Tag: Technology

Who Does The Work During A Labor Shortage

Neophobes always whine about automation taking jobs but what happens when there’s nobody around willing to do a job? That’s what Komatsu was asked when it became clear that there wasn’t enough laborers in Japan willing to fulfill the demands of building the 2020 Olympics facilities. Its answer? Automation, of course:

As Japan ramps up new construction in preparation for hosting the 2020 Olympics, experts believe it will face a serious obstacle. “The labor shortage in the construction industry could reach a crisis level in the next few years,” Martin Schulz, an economist at Fujitsu Research Institute in Tokyo, told Bloomberg.

To get around this problem, Komatsu has begun creating a new service it calls Smart Construction. A team of robotic vehicles scoops rock and pushes dirt without a human behind the wheel. They are guided in their work by a fleet of drones, which map the area in three dimensions and update the data in real time to track how the massive volumes of soil and cement are moving around the site.

There’s no reason why you need humans to operate earthmoving equipment. You can just as easily have the equipment operated remotely or autonomously. Komatsu’s solution appears to rely on autonomous earthmoving equipment that is guided by information provided by ariel unmanned craft. The unmanned ariel craft, which is operated by a human, scans the area and tells the earthmoving equipment what it needs to do to change the undesirable landscape into something desirable.

In addition to alleviating the labor shortage this solution is also much safer since no humans have to be directly involved in potentially dangerous work. I can’t help but reiterate that this future we live in is awesome.

Education Has Never Been Cheaper

While the Republicans beat on the fear of illegal immigrants drum the Democrats have been beating on the free shit drum. One of the things many Democrats claim should be free is education. In fact they go so far as to say the costs of education are unreasonable. This is nonsense.

Education today is cheaper than it has ever been before. Knowledge has been liberated from the ivory towers of universities and made openly available to the masses. Gone are the days when you had to be extremely wealthy to become learned in anything outside of a trade.

Do you want to learn a language? Duolingo and Memrise have your back. Do you want to learn how to program? Codecademy and Khan Academy have you covered. Do you want to learn history? Khan Academy and MIT are there for you. Do you want to learn mathematics? Khan Academy, MIT, and iTunes U will help you out. Do you want to learn history? Khan Academy, MIT, and iTunes U are all ready to fulfill your desire. Do you want to learn about economics? The Mises Institute has more economic knowledge available than a majority of universities (unless you subscribe to the fantasy economic dreck of Keyes, Marx, and other people who should never have been taken seriously).

What I’ve listed here is just a tiny sample of all the resources available to you to further you education. All of the ones I’ve mentioned above are freely available to you (which is not to be mistaken for free, somebody is footing the bill on these things) and of fantastic quality.

The cost of education has plummeted. What has gotten ridiculously expensive is a university education. More specifically the degrees they issue. But a degree is not synonymous with an education. We don’t need free education, that already exists (again, free to you). What we need is for people to use this knowledge to further their entrepreneurial goals and to help employers understand a Github repository makes a better programming resume than a university degree.

Verizon To Sell Customer Data To AOL

There is a battle between Verizon and AT&T to determine which of the two companies is the most evil. Both companies have gone to tremendous lengths to fuck their customers over but Verizon’s latest ploy may be enough to put it ahead:

Verizon is giving a new mission to its controversial hidden identifier that tracks users of mobile devices. Verizon said in a little-noticed announcement that it will soon begin sharing the profiles with AOL’s ad network, which in turn monitors users across a large swath of the Internet.

That means AOL’s ad network will be able to match millions of Internet users to their real-world details gathered by Verizon, including — “your gender, age range and interests.” AOL’s network is on 40 percent of websites, including on ProPublica.

Here again we see the need for HTTPS everywhere. The key to Verizon’s tracking technology is its ability to inject a tracking number into its customers’ web traffic. HTTPS is not only good at preventing people in the middle of a client-server communication from seeing content. It’s also good at preventing people in the middle from altering the content in any way.

Verizon’s tracking technology works by exploiting the fact insecure web traffic can be modified. The modification, in this case, is including a traffic number, that is invisible to the user, into a customer’s web traffic. This is made possible by the fact Verizon, the customer’s Internet service provide, sits in the middle of all communications between its customers and the Internet. By using HTTPS to secure the connect between the customer and websites on the Internet Verizon can no longer alter the traffic and therefore cannot inject its tracking number.

I’m obviously beating a dead horse on this one but I will continue to do so until every website using HTTPS exclusively.

Microsoft Hit It Out Of The Park Yesterday

As an Apple user I tend to pay far more attention to Apple’s products than Microsoft’s. Truth be told, with the exception of the Xbox line, Microsoft just hasn’t had anything that really piques my interest… until now. Yesterday Microsoft unveiled a number of new products and, damn, were those announcements sweet.

The Surface Book is everything the iPad Pro should have been. It’s a full laptop that converts into a tablet. Unlike previous computers that did so, the Surface Book doesn’t have a stupid hinge design. In fact the hinge design is really neat. If you’ve used old Windows tablets you’ve experienced the terrible world of monitors that flip around and fold down over the keyboard. None of that bullshit is present with the Surface Book. Instead the monitor bends around the body of the laptop to lay behind it. The weakest point of tablet computers, the rotating hinge the monitor sat on, has been replaced by something that looks pretty robust.

More interesting to me though was the new line of phones. Specifically the Display Dock. Microsoft has delivered what Ubuntu has been promising with its phone line and has yet to deliver, the ability to plug the phone into a dock and have it work as a full computer. This is something I’ve wanted since smartphones became a thing and nobody has delivered it until now. The Display Dock is the big payoff for Microsoft’s unifying strategy with its operating system. If Windows only had the software I need I would actually consider a Windows-based phone now. One device to do it all, or at least do most of it all, really appeals to me.

Getting rid of the old guard was the right strategy for Microsoft. It seems the company is no longer willing to rest on its laurels while companies like Apple eat its lunch. Due to that the market again has another decent competitor.

Micro Hosting

I’ve been talking about the need to decentralize the Internet. Unfortunately handing so much power to a handful of domestic companies has proven to be a boon for the surveillance state. This is one of the reasons why I self-host most of my online services. I don’t like the current centralized environment and am therefore trying to walk the walk in decoupling myself from large service providers. Admittedly the current environment makes things like self-hosted e-mail questionably useful in most cases, mostly because almost everybody uses Gmail and therefore most email ends up on Google’s servers anyways, it does demonstrates the feasibility of a strategy (and as I wrote elsewhere every revolution has a humble beginning).

For the purposes of this post I’m going to create a phrase that’s probably already being used unknown to me: micro hosting. Micro hosting is an idea that came to me at AgoraFest after hearing a speaker urging agorists to develop a million one dollar ideas instead of one million dollar idea. A micro host is some schmuck like me with a server, a business Internet connection, and knowledge in system administration providing services to a handful of people. The key to this model is that you have a million small hosts providing services instead of one large host. Decentralization not only makes it more difficult for the State’s surveillance apparatus but also makes it difficult for the state to enforce it’s massive number of regulations.

Another advantage to this model is that it could finally weaken the grip advertising has on Internet services. Each host is obviously free to develop whatever business model they choose. For people like me that business model would involve getting paid by users instead of advertisers. Under such a business model privacy becomes a feature instead of a liability since convincing customers to pay for your service over, say, Google’s would likely require assurances that you’re not snooping through their communications for advertising purposes.

Recently I’ve put out feelers to people I know who are concerned about privacy to see if there’s an interest amongst them to have me host their e-mail for a small charge. Surprisingly there has been quite a bit of interest in not just e-mail but other services as well. Since I’m already running the services the overhead of hosting more people is pretty minimal. In other words this makes for a great agorist business idea since the risks are fairly minor and the prospect of turning a profit exists.

As I move forward with this this plan I’ll post updates. My reason for this is to inspire other agorists, specifically to start a small business such as a micro host. An additional reason, of course, is to inspire other people who may not be agorists to start a micro host to help decentralize the Internet.

Embrace The Mesh

Mesh networks are wonderful for many reasons. My primary interest in them is their ability to decentralize Internet connectivity but they also offer a major advantage for those living in areas not currently services by high-speed Internet providers: a more cost effective means of obtaining Internet connectivity.

A lot of people complain that the Internet service providers (ISP) in their area don’t offer high-speed connectivity to their home but offer it to homes only a block or two away. In almost all cases ISPs will connect your home up but they’ll put the cost of expanding their infrastructure on you:

When Cole Marshall decided to buy an empty lot and build a house, one of his top priorities was getting fast and reliable Internet service.

Marshall says he received assurances from Charter, the local cable company, that he could get Internet access to his home in Wisconsin. There was also a promise of relatively fast DSL, with telco Frontier Communications telling him it could provide 24Mbps download speeds, he told Ars.

As it turned out, neither company could deliver. Once the house was built, Charter would only offer service if he paid $117,000 to cover the cost of extending its network to his new home. Frontier does provide DSL Internet, but only at slower speeds of up to 3Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream.

Marshall, who works at home as a Web developer, subscribed to Frontier and struggles with his Internet connection daily.

“Cable was always available everywhere I lived, and I never thought moving just a little bit out of the city would mean I’d get hardly anything,” Marshall said.

Whether Charter and Frontier provided those assurances is a case of he said, she said. But the core problem, Marshall wanting access to faster Internet connectivity, exists regardless. In this case Charter isn’t unwilling to provide him cable Internet but it does expect him to pay for expanding its infrastructure to him. The price isn’t surprising since acquiring permits, digging up ground, burying fiber, and covering it back up isn’t cheap. But Marshall also isn’t without choices.

Wireless Internet connectivity is nice because it doesn’t require building a lot of physical infrastructure. You only need two radios to span a gap. And based on the story Marshall isn’t that far from Charter customers with cable Internet service:

Marshall has been told that his home was about 3,200 feet from Charter’s network, or about 6/10 of a mile. But a Charter spokesperson told Ars that an inspection determined it could not build to Marshall’s home from the nearest facilities.

Spanning approximately one kilometer is easily doable with affordable radios. The directional NanoStations we used at AgoraFest can span five times that distance and cost about $40 to $50 per radio. Here is where Marshall could make use of a mesh network.

Were he to offer to pay one of Charter’s customers it’s likely they would have no issue providing him Internet access via wireless radio. After all, most people buy more bandwidth than they need and are happy to receive a little undeclared income. If other people in his housing development made similar deals it would be trivial for his neighborhood to have access to fast Internet connectivity for a very modest price. And because of how mesh networks operate the Internet connectivity could be maintained even if one of the Charter customers canceled a deal.

Establishing Reputations

Reputations are a tool we use everyday. Most people will warn their friends and family members about unsavory sorts and recommend reputable individuals. When looking for a new restaurant it’s not that uncommon this day and age to check for reviews on sites like Yelp. Successful businesses can find themselves in bankruptcy if their reputation becomes tarnished. Hell, I just bought a new shaver from the manufacturer of my old shaver specifically because of the positive reputation that company has established with me. With how important reputations are to most us of I am having a difficult time understand the outrage over this app:

You can already rate restaurants, hotels, movies, college classes, government agencies and bowel movements online.

So the most surprising thing about Peeple — basically Yelp, but for humans — may be the fact that no one has yet had the gall to launch something like it.

When the app does launch, probably in late November, you will be able to assign reviews and one- to five-star ratings to everyone you know: your exes, your co-workers, the old guy who lives next door. You can’t opt out — once someone puts your name in the Peeple system, it’s there unless you violate the site’s terms of service. And you can’t delete bad or biased reviews — that would defeat the whole purpose.

My question isn’t how a company could have the gall to release this but why it’s taken so long for something like this to be developed. The Internet has made it possible for people who have never met and have no common friends in real life to have meaningful relationships (be they friendship, business, or even romantic). As this trend continues to become more common a replacement for personal reputation recommendations needs to be developed. Will this app be it? Only time will tell. But it’s certainly a contender in a market with apparently few contenders.

Once Data Is Retained You Lose All Control

Apologists for the National Security Agency (NSA) claim that Americans have no need to worry since the agency’s focus is on foreigners. Sometimes they even claim that the NSA cannot legally act on any of the domestic communications it collects so there is no danger to Americans regardless of how expansive its surveillance apparatus is. These arguments are irrelevant though because once your data is retained you have no control over how it is used.

Case in point, the NSA has been sharing data with domestic law enforcement agencies:

The Justice Department is investigating the FBI’s use of information taken directly from mass surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA)’s collection of telephone metadata.

[…]

Another ongoing Justice Department investigation is examining the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)’s use of “parallel construction.”

Parallel construction is a controversial investigative technique that takes information gained from sources like the NSA’s mass surveillance, covers up or lies about the sources, and then utilizes them in criminal investigations inside the United States. The information was passed to other federal agencies like the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

While the NSA itself may be restricted to some extent from using any data it collects on domestic individuals there is nothing stopping it from handing that data to an agency that isn’t. The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) are all agencies that can act on data collected on domestic individuals by the NSA. Furthermore, due to the secrecy of the NSA’s program, these domestic law enforcers can made defending against any collected data extremely difficult. You only have a right to face your accuser publicly if your accuser isn’t hiding behind the nebulous label of “national security,” after all.

AgoraFest’s Mesh Network

AgoraFest happens at Villa Maria, which is a retreat in Frontenac, Minnesota. There’s a lot of things to like about the location but Internet connectivity isn’t one of them. For the most part the only Internet accessibility is in the castle. None of the cabins have Internet connectivity and you’re out of luck getting it via your phone unless you have Verizon.

Because we’re modern day agorists we want Internet connectivity. After all, how else can we use Bitcoin or quickly look up the spot price of silver and gold? To solve this I was charged with creating a mesh network.

Mesh networks, for those of you who don’t know, are networks where each node is capable of connecting directly to every other node. The advantages of this kind of setup the lack of central failure points. It also allows you to expand a wireless network as far as you have nodes.

Commotion Wireless is a firmware built on OpenWRT that aims to make setting up mesh networks simple. I loaded this firmware onto a series of Ubiquiti NanoStations and PicoStations. The NanoStations are directional and have an advertised maximum range of five kilometers and the PicoStations are omnidirectional and have an advertised maximum range of 500 meters. Both are outdoor rated so weather conditions such as rain don’t require us to shutdown the network.

In all we used four NanoStations and five PicoStations for the setup. With this setup we were able to extend the Internet connectivity at the castle to all three cabins and a tent we setup for flying drones and launching model rockets. Speeds weren’t great because the Internet service at the Villa isn’t fast but we managed to get a reliable connection spread across a pretty wide area.

Setting up a mesh network wasn’t only a good idea technically, it helped demonstrate the feasibility of mesh networks to attendees. I gave a talk about mesh networks at AgoraFest, which included my overarching plan to get networks to establish mesh networks and eventually interconnect them to bypass centralized Internet service providers. In other words I want what Guifi has accomplished in Catalonia. Obviously that will take a great deal of convincing, resources, and effort but there’s no better place to find a group of willing people than AgoraFest.

The People Who Make The World Better

I have several especially statist friends who constantly claim they’re making the world a better place because of their involvement in politics. It’s the most pathetic ego stroking I’ve ever seen and there isn’t even a kernel of truth to it. Running for office, sucking off political candidates, and constantly telling other people how they should live their lives doesn’t improve the world in any way. Do you know what does improve people’s lives? Markets. Providing people the goods and services they need will actually benefit them. Consider the prosthetics market. Prosthetics are leaping ahead at a fantastic pace. We’ve gone from hooks on pulleys to replace missing arms to prosthetics attached to the nervous system capable of mimicking a lot of what natural limbs can do:

Hastened by advances in neurology and robotics — and tragically by the spike in U.S. soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan without limbs — a new era of prosthetics has emerged, using signals from the brain to evoke an increasing variety of movements from bionic limbs.

Jorgenson is one of about 50 patients worldwide — and the youngest, so far — to undergo a surgery called targeted muscle reinnervation, in which severed nerve endings in her arm were reassigned to control muscles that would trigger sensors in the bionic arm. With the surgery, which was performed last year at the Mayo Clinic, she also became the first to have six nerves rewired, giving her the ability at will to move the robotic elbow up and down, rotate the wrist, and open and close the hand.

[…]

Learning how to signal the proper muscles to trigger movements from the bionic arm happened quickly, Jorgenson said, but mastering it is taking time.

“Sometimes when I raise my arm up,” she said, “the hand will start twisting around.”

When it closes, the hand can create a grip-crushing 22 pounds of force, but it can also be delicate enough to hold a paper cup. So developing control has proved crucial. After daring her older brother to let her squeeze his nose, she tried it on herself. She squeezed too tightly and found herself unable to release the hand because the shock caused her muscles to tense up.

But on Wednesday, she transplanted the plant, filled the pot with soil, and cleaned the mess with a dustpan — all with little to no delay between the time she wanted her prosthetic to move and when it did.

“It’s pretty amazing how intuitive she has become,” her father said.

Her next step will be triggering two motions at once — such as moving the elbow while closing the hand — but she is comfortable enough to start wearing the bionic arm to school. The eighth-grader had delayed until now, because her school lacks air conditioning and the prosthetic can become uncomfortable in high heat.

The people involved in the development of this girl’s prosthetic limb have done more to improve the world than anybody who has invested their time in politics. And they’re not done. Unlike politicians who accomplish a minor goal and declare complete victory, people involved in the prosthetics market aren’t satisfied with replicating only a few features of natural limbs. They want to replicate everything:

DARPA promised prosthetic limbs that produce realistic sensations, and it’s making good on its word. The agency’s researchers have successfully tested an artificial hand that gave a man a “near-natural” level of touch. The patient could tell when scientists were pressing against specific fingers, even when they tried to ‘trick’ the man by touching two digits at once. The key was to augment the thought-controlled hand with a set of pressure-sensitive torque motors wired directly to the brain — any time the hand touched something, it sent electrical signals that felt much like flesh-and-bone contact.

If you want to make the world a better place learns skills that allow you to make new goods and services for consumers. You don’t have to work in the medical field but that’s certainly a great market to consider. Something as simple as a restaurant will provide more people more good than any politicking.