Sunday, August 22, 2004

Fish bar code system under development. A new cell phone information system is being developed to enable consumers to receive detailed information about fish at retail stores, including where and when the fish was caught and by whom, reports the Daily Yomiuri Online via Engadget. DoCoMo Sentsu and the NPO, Fishing Boat and System Engineering Association, will test the system in a series of experiments next month on sanma (Pacific saury) caught off Kushiro, eastern Hokkaido. In the experiments, on-the-spot information, such as the names of the fishermen, the cooperatives they belong to, and where and when the fishery operations were conducted, will be transmitted from fishing boats to a data processing center via telecommunications satellites. At ports where the fish is unloaded, information from the fishing boats will be converted into QR codes so fishery certificates containing the information can be issued by the fishermen's cooperatives concerned. After these certificates are printed, they will be affixed to boxes of sanma at the time of their shipment. Copies of the certificates will be placed alongside the fish being sold at supermarkets and other retailers. If customers being served the fish at restaurants are shown the certificates, they will be able to pick up the information on their cell phones, providing that they are able to pick up satellite-relayed information, DoCoMo Sentsu said. Web site addresses and phone numbers of offices will be included so that customers can make inquiries if necessary, according to the company. [Smart Mobs] Kind of a neat idea, but too easy to mess with. You'd need threat of significant punishments within the system and for those who try to spoof for this to have any hope, I think. Oh -- and consumers with 3G phones ... 5:27:41 PM    comment []

Seth's Copyright items round-up - Junger (code/speech), Skala (law/tech), Crawford (info commons). "Little people" deserve link-love too: Peter Junger's Samsara blog for August is full of interesting yet unremarked copyright/code/speech items. It ranges from Is Source Code Like a Machine Gun? to Why All the Fuss About Source Code? Copyright, Machine Code, and Compilers. Disclaimer: He's also posted, ahem, Seth Finkelstein's Contribution. Matthew Skala has a follow-up piece on Colour, social beings, and undecidability. Basically, writing from the tech perspective (which I share) that law is about political/social rules, not physical/mathematical rules. Walt Crawford's library 'zine "Cites & Insights" (not blog - but there is now a Cites & Insights Updates Blog) has come out with the September 2004 issue. There's a long, informative, discussion of open-access publishing But not at all obvious from the capsule, buried deep toward page 20, is an interesting skeptical discussion of the Information Commons Report: Will I become an advocate for the information commons? Not directly, not until the mental model makes sense to me--but that could change at any time. ... I was hoping that [the report] would convince me that "information commons" was a well-defined concept and one that I should support. That didn't happen--and I'm not sure whether it's because I'm unable to recognize the grand vision or because I don't buy this particular aggregation of concepts. While I'm actually not in agreement (being mildly subject to the grand vision), the analysis is complex and subtle enough to be worth pondering, as non-polarized criticism. [Infothought] 9:28:24 AM    comment []