Virtual Thought

I was talking to Ryan and he asked me what RSS reader I used. “Nothing,” I replied, “I just visit the websites themselves.”

“What?” he exclaimed, flabbergasted. “You visit websites?” Jesus, I thought, when did visiting websites become old school?

So I’ve been taking Ryan’s suggestion and using Google Reader. It’s a pretty nice piece of work and has definitely decreased the amount of time I spend catching up. As I remember to add sites that I frequent (Boing Boing, 37signals, the various friends’ blogs I read) I’m reminded of just how much information I try and take in every day in an effort to raise my cluefulness.

In that vein, one thing that caught me by surprise today was a post on BoingBoing about phishers sending out pink-slips. Apparently when someone sends out targeted spam with the intent of defrauding someone (installing malware like keystroke loggers or the like) this is called spear phishing.

That is awesome.

There’s this interesting article on CNET that discusses how Microsoft is suing the FairUse4WM developer over stolen source code because, in the Microsoft rep’s words:

“Our own intellectual property was stolen from us and used to create this tool,” said Bonnie MacNaughton, a senior attorney in Microsoft’s legal and corporate affairs division. “They obviously had a leg up on any of the other hackers that might be creating circumvention tools from scratch.”

So, is someone from Microsoft saying that, obviously, only someone with access to the source code could crack FairPlay?

Boy, is that wrong.

Here’s the big fallacy with DRM: if you give someone protected content (songs) and the thing that has to un-protect it to play it (Windows Media Player) then you have given that someone the keys to the kingdom and it is impossible to protect that content. This happens over and over and over… CSS encrypted DVDs and DVD players, locked up game content on XBox titles and the XBox itself, iTunes songs and the iTunes player.

I think what’s really going on is MS(Microsoft) trying to get some legal momentum on this fight, maybe get this hacker-type person Viodentia to pay many, many dollars in a drawn-out legal contest when, truly, MS isn’t going after the hacker for stealing source code—they’re going after the hacker because he/she circumvented the copy protection which is a lesser offense than stealing source code.

Sound and fury. I just hope the judge in the case is smarter than that and doesn’t let MS get away with it.

Finally, an AI project to get excited about: A fully computer-generated society with its own culture.

I think this is exciting because, as I was discussing with a friend of mine, I don’t think “brain-in-a-jar”-type research comes close to simulating intelligence. I think dismissing the factor that embodiment, both physically and socially, can have on intelligence is the Wrong Way to Go.

The article doesn’t go into a lot of detail about the startup conditions: has a language been provided? Obviously something like geography already exists… but how much of this artificial physical world is simulated? Are there other animals besides these proto-intelligences? Considering that we multi-cellulars used to be single-cellualrs, and, we think, pieces of our cells used to be other single-cellular creatures (e.g. the mitochondria, power-house of the cell) then it’d be neat to see this artificial society evolve in the face of disease and other physical pressures.

How cool!

GameSpy has a neat article called Will Wright Presents Spore that documents a super-fantastic approach to game creation and gameplay.

Using deterministic, procedural algorithms in response to user-supplied data the game grows the creature and determines behavior based on its form. Awesome! I especially love the “massively single-player” aspect of downloading specifications for other players’ structures and creatures and populating the world with these buildings and beings. I cannot believe that I have to wait a year for this game to come out.

I’m also already thinking about ways I want to do this in my own as-yet-unnamed project… stay tuned. ( =

EDIT: Google video has a fantastic Spore gameplay video. 35 minutes long but so worth it.

It seems that recently I’ve only been putting funny stuff online. This time, I’m talking about something more serious… a little something called network neutrality.

Prior to a few days ago, the physical infrastructure of the internet was just a bunch of wires that transmitted everyone’s data equally. However, the big telecom companies want to skew this level playing field based on which companies pay them the most. This is where Save the Internet comes in.

Do you like visiting my blog? I probably couldn’t afford to compete with Blogger, or Yahoo, or any other blogging service… and what would happen when I don’t pay? Would my voice be marginalized due to some external market force introduced to pay for a resource that has already been developed and is easily maintained with the current schedule of fees that nearly everyone pays?

I don’t want that to happen. If you don’t either, check out Save the Internet and see what you can do, too.

[tags] Save_The_Internet [/tags]

There’s a small firestorm going on over at digg about a story on forevergeek about how digg is hierarchically edited instead of peer edited. Very interesting stuff if true… and, adding fuel to the proverbial paranoid fire, the story on digg reporting this has been buried. (That’s me in the second comment… neat!)

One of the main things that attracted me to digg in the first place was the idea of a truly semi-automated, peer-reviewed selection of stories which, on the face of it, seemd more fair than Plastic and Slashdot which have more editorial control. Sure this leads to some really, really dumb digg stories… but they don’t get dugg onto the front page and quickly get lost in the random noise of the site. If a story was interesting enough then it would get voted up by those who cared, cream rising to the top.

But, of course, like any system digg is eminently hackable. And it seems as though we’re seeing it right now…

Or are we? I think it’s a little premature to say that there’s some vast conspiracy destroying this pretty cool site. I want to see what the diggers-that-be have to say about this, let it play out, before I start jumping on the “digg is ruined” bandwagon, or the “digg’s been compromised” conspiracy theories.

One thing that would help this process enormously is some visibility into the process by which a digg story is buried. How bout it, digg? What’s the trail here? Why is this story getting buried?

Found this article about neurochips that explains that some researchers in Europe created a silicon chip that can communicate with neurons through direct stimulation.

Then, I found this article about the first truly artificial life form: a simulated virus using more than a million digital atoms.

A friend of mine put it best:

I always have two simultaneous responses to stories like these: “That’s so cool!” and “We’re so fucked!”

This is a fantastic time to be alive. Lasers in the jungle somewhere.