Testing Technolgy

https://www.arabnews.jp/en/opinion/article_171420/

25-Country Bitcoin Study

The Technology Behind Financial Freedom: Evidence from a 25-Country Bitcoin Study  - The National Interest

Conflict & Reconciliation Feature for Social Networks - A Proposal

 Subject Matter & Problem

In the course of interactions among human beings, there arises, perhaps inadvertently and perhaps otherwise, that one or more parties take offense or are made angry by the utterances or behavior of another party or parties.  Human societies, historically, have developed mechanism to cope with social friction among the members, limit its negative consequences, and to facilitate reconciliation among the affected parties.

Virtual communities and social networks such as Facebook, Google Groups, etc. are novel ways of human interactions and group formation which are based on computer and information technologies.  However, they are not immune to the occurrences of social friction among their members and the attendant issues of anger management and reconciliation among “warring” parties.  Facebook, for example, offers a binary choice between a “Friend” and “Un-Friend”; one may “Un-Friend” a “Friend” if one has been angered – or otherwise disappointed – by that person.   There is no intermediate state between a “Friend” and “Un-Friend” which could distinguish among total strangers in contradistinction to former friends and acquaintances who could, when one’s anger cools, become one’s friends again.

Solution

The gist of this solution is to endow the social networking sites and virtual communities with a feature to mediate and affect a reconciliation among former friends and acquaintances beyond the binary choice of “Friend” and “Un-Friend” and to further facilitate the resolution of the conflict through selected “Intercessors”.

Use Case 1 – Normal Use

• The user navigates to a screen that contains a list of his contacts.
• He selects one or more of them and designates them as: “Not on Speaking Terms”, or “Sulking”, or “Furious” or some such phrase (or its equivalent in other languages).  That is, he sets their “Conflict” status.
• The system updates their profiles accordingly.
• The system displays the text above and an appropriate icon that indicates that these individuals have been thus designated as being in “Conflict” with this or that user.

This will be visible to all.

This designation is not conceived to be equivalent to “Un-Friend”.

• The user could further designate a time period for that status: from “Never Expires” to a date and time range (either selectable from a screen widget or entered manually by the user).
• The user may optionally decide if he wants to block communication from the “Conflict” contacts.
• The system will notify those contacts of a change in their status.

That communication could be in the form of email, internal communication, text messages, phone calls etc. – together with an appropriate text message.

• The system will notify others who share the affected contacts with the user and are also in the user’s social network of the “conflict” status change above.
• When the “Conflict” status time interval expires, the system reverts the status to “Friend”.

 Use Case 2 – User Selected Intercessor Option

• The user could further designate one or more “Intercessors” for each and any of the affected contacts from among their common contacts.
• The role of “Intercessor”, should they accept it, would be to try to mediate and resolve the conflict among the affected parties within the stated period of the conflict.
• This is an option that the user may or may not exercise.
• The system will query the “Intercessors” through a possible multiplicity of communication channels if they consent to play that role (for conflict resolution and mediation).
• If the “Intercessor” agrees, the system will notify the user who had initially requested the help of the “Intercessor” as well as the affected “Conflict” contacts.

4.       It is up to the “Intercessor” then to initiate the process of reconciliation.

Use case 3 – User elects to be “Intercessors”

Optionally, any user may elect to be an available as an “Intercessor” in a social network or virtual community.

Use case 4 – System Recommends “Intercessors”

Optionally, the system recommends a list of available “Intercessors” to the user.

Use case 5 – “Conflict” contact looks for an “Intercessors”

Optionally, the system recommends a list of available “Intercessors” to a “Conflict” contact after the system has informed him of the change in his “Conflict” status by another user.

Description

This is envisioned as a software add-on to existing as well as new social networking sites and virtual communities.  The operation of the invention is described in the above use cases.

Advantages

The chief advantage of this invention is that it enables one to retain one's "Friends" in social network even when one is cross with them. To wit, one announces publicly that he is cross with this or that person, others take note of it, and depending on the desire of both sides and their own inclinations could help them reconcile. So one does not necessarily wind up losing one's friend in a network due to a temporary emotional outburst or state of anger.

System Architecture & Design

The architecturally significant components of the system are illustrated below:

 

Possible Modifications

Something analogous to this may be incorporated into email clients – a “conflict” icon or button in which enables a user to designate one or some of his/her contacts as “In Conflict” until further notice.  The email server can then alert the person so designated of the change in his/her status by another user.  Optionally, all members of a person’s social network could be advised of the status.  Furthermore, the email client can expire the status and revert it back to “Friend” at a designated date and time (by the user).  Likewise, the email client or the email server could, for the duration, junk or otherwise archive email messages from such users.

 This invention could be extended to text messaging systems as well and with a suitable emoji.

 

The House that Spies on You

Truly dreadful news from our friends at Amazon.com - The house that spies on you

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-51709247

This device is a doorbell combined with a camera. There are obvious advantages, such as monitoring remotely who is getting close to your front door. All of it is computerized technology, of course, so that it links up to a database run by Amazon. Amazon can collect the data streamed to its servers; therefore, Amazon does collect, retain and store the data.

This is the familiar pattern whereby tech companies store data for no apparent reason, which can then be used, analyzed, shared or sold on. Not to mention the risk that a hacker gets into the system, and can then see when a family/ person is likely to be at home or not -- ideal for professional burglars.

As for having cameras in every room, say no more...

You may remember the story about the National Health Service in UK: they hold millions of data sets on patients and don't do very much with those. So, in their case, what do they do? Store the data passively. No. Sell it on to companies such as Amazon or US-based healthcare providers.

Same logic. If I have it, I will use it. It is 'anonymized' but, actually, fully accessible with a bit of ingenuity. Meanwhile, insurance companies and recruitment firms, among others, are knocking on the door, drooling at the thought of accessing such data...

All of this reminds me of the case of French police files on the French Jews during World War II, kept at Marseilles, for the benefit of the collaborationist government of the Vichy France, and the occupying Germans of course - which the French government decided to keep after the Liberation in 1945.

They were little index cards. Same as a computerized database.

The lesson is clear: if you have the data, you keep it and you stockpile it, just in case it may be useful later. The logic of it truly is sinister. With Amazon's doorbell, the data is available to the police if they want it. And you can imagine a wife spying on her husband if she suspects he's been having an affair with the neighbor's wife, etc.

Ghosts in the Network

From the London Review of Books

A minor issue for Facebook, as compared to all the rest...

You can live, you can die, and then you can be in limbo, somewhere in the parallel universe of Facebook, trapped in your virtual profile for ever and ever. And if there is no end, can there be any 'closure'?

The problem is, who is going to do the clean-up? Eventually, the 'dormant' accounts will probably get archived at best, deleted at worst -- a bit like dormant bank accounts (but, with those, the banks have tended to get hold of the cash and keep it, as I understand).

I can't imagine the Facebook geeks have answers to these questions, which lie somewhere beyond their limited intellectual capacities: "It was all meant to be fun and a way to find long-lost friends from college!"

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https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2019/june/ghosts-in-the-network?

Geriatric Issues in Usability

Don't Get Me Started - Senioritis

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/mt832865

Social media is anti-social

No real surprises here: the more time you spend on line, checking on virtual friends (who may be real friends or not), the less time you have to go out and meet people, since there are only 24 hrs in the day (and night). With some young people, it reaches bizarre levels, as we know.

_______________________

https://newatlas.com/social-media-increases-depression-loneliness-fomo/57202/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2018-11-

Study finds too much social media is making us feel lonely ... An interesting new experimental study from the University of Pennsylvania has demonstrated the first causal connection between social media use and feelings of depression and loneliness.

Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere

"I have been asked by my superiors to give a brief demonstration of the surprising effectiveness of even the simplest techniques of the new-fangled Social Networke Analysis in the pursuit of those who would seek to undermine the liberty enjoyed by His Majesty’s subjects.
 
This is in connection with the discussion of the role of “metadata” in certain recent events and the assurances of various respectable parties that the government was merely “sifting through this so-called metadata” and that the “information acquired does not include the content of any communications”.
 
I will show how we can use this “metadata” to find key persons involved in terrorist groups operating within the Colonies at the present time. I shall also endeavour to show how these methods work in what might be called a relational manner." 

Unique in the Crowd

In the paper "Unique in the Crowd: The Privacy Bounds of Human Mobility," published in Nature's Scientific Reports last year, Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, César A. Hidalgo, Michel Verleysen, and Vincent D. Blondel of MIT and the Universite Catholique de Louvain, examined a dataset of 15 months of anonymous cell-phone data from 1.5 million people in Belgium (most likely).

There were no names, addresses, or phone numbers in the data, yet they argue that "if individual's patterns are unique enough, outside information can be used to link the data back to an individual." In fact, just four points of observation -- time of the call and the nearest cell-phone tower -- were enough to identify 95 percent of individuals in the data et. 

That is, if one makes four calls from four different places over the course of a 15-month period, one's pattern of movement could be identified out of a population two and a half times the size of Washington, D.C.

If someone is able to cross-reference that with the Twitter feed, say,  he could be able to build a pretty good picture of  who be that person .

The pattern still worked when the researchers "coarsened" their sample by using less specific time observations and by lumping multiple cell-phone towers into one.

Evidently, the way people move through the world and share and communicate information is quite distinctive.

de Montjoye  has stated that: "We use the analogy of the fingerprint, in the 1930s, Edmond Locard, one of the first forensic science pioneers, showed that each fingerprint is unique, and you need 12 points to identify it. So here what we did is we took a large-scale database of mobility traces and basically computed the number of points so that 95 percent of people would be unique in the dataset."

Since phone companies need to keep this kind of data for billing and customer service purposes, it seems inevitable that it would sooner or later be put to questionable use by the security agencies of various governments.
 
The authors have an op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor arguing that consumers should be granted more control over and more information about how much of their data is being stored and for what purpose. 

Their study "shows that when it comes to rich metadata datasets, there are no clear cut between anonymous and not anonymous data. Achieving anonymity is really hard and might even be algorithmically impossible."

The paper may be found here:

http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130325/srep01376/pdf/srep01376.pdf

The Tomorrow Project

Check out the Tomorrow Project and he anthology of Science-Fiction stories there- available as a free download:

http://uk.tomorrow-projects.com/2012/09/the-tomorrow-project-anthology-imagining-the-future-and-building-it/

Art & Technology

Tag: We’re It is a digital art installation that used projectors to deliver a floating field of droplets along a white wall. Visitors to the exhibition were invited to share a memory which is recorded and they were then presented with a frame which they could use to reconstruct a Microsoft Tag by placing their frame on any grouping of droplets on the wall. This may sound confusing – just hit play on the video above to see the resulting beauty of the installation. Viewers could use their smartphone to scan the tag that their frame created and access any one of a hundred pre-recorded video memories, perhaps even their own.

The exhibition was attended by over 400 people in two days, and was extended by the gallery for two weeks through the E.A.S.T. Austin studio tour - Austin’s single largest art event of the year. It was the work of Lisa Kaselak, a filmmaker and digital artist and Lee Billington, a creative director and designer specializing in interactive design. They wanted a two-dimensional piece of art that you could explore and that delivered more than just the surface content. Microsoft Tag afforded that opportunity, not least as the Tag’s are dynamic (unlike QR codes) so the video content could easily be changed.

To quote one of their visitors - "I haven’t seen art and technology come together in quite this way"

http://vimeo.com/leeandlisa/tagwereit

Spector360

Here is another nail in the coffin of Liberty.

http://www.spectorsoft.com/ads/360wild/

I wonder if the developers of these products are aware of the fact that they are directly enabling totalitarianism?

The Gestapo and the KGB would have been proud!

Facts on Facebook

If you want to know how Facebook, the number 2 property on the Internet, does what it does, listen to:

http://cns.ucsd.edu/lecturearchive09.shtml#Roth

A Murder In A Virtual World

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081023/ap_on_re_as/as_japan_avatar_murder/print

Google's Virtual World

http://www.lively.com/html/landing.html

OpenSim

OpenSim is a open source server-side application for running grids and single regions, and you will be able to connect to your region / grid via the Second Life client. So basically, you'll be able to host your own capable sandbox. And, no, OpenSim is not a client for Second Life!

Learn more about it @ http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page

and

http://www.wtfnext.com/Tutorials/OpenSimandSecondLife/InstallingandRunningOpenSimulator/tabid/83/Default.aspx

OLIVE: On-line Interactive Virtual Environment

Forterra Systems' goal is to enable users to create their own proprietary virtual worlds. Check the link below to learn more:


"The On-line Interactive Virtual Environment, OLIVE creates virtual worlds for customers in health care, the military, and the media. MTV Networks uses OLIVE to create online worlds based on its television shows; surfers can take dips in pixelated hot tubs with bikinied beauties from the Virtual Real World or customize shiny hubcaps on a flame-red hot rod in Virtual Pimp My Car. But most of OLIVE’s applications are available by invitation only, primarily for the purpose of training staff. The U.S. National Institutes of Health is creating a world that tests industrial workers’ skills at responding to emergency disasters..."

Geopolitics of Facebook - II

http://joshualandis.com/blog/?p=493

Geopolitics and Facebook

http://joshualandis.com/blog/?p=489

Wikis in the Enterprise - NOT!

Why Wikis won't work in the enterprise:

http://www.dmreview.com/issues/2007_41/10000201-1.html