Radar Waves

uh oh: yahoo ad insertion sftwr fails to catch tasteless juxtaposition

Catching up on my boingboing (been busy finishing the dissertation and moderating a panel at the millenials conference). came across a creepy item about a real-life andromeda strain scenario, in which peruvians near a recent meteor strike came down with a strange illness - perfect for my not-so-unique combination of technogeekery, hypochondria, and paranoid dystopian apocalyptic visions.

so i checked out the article on yahoo! news, and was astonished to see the netflix ad inserted into the page, which overpowers the actual (boring) photo that accompanies the story. in the netflix ad, ghoulish, decomposed faces grin and snarl menacingly from the frame. they look exactly like they've been hit with an interstellar flesh-eating zombie virus.

maybe there should be some editorial oversight over ad placement, after all...

Why the iPhone is like Barack Obama

After careful consideration, I've decided that I feel very similarly about two new products that have been recently introduced to the American market: the iPhone and Barack Obama. I don't have time for a thorough, prosaic explanation, so for now, I'll reduce it to the language of the board room meetings that no doubt produced them both -- bullet points.

PROS
- black (in a field where white has been the norm)
- sexy
- sounds great
- light years ahead of the competitors

CONS
- functionality hindered by necessary but regrettable attachment to a bloated, corrupt legacy organization that controls access to consumers
- first generation product; unproven in a real-world environment

FINAL ANALYSIS
- i want to believe, but i'm still skeptical
- will wait until next generation deployment, when the bugs are ironed out, before i decide to adopt

UPDATE: Apparently I'm not the first one to make this comparison (thanks, Eliot!)

 

 

Hoax alert: From the annals of misunderestimation: the PC circa 2004

I love this photo of RAND corporation's mock-up (in 1954) of what a home computer might look like in 2004. As a professional prognosticator, I'm used to getting things wrong, but so far I don't think I've ever gotten anything this wrong. Kind of makes me feel better about my digital music projections circa 1999.

Thanks for the pic, Masha!

UPDATE: Speaking of getting things wrong, I've been duped! Wally Baer, former RAND guy, says:

Sorry to disappoint, aram, but the picture is an urban legend hoax that
circulates every few months or years and has nothing to do with RAND  It's
actually a montage of several images, as described at

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/computer.asp

However, it's certainly apropos to your interest in remix.

Wally

Happy Wiretap Day

According to the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), today is the deadline by which network operators -- everyone who provides Internet service to businesses and consumers -- have to install "back doors" making it easier for the FBI to spy on American citizens. This is yet another nail in the coffin of American civil liberties, and a very dangerous check on free expression, not to mention the security and commercial viability of the Internet. As Wired succinctly explains:

Making surveillance easier and faster gives law enforcement agencies of all stripes more reason to eschew old-fashioned police work in favor of spying. The telephone CALEA compliance deadline was in 2002, and since then the amount of court-ordered surveillance has nearly doubled from 2,586 applications granted that year, to 4,015 orders in 2006.

Of course, we still have the right to encrypt our communications. We suggest using tools such as the TorPark browsing anonymizer (a small but effective add-on for the Mozilla Firefox browser), and GnuPG, a free and easy-to-use encryption tool that works on documents, emails, IMs, or just about anything.

Mash-ups... They're not just for kids any more!

YouTube star and octogenarian sweetheart Sue Teller has posted a "how-to" video for making musical mash-ups. We're not sure what to make of this; has configurable culture gone from bleeding-edge to the granny set without passing Go or collecting $200? Or is Mrs. Teller simply living proof that when change happens, it happens in beautiful and unpredictable ways? Either way, we're delighted to finally hear "Flight of the Bumblebee" with a hip-hop backbeat -- the way it was meant to be heard.

Our only beef with the video: there's a conspicuously open laptop next to her turntables, but she doesn't seem to be using it to generate any sounds...

BTW, there's good reason to believe this is stealth marketing by Pepsico for the Mountain Dew brand. If so, we applaud it all the more.

Sounds more like Survivor: Leavenworth

CBS just announced that its thirteenth season of Survivor, due to premiere next month, was shot on the atoll of Aitutaki, in the Cook Islands.

There's nothing particularly shocking about this locale (in fact, spoilers revealed it before CBS's official announcement). What is shocking is the way they're dividing the tribes this season -- not randomly, as in earlier seasons, or by gender, as they have more recently, but BY RACE!!!! There will be a Caucasian tribe, a Hispanic tribe, an African-American tribe, and an Asian-American tribe (I guess there's no room for Native Americans, let alone "multiracial" people like my son). Eventually, Survivor will integrate the tribes (as they always do), but who can doubt that the entire season -- down to the pitched battle between the "final four" -- will be inevitably viewed through the racial lens?

I don't even know how to respond to this. Is CBS revealing America's racial burlesque for what it is -- an arbitrary, temporary and ultimately meaningless categorization more valuable for dividing people than for uniting them -- or simply cashing in on the inevitable public outcry (read: free marketing) that always results from poking at the still-festering sore of our nation's racist history? Or is racism now just a quaint artifact of centuries gone by, and racial identity reduced to the kind of paper-thin group affiliations that usually characterize "reality" television? Given the egregious disproportion in access to healthcare, wealth, education, and so forth that still exist between so-called racial groups in America today, I simply can't accept the latter interpretation.

Anyway, from a pure business context, I wonder whether the boost this gives CBS's flagging franchise will be worth the fallout. We shall see...

P.S. I was just reading Henry Jenkins' new book Convergence Culture, which has an excellent chapter on the culture of Survivor spoilers.

P.P.S. If you have any question whether the racialized division of contestants on Survivor will actually provide fodder for stereotype, bias, and other assorted manifestations of American bigotry, look no further than Rush Limbaugh's predictions about how the various races will fare in the contest. Sneak peak: it's "not going to be fair if there's a lot of water events." Ugh.

Imposible es nada: Castro wears Adidas

Under-the-weather Cuban dictator Fidel Castro wears Adidas. Karl Marx must be turning in his bargain-brand coffin.

I'll let Marissa weigh in on whether this is good or bad branding -- for either party.

Best/Worst Brand Extension Ever?

something tells me Bill Gates hates this brand extension, but a couple of programmers totally dig it:

Xbox 360 MDMA

A tipster sends us word of a new "brand" of ecstasy (aka MDMA) making the rounds at UK raves and such, called Xbox 360. I kid you not. There's a little debate going on over at Squatjuice about whether the game-named drug is cut with MDA, LSD or even Mescalin.

Future media tech: remote control brain implants

Ohboy, I love stuff like this. Nature just published an article describing a new device called BrainGate, which allows people who have lost the use of their limbs (and, I would guess, people who can still use their limbs as well) to operate machines just by thinking about it:

MN [test subject] opened simulated e-mail and operated devices such as a television, even while conversing. Furthermore, MN used neural control to open and close a prosthetic hand, and perform rudimentary actions with a multi-jointed robotic arm.

Of course, it's important to let the technology be used first to help disabled people live more independently, but you can see where this is going. Fifteen years from now, the Pentagon announces thought-controlled drone airplanes and battlebots (incidentally, before Firefox was a browser, it was actually a lame Clint Eastwood pic about though-controlled planes... I saw a few minutes of it on the big screen because I was too grossed out by the earwigs in The Wrath of Khan to stay put in my own theater). Then, thirty years from now, we finally get the payoff: trickledown to the consumer market, where the PS9 wages a market war against the WiiBox12 for thought-controlled MMORPG fighting action. And VonageSprintATTBellizonGoogle charges an extra $295 per month for thought-to-voice messaging.

Or maybe I'm wrong and porn once again leads the way. Maybe the big thing will be thought-controlled StripperBots^TM [shudder].

Or maybe I'm waaay wrong, and we consumer-types end up on the receiving end, rather than the giving end, of the thought-control machines [super-shudder].

Maybe it would just be in everyone's best interest if this technology stayed in the healthtech sector. Even better, a robot from the future and a renegade madwoman with a whiny teenage son should destroy it before it evolves any further.

Youtube NOT hacked

I stand corrected, although apparently YouTube's cryptic message confused a few of us:

YouTube: Our humor, not our hack

update Engineers at video upload site YouTube.com played a practical joke on fans late Thursday evening as they prepared to roll out new site features.

 

YouTube, which hosts homemade videos, took down the site and posted a cryptic and grammatically incorrect place-holder message written in capital letters: "All your video are belong to us."

The inability to get on to the site and the poor grammar, a likely reference to a poorly translated video game that evolved into an animated Web phenomenon some years ago, had some YouTube fans believing that the site had been hacked. At around 10:45 p.m. PT, an additional sentence appeared that let confused users in on the hoax: "No, we haven't be hacked. Get a sense of humor."

Sure, the message made me laugh, but would it have been that hard for YouTube to add a line referring to the site maintenance? humor is all well and good, but reliable, honest customer service goes a long way to building goodwill.