Category Archives: The Brain

Botnets … the unknown reality

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I find it hard to believe that many people are not aware of botnets,
and what they are doing.  Of course, I’m so deep in technology and
the Internet that my “common sense” is now severely distorted. 
For those people who have not heard about botnets, this Washington Post botnet article is a great place to start.  It’s an eye opener.

When you read this article, just realize that this is about the botnets
that have been discovered and are known.  There are more out there
that are unknown, and the sizes of some of these botnets is staggering.  Read here, here, or here, about the FBI arrest of a many running a 400,000+ node botnet!  Oh yeah … and he was 20 years old.

Tagging++ … where the web is heading?

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I have to admit that I really love RSS. Not necessarily
“blogging”, but the concepts of RSS itself. It is an amazingly
simple idea, and yet it can be used for extremely powerful
solution. The whole world of blogging, and news aggregators, is
built on the foundation of RSS.

Of course, then came “pinging”. When a RSS feed is updated with
new posts or data, it can “ping” a service to notify others that it has
been updated. This provides a way to subscribe to the updates of
huge numbers of RSS feeds and blogs. So if I can then get all of
these updates, how do I make sense of them? Enter “tagging” …

Tagging is an ingenious idea … it embraces the concepts of
“microformats” where additional metadata can be embedded into content
like RSS feeds and blogs. In the most simple cases, tagging
allows for a post to be “categorized” using simple keywords …
anything. So now if I subscribe to the updates of large numbers
of posts, I can scan each post for “tags” and create new outbound feeds
(which is what Technorati does) or do my own sorting and filtering based on tags.

Tonight I was reading about Edgeio in a post by Tom Raftery.
This is a whole new step in tagging … and it’s really getting me
thinking. This is where the tags can now designate a post in a
blog for a specific purpose! This is not just about categorizing
… but now hinting at what the content is … and allowing for
specialized engines – like Edgeio – to consume the posts to create new
aggregated solutions. In the case of Edgeio, the new tags are for
“listings” … posts about things that you want to have listed on the
Edgeio web site.

What I really like about this, is it that it represents the latest
turns in the whole microformat/tagging process. Now, I can simple
posts something in my blog, and provide some custom tags that will tell
various engines out in the Internet what my intentions are with that
post. Already I’m using tags to allow people to simply subscribe
to tag feeds … RSS feeds of posts along a particular topical
category. But now I’m able to tag a post to indicate to some
engine that this is a post that I want it to consume and take action
on! This is an impressive capability.

I can start to think of other directions that this could take. For example, Flickr
– the popular photo sharing web site – could now begin to support tags
that would indicate a post contains photos that are to be included into
Flickr. So instead of uploading my images … I simply blog about
my photos, including the images in my posts. Flickr could detect
these images based on tags that I include and automatically consume
them. This is where whole new types of tags and actions can begin
to take place … and create some interesting new directions with the
web. This introduces yet another “neural” aspect to the
applications emerging on the Internet.

Great series of Global Thinkers

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I found this post from Thomas Barnett early, but only recently began to
download and listen to the podcasts … amazing stuff!  This is a
great series about global politics, etc.

A video of my Blueprint for Action brief.

This is the one I delivered in early November in DC to the seminar
series put on by Johns Hopkins and the Office of Force Transformation.

It is found here: http://www.jhuapl.edu/POW/rethinking/video.cfm. You can watch it in chunks or download the entire brief as a file.

You can also access a PDF compilation of the slides. Pretty cool package!

[Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog]

Manipulating biology

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I have recently been at a few events where I mentioned reading the
article about the rat brains being used to fly a F-22 jet
simulator. Here is the article – Why this brain flies on rat cunning – and the reference below is where I first found it. Yes … I find this really cool … amazing work.

Why this brain flies on rat cunning.
A “brain” grown from 25,000 neural cells extracted from a single rat
embryo has been taught to fly an F-22 jet simulator by scientists at
the University of Florida.

They hope their research into neural computation will help develop sophisticated h… [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News]

Google? Privacy? Yeah … sure …

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Since the beginning of Google, I have always been reluctant to allow
cookies from their site. I’ve also been reluctant to heavily use
many of their other services. Part of this has been my
understanding of their overall architecture, and knowing that they
could choose to store a whole lot of information about me. Is
this just paranoia? No … it is because of my understanding of
the inevitable. I fully understand and accept that I’m just
delaying the inevitable … and so it’s just my little game with the
giant Google.

So what am I talking about? It’s the fact that computers are
getting to be so pervasive, and their ability to gather information
about us, and create profiles, exceeds our own abilities to distinguish
our own behaviors. We all have certain predictable behaviors,
many of which we are aware of. We also all have behaviors that we
are not aware of … that
become predictable to others who gather enough information about
us. Computer systems are able to gather large amounts of
information, and mine that information for patterns that we are not
even aware of.

I often use the simple example of grocery stores and their “discount”
or “members” cards. Yeah … just sign up, allow the grocery
store to gather information about everything that you have ever bought,
and they’ll give you a little discount. C’mon … what could it
hurt? Honestly, I’m not sure how it could hurt … but I have
thought through the amazing amount of behavioral data that they could
gather from you. The potential for them to then prey upon your
undistinguished behaviors and reactions grows quickly. They know
what day you buy what. They know what aisle and shelf it was on
when you bought it. They know the color of the packaging when you
bought it. They know the messages printed on the packaging when
you bought. They know the weather, the time of day, and the phase
of the moon. Your grocery store knows much more about your buying
patterns that you would ever think of.

And Google? Uh huh … they know your on-line behaviors. Big time. According to this article FAQ: When Google is not your friend
they have been recording everything that they can. Of course they
have been … storage is cheap, and only getting cheaper. They
know every search you have done, and when you did it, and what Google
Ads that you might have clicked on from the results. So
what? Yeah … I’m not immediately sure of the impact on my life,
however it is interesting to think about what Google can start to know
about you, and who you are, by all of this data. When are you
on-line. When do you search for what. What kinds of Google
Ads attract your attention. Where do you search from. To me
… this is pretty amazing. When you begin to think about mining
this huge volume of data it seems to me that some interesting patterns
have to emerge. Google can begin to know a lot about you, your
interests and undistinguished behaviors. Google … knows who you
really are. Google … knows your true identity.

Oh yeah … you use Gmail? Google Groups? Google
News? Google Alerts? Google Maps? Holy cow … they
have a whole lot on you! 🙂

What is so funny to me is when people are all up in arms about the
“government” and what “they” can find out about you. The article
above really touches on an ironic twist. The government can find
out all about you … as soon as they get it from Google. You
see, you have been giving your privacy away to Google and don’t
complain a bit. How could a company with a motto: Do no evil!
do anything wrong with all of this information they are gathering about
you? Well, I guess that we’ll see. It’s all inevitable … if it
isn’t Google … it’ll end up being yet another company. The
pervasiveness of the Internet, computers, cameras, sensors, and all
things technological is merely the solidifying of the next
substrate. The technologic substrate is forming all around us. The singularity is coming … and Google is just an example of the evidence.

January 2006 CTO Breakfast

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There was a large group this morning at the CTO Breakfast arranged by
Phil Windley
. It was fun to see people from Novell (even some ex-Novell
employees) and even a friend of mine from SCO. This was probably
one of the largest groups of people that we have had at one of these
breakfasts. A good sign of interest!

Phil kicked off the conversation with a reference to a proposal in North Dakota
to float cell phone “towers” over the state using weather
balloons. I brought up a conversation from the 2005 Gilder Telecosm Conference this year where Klein Gilhousen, Co-founder; Senior Vice President, Technology,
of Qualcomm talked about the
Katrina disaster in New Orleans which left lots of people with cell phones
… with no way to call out due to the towers being down. He
talked about hanging cell towers from helicopters, and also
implementing peer-to-peer mesh networking in cell phone handsets. Cool … I just found that can hear the Klein Gilhousen Telecosm 2005 audio.

I then brought up the Pop!Tech podcast “Mind and Body” podcast from ITConversations about the coming man machine interfaces. The story of Jesse Sullivan
is an amazing thing to listen to. It details how far we have
progressed in using computer systems to monitor nerve activity for the
operation of artificial limbs. The doctor presenting talked about how
they can now move nerves from the upper arm, and split and “regrow”
them into muscle in the side of the chest. These nerves can then
be monitored … and the computer tranlates the signals into control
signals for the artificial limbs. Watch the videos in the link
above
and you’ll see how amazing the research is. The coolest part of
the conversation was when they discovered that the sensory nerves were also growing! So they can even add artificial senses to the artificial limbs!

We then got off talking about DVDs, and the growth of storage.
When I mentioned that I had seen the 320GB SATA drives at Costco for ~$179.00, Eric Smith brought up the ~$700 Buffalo Technology TeraStation
storage server that he bought. Ok … that is a cool. I
turn-key terabyte storage server for under $1000! Ok … and
where will we be in 5-10 years? When will a turn-key petabyte
storage server fall below $1000?

Bruce Grant then moved into a conversation about psuedo-AI. He is
implementing a version of the “application substrate” ideas that we
developed when we were both at SCO. The core concept is to create
a set of portable component services that can be replicated, migrated,
and connected in various ways to provide composite services. He
is now looking for ways to create emergent services … or simple ways
for the average person to define some sort of high-level goal, and have
the services create paths of connectivity automatically to create
solutions. He’s working on some very cool stuff …

The topic of “thin-client vs. thick-client” came up when someone asked
if we are about to see the turn back to “thick clients”, or to “thin
clients”. This got me thinking, and I suggested that what we are
actually watching is the natural progression of our perception
of a “thick client” until the substrate that it exists on evolves more
capacity. At this point we perceive the client as “thin”.
e.g. when we didn’t have much processing power, a browser would be
thought of as “fat” … now that we have so much processing power, AJAX
is referred to as a “thin” client. When processing and memory
evolves forward further, virtualization will continue to evolve where
running multiple entire instances of operating systems will be thought
of as “thin”! My three year old son is going to be laughing 10-15
years from now when we talk about the platform limitations that we are
experiencing now. What we perceive as a fat client today, will be seen as a background task 10 years from now.

One of the guys from Novell brought up No Machine
… a VNC-like solution for remote desktop computing. Another
person brought up what Microsoft has been working on with their UI technologies, and also the AJAX Dojo
project … all various directions that UI, remote UI, and AJAX are continuing to make distributed netowrked computing occur.

From mobile devices we got talking about child ren using them, the
user interfaces, and the way that children quickly adapt to new
experiences. We got onto the conversation about children and
computers, and that children often are more interested in the games on
DVDs then the movie content itself! They seem to be wanting the
constant interaction and challenge. I joked that eventually
children are going to want more and more
interactive media that ultimately they will realize that the most
amazing, realistic interactive media is life itself! They will realize
that
going out the front door of their house will immerse them in the
richest multimedia experience possible! Phil Burns brought up a
book called Natural Born Cyborgs where he said that this is one of the core topics of the book.

Hamachi was brought up as a
solution for encrypted peer-to-peer communications. This looks
pretty cool and appears to be yet another growing start-up on the
Internet. I always question a solution like this when it’s not
Open Source code … what am I really installing on my machine?

There are a lot more topics that were discussed … as usual too much
to write about. I have to admit that I like to see the continuing
tech culture growing here in Utah. There are more and more events
where you can find people who are in tune with what is going on in the
world and the Internet.

Phil Windley
… thanks for creating this breakfast!

Early uploading research

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I love being alive as we approach the next singularity.  There is
so much technology research occurring, and expanding in all
directions.  Uploading is coming to a neighborhood near you. 
For those of you not familiar with concepts of uploading,
this is where computers are used to run simulations of a brain …
simulating all of the neural activity, and possibly then providing
interfacing with the real world.  In the future, this might even
be a simulation of your brain.  If it is a simulation of your brain, how much of your identity does it share with you?

So to do this, you have to scan the brain, create a neural map, then
simulate the entire neural network within a computer.  How likely
will we see something like this in our lifetime?  Well … it’s
already begun:

Blue Brain Power: Modeling the brain with a supercomputer.
Future Watch: The Blue Brain Project starts by mapping neurons in rats
to simulate brain activity in the neocortical column, and it might
eventually map the entire brain.
[Computerworld Linux News]

The evolution of RSS

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It is very cool to see how RSS is being used for a wider range of
solutions than just blogging.  In experimenting with my iPod, I
have been studying the RSS enhancements that Apple has started to use,
and this article talks about a bunch of the enhancements that Microsoft
is experimenting with.

Where I have been thinking a lot lately is on new ways to use
RSS.  Since there are now so many news aggregator applications
that can consume RSS, it’s about time to think of new ways to create
feeds that are customized to the requestor.  And these would not
necessarily be the time-ordered “news” feeds … but maybe new forms of
reference material on demand.  What about educational content
being delivered on demand via RSS?  You simply subscribe to a
“feed” that begins to release content to you – posts or enclosures – on
a regular basis.  Your aggregator consumes the feed and presents
you with the content is more of a “chapter-order”.  At some point,
maybe there is even an extension that tells your aggregator that a feed
is now “dead” … or “finished”.

I’m thinking about how I might experiment with these Microsoft
extensions … in addition to some of the things I’m doing with my
iPod.  In the field of “identity management” I begin to think
about how I might want to give someone the ability to “subscribe” to
“me”.  I could easily do this via SSL, and then add
authentication.  People who I want to share with could then
subscribe to updates to my identity attributes.  Things like
sharing my GPS location could easily be done this way.  It’s fun
to see this whole area of technology get more and more mature.

Microsoft making RSS a two-way street.
Microsoft is creating extensions for the RSS syndication format to make
it multidirectional, a move that could allow RSS to be used to
synchronize information such as contacts and calendar entries across
different applications. [Computerworld News]

More and more autonomous

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I know that this is older news, however I still love reading articles
about this race.  This is truly amazing and is going to alter a
lot of things.  The fact that a computerized car can drive itself
131.6 miles and avoid getting stuck.  Oh yeah … and this is only
2005.  So what are we going to be hearing about in 2010?

With the current rate of technological advances, five years is a huge amount of time for amazing developments to occur.

Driverless robots reach milestone in DARPA race.
Stanford University’s Racing Team has accomplished a historic feat of
robotics, finishing first in the DARPA Grand Challenge, a 131.6-mile
driverless car race that no artificially intelligent machine has ever
conquered before.

Stanford’s “Stanley,… [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News]

Remote control … using your brain!

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There are many ways in which the interface between humans and computers
has evolved in recent years, however I think that the biggest jumps are
about to occur.  This article is an example of just how far things
are progressing.  We are now able to isolate specific thoughts
with electrodes placed strategically around the scalp.

My thoughts are not about how to detect thoughts of walking … but
instead how the detection of thoughts can be converted to new forms of
communications.  What if I could think
about sending a message to you, and the computer would generate an
e-mail or an SMS message to you?  I actually think that research
like this is taking us closer and closer to ‘artificial telepathy’ …
technology that will allow us to ‘think’ to each other.

Computer users move themselves with the mind.
Computer scientists have created a brain-computer interface that can
read your thoughts. It allows you to stroll down a virtual street. All
you have to do is think about walking.

The technology detects brain waves by using electrodes placed at st… [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News]