Category Archives: Technology

I Know Where Your Cat Lives

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cats

(photo: author)

Owen Mundy, artist and teacher at Florida State University, has used the metadata attached to photos posted on the internet to track where a million of the world’s cats live, and he’s put their home lairs on an interactive world map. According to Mundy, the web has some 15 million images tagged with the word “cat,” with more uploaded every minute.

If this strange project were only about cats, Mundy’s experiment wouldn’t have received the media attention he’s been getting. Rather, the point of his experiment is to show how easily the locational coordinates embedded in these publicly shared photos can be extracted and linked to (pretty) precise locations.

When you look at the map, you see the streets and rooftops of houses and apartment buildings and back yards that are homes to these charming felines and their amusing antics, but anyone else—say, megacorporations who want to sell you something and scrape every scrap of information about you—are more interested in the cat owners. You watch the cat. They watch you holding the cat. You see the cat playing. They see the inside of your living room. Well, not my living room, Grant and Sherman’s picture isn’t on the map, but 22 other Princeton cats are. I’m going to take a look.

What first appears as an amusing meditation on the prevalence of fur turns into a biting commentary on privacy.

Thanks, Autocorrect!

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Though at times we pound our tiny screens screaming that autocorrect must have sprung full-grown from the forehead of Satan, this devil’s spawn actually has a long history, and Gideon Lewis-Kraus recounted it recently in Wired. The mistakes are shared, sometimes hilarious, and may eventually bring back proofreading, but maybe not.

According to Lewis-Kraus, “the real marvel of our mobile text-correction systems is how astoundingly good they are.” He believes they’ve enabled us to text so much, we of the “podgy fingers” and dimmest memories of sixth grade spelling tests. Our tiny keypads are possible “only when we have some serious software to tidy up after us.” Then, in a scary revelation, Lewis-Kraus admits he typed the whole first draft of his book (doesn’t say which) on a phone.

princess

(photo: c2.staticflickr.com)

Then man behind autocorrect is Microsoft’s Dean Hachamovitch. He began his Microsoft career in the early 1990’s on the Word team and wanted to make typing “sleek and invisible.” His crew began with enabling fixes for common typing errors, which is why every time I abbreviate electronic health record EHR, Word “fixes” it for me. (And, yes, I’ve tried to add EHR it to my personal dictionary.) And there were consequences. Hachamovitch spoke to his daughter’s third-grade class and showed the youngsters how to make auto-fixes, and afterward received parental emails saying things like, “Thanks, but whenever I try to type my daughter’s name it automatically transforms into ‘the pretty princess.’”

Autocorrect’s developers went with primary spellings (judgment, not judgement—take that, Brits!), declined to give suggestions for correct spelling of vulgarities (ignore them), released their baby, and soon laid bare its eccentricities. Linguist now use the word cupertino as a term of art for autocorrection with incorrect words, after older spellcheckers repeatedly replaced “cooperation” with the name of Apple’s home town. Regrettably, my own last name (“Weisfeld”) more than once went out on the bottom of letters with its automatic replacement “Weaseled.”

Don’t abandon hope. Improvements still coming. Meanwhile, here’s the Damn You Autocorrect Hall of Fame.

 

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“Pulling the trigger is easy”

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Russian missile, Malaysia Airlines

Russian Buk missiles (photo: wikipedia)

Discovery of “shrapnel-like holes” on pieces of the fuselage of downed Malaysia Airlines flight 17 adds to evidence suggesting it was shot down using Russian Buk missile technology (which NATO calls the SA-11). A Wired article by Alex Davies reveals just how easy that would be. Says Davies, “The weapon in question is the SA-11, a radar-guided surface to air missile (SAM) system.” The system is mobile, as it was designed to protect troops near the front line from fighter jet attacks. It can hit targets up to twenty miles away and higher than 70,000 feet. It requires a crew of just four.

Once the system is set up, that crew doesn’t need much training to use it. It’s knowing what to fire at that takes the skill, because “the SA-11’s radar system shows the same ‘blip’ for all different targets,” Davies writes. He quotes Paul Huter a Lockheed-Martin aerospace engineer: “Once the radar picks up a target, it is a matter of telling the system that it should engage the target and issuing a fire command.” Another interviewee compared it to firing a gun. “Pulling the trigger is easy. Judgment is hard.”

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A Quandary

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Bitcoins

(photo: Mike Cauldwell, Creative Commons)

Can I escape this post with my First Amendment advocacy credentials intact? Doubtful.

Talking to so many accomplished writers trying mightily to get published, I’ve about decided blind luck is the key ingredient in the publication lottery. Then, in the midst of a long Wired story by Andy Greenberg on crypto-anarchy, one sentence snags my attention: Simon & Schuster has paid Cody Wilson $250,000—a figure a vanishingly small number of authors see these days—to write his memoir.

Who is Cody Wilson you ask? And why does he move to the head of the line, the top of the heap? You may recognize his name as the 26-year-old creator of the world’s first fully 3-D printable gun, which I wrote about here in May. Blueprints of his useable firearm were downloaded more than 100,000 times in two days.

Wilson is also co-creator of Dark Wallet, software intended to enable fully anonymous, untraceable online payments using bitcoins. The software’s purpose is to let people anonymously trade in weapons, drugs, pornography, and general mayhem, and Wilson drapes his creation in the flag of the First Amendment. Untraceable and untouchable, he and his lawyers hope.

Since bitcoins are an international phenomenon, it’s no surprise that Iraq’s newest crop of super-violent, decapitation-loving jihadi fighters, ISIS, selectively aware of the 21st century, touts Dark Wallet as a way to fund their activities.

Wilson takes his anarchic role in stride. “Well, yes, bad things are going to happen on these marketplaces,” he says. “To quote the old civil libertarians, liberty is a dangerous thing.”

More questions for Simon & Schuster: Can he write? Does it even matter?

(if you click on either of the related links below, be sure to visit the comments.)

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Writing in A Digital Age

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book ereader Kindle

(photo: upload.wikimedia.org)

Last week in London, the Literary Consultancy held its third Writing in a Digital Age conference. Participants heard the usual hand-wringing over the issues of digital rights management, the decline in bookstores, especially independents, and the attention-sucks of our various digital tools and devices. Panelists discussed the irony that the gadgets developed to expand reading are the very same ones that can reduce it, if what we use them for is interrupting our reading time to play a game, send an email, scan Facebook, tweet a half-formed thought, watch a YouTube cat video, and check the current weather in Paris. One speaker called them digital Trojan horses.

And while these de rigueur arguments are familiar, echoing past concerns that television would be the end of radio, and video would be the end of movies, one statement by panelist Steve Bohme, who manages the Books and Consumers survey for Nielsen, sent a chill from my toes to the roots of my hair: “When everyone you know has a Kindle, why would you buy them a book?” No more buying (and receiving) books as presents? Oh, no!

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You’ve Been Hacked!

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government spying, cell phone, mobile phone, law enforcement surveillance

(photo: upload.wikimedia.org)

So how do cops and spooks steal data from your mobile phone, anyway? Research teams at the Kaspersky Lab in Russia and Toronto’s Citizen Lab independently analyzed a digital surveillance tool created by the Italian Company, Hacking Team (do watch this marketing video if you want something to think about), which more than 60 government worldwide use to snatch and record mobile phone data. The tool’s components have been designed to target Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry users—one of whom is probably you.

According to a lengthy Wired article by Kim Zetter, here’s what the Hacking Team’s tool can do: collect your emails, text messages, call history, and address books; log keystrokes, reveal where you’ve searched, and take screenshots; record audio of calls and the ambient sounds in the room where the phone is; and use the phone’s camera to take pictures of the surroundings. No surprise, the tool can use the phone’s GPS system to locate it (and probably, you, too). In other words, the tool can do with the phone pretty much everything you can.

What’s new about these revelations is that this is the first time these techniques have been reverse-engineered to reveal how they really work, including how they protect themselves from detection. Here’s a blog post about these discoveries from Russian researcher Sergey Golovanov.

film noir, spies

(photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

Spies following each other through the wetly reflecting nighttime alleys of Eastern Europe will be relegated to film noir, since the above functions let a tracker follow you to that screening of 1984 and home again from some remote center. Most countries using this technology have one or two command-and-control centers to monitor multiple targets and conduct surveillance. The nation with by far the most such centers? The United States, with 64.

The genie is out of the bottle, however, and “This type of exceptionally invasive toolkit, once a costly boutique capability deployed by intelligence communities and militaries, is now being marketed for targeting everyday criminality and ‘security threats,’” say Citizen Lab researchers. Inevitably, people who shouldn’t have it, will.

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****Spycraft

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Desmond Llewelyn, Q, James Bond, Spycraft

Desmond Llewelyn as “Q” (photo: wikimedia.org)

By Robert Wallace, H. Keith Melton, and Henry Robert Schlesinger. Foreword by George Tenet, narration by David Drummond. The digitization and miniaturization everywhere in our daily lives has affected tradecraft in the espionage world, too—and sometimes began there before entering the consumer market. Initially, the CIA tried to heavily censor Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA’s Spytechs, from Communism to Al-Qaeda, but eventually ended up making almost no changes. The book details the history of the Agency’s Office of Technical Services—the department that, since World War II, has come up with all the dead drops, audio surveillance techniques, secret inks, espionage gear, and so on needed by field agents. Q, in other words.

Co-authored by a former OTS director, Spycraft begins with a review of cases involving some of the most notorious and significant, mostly Soviet, spies run by the CIA, then turns to a detailed review of various spycraft essentials and what makes them work—or not—in the field. The history of the Soviet spies, most of whom were discovered and executed, provides an appreciation for the steady improvements in technology, though it’s pretty much a mug’s game, because improvements in detection soon follow. The challenge is to remain one step ahead. I didn’t come away with a satisfactory answer to the key question: with all this amazing technology, how come the CIA has missed the big plays? 9/11, Iraq’s true WMD situation, the Arab Spring?

For anyone writing spy and espionage fiction, Spycraft summarizes innumerable backstory issues and technical details that must be right! But beyond these specifics, the choice of what OTS worked on and how the technical officers solved problems reveals the dilemmas faced by field agents. Other readers may simply be amazed at the scope and persistence of this clandestine effort. (Amazon reader rating: 4.5 stars.)

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Automotive Report: LeMans Update

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car

(photo: author)

UPDATE: There’s a link to pix of last weekend’s 24-hour LeMans race, below, but New Jersey cars, not to be outdone, show real personality! The most recent parking lot find: the eyelash car. Remember the cars whose headlights would rotate closed when not in use? One of them wouldn’t be working right and would close only partway, making the car look half-asleep, when in New Jersey, that privilege is reserved for the driver.

carI’m intrigued by what the person with the do-it-yourself woodie is trying to accomplish.

Is he creating a lumber exoskeleton to give his vehicle some extra protection from his fellow drivers? Pointing out the inadequacy of materials or imagination in Toyota’s design? Making an artistic statement? And, is the upside-down Toyota emblem an international symbol of automotive distress?

 

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Hackers in the Hospital

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Innocent-looking bedside computer!(photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

Innocent-looking bedside computer!(photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

Seven years after the Vice President Dick Cheney’s cardiac defibrillator was disconnected from the net to protect him from a wireless attack, hospitals have done little-to-nothing about the security problems in a myriad of medical equipment and devices, according to a recent Wired article by Kim Zetter. Worse, they seem unaware of the risks.

The defibrillator problem resurfaced in a 2012 episode of Homeland, but the thriller-writing community has yet to explore the full horror of this catastrophe in waiting. The problem? All the old familiars: hard-coded passwords, simple easily-guessed passwords, problem notification features that can be turned off, and lack of authentication systems. With equipment networked to provide medical records with test and x-ray results, placing false information in the record is comparatively easy. Even if equipment and devices aren’t themselves connected to the internet, the easily hacked internal systems they are connected to may be externally accessible—and certainly internally accessible if one employee responds to a phishing attack.

Additional examples of potentially lethal equipment hacks include: changes to morphine or other drug dosages delivered to patients via drug infusion pumps; adjustments to temperature settings on refrigerators that store blood and drugs; and alterations in electronic medical records.

It might be difficult to target specific patients with such rogue equipment and documentation changes, at present, but “random attacks causing collateral damage would be fairly easy to pull off,” the article reports. Some devices, unique to an individual, such as the implantable defibrillators, are targetable now.

Medical thrillers using these vulnerabilities as plot devices might do an inadvertent public service by sensitizing hospitals and the public to the risks.

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Have an iOS 7.1 Device?

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Stan Douglas, Circa 1948

Stan Douglas’s exquisitely rendered mystery (photo: docubase.mit.edu)

If you do, you can explore an art project/mystery tale entered in this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Circa 1948 is a 3-D film noir-inspired multimedia project by Canadian Stan Douglas, who set the work—which was meticulously rendered, not photographed—in two post-war Vancouver neighborhoods. The project lets the viewer to pursue the narrative, where “you’re sort of always in the middle.” Unlike a game, there is no externally defined goal; it’s an exploration of the case of a woman falsely accused of murdering her husband. A mystery, like life. It’s getting ***** on the iTunes app store.

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