Boing Boing » floss

Eschersketch: automated tessellated Escher-esque drawing toy

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 09 May 2013 15:37:46 +0000

Levskaya's Eschersketch is a GitHub-hosted web-toy that produces Escher style tessellated drawings that are very good fun to make and elaborate upon.

Eschersketch (Thanks, Hugh!)

NeoLucida: kickstarting a new version of the Old Masters' favorite drawing gadget

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 09 May 2013 14:13:55 +0000

Pablo Garcia and Golan Levin, two celebrated art profs and dead media specialists, have launched a fantastically successful kickstarter to recreate the Camera Lucida, a gadget much favored by the Old Masters. It uses an optical trick to superimpose the scene in front of you on a sheet of paper that you can trace in order to produce highly realistic drawings. They're producing a limited one-time run of them (a $35 pledge gets you one) (assuming, as with all Kickstarters, that this actually gets made -- caveat emptor!), and then the designs will be released as open source hardware for anyone to make.

The NeoLucida is designed to fit in a purse or bag, and the creators want to create a gallery of art made with it -- each one comes with a postage-paid card for you to send in one of your drawings

NeoLucida - A Portable Camera Lucida for the 21st Century (via Beyond the Beyond)

DroneShield: crowdfunded, networked drone detectors

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 03 May 2013 20:58:39 +0000

DroneShield is an indieGOGO project from a DC aerospace engineer that aims to build a tiny, net-connected drone-detector/identifier. Based on a Raspberry Pi gumstick computer, it uses a mic to detect the audio signature of nearby drones, and then communicates about its findings over the Internet. The project promises free/open hardware and software specs on its main site. Ars Technica's Cyrus Farivar spoke to Chris Kyriakakis, a USC electrical engineering prof, who suggests the project is feasible, but believes it will need an array of mics for accurate identification. But John Franklin, who's running the effort, says the device will produce useful -- if imperfect -- output even with one mic.

The fully assembled drone detector costs at least $69 as a pre-order (as with all crowdfunded project, it's important to remember that you may never get your device). The project goal is to get them down to $20. For my part, I wonder how this would perform against active countermeasures: it's one thing to detect drones that aren't making any effort to remain hidden or fool detectors about which drone they are, but what about a drone that uses some technology (from playing a recording of a different drone to full-on modifications of its engines and blades) to sound different?

In any event, I expect that this is an intermediate step on the way to this thing disappearing into our phones and becoming an app that would make use of its open database of drone acoustic signatures. I can easily imagine a Drone Foursquare made by volunteers who upload drone "sightings" to realtime maps as they move around the world.

Meet Drone Shield, an ambitious idea for a $70 drone detection system (via /.)

New Ubuntu version hits today!

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 16:32:06 +0000

If it's April, it must be time for a new version of the Ubuntu operating system; a great, free, easy-to-use, highly polished version of GNU/Linux. Ubuntu does two releases a year -- October and April -- and the new release, Raring Ringtail (AKA 13.04) is a consolidation release that adds a lot more polish, performance and stability to the system. I'm happy about this: Ubuntu has been slowly transitioning to Unity, a new graphical interface over some years, and while I've come to really like Unity's featureset, I've also been noticing that it's getting a bit creaky under the hood. A stability and performance release is very welcome.

Ubuntu is my operating system of choice, and has been since 2006 or so. I run it on rock-solid, amazing, lightweight and fast ThinkPad laptops (currently the X230) and I find it to be exactly what I need from an OS: fast, easy, easy-to-maintain, and super stable. Switching to Ubuntu (which runs on pretty much any computer) was a little like remodeling the kitchen: for a couple weeks I kept looking in the wrong place for the menuitem I was seeking (just like I kept looking in the wrong place for the cutlery drawer), then, one day, everything was where I expected it. I don't even notice my OS anymore, in the same way that I don't notice my doorknobs or coathooks anymore. It just works.

And when something goes wrong, it goes wrong very well. I spilled a cup of coffee into my last laptop, an X220, while on tour in February, just as I was leaving my DC hotel for a plane to Boston. I rushed straight to a Micro Center in Cambridge -- where I met not one, but two knowledgeable, helpful and skilled sales clerks! Seriously! -- and bought the X230 I'm working on right now. I then commandeered a pallet of blank CDRs as a worksurface, removed the single screw that holds the drive, and smacked it into the new laptop and pressed the power button. Ubuntu figured out that it was in an all new computer, churned for about 30 seconds, and has worked great ever since.

Now I fear that I've got a problem with my hard-drive (a big SDD that threw a couple rare and suspicious crashes last week during big file-writes) so I'm about to switch to a new drive that should be arriving in the post today. All I need to do to effect this drive-swap is pop the drive in the machine, install Ubuntu on it (it's free to download and you can easily make a bootable USB-stick installer), and feed it a tiny text-file listing all the apps ("packages") I've used Ubuntu to install. It will auto-download the right apps for the new version of the OS, auto-configure them, and auto-install them. Then I copy over my user data and bamf, it's ready to rock. No re-keying serial numbers. No searching out the original install disks. No worrying about whether I have the right version for this OS.

I love living in Linuxland. The operating systems are so boringly useful and undramatic. They work great, and fail better.

Ubuntu 13.04 available Thursday, brings a streamlined footprint to the forefront

EFF, FSF, Creative Commons and many others ask W3C to reject DRM conspiracy

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 13:59:31 +0000

John from the Free Software Foundation sez,

Hollywood is making yet another attempt to lock down the Web. Undeterred by SOPA's failure, Hollywood is conspiring with tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and Netflix to try to influence the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). A proposal currently under consideration at W3C would *build accommodation for Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) into HTML itself.* The W3C's job is to keep the Web working for everyone; building DRM into HTML would be a dramatic departure from the NGO's mission.
Today a coalition, organized by the Free Software Foundation and including EFF and Creative Commons, released a joint letter to the W3C condemning the proposal. The coalition is also asking Web users to send a message to W3C by signing a petition>.
The coalition says, "Ratifying EME would be an abdication of responsibility; it would harm interoperability, enshrine nonfree software in W3C standards and perpetuate oppressive business models. It would fly in the face of the principles that the W3C cites as key to its mission and it would cause an array of serious problems for the billions of people who use the Web."

I wrote about this in detail in the Guardian in March.

Keep DRM out of Web standards -- Reject the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) proposal (Thanks, John!)

Open Tech Forever: open source hardware co-op

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 23:08:46 +0000

Yoonseo Kang sez, "Open Tech Forever is a new open source hardware cooperative: a worker-owned R&D and education company that teaches others how to make hardware and start their own businesses. The Open Tech Forever team has recently launched their Indie-gogo crowdfunding campaign to fund the construction and documentation of an open source R&D factory on their 40 acre site in Denver, Colorado, and runs thru May 13."

Controlling a robot arm with an Android phone

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 20:33:33 +0000

Paul sez, "This past semester, three engineering grad students at the University of Toronto (myself and two others) created an Android app for a course project that allows for wireless and intuitive control of a robotic arm from an Android-powered smartphone. We're pretty proud of the results (the link is to a demo we put together) and have released the code open source."

Android Robotic Manipulator Demo (Thanks, Paul!)

Detect your pulse with your webcam

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 15:17:21 +0000

Thearn released a free/open program for detecting and monitoring your pulse using your webcam. The code is on github for you to download, play with and modify. If this stuff takes your fancy, be sure and read Eulerian Video Magnification for Revealing Subtle Changes in the World, an inspiring paper describing the techniques Thearn uses in his code:

This application uses openCV (http://opencv.org/) to find the location of the user's face, then isolate the forehead region. Data is collected from this location over time to estimate the user's heartbeat frequency. This is done by measuring average optical intensity in the forehead location, in the subimage's green channel alone. Physiological data can be estimated this way thanks to the optical absorbtion characteristics of oxygenated hemoglobin.
With good lighting and minimal noise due to motion, a stable heartbeat should be isolated in about 15 seconds. Other physiological waveforms, such as Mayer waves (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayer_waves), should also be visible in the raw data stream.
Once the user's pulse signal has been isolated, temporal phase variation associated with the detected hearbeat frequency is also computed. This allows for the heartbeat frequency to be exaggerated in the post-process frame rendering; causing the highlighted forhead location to pulse in sync with the user's own heartbeat (in real time).
Support for pulse-detection on multiple simultaneous people in an camera's image stream is definitely possible, but at the moment only the information from one face is extracted for cardiac analysis

thearn / webcam-pulse-detector (via O'Reilly Radar)

Mozilla announces agnostic, safe payment system for the Web

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 03:05:44 +0000

The Mozilla Foundation has previewed a new, experimental system for in-app payments that is intended to solve several major problems with existing payment systems available to developers, including the fact that other payment systems are strongly partisan, tilted to one or just a few payment processors. It's a good and useful thing, and an example of the sort of good that a well-funded nonprofit can do for the health of the Web:

Here’s what’s wrong:
* Users cannot choose how to pay; they have to select from one of the pre-defined options.
* In most cases, the user has to type in an actual credit card number on each site. This is like giving someone the keys to your expensive car, letting them drive it around the block in a potentially dangerous neighborhood (the web) and saying please don’t get carjacked!
* Merchants typically have to manage all this on their own: payment processor setup, costly processing fees, and possibly even PCI compliance.
There are services to mitigate a lot of these complications such as PayPal, Stripe, and others but they aren’t integrated into web devices very well. Mozilla wants to introduce a common web API to make payments easy and secure on web devices yet still as flexible as the checkout button for merchants.

Introducing navigator.mozPay() For Web Payments [Mozilla.org/Kumar McMillan]

(via /.)

How geeks can get involved in politics (and why they should)

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 01:31:40 +0000

Thomas Gideon, host of the Command Line podcast and technical director of the Open Technology Institute at New America Foundation gave a great speech at the Northeast Linux Fest. His talk, which is outlined in detail here, was about getting free software geeks involved in political activism, and was a thoughtful explanation of the differences between the way free software stuff gets done and the way that Congress gets stuff done. (MP3)

Cory's HOW I WORK interview

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 21:54:14 +0000

I did a How I Work interview for Lifehacker, where I talked about the tools I use, and how I use them:

What apps/software/tools can't you live without?
Ubuntu and the suite of GNU tools in any robust Unix system. A good text editor (currently Gedit)—I keep all of my working files at .txts. A robust, highly configurable browser (Firefox/Firefox for Android). A fast RSS reader (presently Google Reader, likely to be Newsblur next). A tetherable mobile connection—I use EasyTether for Android to circumvent tether-blocking as deployed by some of the carriers I use around the world, especially Rogers in Canada. AirDroid for moving files on/off Android devices in my life. An external USB battery (currently PowerGen 5200mAh External Battery Pack).
A rugged, roomy, weatherproof backpack (currently a Bagjack Skidcat). A moneyclip. A small, six-card credit-card wallet. LibreOffice spreadsheets for bookkeeping. GPG, cryptsetup, and TrueCrypt for information security. A high-performance mailer with functional scripting engine (currently Thunderbird with a ton of rules and a huge black-listed kill file and white-listed address book). A titanium Widgy keychain prybar (pictured at right)—useful as a pocket knife but flies (heh) under TSA/BAA radar. No-name, easy to replace earbuds with integrated mic for phone. Exeze waterproof MP3 player for swimming. AquaSphere Seal swim goggles—I swim everyday for about an hour and listen to last night's CBC's As It Happens news podcast. Exeze + Aquasphere are a reasonably priced, reliable goggles/MP3 combo. GoToob silicone bottles for shampoo/soap for the pool—these have strong, reliable suction cups that stick them perfectly to the shower wall.
A no-name, cheap mini screwdriver set—I get these confiscated about six times a year by airport security, especially the jerks at Gatwick airport, but it's worth buying a new set every time. Catering-sized sachets of Tabasco—these don't show up as liquid on airport scanners, unlike the mini bottles. I put Tabasco on everything. I'd use it for contact-lens solution if I could. Aeropress—the single most versatile and reliable way of making coffee, especially on the road. Perfect when paired with a Porlex hand-grinder.

I’m Cory Doctorow, and This Is How I Work

DIY cellphone

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 17:48:12 +0000

David Mellis at the High-Low Tech group at the MIT Media Lab built a DIY Cellphone, making a custom circuit-board and laser-cutting his own wooden case. The files are hosted on GitHub in case you'd like to try your hand at it.

An exploration into the possibilities for individual construction and customization of the most ubiquitous of electronic devices, the cellphone. By creating and sharing open-source designs for the phone’s circuit board and case, we hope to encourage a proliferation of personalized and diverse mobile phones. Freed from the constraints of mass production, we plan to explore diverse materials, shapes, and functions. We hope that the project will help us explore and expand the limits of do-it-yourself (DIY) practice. How close can a homemade project come to the design of a cutting edge device? What are the economics of building a high-tech device in small quantities? Which parts are even available to individual consumers? What’s required for people to customize and build their own devices?
The initial prototype combines a custom electronic circuit board with a laser-cut plywood and veneer enclosure. The phone accepts a standard SIM card and works with any GSM provider. Cellular connectivity is provided by the SM5100B GSM Module, available from SparkFun Electronics. The display is a color 1.8″, 160×128 pixel, TFT screen on a breakout board from Adafruit Industries. Flexures in the veneer allow pressing of the buttons beneath. Currently, the software supports voice calls, although SMS and other functionality could be added with the same hardware. The prototype contains about $150 in parts.

Mellis's Master's thesis is "Case studies in the digital fabrication of open-source consumer electronic products" and includes a 3D printed mouse, fabbed speakers and a fabbed FM radio.

High-Low Tech – DIY Cellphone (via Hacker News)

(Images: Laser-cut plywood and veneer case, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from mellis's photostream; Making a call, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from mellis's photostream)

We have a choice about the world that technology will give us

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 15:31:26 +0000

Phil Windley, former CTO of Utah and now CTO of a startup called Kynetx, has an inspiring, brief piece on how technologists can help build a technological world where technology helps us live better lives over which we have more control, and how a failure to do something to build this world will give us a place where we are continuously spied upon and manipulated.

We probably don’t really have a choice about whether a $0.03 wireless sensor platform will exist. Technology marches on.

But we do have a choice about how it will be employed. If we follow the path we’re on now, all those devices will be controlled by some company somewhere that is providing the service behind them. All that data that all those devices are gathering about you will be streamed back to a walled garden via an encrypted channel to end up as fodder for some big data analytics platform that will be used by someone to sell you more stuff. You will be spied on by everything around you with no rational way to understand where all that data is going and how it’s being used. We’ll create government regulations that will do little to rationalize your world or help you understand it because they will only succeed in further Balkanizing it.

There is another path: in this alternate world all the devices that are related to you will push their data into a place that you control. This will seem rational and natural because the model will follow the structure of the world you’re already used to with clear delineations between public and private spaces and easy-to-understand controls over how data is used and shared. I say “natural” in a literal way. This is the way the physical world works and we’re all used to it. In this alternate world you are in control.

Build the World You Want to Live In (via Hack the Planet)

DRM-free label for all your DRM-free stuff

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 04:23:29 +0000

Kxra sez, "Defective by Design, the Free Software Foundation's campaign against DRM has just released a new graphic to mark DRM-free works on the web. The DRM-free label quickly communicates the DRM-free status of files, increases in value as more distributors adopt the label, and adds value to being DRM-free by linking to an informational page about DRM. The logo is already in use by O'Reilly, Momentum, the Pragmatic Bookshelf, and Magnatune. It is available in a few different styles with source files under CC-BY-SA 3.0."

New and improved label for DRM-free files (Thanks, Kxra!)

HTML5's overseer says DRM's true purpose is to prevent legal forms of innovation

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 16:29:46 +0000

Ian Hickson, the googler who is overseeing the HTML5 standard at the W3C, has written a surprisingly frank piece on the role of DRM. As he spells out in detail, the point of DRM isn't to stop illegal copying, it's to stop legal forms of innovation from taking place. He shows that companies that deploy DRM do so in order to prevent individuals, groups and companies from innovating in ways that disrupt their profitability:

The purpose of DRM is to give content providers leverage against creators of playback devices.
Content providers have leverage against content distributors, because distributors can't legally distribute copyrighted content without the permission of the content's creators. But if that was the only leverage content producers had, what would happen is that users would obtain their content from those content distributors, and then use third-party content playback systems to read it, letting them do so in whatever manner they wanted.
Here are some examples:
A. Paramount make a movie. A DVD store buys the rights to distribute this movie from Paramount, and sells DVDs. You buy the DVD, and want to play it. Paramount want you to sit through some ads, so they tell the DVD store to put some ads on the DVD labeled as "unskippable".
Without DRM, you take the DVD and stick it into a DVD player that ignores "unskippable" labels, and jump straight to the movie.

This is the first third of my recent Guardian column, What I wish Tim Berners-Lee understood about DRM, but there's two other important points to make, apropos the W3C:

1. DRM always involves patents with onerous licensing terms that are incompatible with the W3C's patent policy, because patent licensing is the hook by which those disruptive -- but legal -- features can be prohibited

2. DRM can't be implemented in free/open code. For DRM to work, anyone who implements it has to design their implementation to prevent users from changing it. This is reflected in the "robustness" rules that always accompany DRM licensing, which always prohibit "user modifiability."

In other words:

1. DRM's purpose is to prevent legal innovation

2. DRM requires onerous patent licenses

3. DRM is incompatible with free/open code and systems

Discussions about DRM often land on the fundamental problem with DRM: that it doesn't work, or worse, that it is in fact mathematically impossible to make it work. (via /.)

"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back." - Robert A Heinlein, Life-Line

Mozilla Foundation unveils dev tools

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 20:17:12 +0000

The good folks at the Mozilla Foundation have unveiled an amazing suite of Web-development tools. Wired's Webmonkey has a great summary:

The most popular request, and by far the coolest of the bunch, is the ability to do live edits in the text editor of your choice — effectively controlling Firefox with your editor. The video below shows an example of live editing via the popular Sublime Edit. This would essentially eliminate the need to jump from your editor to the browser, hit refresh, jump back to your editor, and so on. A dance that most of us are all too familiar with. Perhaps the best part, Rouget says this will work with the mobile version of Firefox as well.
Mozilla is also working on the opposite idea — authoring in the browser. That means putting an editor inside Firefox’s Dev Tools suite. Thus far this idea is less fleshed out, but the possibilities include putting in something like jsFiddle or perhaps a more traditional file-based editor.
Other new tools include some catch up features that bring Firefox’s Dev tools up to speed with what you’ll find in WebKit browsers. Examples include a new network panel prototype and the ability to doc the tools to the right side of the screen — great for wide monitors (this is already available in Nightly). There’s also a new “repaint” view that shows what gets repainted on the page, very useful if you’re trying to improve performance. Rouget has also been working on a new, dark theme for the Firefox dev tools.

Mozilla Shows Off Powerful New Developer Tools for Firefox

Kickstarting a free, open version of Livecode

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 22:34:04 +0000

Edwin sez,

I've been using Runtime Revolution's Livecode for over a decade. It's sort of like Hypercard on steroids. It uses the same concepts - stacks with cards, interface elements that you drag around, resize, natural language code that makes sense when you read it and so on, but updates all of this to incorporate modern stuff like interwebs and mobile devices. Once you have written something you can easily pop out executables for Mac, Linux, PC, Ios or Android without a major porting effort. There's even a server version that works like php, but using language that doesn't make my head hurt.
Anyway, while I've been using this for years to automate all sorts of tasks, designing my own web-page generating apps and creating game prototypes, I have not been able to unreservedly recommend it to friends that would like to experiment with it because of the cost.
That could change though because the company behind Livecode has a Kickstarter up to create an open source version of Livecode with many improvements over the current closed version. From what I am seeing on the kickstarter the only difference between the future open source version and the future closed version is the licensing - if you pay for the closed version you won't have to share your code. I am very excited about this - Livecode is probably the easiest to use development environment around and it makes introducing programming to kids and less-technical-but-creative friends a real joy. I am certain that having this out in the wild would make the world a better and weirder place, so I am supporting it. I think that anyone interested in increasing the number of people that can write their own applications should do so too.

I, too, loved Hypercard, and have been impressed by Runtime Revolution. A free/open version (they're promising GPLv3) would be a serious force for good on earth. I just kicked in a hundred. This would be great.

Open Source Edition of LiveCode (Thanks, Edwin!)

Open source ecology explained

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 16:34:57 +0000

Tristan sez, "Open Source Ecology founder Marcin Jakubowski and the OSE team explain the philosophy behind their work and the open source movement as a whole. We're always looking for remote collaborators to pick up and run with our designs. If you're interested in building or improving on our work, please visit the OSE wiki."

Open Source Philosophy. (Thanks, Tristan!)

HOWTO assemble the Powercube, hydraulic power source for the Global Village Construction set

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 02:08:00 +0000

Tristan from Open Source Ecology sez, "This comprehensive, user friendly video shows you how to assemble the Powercube; Open Source Ecology's modular power unit. This machine can be used to Power any of the 50 Global Village Construction set machines, including the Liberator CEB Press." (See today's earlier post on the CEB Press).

Full instructions are available on the CEB Wiki:

Power Cube VII (Thanks, Tristan!)

HOWTO make your own automated compressed earth brick making machine

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 20:02:43 +0000

Tristan from Open Source Ecology sez, "This comprehensive, user friendly video shows you how to assembly the Liberator CEB Press; the worlds first open source, automated compressed earth brick making machine. Made from $4000 worth of parts, this machine sets a new standard in affordability, allowing users to build almost any type of brick structure out of dirt."

The OSE Wiki page has full instructions for building your own:

CEB Press (Thanks, Tristan!)

Github repository for Aaron Swartz memorials

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 07:03:34 +0000

Brian Guthrie writes,

Aaron was a tireless supporter of the open internet and an old-school hacker. To honor his memory and his contributions to technical community, Aaron's family and friends wanted to provide a way to share their memories that:
* uses free and open source software wherever possible
* licenses its content under the Creative Commons
* is open to the technical community to hack on and contribute to
* leverages tools that Aaron used and contributed to, like Markdown and RSS
If you'd like to contribute, please fork the repo on Github and get hacking. You can also email your thoughts to rememberaaronsw@gmail.com, and we'll shift them onto the website as quickly as possible.

rememberaaronsw/rememberaaronsw · GitHub (Thanks, Brian!)

Not Pacman: a swiftly tilting Pacman variant

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 02:24:49 +0000

Not Pacman is Stabyourself's Pacman variant in which the whole field is subject to wild rotations that cause all the game sprites to tumble, making for an extremely challenging version of the old favorite. It's Win/Lin/Mac, and there's sourcecode, too.

Stabyourself.net - Not Pacman (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

LulzBot, a "libre hardware" 3D printer

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 23:01:39 +0000

Kristin sez, "Based in Loveland, Colorado, LulzBot designs, builds, and sells desktop 3D printers, parts, and plastics for entrepreneurs, inventors, engineers, and experimenters. They've just launched their AO-101 3D printer a high-quality, cost-effective solution that embodies the philosophy of "Libre Hardware," allowing people to learn from, share, and improve the hardware and software they use."

AO-101 3D Printer (Thanks, Kristin!)

Robots are taking your job and mine: deal with it

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 16:11:07 +0000

Two striking articles on the roboticization of the workforce: first is Kevin Kelly in Wired, with "Better Than Human", an optimistic and practical-minded look at the way that robots change the jobs landscape, with some advice on how to survive the automation of your gig:

Now let’s consider quadrant C, the new jobs created by automation—including the jobs that we did not know we wanted done. This is the greatest genius of the robot takeover: With the assistance of robots and computerized intelligence, we already can do things we never imagined doing 150 years ago. We can remove a tumor in our gut through our navel, make a talking-picture video of our wedding, drive a cart on Mars, print a pattern on fabric that a friend mailed to us through the air. We are doing, and are sometimes paid for doing, a million new activities that would have dazzled and shocked the farmers of 1850. These new accomplishments are not merely chores that were difficult before. Rather they are dreams that are created chiefly by the capabilities of the machines that can do them. They are jobs the machines make up.
Before we invented automobiles, air-conditioning, flatscreen video displays, and animated cartoons, no one living in ancient Rome wished they could watch cartoons while riding to Athens in climate-controlled comfort. Two hundred years ago not a single citizen of Shanghai would have told you that they would buy a tiny slab that allowed them to talk to faraway friends before they would buy indoor plumbing. Crafty AIs embedded in first-person-shooter games have given millions of teenage boys the urge, the need, to become professional game designers—a dream that no boy in Victorian times ever had. In a very real way our inventions assign us our jobs. Each successful bit of automation generates new occupations—occupations we would not have fantasized about without the prompting of the automation.
To reiterate, the bulk of new tasks created by automation are tasks only other automation can handle. Now that we have search engines like Google, we set the servant upon a thousand new errands. Google, can you tell me where my phone is? Google, can you match the people suffering depression with the doctors selling pills? Google, can you predict when the next viral epidemic will erupt? Technology is indiscriminate this way, piling up possibilities and options for both humans and machines.
It is a safe bet that the highest-earning professions in the year 2050 will depend on automations and machines that have not been invented yet. That is, we can’t see these jobs from here, because we can’t yet see the machines and technologies that will make them possible. Robots create jobs that we did not even know we wanted done.

Kelly is one of the great technological optimists of our era, and always makes a good case for the net benefit of technology. I really admire What Technology Wants, his 2010 book, not least because it sets out a program for deciding how to integrate technology with your life, and, more importantly, how and why to refuse to adopt some technologies (Kelly frames as being a "technology gourmet," someone who knows what she wants from technology and seeks it out; versus being a "technology glutton," who pigs out on whatever technology is on offer).

Now, contrast that robot-human co-existence manifesto with Why Workers Are Losing the War Against Machines, an excerpt from Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy , a new book by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee that's being serialized in The Atlantic:

Skill-biased technical change has also been important in the past. For most of the 19th century, about 25% of all agriculture labor threshed grain. That job was automated in the 1860s. The 20th century was marked by an accelerating mechanization not only of agriculture but also of factory work. Echoing the first Nobel Prize winner in economics, Jan Tinbergen, Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz described the resulting SBTC as a "race between education and technology." Ever-greater investments in education, dramatically increasing the average educational level of the American workforce, helped prevent inequality from soaring as technology automated more and more unskilled work. While education is certainly not synonymous with skill, it is one of the most easily measurable correlates of skill, so this pattern suggests that demand for upskilling has increased faster than its supply.
Studies by this book's co-author Erik Brynjolfsson along with Timothy Bresnahan, Lorin Hitt, and Shinku Yang found that a key aspect of SBTC was not just the skills of those working with computers, but more importantly the broader changes in work organization that were made possible by information technology. The most productive firms reinvented and reorganized decision rights, incentives systems, information flows, hiring systems, and other aspects of organizational capital to get the most from the technology. This, in turn, required radically different and, generally, higher skill levels in the workforce. It was not so much that those directly working with computers had to be more skilled, but rather that whole production processes, and even industries, were reengineered to exploit powerful new information technologies. What's more, each dollar of computer hardware was often the catalyst for more than $10 of investment in complementary organizational capital. The intangible organizational assets are typically much harder to change, but they are also much more important to the success of the organization.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee are more economist-jargon heavy than Kelly, and more downbeat, and they're also pointing out something obvious, which is that there are losers in technological revolution. See, e.g., Bruce Sterling's end of the year roundup:

Come 2013, I think it's time for people in and around the "music industry" to stop blaming themselves, and thinking their situation is somehow special. Whatever happens to musicians will eventually happen to everybody.
Nobody was or is really much better at "digital transition" than musicians were and are. If you're superb at digitalization, that's no great solution either. You just have to auto-disrupt and re-invent yourself over and over and over again.
It's pretty awful to be a musician and have no possibility of health insurance (as Jaron Lanier keeps pointing out), but you could have been a Nokia engineer. You'd have been blindsided even harder and faster, and you wouldn't even have had the girls and the weed.

Which is to say that even though technology makes us more "productive" and puts more goods into more peoples' hands, that the transition isn't bloodless, it isn't fair, and it isn't always very nice.

But here's the thing that neither of these articles -- or even Bruce's acid observations -- touches on: once technology creates abundance, what possibilities exist for distributing the fruits of that abundance such that the benefits are more evenly felt? We've been talking about an increase in productivity producing an increase in leisure for a long time, but instead, the "winner take all" world of Brynjolfsson and McAfee often seems to produce a "winner" class that works itself into an early grave by running 100-hour work weeks at astounding payscales, and a much larger "loser" class that works itself into an early grave by working 100-hour weeks in shitty, marginal, grey-economy jobs, trying to stitch together something like an income.

In America, anyone who proposes an increase in overall quality of life through public schools, health programs, libraries, or even Internet access, is immediately branded a socialist and dismissed out of hand.

On the other hand, the Internet-age's sweetest dividend is the creative possibilities: the chance to sit in your little grass shack or organic farm or urban crackerbox and use the tubes to carry on debate; to contribute to software and Wikipedia; to crowdsource capital for your creativity; to find makers who have solved 90% of the problem that's nagging you and who will help you solve the remaining ten percent; to access a library of human creativity and knowledge without parallel; to have your art and creativity accessible to all, and to find the mutants who're wired the same as you and jam with them.

That world of de-marketized, non-market, non-commodity and/or gift economy living is something that seems tantalizingly within our grasp today, and it feels like automation holds the key to so much of it. But is it just the latest version of the dream of a leisure society? Or can we Craigslist and Kickstarter and Freecycle and Etsy and Thingiverse and Open Source Hardware and Wikipedia and Creative Commons our way to a world where the means of information is owned by no one and yet tended by all?

(via O'Reilly Radar)

Bunnie Huang is building a laptop

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 06:38:33 +0000

Virtuoso hardware hacker Bunnie Huang is building an open hardware laptop. Want.

We started the design in June, and last week I got my first prototype motherboards, hot off the SMT line. It’s booting linux, and I’m currently grinding through the validation of all the sub-components. I thought I’d share the design progress with my readers.
Of course, a feature of a build-it-yourself laptop is that all the design documentation is open, so others of sufficient skill and resources can also build it. The hardware and its sub-components are picked so as to make this the most practically open hardware laptop I could create using state of the art technology. You can download, without NDA, the datasheets for all the components, and key peripheral options are available so it’s possible to build a complete firmware from source with no opaque blobs.

Building my Own Laptop

Open University is now more open

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 01:35:22 +0000

The UK Open University, where I'm a visiting senior lecturer, has just announced a new free/open learning platform called Futurelearn: "Futurelearn will be the UK's first large-scale provider of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), a new kind of educational offering that charges no fees, offers no formal qualifications and has no barriers to entry. The first generation of MOOCs, which has attracted millions of students from around the world, laid the foundation for widespread change in higher education. The universities of Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, East Anglia, Exeter, King's College London, Lancaster, Leeds, Southampton, St Andrews and Warwick have all signed up to join The Open University in Futurelearn." (Thanks, Helen!)

Sitegeist: mobile app mines public data to tell you about the spot you're standing in

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 03:23:09 +0000

Nicko sez, "Sitegeist is a free Android and iPhone app from the Sunlight Foundation that helps you to learn more about your surroundings in seconds. Sitegeist takes public data about the people, housing, history, environment and things to do for any U.S. location and presents it in easy-to-view infographics. Just scroll and swipe your way through the categories to get a feel for the area. Everything from age distributions to political contributions and median home values to record temperatures. It makes complex localized data easy to understand so you can get back to enjoying the neighborhood. The app incorporates publicly available data from a number of sources including the U.S. Census Bureau, InfluenceExplorer.com, the Dark Sky weather API and even Yelp and Foursquare. Sunlight will continue to add and improve on the app as more rich data becomes public."

(Thanks, Nicko!)

Burrito Bomber: open source hardware-based drone autonomously delivers Mexican food

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 20:11:28 +0000

The good folks at Darwin Aerospace have figured out how to use drones to parachute burritos directly onto your property. They await pending FAA reforms before they can go into business, however. Here's how it works:

It works like this:

You connect to the Burrito Bomber web-app and order a burrito. Your smartphone sends your current location to our server, which generates a waypoint file compatible with the drone's autopilot.

We upload the waypoint file to the drone and load your burrito in to our custom made Burrito Delivery Tube.

The drone flies to your location and releases the Burrito Delivery Tube. The burrito parachutes down to you, the drone flies itself home, and you enjoy your carne asada.

We built Burrito Bomber using a handful of open source projects and some new bits we created ourselves. All the code and 3D models we created for Burrito Bomber are on our GitHub page so you can build one too!

Burrito Bomber - Darwin Aerospace (via JWZ)

Hacker High: free lessons to teach kids to pwn their stuff

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 17:14:11 +0000

Pete sez, "Hacker Highschool, Security Awareness for Teens is releasing version 2 of its popular Hacking Lessons to teach teens how to be more resourceful, creative, and in control of the things they own. All this while providing practical security and safety techniques. This open, free project is a relaunch of the lessons first published in 2004. Over 60 volunteers have been working months to provide a total of 23 lessons. The first of which has been released today, 'Lesson 1, Being a Hacker'."

Coding Freedom: an anthropologist understands hacker culture

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 12:35:04 +0000

Biella Coleman is a geek anthropologist, in both senses of the epithet: an anthropologist who studies geeks, and a geek who is an anthropologist. Though she's best known today for her excellent and insightful work on the mechanism and structure underpinning Anonymous and /b/, Coleman is also an expert on the organization, structure, philosophy and struggles of the free software/open source movements. I met Biella while she was doing fieldwork as an intern at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She's also had deep experience with the Debian project and many other hacker/FLOSS subcultures.

Coleman's has published her dissertation, edited and streamlined, under the title of Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking, which comes out today from Princeton University Press (Quinn Norton, also well known for her Wired reporting on Anonymous and Occupy, had a hand in the editing). Coding Freedom walks the fine line between popular accessibility and scholarly rigor, and does a very good job of expressing complex ideas without (too much) academic jargon.

Coding Freedom is insightful and fascinating, a superbly observed picture of the motives, divisions and history of the free software and software freedom world. As someone embedded in both those worlds, I found myself surprised by connections I'd never made on my own, but which seemed perfectly right and obvious in hindsight. Coleman's work pulls together a million IRC conversations and mailing list threads and wikiwars and gets to their foundations, the deep discussion evolving through the world of free/open source software.

Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking