Cloud Clarity vs. Shadow Banking

CAN THE BURGEONING INTEGRATED FABRICS OF WEB 3.0 HELP GENERATE A BROAD, SUPER-RESILIENT TRANSPARENCY THAT SAVES INT’L BANKING SYSTEMS?

The United States is facing what some experts are calling an “economic perfect storm“, with historical economists worrying about symptoms and reactions “not seen since the Great Depression”. Resources (natural and financial) are increasingly scarce, strained by tight credit markets and by competition from major emerging economies (China and India), and food prices are soaring.

One of the most serious aspects of the current crisis is tied to the widening deficit in the credibility of major financial institutions. The New York Times, for instance, is reporting:

The Federal Reserve not only [has taken] action unprecedented since the Great Depression — by lending money directly to major investment banks — but also has put taxpayers on the hook for billions of dollars in questionable trades these same bankers made when the good times were rolling.

“Bear Stearns has made it obvious that things have gone too far,” says Mr. Gross, who plans to use some of his cash to bargain-shop. “The investment community has morphed into something beyond banks and something beyond regulation. We call it the shadow banking system.”

The lesson may be that we have a problem of endemic manipulations, permitted by current regulatory and technological standards. What if it were possible to build into international banking institutions —including but not limited to the manner and volume of transactions engaged in by investment banks— a transparency-insuring mechanism based on the dispersed computing power of an integrated web-based “cloud” matrix?

While a primary function of Web 3.0 must be the innovative enhancement of privacy safeguards, it should become increasingly possible to create broad-spectrum data-screening aggregator applications that allow for the creation of a banking process safeguard fabric. Multiple unique and even competing software analysis platforms could work on the same expansive datasets to help prevent dangerous overdependence on excessively volatile market trends.

Web 3.0 Must Make Information More Free, the Individual More Autonomous

We are on the verge of a major communications and global economic revolution, in which major media, technological advances, cloud computing and dispersed optimization, adapt to and take over new models for living and producing in human society. The New Scientist magazine reports in its March 15-21, 2008 edition that “web 3.0 will be about making information less free”.

We must, as end-users, content creators, innovators and even pioneers in media and technology, consider that for very serious and transcendent reasons, this cannot be permitted to become true. Web 3.0 must be liberating, and it must expand, not shrink the freedom of information that stems from the First Amendment to the US Constitution, free and open society in general, a free press specifically, and the Internet’s empowerment of the individual.

If we are to be a global society, or a “globalized” society, if we are to have a planetary consciousness, or benefit from the “village” dynamic inherent in global trade and telecommunications, then we must ensure that individual freedoms are not limited by global media powers or by governments who think there is something expedient about limiting media freedoms. When freedom of information is restricted, human beings suffer, in real terms, and economic vitality is slowed and economic resilience damaged.

Technology is the great economic immune system for industrial and post-industrial societies. It breeds competition, innovation, the expansion of learning and individual potential, opportunity and social mobility, and it spurs the exploration of new directions in thought and production. Information technology is helping to create a global fabric of human ideas, individuals and broader societies, interwoven in a complex web of shared and competing interests and shared and competing freedoms.

The mass convergence of new media, established media, commercial activity, personal communications, event planning and vital services (such as medical, financial, travel and utility), poses an obvious threat to the freedom of individuals to remain unmonitored or unexposed to new risks and new controls. But information serves us best when it is free, when it is untainted by powerful interests, when it moves where it needs to move, finding its level like water.

People move toward information and information moves toward people, in ways that cannot be calculated from a media conglomerate’s boardroom, and which, for better or for worse, do not parallel anyone’s particular bottom-line. Yet major telecoms are planning to stratify web-speeds for paying media giants, and advertisers are looking to recruit bloggers to create specialized information which actually functions like a covert advertisement.

Segmenting the web further by charging for the permission to let end-users access your servers via the highest bandwidth is a direct assault on media freedoms and access to information. It is also an attempt to ensure that most web traffic ensures at least 3 separate payments to the telecom for a single event. This attack on Net Neutrality —tied to the basic freedom of the press— runs contrary to the real promise of Web 3.0 and media hyper-convergence.

Deceptive or manipulative advertising formats are not inherently an attack on web freedoms, but they do pose a threat to the equality of access individuals may have to quality information as such. This means consumers may actually opt to create or to frequent services that shy away from those practices, which may in many cases be closed services or “gated communities” that provide their audience with a self-image of privilege, though their main function would be to limit the flow of information.

Neckband Senses Nerve Impulses, Reconstitutes Speech Not Spoken

The news may best be stated as smart neckband makes “telepathic” chat possible. But it is more appropriate to say that a group of cunning neurological researchers and engineers have found a way to tap thought about speech and recreate speech, even where the person in question chooses not to utter a word, or is unable to.

The new device does not actually achieve telepathy, but it does appear to tap into the specific impulses that would create specific sounds through the vocal chords, allowing it to recreate those sounds, and achieve speech where no words are spoken. The end-user will have to “train” both mind and voice to work with the device, to produce the highest level of accuracy.

In an on-stage demonstration, seen in the following embedded video from YouTube, there appears to be significant delay in this early version of the technology, but it’s ability to capture the colloquial word-choice and the manner of speaking of the individual are surprising.

The device detects impulses intended to stimulate muscles in the throat that manipulate the vocal chords to create the desired sound memes that make the words intended to be spoken. If the neckband detects these impulses, but the individual does not actually speak, then the effect can be a “silent” conversation, where only the person on the other end of the connection hears anything, and those in one’s environment are none the wiser.

This could have applications for business or for journalists, who may have a use for communicating verbally while in an environment where their ability to speak aloud is limited for a given time period. It could also allow for more private communications in public places, or more importantly, give voice to those suffering from muscular, throat or neurological disorders, depending on the individual case.

The same technology has been applied to a system that allows thought about words to command an electronically-equipped wheelchair, giving new mobility and versatility to those suffering severe or total paralysis. Other medical applications could help develop new treatments for a number of muscular disorders which impair speech.

The ability to use “thought-control” to produce speech, or to reconstitute a physically-inhibted speech ability, is a powerful, if unexpected level of integration of the physical individual into the phenomenon of digital hyper-convergence. Neurological signal capture may also allow thought-control to radically transform informational media and online services, depending on the technology an individual uses to interact with those media.

The Ambient presentation of the voiceless speech neckband —branded ‘Audeo’— includes mention of a powerful, though at this date perhaps clumsy potential use for the technology: Ambient suggests that the neckband could be used to dramatically enhance the value of online information searches.

For instance, voice-enabled map searches could allow someone to “ask” —through voiceless speech and remote speech recognition— an online service how to get to a given place, or what address to go to, and receive in response a physical or audible response to that voiceless search query.

In a way, this would appear to “enhance” human intelligence, by giving access to the collective wisdom of the world wide web. But as with all such advances, it is important to recognize that certain technological “enhancements”, while they expand our access to information, do not actually expand our basic personal abilities, and to distinguish between potential complements and limitations to those abilities.

• New Scientist: “Nerve-tapping neckband allows ‘telepathic’ chat”
• New Scientist: “Thinking of words can guide your wheelchair”

Cloudscape Computing: the Dispersed Matrix as ‘Infinite’ Computing Platform

As the web moves into a more mature stage of its adolescence, the beginnings of an all-media platform, computing has begun to move to the “cloud” format. Cloudscape computing means that software, files, private accounts and processing power are dispersed over an extensive array of machines across the world.

“The Cloud” is the world wide web, and the nature of cloudscape computing can provide significant, if surprising, returns in security and accessibility. Dispersing, via dedicated encryption, the bits that compose a given file over an array of servers, with some redundancy, can make it more difficult to hack into any actual file or file storage device.

And, where cloudscape storage and computing come into play, there is a genuine motivation for large organizations, or for the pressures of the vast consumer and advertising marketplace, to push for ever more accessibility (wirelessly, in mobile telephony) to online material, which could have a positive effect both in fomenting further innovation, broadening the array of services available and bringing prices down.

Cloudscape computing does have its shortcomings, or its risk areas, but all in all, it is one of the commercial practices most likely to push into new terrain in mobile and wireless web access. With that, however, comes the serious means of market control it may lend to web-based software giants like Google. As always, the freedom of content access, generation and distribution is a paramount concern.

The real change of dynamic in computing connection time and browsing tendencies, comes with the types of services that can be made available by way of dispersed or distributed document and database hosting. More dynamic websites, more graphic-intense visual content, higher processing speeds, software applications that require zero installation and zero hard-disk space, accessible-from-anywhere desktop publishing suites and content-management technologies, are just a few.

Cloudscape computing requires a level of impeccability in encryption and programming that goes beyond what has been required in consumer computing to date. But this demand is also a challenge that will help promote new exploration of the potential benefits of more complex, more flexible, more resilient encryption paradigms.

We will only begin to see real benefits of distributed computing capacity, for the average end-user, when instant document-transfer encryption stands have advanced far beyond what we now enjoy, layered and impromptu in ways that will require one or two orders of magnitude more processing speed (and bandwidth) than is now commonly available.

Electronic Paper Makes Reading a More Diverse & Flexible Experience

Researchers at MIT have been working for years now on a wide range of variations on the changeable visual text formats that might replace many of the backlit screens we now use to read and interact with electronic documents. ‘Electronic paper’ refers to a number of these technologies, able to reproduce encrypted files in visual text form, as if they were computer monitors, some touted as having “the look and feel” of real paper.

The benefits of this advance are various:

1. paper is an ancient technology whose ease of use is difficult to match, one of the pillars of civilization;
2. electronic paper may help eliminate the strain on forest environments that comes from increasing consumption of paper worldwide;
3. the texture of paper makes viewing a document less challenging to the eyes;
4. adding touch-response makes it possible to read “on-screen” with the feeling of flipping pages, visually and physically;
5. advances in storage capacity mean being able to store huge amounts of readable text and images in a very small space

The potential for streamlined storage and portability of large amounts of reading material is one of the most important functions of the e-paper phenomenon. The ability to not only store thousands of books, or hundreds of magazines with full-color imagery, or to view video or even browse the world wide web, from a paper-thin device, makes exploiting the resources of the information age a far more comfortable experience for the everyday commuter, or news reader.

At MIT’s Electronic Paper project, the fundamental challenge regarding e-paper is stated as follows:

Books with printed pages are unique in that they embody the simultaneous, high-resolution display of hundreds of pages of information. The representation of information on a large number of physical pages, which may be physically turned and written on, constitutes a highly preferred means of information interaction.

A key element in the quest for a less massive, but more flexible format for text reading, i.e. electronic paper, follows: “An obvious disadvantage of the printed page, however, is its immutability once typeset.” This is a major issue when relating to informaton that is not necessarily transcendent or in itself immutable, and commercial applications, as well as everyday news and information uses for paper, make it attractive to create an alternative that is precisely mutable, or rather, programmable, modifiable, able to be updated when the information itself has changed.

MIT’s Technology Review explains the hardware that makes e-paper work, in devices like Amazon.com’s ‘Kindle’ reader:

At the front of the screen is a layer of transparent electrodes. Below it are millions of microcapsules containing positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles, and below them is a layer of nearly a million more electrodes. A negative charge on one of these bottom electrodes pushes black particles to the top, and a positive charge does the same with the white ones. Each microcapsule acts as a pixel that can thus be made to appear black, white, or gray.

The gist is to achieve ease of use, visual stability, paper-like quality, and high-resolution text imaging, in a device that allows for interactive navigability and mass storage. Amazon.com has added a wireless download functionality that is designed to promote spontaneous purchase and on-the-spot access to e-paper-ready e-books sold through its store.

In October 2005, Sentido.tv reported that Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, “told a London audience that the static format of paper would be replaced by paper-thin digital wireless devices which would be constantly downloading huge amounts of information from the internet. He predicted we would all be connected all the time, within 10 years.” Electronic paper provides some brave new frontiers for niche media to grow their markets exponentially, with new editorial methods and distribution mechanisms never before possible.

If e-paper and wireless internet meet in the coming process of hyper-convergence of media, we will find that text is at once ‘liberated’ and ‘filtered’, and we will need to implement mechanisms that ensure consumers have as much access, on a permanent and private basis, to information as with the standard purchase of a book, which sits comfortably in one’s home, in one’s private space.

This issue of privacy is vital to the entire question of electronic information, because of the fact that a press that is free to produce and distribute according to its own editorial choices tends to produce far more reliable information and helps protect the rights of individuals. A lack of privacy in the media sphere, by contrast, would have a chilling effect on what sorts of content some major media outlets would be willing to provide.

The standard for e-paper should also be maximum possible user-enabled modification (a standard that is the rule in paper publishing: readers can write, cross out, highlight, rewrite and reproduce section by section, by hand, and at will, what is meaningful to them, by their own standards, and without paying a licensing fee). The problem of technical specifications as minimum requirements for accessing information continues to be a nuisance in computing and web-browsing, but would be far more severe if there is a massive migration of text publishing from printed pages to e-paper.

Customization is essential to the long-term success of e-paper as a new, beneficial medium for authors, publishers, web-content providers, bloggers and readers alike. E-paper essentially constitutes an event horizon after which information may be fundamentally changed and questions of accessibility, credibility and longevity (conservation of format and re-accessibility), become central to the question of informational freedoms.

• MIT: “Electronic Paper project”
• E Ink Corporation: “Lower Power, Electronic Paper Displays” [commercial site]
• MIT Technology Review: “Amazon Kindle: The online giant hopes it’s created the ipod of digital books”
• eMedia Wire: “Self Published Book Achieves Top 1 Percent Sales Rank at Amazon.com’s Kindle Book Store”
  
• Washington Square News: “New shiny Amazon Kindle doesn’t replace my old book” [opinion]
• Sentido.tv: “GATES ANNOUNCES PLANS TO REPLACE PAPER WITH SILICON”

Hyper-convergence: the Coming State of Media Arts & Services

HOW TV, INTERNET, TELECOMMUNICATIONS, RFID & COMMERCIAL SERVICES WILL CONVERGE TO CREATE NEW SOCIAL SPHERE, SECURITY RISKS

For some time, we have heard speculation that the user-centered logic of the Internet medium will persuade old-guard media powers to embrace the model, and we will see a convergence of online, print, radio and televisual media, in one integrated system. Media integration will likely go far beyond that, so security has to be the watchword as technology invades personal space and our attempts at a ‘pursuit of happiness’.

At present, the movement favoring net neutrality —or equal access to online content— may be the segment of media markets and public consciousness most aware of the issue and its implications for the nature and quality of information and information access. Net neutrality is the premise that connection providers should not be permitted to take any actions that influence users’ access to online information or content providers’ access to the public.

Cable companies and ISPs are seeking the power to charge for a stratified web-traffic format, where those who pay a special fee will be granted higher degrees of bandwidth not available to any other content providers or customers, even though they already charge for connection and connection speed at both ends of the service. This is what convergence should not be, if it is to benefit consumers and favor the free press.

Hyper-convergence is a term that seeks to explain the integration of a broad array of services and personal information management tools into the multimedia web. It refers to the blurring of the barriers between online activity and real-world effects, which will present major security concerns.

New technologies can make hyper-convergence into a landmark moment for consumers and can increase access for many to events, information and resources that might otherwise be more difficult to access. But they can also increase in dramatic ways the risk to which we subject sensitive personal data.

RFID —Radio Frequency IDentification— is one of the most controversial and well-debated new technologies whose implementation could both expand the scope of hyper-convergence in powerful ways and also subject the individual to unnecessary and ill-advised long-term risk of identity-theft or fraud.

RFID-enabled smart chips can help integrate products, services, personal information and personal space, into a fluid information environment, but plans to implement global networks of “broadcasting” or “active” RFID chips means that one may all-too-quickly let slip sensitive personal information, without technological standards catching up to the severe exigencies of this new security risk.

Biometric data is another, related problem area. Touted as a security enhancement measure, the implementation of even narrowly-construed, isolated biometric readings, poses a major, lifelong personal security risk for the individual.

Unlike a Social Security number, a signature, an account number or a credit card, an iris pattern, a fingerprint, one’s genome, blood-type and facial structure —all of which various biometric security scanning systems propose to read or sample for ID purposes—, cannot be changed. And if they could be, it would present a major security risk for the system attempting to enhance its security by such means, because of the presumption that the use of such information is inherently safer.

Permitting one’s private biological data to propagate across an online network, or into state-run databanks, or databanks run by multinational firms, is to surrender a part of one’s identity, for all time, to the idiosyncracies and shortcomings of the system, at which one must take into serious consideration the supposed value of a potential commercial or procedural convenience.

But services and media are combining, and that makes sense. The logic of synthesis shows that connecting ideas, fields of study, geographical locations, cultural oddities, people and access to information, increases understanding and breeds a more fluid social reality. TV, Internet, mail, messaging, voice communication and purchasing processes, will increasingly combine to blur the line between virtual and lived-in physical space.

The challenge will be building systems that allow the individual to maintain all existing freedoms and natural barriers against fraud and identity theft, while facilitating access to that ever broader range of media and services.

Hyper-convergence of Media & Services Necessitates New Paradigm for Securing Personal Data

Crisis Policy Forum :: The potential for broad-scope “electronic agents” —preprogrammed service aggregators and self-organizing databases with proactive marketing capability—, aiding in everyday information-related activities, will require a new security standard to prevent identity theft, which could become one of the gravest threats to economic performance and individual liberty.

Digital IDs will have to be maintained through unbreakable private information management systems, entirely parallel to and separate from the information actually sent, which will behave as a single identifying set of characteristics for a given internet user, when ID is called for.

Individuals will be able to use a complex array of mental-reference data, unique to personal knowledge, to block hackers’ access to the actual management system itself, which will allow users to take instant corrective-protective action in case of hacked or apparently compromised online IDs.

The main purpose of this service would be to achieve security of personal data by securely matching real personal data with an official, singular digital ID, containing none of the real ID data. Thus, there would exist an impenetrable barrier (semantic separation) between sensitive personal ID data and the malicious intent of those who may seek to misuse it.