Culture

Terrifying or Exhilarating? You Decide.

Blinded by Science, Culture, IT is not magic pixie dust, Life under Capitalism
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cyberpunk_c

Cyberpunk predicted this yonks ago; science fiction has expended reams of print in exploring the human and philosophical ramifications of it, but it still boggles the mind that brain/pc interfaces are actually here, now, licensed to Mattel and likely to retail for under a hundred bucks:

Researchers have developed systems that read brainwaves – in the form of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals – in order to help people suffering from disabilities or paralysis control wheelchairs, play games , or type on a computer. Now, two companies are preparing to market similar devices to mainstream consumers.

Australian outfit Emotiv will release a headset whose 16 sensors make it possible to direct 12 different movements in a computer game. Emotiv says the helmet can also detect emotions.

Compatible with any PC running Windows, it will ship later this year for $299 (see image). They have shown off a game where the player moves stones to rebuild Stonehenge using mind power alone (see video).

Californian company NeuroSky has also built a device that can detect emotions: the firm says it can tell whether you are focused, relaxed, afraid or anxious, for example.

Rather than selling it directly to the public, NeuroSky is licensing its set-up to other companies, including Mattel, Nokia and Sega. Mattel, for example, will soon sell a game which involves players levitating a ball using thought alone (see video).

Mind hacks

These devices are remarkably cheap, especially when compared to the price tags on research-grade EEGs, which can run to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Emotiv’s headset will retail for $299, while Mattel’s game will cost just $80. At such low prices, these dirt-cheap brain interfaces will likely be popular – and not just with people who want to play with them

More…

And where will the technology be in a year, or five, or ten? The New Scientist points out that in a generation’s time children will be growing up who’ve known no other way of existing or using technology. As a commenter noted: “The adventure of what it is to be human has just begun”.

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A Little Pizza Sophistry

Crime, Culture, Food, Funny, New Labour, UK politics
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Headline of the day, from the Metro:

‘Cheese-snorting’ pizza staff charged

Two Domino’s Pizza staff who posted a video on YouTube showing one of them stuffing cheese up his nose and breaking wind on a piece of salami have been charged with distributing prohibited foods.

Kristy Hammonds, 31, and Michael Setzer, 32, have also been fired from the branch of the chain in North Carolina where they worked.

They could argue that’s not fair. There’s no proof they use that cheese and that salami to make pizzas afterwards, so technically they’re in the clear, despite their behaviour being disgusting to any decent person.

What do you mean, that’s a specious argument? It works for Jacqui Smith.

Is Google Streetview NL In Breach of EU Data Protection Law?

Bloody Lawyers, Civil liberties, Culture, Dutch politics, Europe, Internet, IT is not magic pixie dust, Life under Capitalism, Merkins...
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naamplaatjes
naamplaatjes

Streetview may be winning in court in the US, but they may find the legal going a bit stickier in the EU.

The furore in the British press this morning about the advent of Google Streetview in UK and NL echoes that of its US launch, when Google Streetview, which allows the casual browser to wander at will virtually peeking in windows, gardens and doors, or wherever else Google’s camera poked its invasive lens, faced legal challenges on breach of privacy grounds.

So far Google’s defeated its legal challengers – but will EU data protection laws defeat Google?

Streetview’s just been launched here in NL too, and lo and behold! There’s our house: and our bedroom window, which you can look right into. And our front door, with our names on it.

That’s because it’s obligatory when you move into a property here to register your residence with the local authority, the gemeente. They then give you or you buy an embossed nameplate (see above), which you put on your front door, usually above the letterbox or by the doorbell. (Makes it easier to round you up – the Arena bomb hoaxers arrested up the street the other day had their names on the letterbox too).

This means that what Google Streeetview has done, in effect, is to compile a visual database of the names and addresses of every resident in the Netherlands save those paranoids – or the sensible, your choice – who haven’t complied with the local gemeente‘s pettifogging door-labelling rules.

Did Google or its licensers in government ever consider that, because it’s possible to zoom in on this database and that therefore it’s accessible to any casual viewer, they are potentially in breach of EU data protection laws – specifically Directive 95/46/EC on the protection of personal data?

Google claims it owns all Streetview data. Streetview NL is a database, although it’s visual. Surely any database containing individuals’ names and addresses should be subject to EU data protection regs? I’d certainly contend it should*.

Any EU member government body that allows or licenses Google to compile such a database might also be in breach of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights which guarantees the privacy of individuals and families; broadly, it covers “private and family life, .. home and correspondence”, subject to certain restrictions that are “in accordance with law” and “necessary in a democratic society” .

I’m no expert on EU data protection laws and their application in NL – *I am no longer a lawyer – but that jumped right out at me.

Why didn’t it jump out to any of Google’s high-priced advocaten?

UPDATE

Heh.

When interviewed, a Google Streetview driver/photographer demanded he not be photographed.

The Past Isn’t A Foreign Country

Amsterdam, Culture, Europe
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And they don’t do things that much differently there either. Another fascinating recent google find I came across recently is this this Flickr gallery of 1930’s colour photographs of Amsterdam by colour wizard Bernard Eilers:

Visit of Queen Juliana
Amsterdam, Dam Square, Bijenkorf, 1937, Bernard Eiler

From the Stadsarchief Amsterdam:

Bernard F. Eilers (1878-1951) […] was held in high regard as an art photographer both in and outside the Netherlands. He owed his greatest successes to his photographs of Amsterdam, that exude much atmosphere and make one think of a painting by Breitner or Witsen. His free work is pictorial and seems to belong in the nineteenth rather than the twentieth century. In his photographs, Eilers achieved exceptionally high quality by his practically unequalled mastery of the means offered by modern photographic techniques. His photographs paint a nostalgic picture of the Netherlands in years gone by.

Yet Depression Amsterdam as portrayed by Eilers, particularly when neon-lit, didn’t really look that different at all: other than a bit of rebuilding, some insertion of technology and a few cosmetic and stylistic updates central Amsterdam looks more or less now the same as it did then. Now, this shop is a Tie Rack, but it looks almost the same, if not so chic.

Corner Spui and Kalverstraat, Now a Tierack
Corner Spui and Kalverstraat, Now a Tierack

That may be why as my taxidriver navigates the concentric rings of Amsterdam’s architectural history, shortcutting through the Golden Age to skirt the Belle Epoque and cruise down the tidy boulevards of the Amsterdam School to the dialysis unit by the ill-matched, half-empty yet prizewinning skyscrapers on Amsterdam’s southern outskirts, that I find it so easy to imagine the tramp of jackboots, the bark of Nazi officers and the avid expressions of their Dutch enablers, as they scoured the grachten and sanitised the belle epoque suburbs of unwanted aliens, jews and dissidents.

At the hospital I see any number of very old Dutch people, people in their eighties and nineties, who’d’ve been adults then. As I look at those sharp-nosed, heavy-jawed faces can’t help but wonder, was it you?