Category Archives: Technology

Cameras, and a death on the subway

Media, Technology, , , , , , , , ,
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYHS03F7W4Y]

UPDATE BELOW (12/4/2012 8:52 PM EST).

Yesterday afternoon, Ki-Suck Han, a 58-year-old man from Queens, was pushed onto the subway tracks at the 49th Street station and then killed as he was struck by an arriving train. As it happened, a New York Post photographer was on the scene and snapped some photos of the approaching train just moments before it struck the man.

The photographer later told the paper a rather self-serving story about what had taken place:

Post freelance photographer R. Umar Abbasi — who had been waiting on the platform of the 49th Street station — ran toward the train, repeatedly firing off his flash to warn the operator.

“I just started running, running, hoping that the driver could see my flash,” said Abbasi, whose camera captured chilling shots of Suk’s tragic fight for his life.

The train slowed, but a dazed and bruised Han still wound up hopelessly caught between it and the platform as it came to a halt.

A shaken Abbasi said the train “crushed him like a rag doll.”

It’s possible that Abbasi’s version of the events is accurate, although flashing the camera at the train operator A) doesn’t seem to be the most obvious or helpful way of preventing the man’s death, and B) is remarkably convenient, considering the fact that the pictures Abbasi snapped while “repeatedly firing off his flash” just so happened to be perfectly framed photos of the situation, one of which made its way to the front page of today’s Post, accompanied by the grossly irreverent headliner text: “Pushed on the subway track, this man is about to die — DOOMED.”

What I find also quite distressing is the above surveillance video released by the New York Police Department. It depicts the suspect and victim arguing just before the fatal incident. But the video itself is shocking, to me at least, for two main reasons: 1) the fact that the audio is of such high quality, despite the video camera being quite far removed from the action, and 2) the seemingly non-automatic movement of the camera itself, which whirs rapidly from the left to focus on the arguing duo but continues to shake as if it’s a handheld camcorder.

It’s unclear where and how this camera was used (presumably, it’s on some sort of closed-circuit system, although the movements certainly don’t corroborate a hypothesis of an automatically-operated ceiling camera). But the high-quality audio and unsteady movements (implying a human element of some kind, perhaps?) suggest that subway users may have substantial surveillance concerns to worry about, in addition to the obvious (but highly improbable) horror of being pushed onto the tracks.

UPDATE: The New York Times has issued a correction regarding the above issue:

An earlier version of this post mischaracterized a video that the police released. The video was taken by a passenger on the platform on her phone; it was not a surveillance video.

Disappearing the Internet

Politics, Technology, , , , ,

Ezra Klein takes a look at how difficult it would be for the government to shut off the Internet in various countries, as the nation of Syria just did on Thursday:

There are 61 nations, including Syria and Libya and even Greenland, where there are only one or two providers connecting people to the outside world. “Under those circumstances,” Cowie writes, “it’s almost trivial for a government to issue an order that would take down the Internet. Make a few phone calls, or turn off power in a couple of central facilities, and you’ve (legally) disconnected the domestic Internet from the global Internet.”

But countries with a more diversified Internet infrastructure are harder to cut off. It took Hosni Mubarak’s government a few days to shut down Egypt’s Internet. And a blackout is even harder to pull off in countries like Mexico and India. (It’s interesting to see that China is ranked as a “low risk” countries. As James Fallowsreported a few years ago, the Chinese government was able to set up its “Great Firewall” to censor the Internet in part because most of the country’s access runs through fiber-optic cables at just three points.)

Meanwhile, it would be nearly impossible for a government to shut down the entire Internet in the United States or Western Europe. “There are just too many paths into and out of the country,” Cowie writes, “too many independent providers who would have to be coerced or damaged, to make a rapid countrywide shutdown plausible to execute.”

Related articles

Finally, a reason to visit the museum

Miscellaneous, Technology, , , , , , , , , , ,

New York’s Museum of Modern Art is now featuring video games:

In a blog post by curator Paola Antonelli, it was announced that the museum has acquired and will exhibit games including Pac-Man, Tetris, Out of This World, Myst, SimCity, Vib-Ribbon, The Sims, Katamari Damacy, EVE Online, Dwarf Fortress, Portal, flOw,Passage and Canabalt.

“Are video games art?” asks Antonelli. “They sure are, but they are also design, and a design approach is what we chose for this new foray into this universe. The games are selected as outstanding examples of interaction design — a field that MoMA has already explored and collected extensively, and one of the most important and oft-discussed expressions of contemporary design creativity.”

The games will be exhibited as part of the museum’s Architecture and Design collection. It plans to add 26 additional games, to bring the total to around 40 in the near future, including Pong, Snake, Space Invaders, Asteroids, Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda and Minecraft.

The games are selected based not only on their visual quality, but the elegance of the code and the design of the player’s behavior. They were looking for games that combined historical and cultural relevance as well as innovative approaches to technology. The curators have consulted scholars, critics and digital conservation experts to understand how to display and conserve these digital, interactive artifacts.

iTunes gets a facelift

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Courtesy of Mashable.com.

But Slate tech writer Farhad Manjoo is more frustrated with the music software than ever, and he has corralled quite the imaginative narrative style to register his annoyance:

I picture frazzled engineers growing increasingly alarmed as they discover that the iTunes codebase has been overrun by some kind of self-replicating virus that keeps adding random features and redesigns. The coders can’t figure out what’s going on—why iTunes, alone among Apple products, keeps growing more ungainly. At the head of the team is a grizzled old engineer who’s been at Apple forever. He’s surly and crude, always making vulgar jokes about iPads. But the company can’t afford to get rid of him—he’s the only one who understands how to operate the furnaces in the iTunes boiler room.

Then one morning the crew hears a strange clanging from iTunes’ starboard side. Scouts report that an ancient piston—something added for compatibility with the U2 iPod and then refashioned dozens of times—has been damaged while craftsmen removed the last remnants of a feature named Ping whose purpose has been lost to history. The old engineer dons his grease-covered overalls and heads down to check it out. Many anxious minutes pass. Then the crew is shaken by a huge blast. A minute later, they hear a lone, muffled wail. They send a medic, but it’s too late. The engineer has been battered by shrapnel from the iOS app management system, which is always on the fritz. His last words haunt the team forever: She can’t take much more of this. Too. Many. Features.

Anyway, so iTunes 11 finally hit the Internet today.

Mini-robots playing “Fur Elise?” Yup, this must be 2012

Technology, , , , , , ,
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YigAzrFoN3E]

Wired has more:

Here’s how it works: A single “leader” bot knows the score and the positions other robots must be in to play the right notes at the right time. The leader sends this information to the robots closest to it, directing them to the appropriate positions on the virtual keyboard. Those robots, in turn, relay the information to the bots closest to them, mimicking the swarming behavior of insects.

The researchers hope to make the robots as efficient as possible by minimizing the distance traveled by each bot and using the fewest robots possible at any given time. This means the slower the tempo of the song, the fewer robots playing, and vice versa.

Are newspapers about to absorb another blow?

Media, Technology, , , , , ,

That’s what Steven Brill at Reuters is thinking:

The Times article describes the rise of “programmatic advertising,” in which new online tracking technologies allow an advertiser to follow a consumer whose profile fits the advertiser’s targeted demographics wherever the consumer goes online rather than just make an educated guess about the websites that consumer is most likely to visit.

Before programmatic advertising, if an upscale restaurant chain decided that its best prospects were well-to-do men who live in major metropolitan areas and travel a lot, it might buy ads in the business sections of high-end newspapers or on business travel sites. Now the restaurant chain can follow those targeted people to any website they visit. It doesn’t have to buy ads on the sites where the target is most likely to be found but can instead simply bid on an electronic ad exchange to buy the cheapest ad that will reach someone with those demographics no matter where he or she goes (a gossip site, for example).

This erodes the premium  upscale newspaper sites can charge. The individual consumer is what’s important and now identifiable, not the place where he sees the ad.

Thus, the Times reports in this article, “The shift is punishing traditional online publishers,” and that online advertising revenue at its own newspaper actually fell 2.2 percent in the last quarter as a result of a decline in the rates the Times is able to charge for Web advertising. That’s a trend reflected lately in the results of most other major newspapers.

In other words, on the heels of the Internet having destroyed the readership and advertising revenue of printed newspapers, further advances in digital technology now threaten the papers’ digital ad business.

David Petraeus lives on — in Call of Duty: Black Ops II

Humor, Technology, , , , , ,

From Foreign Policy:

Like many of us, the makers of Call of Duty: Black Ops II, which goes on sale this week, apparently didn’t see the David Petraeus sex scandal coming. As Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo reports, Activision’s much-anticipated video game casts the former general and CIA chief as the U.S. secretary of defense in 2025, serving a female president who, according to Totilo, “looks a whole lot like Hillary Clinton” (I don’t see the resemblance as much, and Petraeus refers to “President Bosworth” at one point):

At least Petraeus wasn’t spending his off-hours at the CIA working on the game, though maybe that would have helped him avoid his current jam. A rep for Call of Duty: Black Ops II publisher says Petraeus was “not involved in making the game.” Actor and political impressionist Jim Meskimen is credited with voicing the game’s Secretary of Defense.

Minor Black Ops II spoilers follow.

Petraeus doesn’t do much in the game, and there’s no sign of Paula Broadwell, the woman with whom Petraeus had his affair. When we first see Petraeus, he’s receiving a terrorist prisoner on board the [USS Barack] Obama. Another mission in the game starts with Petraeus and the Clinton-esque President Bosworth on board a futuristic version of Marine One before it is shot down over L.A. The crash should kill everyone, but this is Call of Duty. The important people tend to survive. We don’t see Petraeus again, but an audio message indicates that he survived.

You can check out the scenes Totilo describes here. Call of Duty, of course, wasn’t alone in predicting a bright political future for the general. After the election, a number of assessments of who would compose President Obama’s second-term national security team — including one at FP– floated Petraeus’s name.

And hey, a decade from now the folks at Activision could have the last laugh. If the long history of political scandals has taught us anything, it’s that we may not have seen the last of David Petraeus.

The right to be forgotten

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During my studies in Paris this past academic year, I took a class called “Security and Technology.” My particular project contrasted European conceptions of online privacy with those of their American counterparts. One of the most fascinating elements of the European approach is the recent push for a “right to be forgotten,” as proposed by Viviane Reding, vice president of the European Commission. Essentially, the doctrine stipulates that everyone should have a right to permanently eliminate private information about themselves if they so desire.

So it is in this vein that Simson L. Garfinkel’s article for the MIT Technology Review takes a peek at the possible future of initiatives like these:

In fact, it’s hard to imagine a system that could index all of the world’s information thoroughly enough to allow someone exercising the “right to be forgotten” to track down and eradicate every regrettable message or photo. More likely, the mechanisms to find that data would cause more privacy violations than they would prevent.

A better solution could be a set of standards for labeling the provenance of information on the Internet. It would be somewhat like the way Facebook requires application developers to keep checking back to see whether personal information is still acceptable to use. It would also take advantage of the privacy-protecting steps that other sites like Twitter and Yahoo sometimes are willing to take for their users.

This could be done using the HTML microdata standard being developed. It is still evolving, but this standard will expand the ways that information in Web pages can be represented in their underlying HTML code. For example, the microdata could include tags designed to facilitate privacy tracking and the retraction of privacy-sensitive information. So if you persuaded a website to take down information because it violates the site’s terms of service, that website could automatically notify others that have made copies of your information, informing them that the license to use the data has been revoked.

Trees of the world, rejoice!

Media, Technology, , , , , ,

Newsweek is shutting down its print version at the end of the year:

Tina Brown, founder of the Daily Beast Web site and the driving force behind its merger with Newsweek, announced the move on Thursday in a message on the Daily Beast.

“We are announcing this morning an important development at Newsweek and The Daily Beast. Newsweek will transition to an all-digital format in early 2013. As part of this transition, the last print edition in the United States will be our Dec. 31 issue,” Ms. Brown said in a message co-written with Baba Shetty, the recently hired chief executive.

The all-digital version of the magazine will be called Newsweek Global and operate on a paid subscription model. The name Newsweek, in spite of its trouble in print, still has value in terms of international licensing, as well as several conferences Ms. Brown has created.

Andrew Sullivan, whose Dish blog is part of the Tina Brown-run Daily Beast family that controls Newsweek, gives his take:

…[W]hen asked my opinion at Newsweek about print and digital, I urged taking the plunge as quickly as possible. Look: I chose  digital over print 12 years ago, when I shifted my writing gradually online, with this blog and now blogazine. Of course a weekly newsmagazine on paper seems nuts to me. But it takes guts to actually make the change. An individual can, overnight. An institution is far more cumbersome. Which is why, I believe, institutional brands will still be at a disadvantage online compared with personal ones. There’s a reason why Drudge Report and the Huffington Post are named after human beings. It’s because when we read online, we migrate to read people, not institutions. Social media has only accelerated this development, as everyone with a Facebook page now has a mini-blog, and articles or posts or memes are sent by email or through social networks or Twitter.

And as magazine stands disappear as relentlessly as bookstores, I also began to wonder what a magazine really is. Can it even exist online? It’s a form that’s only really been around for three centuries – and it was based on a group of people associating with each other under a single editor and bound together with paper and staples. At The New Republic in the 1990s, I knew intuitively that most people read TRB, the Diarist and the Notebook before they dug into a 12,000 word review of a book on medieval Jewish mysticism. But they were all in it together. You couldn’t just buy Kinsley’s perky column. It came physically attached to Leon Wieseltier’s sun-blocking ego.

But since every page on the web is now as accessible as every other page, how do you connect writers together with paper and staples, instead of having readers pick individual writers or pieces and ignore the rest? And the connection between writers and photographers and editors is what a magazine is. It defines it – and yet that connection is now close to gone. Around 70 percent of Dish readers have this page bookmarked and come to us directly. (If you read us all the time and haven’t, please do). You can’t sell bundles anymore; and online, it’s hard to sell anything intangible, i.e. words, because the supply is infinite. You no longer control the gate through which readers have to pass and advertizers get to sponsor. No gateway, no magazine, no revenue – and massive costs in print, paper and mailing.

I know a bit about these things, having edited a weekly magazine on paper for five years and running this always-on blogazine for twelve. It’s a different universe now. And to me, the Beast’s decision to put Newsweek Global on a tablet and kill the print edition is absolutely the right one. To do it now also makes sense. To have done it two years ago would have been even better. Why wait?

Felix Salmon is, shall we say, less than convinced that this move is going to work out:

It’s hard to make money in journalism, and even harder to make money in print journalism. But here’s what I don’t understand: invariably, every time a print publication fails, it announces that it’s not going to die, it’s just going to “transition to an all-digital format”. Newsweek, of course, is no exception. But this is supposed to be the clear-eyed, hard-hearted world of Barry Diller:

If doesn’t work out? Move on! “Sell it, write it off, go on to the next thing,” he says.

Once upon a time, Newsweek was a license to print money; from here on in, it will be a drain and a distraction. Merging it into the Daily Beast never made a huge amount of sense, and now it’s being de-merged: instead, its journalism “will be supported by paid subscription and will be available through e-readers for both tablet and the Web”. Some of it, I guess, will be syndicated to the Daily Beast.

The chances that Newsweek will succeed as a digital-only subscription-based publication are exactly zero.

Well, I suppose we’ll always have TIME for covers like these.