations, anyone, to be able to keep track of our position, our spending, our interests, our friends, our history, our genes, perhaps in time even our thoughts when Brain Computer Interfaces become common place? I think not. They are spending your money on new buildings to house datacenters and supercomputers to keep on top of the ever growing data mountain that you generate to keep you safe. Are you okay with that? What happened to warrants and innocent until proven guilty? What kinda of security measures are in place to prevent others from accessing it? What guarantees are there that this massive pile of data won't be abused in the future?
The US gov is not just trying to get their hands on data you generate directly, it's also hoping to gain access to all the data that corporations have on you. They hope to gain this power through CISPA, a proposed law that recently passed the house, it would force various technology and manufacturing companies to share their data. These are big issueas and there are no easy answers but I believe that part of the solutions lies in sousveillance. As they keep tabs on us, so we have to keep tabs on them. This means more transparency from the gov's side but the public too needs to get more involved. Don't want CISPA to pass? Check which way your representative voted and give him a call to make him change his mind or to thank him for his common sense. http://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/113-2013/h117
"With great data comes great responsibility."- Data analyst's uncle
Big Brother is WWWatching You - feat. George Orwell [RAP NEWS 15]
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect
In the best possible future, there will be
no war, no famine, no crime,
no sickness, no oppression,
no fear, no limits, no shame...
...and nothing to do.
http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/mopiidx.html
A Novel by Roger Williams
This online novel contains strong language and extreme depictions of acts of sex and violence. Readers who are sensitive to such things should exercise discretion.
Chapter 1
Caroline at Play
Chapter 2
Lawrence Builds a Computer
Chapter 3
Caroline and Anne-Marie
Chapter 4
After the Night of Miracles
Chapter 5
Caroline Approaches
Chapter 6
After the Change
Chapter 7
Caroline and Lawrence
Chapter 8
After the Fall
no war, no famine, no crime,
no sickness, no oppression,
no fear, no limits, no shame...
...and nothing to do.
http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/mopiidx.html
A Novel by Roger Williams
This online novel contains strong language and extreme depictions of acts of sex and violence. Readers who are sensitive to such things should exercise discretion.
Chapter 1
Caroline at Play
Chapter 2
Lawrence Builds a Computer
Chapter 3
Caroline and Anne-Marie
Chapter 4
After the Night of Miracles
Chapter 5
Caroline Approaches
Chapter 6
After the Change
Chapter 7
Caroline and Lawrence
Chapter 8
After the Fall
The Controller
This might lean closer to fantasy than Science Fiction but as Clarke once said; "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." ;)
Written & Directed by Saman Kesh
Written & Directed by Saman Kesh
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