Via Boing Boing – ‘Hooligan chants silenced by delayed echoes’, a New Scientist story looking at the work of Dutch researchers who are using out-of-sync replayed sound to disrupt synchronised chanting at football matches. “Soccer hooligans could be silenced by a new sound system that […]
All posts filed under “External Control”
Technology designed to serve others
Bruce Schneier, in a Wired story, ‘Everyone Wants to ‘Own’ Your PC’, classifies DRM along with worms and viruses as all being specifically intended to remove control of a computer from the user/owner. This is a particularly succinct quote: “When technology serves its owners, it […]
Is design political?
Over at Core77, the Design Council’s Jennie Winhall has written a thought-provoking essay, “Is design political?”, looking at the links between design and politics, and how design can be used to shape behaviour for political ends:
Philips: You MUST watch these adverts
Via Jack Yan’s excellent Persuader Blog, news of a patent application filed by Philips which would prevent television viewers either changing channel during commercial breaks, or fast-forwarding through the adverts when watching recorded shows.
Making criminals
An interesting quote for a Friday afternoon, from Ayn Rand’s 1957 Atlas Shrugged:
Self-erasing mp3 player: Don’t give ’em ideas!
In a comment on a Boing Boing post about RFID ‘viruses’, Ben Giddings makes an interesting aside:
‘Techno world has MPs beat’ – Guardian
Particularly in reference to the ID card issue, but relevant also to the creeping pervasion of deleterious architectures of control and their sanction by governments, a nice quote from a Guardian article:
Digital media ’empowering users’
According to a BBC Monitoring story brim-full of buzz-words and vague rhetoric – Digital media ’empowering users’:
Another dystopian vision
I should have posted this very impressive piece last month, but forgot, so here it is: ‘Burnoff: Part 1 – The Bad Guys Win’ by Tarmle.
Richard Stallman’s ‘Right To Read’ dystopia growing closer every day
We seem to be accelerating towards the nightmare vision presented by Richard Stallman in his 1997 article, ‘The Right to Read’, ninety years too early, and investigated so thoroughly by Cambridge’s Ross Anderson. (See also here for more discussion of DRM and ‘trusted’ computing).
Anti-teenager sound weapon: more comments
This post from last year has been getting a lot of hits over the last few days due to more media coverage of the story – come on & join in the comment debate: Anti-teenager sound weapon in Wales
‘Value of your home to be determined by the “freedom” your gadgets exhibit’
In a piece examining GPL v.3 and Linus Torvalds’ recent comments (‘If Linus snubs new GPL, is that it for ‘open source’?’), Andrew Orlowski discusses an idea put to him by a “GPL 3.0 advocate”:
“Sign software on the digital line”
Bill Thompson, of the BBC’s ‘Go Digital’ programme, sets out very clearly (‘Sign software on the digital line’) many of the issues involved with ‘trusted computing’ and forcing the use of signed software.