Thursday, February 27, 2003

Mobile Video: Palmtop Webcam Surveillance. David Brin calls it The Transparent Society — a Panopticon where everybody, not just the State, spies on everybody. Brin thinks this could be a Good Thing, in fact. David Pogue astutely points out in the New York Times that, although it is clear nobody really wants to use videophones to talk to each other's grainy faces, a killer app for mobile video might be realtime monitoring of webcams. Your child's playschool. Your spouse's bedroom. The gauges you are supposed to be watching down at the nuclear reactor while you are having a coupla brews at the local. Check out this list of public webcams you can access from Logitech's new Mobile Video sofware. [Smart Mobs] 10:07:43 PM    comment []

Dave notes the Newsweek piece by Michael Hasting, Blogman Becomes Harvardman, saying, Heh. [Scripting News] 9:54:09 PM    comment []

Artificial stupidity, Part 2. Can chatterbots be as dumb as a box of hammers and still pass the Turing test? Go ask ALICE, she might know. [Salon.com] 5:56:30 PM    comment []

Lynda Barry. White House hymnal [Salon.com] 7:00:39 AM    comment []

Voting Software Firm Gets Sued. An engineer sues his former employer, a voting machine software company, for wrongful termination. He claims management ignored his claims that vote-counting software contained defects. By Joanna Glasner. [Wired News] 6:59:19 AM    comment []

BBC News Online Book Club: And our Book Group's chosen title is... Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad is available in PDF from Project Gutneberg, hosted by BBC. Hard copy of the Norton Critical edition, Heart of Darkness: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism, by Joseph Conrad, Robert Kimbrough (Editor), available at amazon.com. Discussion to begin in seven days' time. 2:26:56 AM    comment []