There could be even more privacy issues than "they can see my cat." For example, the link provided here shows a car sitting in a driveway, and you can read the car's license plate clearly. I don't know exactly what you could do with that information, but there it is.

Interesting discussion in regard to the new Google Maps feature... Did their van capture any information someone might not want known? What is the next step for this?

Boing Boing: Google Maps is spying on my cat, says freaked out BB reader

Being crazy is hard, but it's worth the effort. Especially if you're a cop, paramedic, or social worker who may someday need to deal with a person having a psychotic episode. At those times, empathy can be crucial.

That's where Virtual Hallucinations comes in. The training device, created by Janssen L.P., is a rig with earphones and goggles that plunges the wearer into the mind of a serious schizophrenic. The system offers two interactive scenarios. In one, you're riding a bus in which other riders appear and disappear, birds of prey claw at the windows, and voices hiss, "He's taking you back to the FBI!" The other features a trip to the drugstore, where the pharmacist seems to be handing you poison instead of pills, and hostile customers stare at you in disgust.

I can't wait till this comes out for the Wii!

Virtual Hallucinating Device Drives Police Insane for a Day

HD-DVD or BlueRay?

We still don't know why Verio/NTT gave Cryptome.org the boot, but John Young says he's found a new home for the controversial government-secrets repository: Network Solutions. NetSol was once owned by spooky government contractor SAIC, which would seem to make it a poor choice for hosting Cryptome.

This might not actually be a problem. The government didn't want NetSol, they wanted Verisign. Time will tell.

Cryptome Back

k wrote:

The University of Portland handed a one-year suspension to engineering major and Air Force ROTC member Michael Maass after he wrote a computer program designed to replace and improve Cisco Clean Access (CCA).

Its worth mentioning here that this "vulnerability" isn't really a bug or flaw in the software, nor was this "discovery" particularly new. This is how CCA is designed to work. It keeps honest people honest. It is not "secure" against people who lie about their setup, nor could it be, without some sort of "trusted computing" system installed non-consentually on student computers that kept them from controlling the software they were running through cryptographic integrity checks controlled by the University.

RE: Student suspended for bypassing network security - News

Essentially, the devices plug "directly into the processor socket of dual- or quad-socket servers" in order to provide "high performance application acceleration ranging from 10x to 100x compared to processors alone, while simultaneously reducing overall system power consumption."

I've been talking about this for years. Cool announcement.

Xilinx, Altera showing off FPGA coprocessors at IDF - Engadget

Neurobiologically realistic, large-scale cortical and sub-cortical simulations are bound to play a key role in computational neuroscience and its applications to cognitive computing. One hemisphere of the mouse cortex has roughly 8,000,000 neurons and 8,000 synapses per neuron. Modeling at this scale imposes tremendous constraints on computation, communication, and memory capacity of any computing platform.

We have designed and implemented a massively parallel cortical simulator with (a) phenomenological spiking neuron models; (b) spike-timing dependent plasticity; and (c) axonal delays.

We deployed the simulator on a 4096-processor BlueGene/L supercomputer with 256 MB per CPU. We were able to represent 8,000,000 neurons (80% excitatory) and 6,300 synapses per neuron in the 1 TB main memory of the system. Using a synthetic pattern of neuronal interconnections, at a 1 ms resolution and an average firing rate of 1 Hz, we were able to run 1s of model time in 10s of real time!

I'm sorry Dave....

Open the Future: The Early Signs of the Long Tomorrow

A new project from the author of Witko.

Who at the NSA uses Gmail?
Which NASA employees are using Myspace/LinkedIn?
Which people in Kabul are using Skype?

This is some interesting code.

He also claims to be working on an automated identity hijacking capability.

Evolution

Google had been using satellite images of New Orleans that accurately showed broken levees, flooding and repair efforts. But in the new shots of the Big Easy, cranes, tarps and all indicators of human suffering have disappeared, giving the city the look of a "virtual Potemkin village," according to the AP.

Rep. Brad Miller (D-North Carolina), the chairman of the House Science Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight called the photo swap "airbrushing history" and a "great injustice" to Katrina victims. Miller on Friday asked (.pdf) Google CEO Eric Schmidt to explain why the images were replaced.

Google is innocent. They upgraded to higher resolution pictures that happened to be older. However, the fact that this caused such a stir signifies the importance of public access to satellite imagery, which is itself a fairly recent development. I want GoreSat.

Google Maps update sitrs Katrina drama

Bruce Sterling wants to fund the Industrial Memetics Institute.

"I'm shocked that I understood every damn thing Benkler's saying. Online experiences need to be granular, modular, and integratable. Furthermore, I didn't know about self-selection, humanization, and trust construction. I'd love to see that industrialized. Norm creation, transparency, peer review, discipline, yeah, all of that's lacking today. Internet institutions lack sustainability. They have the lifetime of my skin. They get bought out. The available platforms for self-expression are terrible. I use seven word processors, all of them terrible."

"Why are social applications businesses? Why aren't they political parties?"

"I hang out at a lot of gigs like this. Everybody's sticking it to the man; nobody's the man. What if the state of Vermont gets metal-spined ubiquitous broadband? If it leaks over state borders, are you going to sell connectivity? Will they make sure nobody in New Hampshire can 'steal' Wi-fi? What if New Hampshire becomes the next Baltic-style e-state, the next Estonia?"

What you build, you cannot contain or control. "I'm a cyberpunk. Information wants to be free. It used to be hard to find, but Google was my apotheosis. We now have this unbelievable tidal wave of information. There's no end to it. It's endlessly seductive. Suddenly, your skills at ferreting out obscure information are almost worthless. Now they don't want to pay you. I say, follow your bliss. I spend more time with Google now than with novels and magazines. I'm swimming in it. I'm marinating it."

"Follow your bliss into the abyss. That's my new bumper sticker. This is the abyss. This is where my explorations led me. You guys are the denizens of the abyss. I strap on my diver helmet and go into the internet as far as you can go. You're the guys laying the pipe. It's a cyberpunk Mariana Trench in this room. I have to cheer you. Thank you for having us here."

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