technology

Honda's W.O.W. concept car has built-in dog crates, washable roll-out flooring, and wide sliding doors. The article notes that in Japan, demand is growing for cars that cater to dogs and their people.

I noticed during my first visit (I'm going to get to go back in a few weeks) that Japan seemed a dog-friendly country, it seemed more common for people to have their dogs out with them in Kobe than in Baltimore. Also more older dogs, it seems they rarely put dogs down just because they get old.

As Bruce Sterling and Richard Kadrey's Dead Media Project has shown, information may last a lot longer that our ability to read it. For example, try reading an old WordPerfect file stored on a 5 1/4 inch floppy from the days of MS-DOS.

What to do about preserving information amidst the constant flux of file formats, software applications, storage hardware, and operating systems? The National Archives and Records Administration has awarded Lockheed Martin a $308 million, six-year contract to build an system to preserve federal electronic records in a media, software, and hardware-independent fashion. We'll see.

A different approach to information preservation is being taken by the Rosetta Project of the Long Now Foundation. As fifty to ninety percent of the world's 7,000-odd languages are predicted to disappear in the next century, they are attempting to create a near permanent physical archive of 1,000 of them, in the form of a large number of micro-etched 3" nickel disks scattered about as heirlooms.

Freedom to Tinker summarizes a paper on snooping typed information by analyzing a recording of the typing sounds.

The recovered text gets about 90% of the words right and is said to be "quite readable". While passwords don’t have the same statistical properties as ordinary text, as long as the password-typing is accompanied by enough English-typing the algorithm can come up with a short list of possible passwords, which almost always includes the correct one.

"Sounds let eavesdroppers determine what you're typing" plus "cellphone companies can remotely install software to activate the microphone when the user is not making a call" equals "a creepy feeling up and down my spine".

Security guru Marcus Ranum writes about The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security. (Marcus worked at TIS the same time I did; he is an intensely clueful person whose advice on matters of information security should probably be heeded.)

Nothing quite like Google for reading the thoughts of the world as expressed on the web. Try a Google search on the word "failure" and what's the first entry? The official White House web site's biography of the George W. Bush.

That would be a lot funnier if it wasn't for the thousands of people left dead, maimed, or destitute because of Bush's criminal and incompetent behavior. But hey - a Google search for "impeachment" brings up www.VoteToImpeach.org, former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark's organization devoted to giving W the treatment he has so richly earned.

You know, it occurs to me that in a few months, after all the Katrina refugees have at least been fed, families reunited, and have roofs over their heads again, the impeachment of George W. Bush would make a great Christmas gift to them.

So let's say you're a Katrina refugee - sorry, that's not PC, evacuee, but that's another story - and you've found refuge at a friends' house. And let's say said friend has a computer. Can you go to register for aid from FEMA on-line? Only if your friend does business with a corporate criminal, Microsoft. MSNBC (ironically, a Microsoft - NBC joint venture) reports:

The good news: If you've survived Hurricane Katrina, the government will let you register for help online. The bad news: But only if the computer you're using is running Windows.

Pity Jason Striegel. He got his AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) account added to a list of sex chat bots...and can't convince IM'ers that he's really human. Read "How I Failed the Turing Test".

The Turing Test, for those not familiar with it, is a test of artificial intelligence proposed by Alan Turing, in which a computer program tries to act like a human in conversation. Turing envisioned using teletypes to hide the machine, but the 'net does the job even better.

For those who came in late: for years now, tech and media companies have been trying to use copyright and patent law to restrict your freedom to share information, or modify or explore the devices you buy, or generally do anything that might decrease their profit margin. The two latest examples:

This Guardian story mentions in passing:

Not only can operators pinpoint users to within yards of their location by "triangulating" the signals from three base stations, but - according to a report in the Financial Times - the operators (under instructions from the authorities) can remotely install software onto a handset to activate the microphone even when the user is not making a call. Who needs an ID card when they can do that already?

Yummy. The Damn Small Machine is a Nano-ITX system that is 100% silent because it has no moving parts - no fan, no disk drive. Very low power consumption. Runs Damn Small Linux.

If and when the house gets sold and I put part of my share to a audio recording setup, this might end up part of it, if I could plug something like the Tascam US122 in to it. (Need to do more research about the Linux compatibility of that unit.)