Sunday 30 October 2011

Internet of Useful Objects

I think I can speak for everyone this time around. If you had not heard of the internet of things before, Ted's week 13 lecture really did open some eyes.

At first I had no idea what the concept was all about. During the beginning of the lecture, Ted mentioned "everything connected" and "even inanimate objects", but I couldn't see the practicality of these implementations. Seriously, who would need to connect their t-shirt to the web?

As the lecture went on, it became more evident. Objects can have a voice too. If you think about one main thing: condition. Condition is what objects can report about themselves. It's what we need to know about the things we own, yet sometimes it is hard to keep track of everything. We can't instantaneously know how dirty our clothes are, how fragile our dishes are, how worn our cars become.

Or can we? The internet of things promotes the idea that inanimate objects can report their condition. Not only condition, but location too. I would personally love it if my keys were connected to the internet. That way, a simple GPS request would allow me to triangulate their exact whereabouts. Or I could ask them to reveal themselves on my own home social network. Sneaky keys can't be sneaky any more.

Of course, the dystopian view sees the internet of things as a threat. And you know what? I agree, to some extent. I do believe that hackers can train themselves to control our connected belongings. I think Minority Report depicts a unique and eye-opening scenario if the concept became out of hand.

I also think, however, that if there is some way to hack-proof our devices, the internet of things will boom. On paper, it's completely legit. The efficient capabilities that can be brought to farm owners, motorists and practically anyone who requires a degree of maintenance in their belongings is astounding. Although our knowledge of tech ethics is quite high nowadays, and a complete dystopia is unlikely, the concerns are also legit, and I think something as big as this needs careful (and extensive) review before a rollout (and possible evolution) happens.

Sunday 23 October 2011

Why Apple believers are idiots.

** DISCLAIMER ** This topic has been a passionate discussion point for me even before I took up this subject. If you are a closed-minded Apple fan and decide to read this entry, you have been warned.

Dear Apple believers. You're stupid.

To start, I would like to point out that when I say "Apple", I'm only referring to their market of phones, tablets and computers. I own one Apple product, an iPod, for the fact that there is no other competition whatsoever in the mp3 player market at the current time. I'll let you know, however, that I owned three different non-Apple mp3's before my iPod. If there were equal competitors for mp3 players today, I would not own an iPod.

My first point branches from the comfort or freedom ideology. To you Apple fanboys and fangirls, I ask you this. If you had a choice between arranged marriage or conventional marriage, what would you pick?
By buying Apple products, you are signing yourself up for an arranged marriage. You are trusting a higher figure of authority to spoon-feed you an aspect of your life without your own personal input. You are trusting the authority that whatever single aspect they find, it will fit your needs, based on their judgement.

Now, this is not to say I'm against arranged marriages. I understand that culturally and religiously, arranged marriages are a historical value dating back thousands of years. My analogy questions this: if you originally had the option of whether you made the choices, or someone else was assigned to make your choices for you, why on earth would you pick the latter?

Onto point two. Here's a bold statement. Apple believers are technologically illiterate.
When I said Apple believers were stupid, what I really meant is that they were lacking in technological knowledge. I say this because Apple products are designed for babies. I kid you not people, there are videos of babies using iPads on YouTube. Apple dumbs down the interface of their products. Why? It's so technologically illiterate people can use them. I understand if a toddler or an elder were to choose Apple products, but if you are a part of Generation Y, have money, and are somewhat in touch with the tech world, I honestly see no logical reason why you would dedicate yourself to Apple's devices.

My understanding is that Apple believers don't know enough about hardware. My understanding is that an Apple believer will be spoon fed their Apple devices, and expect them to work without knowing why. My understanding is that the average Apple user won't know what a CPU overclock is, won't know what GUI customisation is, and won't know what WiFi tethering is. Believers? You know very little.

Sure, the tech-illiterate market may be a valid target for Apple to sell their products, but to me, owning an Apple smartphone and calling yourself a true 'tech enthusiast' is similar to reading Physics For Dummies and calling yourself a PhD physicist. It's like driving nothing but automatic cars and pretending to know how the gearbox works. It's like.. you get the point.

Onto my third and final point. Quality.
Apple believers may be under the impression that their products are somehow "malware proof". The truth? They're definitely not. An Apple believer will say that an open source device will allow unwanted material to infect your computer. The reality is, your closed devices aren't so safe after all.

Furthermore, an Apple believer will argue that the most recent iPhone is the best selling product in the world. Seriously, I actually asked a TechCrunch blogger (also Apple fan) this question. It's obvious that the only reason the iPhone is a top-selling device, is because Apple believers only have that single device to choose. I can guarantee you that if Android had a single-device equivalent, it would outsell the iPhone. Instead, Android has multiple devices, and their combined sales are enormously larger than any other OS.

With regards to computers, I simply laugh. Computers are used for three main things at the present time: Internet browsing, gaming, and business software purposes. Apple Macs are designed for one of the above. Can you guess which one?
Gaming is a joke on a Mac. You can't tweak your hardware to suit your video game needs. Want to update your graphics card to suit a new game? Looks like you're going to have to buy a whole new Apple computer, which even though are manufactured in China by underpaid factory workers, certainly are not cheap products.
Business software? Have you even looked at the compatibility issues Apple's OS has with non-Apple software? Again, you don't get to choose what suits you. Apple chooses what suits you.
Did you guess it right? Apple computers, I admit, are great for browsing the internet. But is that really all you do with a computer? If you say yes, then I'd place you in the 'technologically illiterate' category.

Oh, and with regards to the App Store, why does one company get to decide who produces a quality app and who doesn't? If this logic were congruent, why aren't all apps rated 5 stars in the App Store? Why do Apple users have to illegally jailbreak their iPhone just to get their apps from other locations?

In conclusion, if you admit you are illiterate in the tech department - if you admit that Windows and Android are truly too complex for you - I give you permission to use an Apple product, even though you're admitting that you're too lazy to make choices. But keep in mind that the future of technology is never dominated by a single company. The future of technology, rather, is held within the tweaking and feedback improvements provided by the users. Not the company's development team, but the users. It's why Google will outperform Apple in a few years' time. I bet 10,000 Bitcoins on it.


Saturday 22 October 2011

Asmaa Mahfouz for president! Social networks are pretty cool.

Like multiple stones have been cast into the same pool. Social networks are the catalyst for the ripple effect of what's going on here and now. They are the catalyst for individual empowerment, and as seen in the cases of Tunis and Egypt.

Personally I think it's disgusting when a government simply cannot handle the amount of protest and traffic when their people argue that something is wrong. Following the same line, I have enormous respect for individuals who make significant large scale differences purely on their part, even if they didn't intend to. A prime example of this is Asmaa Mahfouz. Her sheer determination and willpower was inspiring. She was beaten as a result of her voice, and still got back up and fought for what she knew was right. Without her, the protests may have been shaped much differently, but as the timeline points out, her voice marked a large scale turning point in history.

Oh, by the way, the internet traffic shutdown in Egypt? Disgusting. It was an absolutely blatant form of power abuse. Again, I stress the sadness when a government runs out of legit options. I think that kind of outrageous action demonstrates how wrong their positions were. How wrong their actions were. How wrong their estimations were of the people. I think that's what it comes down to. The fact that protest will never be same these days. Protesting 2.0. The integration of social networking into organisation and sharing, worldwide.

Wednesday 21 September 2011

Inside a hacker's mind. (4|\| `/0u |234|) 7h15?

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Firstly I'd like to get straight to the point. The video of the military gunner shooting down civilians in the street was absolutely horrifying. I had never seen the actual footage before when the WikiLeaks stories were all over the TV (how's that for media filtering), but to witness the slaughter made me realise something. Yes, I say, yes to this information being publicly released. Why was it confidential material in the first place? Because its a demonstration of wrong decision. Wrong decisions made by people representing an entire country, and governments don't want you to see that, do they?

Of course, its difficult to draw the line defining what content should remain private and what should be deemed as rightfully public. The solution? Make right decisions so you don't have to hide information. Easier said than done of course, but hackers are there to (ironically) snoop out the higher authorities and their books of shame.

I've always wondered what its like to be inside the mind of a hacker. I'd like to ask one some questions. What are your motives? How did you learn to do all of this? Have you ever been hacked yourself? What have you achieved in doing this? This week I was able to seek a form of justice written in short essay format by The Mentor. The Hacker's Manifesto appeared in the lecture this week, and is a great demonstration of how government power is much more unruly than that of a curious hacker. Governments lie, murder, cheat, yet individuals are getting thrown behind bars for 'stealing' information.

I liked Crabtree's emphasis on application in this week's reading. It's just simply astounding that the imagination of a student with a computer can come up with something that effectively "introduced file sharing – or peer-to-peer (P2P) technology – to a mass audience." A mass audience. Do you know how large the scale of P2P networking is today? It makes me wish I were born a decade earlier so I could experience this impact in full. Oh, also that I have been subject to much online reciprocity in recent times, and due to this, I actually do help those in need if I can.


Of course, because you were all wondering, I went home today and found that my Windows Firewall is actually turned on. Not sure whether I should download ZoneAlarm yet.


Have you ever been subject to a hacker attack, trojan, or keylogger? Let me know.


Tuesday 13 September 2011

sxephil: The leading prosumer of news. Twitter greater than gatekeepers.

You already know what we covered this week. I don't need to restate it. Let's get down to business.

I'd like to open with an example of a successful prosumer who exceeds communitychannel. His name is Philip DeFranco, and is one of the leading idols for amateur news on YouTube.

Phil, channel name "sxephil", gains subscribers and views by taking the modern news and throwing his extremely blunt yet true opinions at them. A motto of his reads "I don't make the news. I just make the news bearable". He is the 13th most subscribed person on YouTube, averaging 1.5 million views per video, which he releases every day except weekends. He doesn't like to talk about the money he makes, but three years ago he was doing the show using a $50 webcam and a single Mac. Now he has bought his own headquarters and hires around ten people to edit, produce and expand his work.

If you watch his 12th September video, he explicitly states he doesn't even get many sponsors due to his blatant style. He says that the only reason he got to where he is now is because of us, the audience. Through audience empowerment, we now have a new source of media, one stripped of corporate gates and decisions.

One of the readings this week capitalises on this new type of audience empowerment. Through the explosion of the kind-of-recent microblogging platform Twitter, news is now created pretty much instantaneously as it happens. As seen in the article: "Instead of being built by some kind of artificially intelligent software algorithm, a customized newspaper will be compiled from all the articles being read that morning by your social network."


Both of the above cases are prime examples of citizen journalism. It is becoming clear that we are beginning to break the bonds of corporate media, upon the realisation that we ourselves can create media with more truth, or punctuality or entertainment.

Let me know what you think. Thanks for reading :).

Wednesday 7 September 2011

A mass market of niches? The 80/20 model. We pay for first in line, or do we?

This week there were several main points that I'd like to capitalise on.

It's amazing really, that I can sit through a lecture attempting to figure out every next step using logical induction, yet there is always some way for digital media and communication to overthrow my logical thinking.

The 80/20 or "power law" model, for example. You'd think that a company producing content to appeal to the mass market side would always succeed and beat the niche market. It just makes sense. As said in the lecture, Transformers will always have the upper hand against some romance journey film made in another language. Sure, people might like romance journeys, but the majority will appeal to Transformers.

This is why I was mindblown with how Amazon approached the matter. A mass market of niches. Appeal not only to the mass market, but have enough supply to attract the niche markets too. Store front? Who needs them? Why spend time on making the face value of your company pretty by sacrificing storage space? No, just buy a warehouse or ten, fill them to the ceiling with books and become one of the biggest book distributors in the world.

I also would like to stress on the attention vs content changeover after the amateurization of the Internet began. Before, there were high profiled publishers writing articles and stories with quality and flair. Now, we have millions of publishers writing blog posts and stories with just flair (okay, and some quality). Before it was the content that was scarce - those who were good writers were worshipped. But now, the attention is scarce. There are so many "writers" on the internet nowadays screaming for attention. Digital evolution on a social scale, eh?

Lastly I'd like to pose a question: do we always pay for what's first in line? Google charge a fee per month to give you live updates on stock prices. People pay money for a book before it gets digitally publicised. But what about things like torrented movies? It's not rare to get your hands on a HD film before it is released on DVD.. but is that why people pay to see a movie in the cinemas?

Thanks for reading and I'll see you all next week :).

Tuesday 30 August 2011

Last week's catch up! Have you ever read an entire EULA? Radiohead's 2008 decision.

This week I caught up on the material I missed out on in week 5 whilst I was overseas. Whilst wading through the relevant lecture and reading sources, I realised what the statement "Information wants to be free" really means. It is information that not only wants to be free of charge, but free of restriction and limitation.

I ended up being extremely amazed that the Happy Birthday song is actually owned by a company, and that filmmakers must pay to use it in their scenes. Could you imagine a family sitting around a table with a birthday cake and singing the song, only to have the Warner Police bust through their window and arrest the family for infringement?

I was also surprised that every single account in existence on World of Warcraft is owned by Blizzard. How is this possible? That hundreds of thousands of players have spent months, if not years, accumulating currency and character gear which is still not theirs. I think it's tricky of companies to include such statements in a way that is so visually unappealing to read, yet they can argue that its the only right and 'legal' way for them to distribute the EULA. I can confess that out of the hundreds of times I have opened the World of Warcraft client, I have never once read a word of their mandatory pre-game EULA.

I personally think more bands need to act as aggressively as Radiohead, who decided to slap a "Pay What You Want" option on their recent album In Rainbows in 2008. Although the stats say three fifths of their fanbase chose to pay nothing, their profits still exceeded those of their previous album. I admire Radiohead's ability to make bold moves like these - they chose to realise the magnitude of the copyright problem and embrace it rather than fight it. Although their success was mainly due to their pre-In_Rainbows large fan community (thus allowing them to gamble their money like this), it shows that true inspiration still exists, and not every intelligent-content producer is a smug caterpillar wrapped in a cocoon of copyright armour.

Thanks for the read and let me know what you think!