AT&T May Expand Fiber Network

From Ars Technica:

Two months after Google announced that it will try to bring fiber Internet to 34 cities in nine metro areas, AT&T today said it will "expand its ultra-fast fiber network to up to 100 candidate cities and municipalities nationwide, including 21 new major metropolitan areas."

Before anyone gets too excited, AT&T isn't promising that it will actually build in any or all of these cities. "This expanded fiber build is not expected to impact AT&T’s capital investment plans for 2014," the company's announcement said, possibly to assure investors that it isn't wasting money.
But AT&T will consider building in the cities that provide the best options.

Google isn't a telecom or cable provider, so it has to pay more for access.

"AT&T will work with local leaders in these markets to discuss ways to bring the service to their communities," the company said.

Falkvinge: Private Communications or Mass Corporate Surveillance, Pick One

In his most recent column for Torrent Freak, Richard Falkvinge, the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, argues that we have a simple choice before us. We can opt for retaining some semblance of private correspondence and communication that is outside the scope of government and corporate surveillance, or we can acquiesce to the demands of the entertainment industry.  Excerpt:

There is no way to enforce the copyright monopoly without reading all the private communications in transit – mass eavesdropping and mass surveillance. There is no magic way to just wiretap the violations and ignore the rest; the act of finding which communications may violate the copyright monopoly requires that you sort all correspondence into legal and illegal. The act of sorting requires observation; you cannot determine if something is legal or illegal without looking at it. At that point, the postal secret and the privacy of correspondence have been broken . . .

So we’re at a crossroads where we as a society must determine which is more important – the right to communicate in private at all, or the obsolete distribution and manufacturing monopoly of an entertainment industry. These two are completely mutually exclusive and cannot coexist. This is, and has been, the problem since the cassette tape.

Submit: The Failure of Social Media "Activism"

Social media have, without a doubt, already begun to revolutionize the political process world wide, and has been credited with facilitating popular uprisings and even the toppling of governments the world over. However, in many cases, it also serves a more reactionary function: to create an appearance of activity and engagement that masks a more fundamental social and political passivity.  A new study out of UC San Diego shows the superficiality of social media slacktivism.  Excerpt:

“The study is an important counter-balance to unbridled enthusiasm for the powers of social media,” said UC San Diego’s Lewis. “There’s no inherent magic. Social media can activate interpersonal ties but won’t necessarily turn ordinary citizens into hyper-activists.”

In the case of the Save Darfur campaign, the Causes Facebook app appears to have been “more marketing than mobilization,” Lewis said. It seems to have failed to convert the initial act of joining into a more sustained set of behaviors. For the vast majority of the members, he said, “the commitment might have been only as deep as a click.”

Survey: Americans Optimistic on the Future of Tech Breakthroughs

From the Pew Research Internet Project:

The American public anticipates that the coming half-century will be a period of profound scientific change, as inventions that were once confined to the realm of science fiction come into common usage. This is among the main findings of a new national survey by The Pew Research Center, which asked Americans about a wide range of potential scientific developments—from near-term advances like robotics and bioengineering, to more “futuristic” possibilities like teleportation or space colonization. In addition to asking them for their predictions about the long-term future of scientific advancement, we also asked them to share their own feelings and attitudes toward some new developments that might become common features of American life in the relatively near future.

Overall, most Americans anticipate that the technological developments of the coming half-century will have a net positive impact on society. Some 59% are optimistic that coming technological and scientific changes will make life in the future better, while 30% think these changes will lead to a future in which people are worse off than they are today . . .

Reality Mining: Techno-utopian Fantasy or Totalitarian Nightmare?

At the MIT Technology Review, Nicholas Carr reviews the work of Alex Pentland, director of MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory.  Pentland's work apparently aims to help create a fully programmed social order that would be difficult to distinguish from your worst nightmare of a totalitarian surveillance society.  Excerpt:

Pentland describes a series of experiments that he and his associates have been conducting in the private sector. They go into a business and give each employee an electronic ID card, called a “sociometric badge,” that hangs from the neck and communicates with the badges worn by colleagues. Incorporating microphones, location sensors, and accelerometers, the badges monitor where people go and whom they talk with, taking note of their tone of voice and even their body language. The devices are able to measure not only the chains of communication and influence within an organization but also “personal energy levels” and traits such as “extraversion and empathy.” In one such study of a bank’s call center, the researchers discovered that productivity could be increased simply by tweaking the coffee-break schedule.

Pentland dubs this data-processing technique “reality mining,” and he suggests that similar kinds of information can be collected on a much broader scale by smartphones outfitted with specialized sensors and apps. Fed into statistical modeling programs, the data could reveal “how things such as ideas, decisions, mood, or the seasonal flu are spread in the community.” . . .

What really excites Pentland is the prospect of using digital media and related tools to change people’s behavior, to motivate groups and individuals to act in more productive and responsible ways. If people react predictably to social influences, then governments and businesses can use computers to develop and deliver carefully tailored incentives, such as messages of praise or small cash payments, to “tune” the flows of influence in a group and thereby modify the habits of its members. Beyond improving the efficiency of transit and health-care systems, Pentland suggests, group-based incentive programs can make communities more harmonious and creative.

Call me cynical, but it seems just plain deluded to assume, as Pentland apparently does, that such technology, if adopted widely by governments and businesses, would ultimately fulfill these techno-utopian fantasies, and not result in a dystopian nightmare of surveillance and control.

Google Expands Glass "Explorer" Program

From Yahoo:

Google will make a limited supply of its controversial Internet-linked Glass eyewear available for purchase in the United States beginning — and ending — on April 15.

Anyone in the United States with $1,500 to spend on Glass will be able to join the ranks of “Explorers” who have gotten to test out the devices prior to them hitting the market, the California-based Internet titan said Thursday in a post at Google+ social network . . . 

On April 15, starting at 9 a.m. Eastern, Google will commence what it billed as the biggest expansion of the Explorer program to date by letting anyone in the U.S. buy the eyewear online here, noting that there would be a limited number of units available.

But Glass users, who have not so affectionately become known as "Glassholes", have also become targets of ire and even violence.  But not to fear, Google has a solution . . . contact lens cameras. From CNET:

Google has a patent pending for a contact lens with a micro camera and sensors embedded on the surface controlled by blinking, which would enable you to take hands-free pictures and could help the blind navigate the everyday obstacles of the world.

FBI to Expand Facial Recognition Photo Database

From the EFF:

New documents released by the FBI show that the Bureau is well on its way toward its goal of a fully operational face recognition database by this summer.
EFF received these records in response to our Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for information on Next Generation Identification (NGI)—the FBI’s massive biometric database that may hold records on as much as one third of the U.S. population. The facial recognition component of this database poses real threats to privacy for all Americans.

NGI builds on the FBI’s legacy fingerprint database—which already contains well over 100 million individual records—and has been designed to include multiple forms of biometric data, including palm prints and iris scans in addition to fingerprints and face recognition data. NGI combines all these forms of data in each individual’s file, linking them to personal and biographic data like name, home address, ID number, immigration status, age, race, etc. This immense database is shared with other federal agencies and with the approximately 18,000 tribal, state and local law enforcement agencies across the United States.

The records we received show that the face recognition component of NGI may include as many as 52 million face images by 2015. By 2012, NGI already contained 13.6 million images representing between 7 and 8 million individuals, and by the middle of 2013, the size of the database increased to 16 million images. The new records reveal that the database will be capable of processing 55,000 direct photo enrollments daily and of conducting tens of thousands of searches every day . . .

In order to avoid the prying eyes of government pervs, you might want to consider a new look, such as those being developed by Adam Harvey, who is seeking to "create a growing catalog of designs and techniques that can be employed as camouflage against face detection."