Amazon's Quadcopters : Short Comment

I'm not as sceptical as some people about Amazon's quadcopter delivery system.

Although it's certainly still in the stage of playfulness and hype, Amazon are very smart, very ambitious and very good at turning advanced technology into viable services. The thing to remember is that quadcopters can be combined with delivery trucks, so that a truck can go to an area, launch 10 or so quadcopters to take packages the last half-mile and then move on. I bet there are some serious fuel savings there. And over such short distances, not a huge risk of air-piracy.

Max Keiser On LIBOR

From the funeral of Jose Claudio Ribeiro da Silva

Blogrolled : The Radical History of Hackney

My bike ... (sniff) .. stolen today, sometime between 2pm and 7pm, outside Goldsmiths.

Econo-politics Link-fest

On Goldman Sachs :

John Robb :

Does this signal a reversal in the titanic life and death struggle between nation-states and the global financial oligarchy? No. The amount of lawfare needed to reverse the course of this war before sovereign defaults litter the battlefield is immense: thousands of trials, trillions in assessed damages, and tens of thousands sent to jail. Even that might not be enough without a long campaign of financial COIN to pacify and disassemble the too-big-to-fail banks and hedge funds.

Valdis Krebbs maps sub-prime mortgages flow into Goldman Sachs. Clearly, it ought to be possible, today, for any potential buyer of a package of investments to see a map like this. Or even an active map / model, implemented like a spreadsheet on which you can play games of what-if.

re: The Auditors

Why did it take so long for the media, the regulators and the legislators to acknowledge what some of us have known for a while?

...

Why didn’t the Big 4 audit firms warn that these obscenely over leveraged institutions threatened our financial future? Why didn’t the auditors question, push back, or raise objections to illegal and unethical disclosure gaps? Every one of the failed or bailed out financial institutions carried non-qualified, clean audit opinions in their wallets when they cashed the taxpayers’ check.

...

Something is rotten with the accounting industry.

Update Jim Kunstler asks a related question :

The question that now begs to be answered is: why is this activity not being investigated and prosecuted under the federal RICO statutes against racketeering? ... How is it not a racket to deliberately and systematically construct investments designed to fail so you can collect what amounts to insurance against them -- and then to sell those financial instruments to customers without telling them that these investments were engineered to blow up? At the very least it amounts to a failure to disclose material information, which is the basis for distinguishing illegality. More to the point, it almost certainly amounts to prosecutable criminal fraud and insider trading.

Meanwhile, in the face of volcanoes, The Economist promotes resilience in favour of risk management for a networked world.

The aim is less about trying to predict what unlikely events may come along, and more about creating mechanisms and relationships that would help the firm and its partners respond with agility if disaster did strike.

Maybe .. just maybe .. the world is starting to wise up to the true crimes of the bankers.

Augmented Reality Face Recognition

Update : Answering Ben and John's comments :

Ben: I guess the question is, now the tech. is out there, how long does it remain "opt-in". Let's suppose it was, say, Facebook that bought this technology and incorporated it into their iPhone / Android client ... ie. see which people around you have FB accounts.

Then, one day, they find that not enough people opted in, so decide to make the system opt-out instead.

John : Yes, I love Github; and the social aspect of Github is very cool. ( http://github.com/interstar )

I use it for work, and will start putting social projects up there. But you have to be careful with making too many inferences (eg. about code quality) : sometimes I check-in code written by colleagues, and they check-in my code ...

On the broader point, I'm more convinced than ever we're heading into netocracy. And one of the symptoms is when people start making inferences from the social graph itself as opposed to using just navigating the social graph and then analyzing. Ie. when people start saying "X is probably a good potential hire *because* he's connected to these people and worked on those projects" rather than "I found X via these people, now let's see if he's a good hire".

What I really think is that there's little chance for society as a whole to retreat from netocracy.

And when we arrive, there'll be no way for individuals to opt-out. We could try to avoid making our social network explicit and publishing it, but it will become increasingly difficult to function in society without doing so.

In a real netocracy, not being in a social network will be as debilitating as not having any money under capitalism.

What is much more likely though, is that smart operators will work through secret or more private social networks (much as smart operators under capitalism have Swiss bank accounts or use otherwise dark payment schemes)

However, such secretive individuals and organizations will need to break cover and become partly visible, in order to operate at all in netocracy (witness this story about a criminal gang, who court certain kinds of visibility and connections)

Some quick(ish) news about a few changes that are going on, spread over a number of posts :

News 1 : Superstruct

In the next two months or so, I'm going to be heavily involved in Superstruct as an assistant game-master, "community leader" in the "Outlaw Planet" scenario. What that means is that I'll be writing somewhere (not 100% sure where yet) in the role of myself in the year 2019.

By then we'll have had another 10 years advance in ubicomp (the device swarm gets faster, cheaper, denser.) The swarm will become a focus of conflict between "legitimate" authorities (who would obviously like to use it as an instrument to protect and promote the nation-state) and anti-state, 4GW, criminal and general miscreant groups, who for a variety of different reasons are trying to use the swarm destructively.

This conflict is played out against a backdrop of four other super-threats : a peak-oil related energy-crisis; a virulent new respiratory disease with no known cure; an increase in mass-migration as people flee wars, extreme weather and other natural problems; and a break-down in the current food supply-chain (due to energy and environmental problems).

The task of the players is to tell stories about themselves and their lives, 10 years in the future, while inventing new social institutions (purposeful collaborations between previously non-collaborating groups, that we call "superstructs") to help humanity cope with the catastrophic results of the combination and interactions between these threats.

Having been doing some preparatory collaboration with other members of the Superstruct team, and going through our orientation meetings today, I can see that this is actually going to take up a lot of time and energy. (More than I originally thought.) So, expect to see lighter than usual blogging from me, or engagement in other projects (both here or on Smart Disorganized, Platform Wars, OPTIMAES etc. etc.)

(Apart, that is, from a collaborative project I have in the works with Zby, and a couple of outstanding things that are basically done and I just need to write up.)

It's getting easier to analyse patterns of crime and search for people's criminal records.

Interesting patterns of malware from BRIC countries.

Sao Paulo (where I ... erm ... was thinking of moving to) explodes.

The beeb has a quick overview of the gangs. Including the PCC which apparently started as a prisoners' defence movement after (presumably, although not specified by the BBC) the Carandiru massacre. It's worth watching that film to get an idea of Brazilian prisons.

That emphasis on the interaction between political and criminal activity is important. It is the "Global Guerrillas" analysis (which I referenced in my discussion of the Euston Manifesto) You'll misunderstand the whole thing if you see "islamism" as some kind of sui generis unique evil. What we're seeing is the switch in people's loyalties and sense of who they are, to their membership of religious sects, tribes, gangs etc and away from their loyalty to the nation-state. This happens when the state is either a) repressive to this group, b) too weak to provide the group with the security it needs or c) the group are immigrants from another culture who have difficulty assimilating.

That's not new. There have been epochs of warring "gangs of New York" of ethnic Irish, Jewish and Italians. It's not new that such gangs are started with a mixture of community defence vigilantism and other political ideals, but soon extend the violence and adopt crime as tactics for financing themselves, protecting their own integral structure and the positions and lifestyles of their leaders.

What's, maybe, new is the degree of empowerment that new technologies like cell-phones bring. And also, the degree of spontaneous / opportunistic co-operation and information sharing between different groups. Criminal gangs in Haiti have copied the beheading tactic of Iraqi groups. Nigeria has car-bombs. In Rio, gangs pioneered the burning of busses with their passangers on-board. Although, thankfully, this doesn't seem to have been repeated in Sao Paulo (yet).