TidBITS#848/25-Sep-06
=====================
Issue link: <http://db.tidbits.com/issue/848>
You may be an inforg and not even know it. In this issue, we welcome
back Professor Luciano Floridi for a forward-looking article on how
we're adapting to the infosphere and what's in store as humans and
technology continue to merge (and no, we're not talking cyborgs). In
other news, Apple releases Security Update 2006-005 and AirPort
Update 2006-001 to deal with potential AirPort exploits, the iTunes
Store sells 125,000 movies during the first week of movie sales,
Adobe attempts to clarify the future of GoLive, and Glenn Fleishman
reviews Rogue Amoeba's Fission audio editor.
Articles
Disney Sells 125,000 Movies in First Week on iTunes Store
AirPort Updates Stop Wi-Fi Exploit
The Future Beyond Tomorrow, Courtesy of Adobe
Fission Manipulates Audio Tracks of All Stripes
Peering into the Future of the Infosphere
Take Control News/25-Sep-06
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/25-Sep-06
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Disney Sells 125,000 Movies in First Week on iTunes Store
---------------------------------------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/8682>
Playlist is reporting that Walt Disney President and CEO Robert Iger
said that 125,000 downloadable movies had been purchased in the week
since Apple's debut of movies on the iTunes Store. That sales level
generated $1 million in revenue for Disney, which works out to $8
per movie. This implies Apple is taking in between $2 and $5 per
movie since most, if not all, of the movies were in their first week
and thus cost either $10 or $13; now most of the newer movies cost
$15.
<http://playlistmag.com/news/2006/09/19/disney/>
Playlist also reports Iger as predicting that Disney would receive
about $50 million in revenue from selling movies on the iTunes Store
in the first year. Extrapolating out from $8 per movie, that would
imply that Disney would sell 6.25 million movies via the iTunes
Store by this time next year. Those numbers are important, since
they need to be high enough to scare other movie studios into
wanting to work with Apple or risk leaving big money on the table.
No results have yet been forthcoming from the competing Amazon Unbox
service, which features movies from studios other than Disney
properties.
<http://www.amazon.com/unbox/>
AirPort Updates Stop Wi-Fi Exploit
----------------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/8683>
Apple last week released a pair of updates, Security Update 2006-005
and AirPort Update 2006-001, which resolve a trio of related
potential exploits in which a local attacker could inject a
maliciously crafted frame into a wireless network. In theory, such
an attack could cause system crashes, execute arbitrary code, or
elevate privileges, though Apple took pains to note that there are
no known instances of these exploits. Although you can download the
individual updates from the Apple Downloads page (only one is
necessary), you must pick the correct one for your machine.
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304420>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/>
Since AirPort Update 2006-001 covers only two specific builds of Mac
OS X 10.4.7 - whereas Security Update 2006-005 handles Mac OS X
10.3.9 and other specific builds of Mac OS X 10.4.7 (with different
downloads for 10.3.9 and for PowerPC- and Intel-based Macs running
10.4.7) - we encourage you to let Software Update download the
correct version for your system. If you're running Mac OS X 10.3.9
and Software Update doesn't show Security Update 2006-005, you must
first install AirPort 4.2 and AirPort Extreme Driver Update 2005-001
(I suspect Software Update will provide them as well).
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/airport42formacosx1033.html>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/airportextremedriverupdate2005001.html>
Although Apple's release notes are terse as usual, these updates
undoubtedly come in response to the Wi-Fi exploit demonstrated by
David Maynor and Jon Ellch at the Black Hat 2006 conference. Apple
did not credit Maynor nor Ellch for these fixes, however, which is
an implicit statement that Apple refuses to acknowledge that the two
researchers contributed to uncovering the flaws. An Apple
spokesperson denied that SecureWorks, the firm for which Maynor
works, provided information that led to these patches. Rather, the
spokesperson told several media outlets and TidBITS that news of the
SecureWorks demonstration prompted Apple to conduct an in-depth code
audit that led to identifying these vulnerabilities. (See "Wireless
Driver Hack Could Target Macs and Windows," 07-Aug-06 and "Apple
Issues Careful Wi-Fi Exploit Denial," 28-Aug-06.) SecureWorks has
not responded to any media outlet with additional clarification at
press time; the company is also in the middle of a merger, which
could be why they're not commenting. What's most important is that
Mac users who apply the patches are no longer vulnerable to these
particular exploits.
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/8628>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/8655>
The Future Beyond Tomorrow, Courtesy of Adobe
---------------------------------------------
by Glenn Fleishman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/8684>
Adobe wrote in to tell us that my article about GoLive CS2 being
dropped from the the forthcoming Adobe Creative Suite 2.3 bundle and
replaced with Dreamweaver 8 was incorrect. Sort of.
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/8679>
The press release for the announcement noted, "Future versions of
Adobe Creative Suite will integrate Dreamweaver as a replacement for
Adobe GoLive. Adobe will continue to develop GoLive as a standalone
product." However, the future, according to the email I received,
isn't just any time after the present point. Rather, the future is
the time _beyond_ the release of Creative Suite 2.3 later this year.
Dreamweaver will be bundled with, but not integrated into, the 2.3
version of the suite.
<http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200609/091806CreativeSuite.html>
Some other future release - we're talking about the future beyond
the future now, most likely Creative Suite 3.0 next year - will
integrate Dreamweaver into the suite, after which GoLive will become
a standalone product.
Perhaps Adobe PR should have a group viewing of "The Adventures of
Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension," in which they can peruse
the motto of Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems, "Where the future begins
tomorrow." Bonus points for anyone who can figure out the other
Buckaroo Banzai reference in this issue.
<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086856/>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoyodyne>
Fission Manipulates Audio Tracks of All Stripes
-----------------------------------------------
by Glenn Fleishman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/8685>
Rogue Amoeba last week released Fission, a simple audio-manipulation
program which can handle AIFF, MP3, unprotected AAC (m4a), and Apple
Lossless format files. Fission's most notable feature is lossless
editing of AAC and MP3 files, a capability that's currently unique
with regard to AAC and for MP3 found only in certain high-end
editing programs or in the discontinued and now free Audion music
player. Freeverse's $80 Sound Studio 3 uses third-party support for
editing MP3 and AAC, and can import and export in those two
compressed formats, but it can't provide lossless, native editing
that avoids re-encoding when saved.
<http://www.rogueamoeba.com/fission/>
<http://www.panic.com/audion/>
<http://www.freeverse.com/soundstudio/>
Like Rogue Amoeba's other products, Fission has focus - it's aimed
at helping you trim, split, and clean up audio files, but doesn't
offer all the features of other audio editors. In other words,
there's a Delete item in the Edit menu but no Paste. You can remove
audio by selecting it and clicking the Cut button at the top of the
audio window. Choosing Cut & Split or using the Split tool divides
an audio file into several clips, each of which is saved as a
separate file when you're done with the file. Fission also replaces
the Save command in the File menu with Save Audio (Command-Shift-S,
like most Save As commands) to avoid overwriting the original file
you're editing. Finally, a Crop tool removes everything in the file
except the current selection.
<http://www.rogueamoeba.com/fission/features.php>
The idea is that you can trim unwanted bits from audio you've
captured or created, such as commercials in the middle of radio
shows, "ums" and static from a podcast, or even the gratuitous
applause at the end of a live recording. Fission can modify selected
segments for fade-ins and fade-outs, too.
When you're working with an AAC or MP3 file, Fission makes changes
directly to the original audio data, avoiding a cycle of decoding
and re-encoding that would produce quality loss. The program can
also export to any audio format available through QuickTime,
including AIFF and WAV. Rogue Amoeba makes much of the fact that you
can create ringtones for some cell phones by trimming and fading
files, and then saving them as MP3 or AAC to phones that can import
those audio formats for ringtone playback.
Fission's interface is delightful, offering the scrub approach to
selection, in which dragging a playhead through the audio plays back
whatever is at the playhead, skipping through it at the speed you're
dragging. After making a selection, you can drag a playhead on the
left to scrub backwards, or on the right to scrub forwards.
(Scrubbing can be disabled from the Preferences dialog box, too.)
Fission costs $32 and is a universal binary; there's a demo in which
saved audio is intentionally degraded with a series of audio fades.
Owners of Audio Hijack Pro can obtain a $14-off coupon. Fission
requires Mac OS X 10.4 and is a 2.5 MB download.
<http://www.rogueamoeba.com/fission/download.php>
<http://www.rogueamoeba.com/audiohijackpro/>
<http://www.rogueamoeba.com/store/fission/ahpcoupon.php>
Peering into the Future of the Infosphere
-----------------------------------------
by Luciano Floridi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/8686>
If you can look into the seeds of time,
And say which grain will grow and which will not,
Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear
Your favours nor your hate.
-- Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act I, Scene III, 59-62.
[And now for something completely different... Back in 1995, we
published a three-part article by Luciano Floridi in which he looked
into the future of the Internet. After a reader ran across the
article and drew my attention to it, I asked Professor Floridi if he
would like to tackle the topic yet again. He did, and you can now
read his thoughts about how we can expect to see the Internet weave
its way further into our lives. -Adam]
**Eleven Years Ago** -- In 1995, I was invited to give a keynote
speech at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, to celebrate UNESCO's
50th anniversary (UNESCO is the United Nations Educational,
Scientific, and Cultural Organization). On that occasion, I was
asked to predict what sort of transformations and problems were
likely to affect the development of the Internet and our system of
organised knowledge in the medium term. That speech turned into an
article, a synthesis of which was published by TidBITS in three
parts (see "The Internet & the Future of Organized Knowledge"; for a
non-abridged version see "The Internet: Which Future for Organised
Knowledge, Frankenstein or Pygmalion?"). They say there are only two
kinds of predictions: wrong and lucky. Mine was lucky, and so I
thought I might tempt fate once more.
<http://db.tidbits.com/series/1267>
<http://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/~floridi/pdf/frank.pdf>
This time, however, I shall not be concerned with the system of
organised knowledge. Rather, I shall focus, more generally, on
future developments in digital information and communication
technologies (ICTs) and their impact on our lives. And since there
is no merit in predicting the obvious, I will avoid issues such as
rising concerns about privacy and identity theft, spamming, viruses,
or the importance of semantic tagging, online shopping and virtual
communities. I will, instead, seek to capture the new worldview that
might be dawning on us.
**Digital ICTs as Reshaping Technologies** -- In order to grasp the
scenarios that we might witness and experience in the near future, I
need to introduce two key concepts: "infosphere" and "radical
reshaping."
"Infosphere" is a word I coined years ago on the basis of
"biosphere," a term referring to that limited region on our planet
that supports life. By "infosphere," then, I mean the whole
informational environment made up of all informational entities
(including informational agents), their properties, interactions,
processes, and relations. It is an environment comparable to, but
different from, "cyberspace" (which is only one of the sub-regions
of the infosphere, as it were), since the infosphere also includes
offline and analog spaces of information. We shall see that it is
also an environment (and hence a concept) that is rapidly evolving.
By "radical reshaping," I mean a very radical form of change, one
that not only structures a system (e.g., a company or a machine)
anew, but also fundamentally transforms its intrinsic nature. In
this sense, for example, nanotechnologies and biotechnologies are
not merely changing the world in a significant way (as did the
invention of gunpowder) but actually reshaping our world in that
both enable us to create fundamentally new substances that didn't
previously exist and enable us to interact with and manipulate the
world in previously unimagined ways.
Using these concepts, my basic claim can now be formulated thus:
digital information and communication technologies are radically
reshaping the very nature of the infosphere, and therein lies the
source of some of the most profound transformations and challenging
problems that we shall experience in the near future, at least as
far as technology is concerned. In the rest of this article, I mean
to clarify and substantiate this simple claim by highlighting three
fundamental trends in the reshaping of the infosphere and some of
their significant implications.
**#1: The Rise of the Frictionless Infosphere** -- The most obvious
way in which these new information and communication technologies
are reshaping the infosphere concerns (a) the transition from analog
to digital data and then (b) the ever-increasing growth of our
digital space. Both phenomena are very familiar and require no
explanation, but a brief comment may not go amiss.
In a 2003 study on information storage and flows, Lyman and Varian
write that "Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media
produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two
percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly
in hard disks. [...] Five exabytes of information is equivalent in
size to the information contained in 37,000 new libraries the size
of the Library of Congress book collections."
<http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/execsum.htm#summary>
Although the production of analog data is still increasing, the
infosphere is becoming more digital by the day. A simple example may
help to drive the point home: the new Large Hadron Collider that is
being built at the CERN to explore the physics of particles will
produce up to 1.5 GB of data per second, or an estimated 5 petabytes
of data annually, a quantity of data hundreds of times larger than
the Library of Congress's print collection (estimated at 20
terabytes) and about as large as Google's whole data storage,
reported to be approximately 5 petabytes. (If you're having trouble
with these units, a petabyte is 1,024 terabytes, and an exabyte is
1,024 petabytes.)
<http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte>
This radical reshaping of the infosphere is largely due to the
fundamental convergence between digital resources and digital tools.
One of Alan Turing's most important intuitions was that, in our
radically reformed infosphere, there is no longer any substantial
difference between the processor and the processed, so digital tools
deal effortlessly and seamlessly with digital resources in a way
that simply wasn't true in the analog world.
The convergence of digital tools and resources potentially
eliminates one of the most long-standing bottlenecks in the
infosphere and, as a result, there is a gradual erasure of friction,
the forces that oppose the flow of information within a region of
the infosphere. Reducing friction in the infosphere thus reduces the
amount of work and effort required to generate, obtain, process, and
transmit information in a given environment, by establishing and
maintaining channels of communication and by overcoming obstacles in
the flow of information such as distance, noise, lack of resources
(especially time and memory), amount and complexity of the data to
be processed, and so forth. Given a certain amount of information
available in a region of the infosphere, the lower the friction in
it, the more accessible that amount of information becomes.
Because of their "data superconductivity," information and
communication technologies are well known for being among the most
influential factors that affect friction in the infosphere. We are
all acquainted with daily aspects of a frictionless infosphere, such
as spamming, and concepts such as micropayments, which become
possible only when there is no friction in the transmission of
payment information between parties. Three other significant
consequences are:
* We have no right to ignore information. It will become progressively
less credible to claim ignorance when confronted by easily
predictable events (e.g. as George W. Bush did with respect to
Hurricane Katrina's disastrous effects on New Orleans's flood
barriers) and painfully obvious facts (e.g. as British politician
Tessa Jowell did with respect to her husband's finances in a widely
publicized scandal).
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/03/02/wkat02.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/03/02/ixworld.html>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessa_Jowell_financial_allegations>
* There will be vast common knowledge. Because of the amount of
information available on any given topic, we will have no right to
claim ignorance, not just because the information was available, but
because everyone else will know that the information was available.
* From these two consequences, it follows that, in the future, we
shall witness a steady increase in the responsibilities of our
information agents, whether they be people, companies, or bots that
seek out information on our behalf.
The upshot is that information and communication technologies are
making humanity increasingly accountable, morally speaking, for the
way the world is, will, and should be. That's a huge change from
times not so long ago when all-powerful gods were deemed responsible
for every otherwise inexplicable event, and it forces us to accept
ever more responsibility for our own actions in every sphere.
**#2: The Global Infosphere Is Becoming Our Ecosystem** -- During the
last decade or so, we have become accustomed to thinking about our
online lives as a mixture between an evolutionary adaptation of
people to a digital environment, and a form of post-modern,
neo-colonization of the digital environment by people. This is
probably a mistake. Information and communication technologies are
as much recasting our world as they are creating new realities. The
threshold between here (analog, carbon-based, off-line) and there
(digital, silicon-based, online) is fast becoming blurred, but this
is as much to the advantage of the latter as it is of the former.
Adapting Horace's famous phrase, "captive cyberspace is conquering
its victor."
The digital is spilling over into the analog and merging with it.
This recent phenomenon is variously known as "ubiquitous computing,"
"ambient intelligence," "The Internet of Things," or "Web-augmented
things." It is, or will soon be, the next stage in the digital
revolution.
<http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/publications/internetofthings/>
Basically, the increasing digitalization of both artifacts of the
physical world and of our entire social environment suggests that
soon it will be difficult to understand what life was like in
pre-digital times (to someone who was born in 2000, the world will
always have been wireless, for example) and, in the near future, the
very distinction between online and offline will become blurred and
eventually disappear. To put it dramatically, the infosphere is
progressively absorbing all other spaces. Let me explain.
In the fast-approaching future, an increasing number of objects will
be able to learn, advise, and communicate with each other. A good
example is provided by RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification), which
can store and remotely retrieve data from an object and give it a
unique identity, like a barcode. RFID tags can measure less than
half a millimeter square, and be thinner than paper. Incorporate
this tiny microchip in everything, including humans and animals, and
you have created what I'm calling "ITentities." This is not science
fiction. According to a report by market research company InStat,
the worldwide production of RFID tags will increase more than
25-fold between 2005 and 2010 and reach 33 billion. Imagine
networking these 33 billion ITentities together with all the
hundreds of millions of PCs, DVDs, iPods, and other digital
communication devices available and you see that the infosphere is
no longer "there" but "here." And it is here to stay.
Nowadays, we are used to considering the space of information as
something we log in to and log out from. Our view of the world is
still modern or Newtonian: it is made of "dead" cars, buildings,
furniture, clothes, which are non-interactive, irresponsive, and
incapable of communicating, learning, or memorizing. But what we
still experience as the world offline is bound to become a fully
interactive and responsive environment of wireless, pervasive,
distributed, a2a (anything to anything) information processes, that
works a4a (anywhere for anytime), in real time. This interactive
digital environment will first gently invite us to understand the
world as something "a-live" (artificially live), i.e. as comprising
agents capable of interacting with us in various ways (shoes, for
example, used to be "dead" artifacts, but you can now interact with
the pair of Nike shoes you are wearing through your iPod). Such
animation of the world will, paradoxically, make our outlook closer
to that of pre-technological cultures which interpreted all aspects
of nature as inhabited by animating spirits.
The second step will be a reconceptualization of what we experience
in informational terms. It will become normal to consider the
physical world as part of the infosphere, not so much as envisioned
by the Matrix movies, where the "real reality" is as hard as the
metal of the machines that inhabit it; but in the evolutionary,
hybrid sense represented by an environment such as New Port City,
the fictional, post-cybernetic metropolis of the Ghost in the Shell
graphic novel. The infosphere will not be a virtual environment
supported by a genuinely real world; rather, it will be the world
itself that will be increasingly interpreted and understood
informationally, as part of the infosphere. At the end of this
shift, the infosphere will have moved from being a way to refer to
the space of information to being synonymous with Being. I suspect
we shall find this sort of informational metaphysics increasingly
easy to embrace.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matrix_series>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Shell>
For the skeptic, there are plenty of daily examples that offer
tangible evidence of such radical transformations. "Robotic
cookware" is already available. MP3 players will soon be able to
recommend new music to their users by learning from the tunes their
owners enjoyed. Many online services, ranging from Pandora to
MyStrands, already do this. Your next fridge will inherit your
tastes and wishes from the old one, just as your new laptop can
import your favourite settings from the old one, and it will
interact with your new way of cooking and with the supermarket Web
site, just as your laptop can talk to a printer or to another
computer. We have all known that this was possible on paper for some
time; the difference is that it is now actually happening in our
kitchens.
<http://www.vitacraft.com.nyud.net:8090/rfiq/home.html>
<http://www.semanticaudio.com/>
<http://www.pandora.com/>
<http://www.mystrands.com/>
<http://www.lginternetfamily.co.uk/homenetwork.asp>
As a consequence of such reshaping of our ordinary environment, we
shall be living in an infosphere that will become increasingly
synchronized (time), delocalised (space), and correlated
(interactions). We shall be in serious trouble if we do not take
seriously the fact that we are constructing the new environment that
will be inhabited by future generations. We should be working on an
ecology of the infosphere if we wish to avoid problems such as a
tragedy of the digital commons. In other words, we are leaving our
children not just a slew of planetary environmental problems, but
problems that will infect and contaminate the infosphere as well.
Unfortunately, I suspect it will take some time and a whole new kind
of education and sensitivity to realise that the infosphere is a
common space, which needs to be preserved to the advantage of all.
One thing seems indisputable, though: the digital divide will become
a chasm, generating new forms of discrimination between those who
can be denizens of the infosphere and those who cannot, between
insiders and outsiders, between the information-rich and the
information-poor. It will redraw the map of worldwide society,
generating or widening generational, geographic, socio-economic, and
cultural divides. But the gap will not be reducible to the distance
between industrialized and developing countries, since it will cut
across societies.
**#3: The Evolution of Inforgs** -- We have seen that we are probably
the last generation to experience a clear difference between offline
and online. The third transformation I wish to highlight concerns
precisely the emergence of artificial and hybrid agents, i.e.,
partly artificial and partly human. Consider, for example, a family
as a single agent, equipped with digital cameras, laptops, Palm OS
handhelds, iPods, mobile phones, camcorders, wireless networks,
digital TVs, DVDs, CD players, and so on.
These new agents can already operate in the infosphere with much
more freedom and control than was possible just a few years ago. We
shall increasingly delegate or outsource to artificial agents our
memories, decisions, routine tasks, and other activities in ways
that will be increasingly integrated with us and with our
understanding of what it means to be an agent. This is rather well
known, but two other, separate aspects of this transformation may be
in need of some clarification.
On the one hand, in the reshaped infosphere - progressively
populated by artificial and hybrid agents, where there is no
difference between processors and processed, online and offline -
all interactions become equally digital. They are all interpretable
as "read/write" activities, with "execute" being the remaining type
of process. It is easy to predict that, in such an environment, the
moral status and accountability of artificial agents will become an
ever more challenging issue.
On the other hand, our understanding of ourselves as agents will
also be deeply affected. I am not referring here to the
science-fiction vision of a "cyborged" humanity. Walking around with
something like a Bluetooth wireless headset implanted in your ear
does not seem the best way forward, not least because it contradicts
the social message it is also meant to be sending: being on call
24x7 is a form of slavery, and anyone so busy and important should
have a personal assistant instead. The truth is rather that being a
sort of cyborg is not what people will embrace, but what they will
try to avoid, unless it is inevitable. Nor am I referring to a
genetically modified humanity, in charge of its informational DNA
and hence of its future embodiments. We shall probably see genetic
modifications of humans in the future, but it is still too far away,
both technically (safely doable) and ethically (morally acceptable),
to be discussed at this stage.
What I have in mind is a quieter, less sensational, and yet crucial
and profound change in our conception of what it means to be an
agent. We are all becoming "connected informational organisms," or
what I'm calling "inforgs." This is happening not through some
fanciful transformation in our body, but, more seriously and
realistically, through this radical reshaping of our environment and
of ourselves.
By remolding the infosphere, digital information and communication
technologies have brought to light the intrinsically informational
nature of human agents. This is not equivalent to saying that people
have digital alter egos, some Messrs. Hyde represented by their @s,
blogs, and https. This trivial point only encourages us to mistake
digital ICTs for merely enhancing technologies. The informational
nature of agents should not be confused with a "data shadow" either
(coined by A. F. Westin in 1968, a "data shadow" is a digital
profile generated from data garnered from a user's online habits).
The more radical change, brought about by the reshaping of the
infosphere, will be the realization of human agents as
interconnected, informational organisms among other informational
organisms and agents.
Consider the distinction between enhancing and augmenting
appliances. The switches and dials of enhancing appliances are
interfaces meant to plug the device into the user's body
ergonomically. Think of Bluetooth headsets and the cyborgs of
science fiction. In contrast, the data and control panels of
augmenting appliances are instead interfaces between different
possible worlds: on the one hand there is the human user's outside
world, and on the other hand there is the dynamic, watery, soapy,
hot, and dark world of the dishwasher; the equally watery, soapy,
hot and dark but also spinning world of the washing machine; or the
still, aseptic, soap-less, cold, and potentially luminous world of
the refrigerator. These robots can be successful because they have
their environments "wrapped" and tailored around their capacities,
not vice versa. Imagine someone trying to build a droid like C-3PO
capable of washing their dishes in the sink exactly in the same way
as a human would. It makes no sense.
Now, to be clear, information and communication technologies are not
augmenting or empowering in the sense just explained. They instead
create environments that the user is then enabled to enter through
(possibly friendly) gateways. It is a form of initiation. Looking at
the history of the mouse, for example, one discovers that our
technology has not only adapted to, but also educated, us as users.
Douglas Engelbart once told me that he had even experimented with a
mouse to be placed under the desk, to be operated with one's leg, in
order to leave the user's hands free. HCI (Human-Computer
Interaction) is a symmetric relation; we both learn and adjust our
behavior to fit our technology.
<http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/>
To return to our distinction, while a dishwasher interface is a
panel through which the machine enters into the user's world, a
digital interface is a gate through which a user can be
(tele)present in the infosphere, as telesurgery clearly shows. This
simple but fundamental difference underlies the many spatial
metaphors of "cyberspace," "virtual reality," "being online,"
"surfing the Web," "wireless gateway," and so forth. It follows that
we are witnessing an epochal, unprecedented migration of humanity
from the physical world we can see and touch to the infosphere
itself, not least because the latter is absorbing the former. As a
result, humans will become inforgs and will coexist with other
(possibly artificial) inforgs and agents operating in an environment
that is friendlier to digital creatures. As digital immigrants like
us are replaced by digital natives like our children, the latter
will come to appreciate that there is no real difference between the
infosphere and the physical world, only different levels of
abstractions. And when the migration is complete, we shall
increasingly feel deprived, excluded, handicapped, or poor to the
point of paralysis and psychological trauma whenever we are
disconnected from the infosphere, like fish out of water.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telesurgery>
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1552211.stm>
One day, being an inforg will be so natural that any disruption in
our normal flow of information will make us sick. Even literally. A
simple illustration is provided by wearable computers and current
BAN (Body Area Network) systems, which are "a base technology for
permanent monitoring and logging of vital signs [...] [to supervise]
the health status of patients suffering from chronic diseases, such
as diabetes and asthma." Both phenomena are properly understood from
an inforg (not a cyborg) perspective.
<http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2005/tc2005038_5955_tc119.htm>
<http://www.ban.fraunhofer.de/index_e.html>
**Are We There Yet?** It would be useful to have some idea of what
sort of empirical evidence we should look for that might signal the
emergence of the infosphere as the real and only environment in
which we human inforgs will be living. How will we know that what
has been predicted above is actually happening? By way of
conclusion, here are five suggestions.
1) Sufficient battery life: One important problem that we shall face
will concern the availability of sufficient energy to stay connected
to the infosphere non-stop, not just through our working day, but
through the rest of our waking hours (and possibly even while we
sleep). It is what Intel calls "the battery life challenge." Today,
we know that our autonomy is limited by the energy bottleneck of our
batteries. The infosphere, and hence life as an inforg, will become
a reality the less we have to worry about running out of power in
our laptops, cell phones, iPods, and other devices that enable our
participation in the infosphere.
<http://www.intel.com/technology/computing/hw03032.htm>
2) Google Objects: You will know that ITentities have finally
arrived when you will be able to use a search engine to find objects
in the house ("where are my glasses?") or in the office ("where is
my stapler?") in the same way that you locate a book in a library
through its electronic catalogue.
3) Children of the PC: For clear signs of digital migration in
recent generations, some evidence can be gathered by looking at the
evolution of the software game industry. For example, in the United
States, the average age of players is increasing, as the children of
the post-computer revolutions [Like us! -Adam] are reaching their
late thirties. By the time they retire, in three or four decades,
they will be living in the infosphere full-time.
<http://www.pacificepoch.com/uploads/docs/20060124_Sample_-_Pacific_Epoch_Online_Game_Report_PreRelease.pdf>
<http://www.theesa.com/files/2005EssentialFacts.pdf>
4) How do I know I am an inforg? If you spend more time connected
than sleeping, you are an inforg. On average, Britons, for example,
already spend more time online than watching TV.
<http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/intacc0702.pdf>
5) Virtual assets? One way of checking whether the new metaphysics
has arrived is to look for the emergence of a serious economy of
virtual assets. This involves two steps:
At the time of writing, End User License Agreements (EULA) of
massively multiplayer online role-playing games such as World of
Warcraft still do not allow the sale of virtual assets. This would
be like the EULA of Microsoft Word withholding from users the
ownership of the digital documents created by means of the software.
This is inevitably changing, as more people invest hundreds and then
thousands of hours building their avatars. Indeed, although it is
forbidden, there are thousands of virtual assets on sale on eBay. A
quick check on 14-Mar-06 showed that the starting bid for a "World
of Warcraft WTB rank14 or epic geared druid" was $1,500, a price
higher than the value of the average computer used to access that
piece of information. Sony, more aggressively, already offers a
"Station Exchange," an official auction service that "provides
players a secure method of buying and selling [in dollars] the right
to use in game coin, items and characters in accordance with SOE's
license agreement, rules and guidelines." John Seely Brown,
previously the director of Xerox PARC, has claimed that the
estimated amount of money trading hands in the underground market in
virtual assets exceeds the gross national product, not of Tuvalu or
Liechtenstein, but of Russia ($315 billion in 2002). Whether or not
he is exaggerating for effect, since it's impossible to track black
market sales precisely, we're still talking about tens if not
hundreds of billions of dollars changing hands in trade for virtual
assets.
<http://stationexchange.station.sony.com/>
<http://pict.sdsu.edu/jsb_lecture18jan05.pdf>
Again, for the skeptical reader, a comparison and some hard evidence
might be useful. In recent years, according to The Economist
(16-Feb-06), many countries have followed the United States in
counting acquisition of software not as a current business expense
but as an investment, to be treated as any other capital input that
is repeatedly used in production over time. This has meant that
spending on software now regularly contributes to gross domestic
products. So software is acknowledged to be a (digital) good, even
if somewhat intangible. It should not be too difficult to accept
that virtual assets too may represent important investments. As for
the hard evidence, the phenomenon of so-called "virtual sweatshops"
in China is highly indicative. In claustrophobic and overcrowded
rooms, workers play online games, like World of Warcraft or Lineage,
for up to twelve hours a day, to create virtual goods, such as
characters, equipments or in-game currency, that can be sold to
other players (warning: this YouTube video is rather disturbing).
<http://youtube.com/watch?v=ho5Yxe6UVv4>
Once ownership of virtual assets has been legally established, the
second step will be to check for the emergence of property
litigation (this is already happening: in May 2006 a Pennsylvania
lawyer sued the publisher of Second Life for allegedly having
unfairly confiscated tens of thousands of dollars worth of his
virtual land and other property) and insurance that provides
protection against risks to these virtual assets. It won't be a
revolution in business, but it might be comparable to the pet
insurances you can currently buy at your local supermarket. Again,
World of Warcraft provides an excellent example. The six million
players (as of 01-Mar-06, this is larger than the whole population
of Norway, for example) who will have spent billions of person-hours
constructing, enriching, and refining their avatars will be more
than willing to spend a few dollars to insure them. In the near
future, this will look normal.
<http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,70909-0.html>
<http://www.sainsburysbank.co.uk/insuring/ins_petinsurance_pet_skip.shtml>
**Conclusion** -- Eleven years ago, I concluded the UNESCO paper with
the following sentence: "Today we are giving the body of organised
knowledge a new electronic life, and in so doing we are constructing
the digital heritage of the next millennium. Depending on how we
meet the challenge, future generations will consider us as new
Pygmalions or as old Frankensteins." It seems that this is still
largely true, if perhaps with two provisos.
On the one hand, the comment can now be expanded to the whole
infosphere: the life and nature of our informational ecosystem
depend entirely on us and will require all our creative attention
and care. On the other hand, what we shall become as inforgs, and
how we shall behave within the infosphere, will determine our
success as the only biological species capable of creating a
synthetic environment to which it then must adapt.
Marcus Aurelius once wrote that "Everything that exists is in a
manner the seed of that which will be." I agree, but then I would
add that this is why a philosophy of information that can look into
today's technology is our best chance to shape a better tomorrow.
**Acknowledgements** -- I am grateful to Adam C. Engst for having
prompted me to write this paper and to Gian Maria Greco, Ken Herold,
Gianluca Paronitti, Sebastian Sequoiah-Grayson, Miguel Sicart, and
Matteo Turilli for discussions of several ideas concerning Ghost in
the Shell and online games during our meetings. Paul Oldfield kindly
checked the last draft.
[Luciano Floridi is a member of the Dipartimento di Scienze
Filosofiche, Universita degli Studi di Bari and the Faculty of
Philosophy and IEG, Computing Laboratory, University of Oxford. A
longer and modified version of this paper is in press and will be
coming out in the 23(1) issue of "The Information Society."]
<http://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/~floridi/>
<http://www.indiana.edu/~tisj/>
Take Control News/25-Sep-06
----------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/8687>
**Take Control Tackles Thanksgiving Dinner** -- A quick note for our
Canadian friends: if you're thinking about Thanksgiving on October
9th, take a look at our just-released "Take Control of Thanksgiving
Dinner." It's a very cool experiment in applying Joe Kissell's
skills in breaking a complex task into easily accomplished steps.
Joe has walked thousands of people through upgrading Mac OS X,
setting up backups, and maintaining their Macs, but those tasks are
nothing compared to hosting Thanksgiving dinner. We've all put a ton
of work into designing the ebook to help with planning and cooking a
huge meal, including a 19-page "Print Me" file that contains
shopping lists, recipes to tape up in your kitchen, and customizable
schedules to keep everything on track. You can think of the ebook as
a "Getting Things Done" approach to Thanksgiving, or a geek's guide
to the most complex meal most of us will ever prepare. (If you're in
the U.S., you have some time before worrying about Thanksgiving, and
for anyone elsewhere in the world, Thanksgiving dinner is mostly an
opportunity for culinary tourism.)
<http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/thanksgiving.html?14@@!pt=TRK-0042-TB848-TCNEWS>
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/25-Sep-06
------------------------------------
by TidBITS Staff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/8688>
**coconutWiFi Reveals Nearby Networks, Status** -- This helpful menu
bar addition lets you see nearby wireless networks, but does it slow
down your connection? (1 message)
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/954/>
**Crossing platforms with PowerPoint** -- A PowerPoint presentation
originally created on a Mac hits snags when run from a Windows
laptop, traced back to the way PowerPoint converts image file
formats. (3 messages)
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/955/>
**Problems with Image Capture** -- A reader notes troubles with
Apple's original digital-image acquisition utility under Mac OS X
10.4. (2 messages)
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/956/>
**Adobe Creative Suite 2.3** -- Adobe's announcement of Creative Suite
2.3, which will include Dreamweaver, leads to a discussion of what a
modern Web design application should do. (8 messages)
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/957/>
**HD program eraser for Mac?** What's the best way to ensure that
files are permanently erased from your hard drive? (8 messages)
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/959/>
$$
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