Made by Carla Franciose, link via yankodesign.com

This is some serious industrial design/car pr0n. From Pink Tentacle:

In Mazda’s vision of the late 2050s, advances in molecular engineering have rendered metal-based manufacturing obsolete. The rise of ubiquitous computing and artificial intelligence drastically accelerates the automotive production cycle…A “haptic skin” suit consisting of millions of microscopic actuators enables the driver to experience the road psycho-somatically while receiving electrical muscle stimulation from the onboard AI guidance system…The vehicle’s entire structure is comprised of a 100% reprototypable, carbon nanotube/shape memory alloy weave with a photovoltaic coating, which allows the vehicle to mimic the driver’s body movements while powering the in-wheel electrostatic motors.

Keep reading for more..

via Futurismic

From Next-Nature:

The next step in biomimetic body extentions for propelling yourself through water…With these fins you can be faster and more acrobatic as they promise to launch you out of the water.

The best part? This is not vaporware, you can buy one today.

via Mac Tonnies

Photo via imgfave.com.

On the Internet, no one knows if your’re a dog, or so I’m told.  But does President Obama’s newly announced “Cyberspace strategy” herald a possible end to the days of anonymity (or for that matter Anonymous) on the internet?

The answer is, “Possibly”.

Along with his press conference, today listing Cyber-Security as a national security priority, the White House also released the 75 page “Cyberspace Policy Review”.  It all seems pretty straightforward, answering basic national security, infrastructure and financian concerns about various “cyber threats”.  (The validity of a lot of these threats is, of course, up for debate, but isn’t what I’m looking to address here.)   However, buried in the text is a somewhat scary bit of policy jargon:

10.  Build a cybersecurity-based identity management vision and strategy that addresses privacy and civil liberties interests, leveraging privacy-enhancing technologies for the Nation.

Now, to be frank, there’s a few scary bits throughout the document.  There’s a lot of wording that could support the growing of walled gardens in the private and public sector and the promise of more government regulation of the internet in the United States, but that bit sticks out to me.

An “identity management vision” is a means of regulating and more importantly authenticating your identity online.   This would mean the creation of some sort of regulatory agent that can assist in the establishment of authenticity standards in the hopes of allowing federal agencies the ability to tell if sexb0mb29@gmail.com, Captain Swing on myspace, and chimplover35 who comments on Digg are all in fact the same individual.  It’s, theoreticaly, the end of anonnimity on the internet.  (At least the US bits.)  Obviously it’s not the first time the US Federal government has shown an interest in policing identity on the internet, and it probably won’t be last, but it doesn’t bode well.

Io9′s Annalee Newitz has an interesting (and likely) take on the likelyhood of indentity policing ending up in the hands of a private sector company:

And here’s where my not-so-wild speculation about Facebook identities comes in. Many companies have turned to Facebook as an “identity management” system (including Gawker Media), allowing people to log into their services using their Facebook identity. The reason is simple: Most people only have one Facebook identity, and they stick with it. There’s a general notion that your Facebook identity is your authentic identity, or at least an identity that you keep over time, and that its characteristics can be traced back to who you are in real life. Therefore, having you log into every web service, from io9 comments to Digg to (possibly in the future) Paypal, is a way of managing your identities. Instead of having a separate identity for each of those services, you have one. Easy to manage, easy to trace.

Why shouldn’t Obama’s cyberczar just cut a deal with Facebook (and maybe a few other social networks like LinkedIn) and turn those profiles into your authentic identities? So you can send mail and buy things using your Facebook ID, and that’s how you’ll be tracked. Hey, you’re already on Facebook right? And you can set your profile to “private.” So it’s easy and “privacy enhancing.” (Never mind how easy it is to get around those privacy settings – pay no attention to that black hat behind the curtain.)

The scenario I’m describing is, in essence, how the Social Security Card became the twentieth century’s identity management system starting in the 1930s. These cards were not originally intended as ID cards, or as a way to authenticate your true identity. They were just a way to manage government assistance to those who needed it. But they became an ID card simply because everyone in the US had been issued one. When the government and businesses needed a way to track people’s identities, it became the easy choice. Showing your social security card meant that you couldn’t just come up with random new names for yourself every time you signed a form or took a job.

Though people in the US now think of the Social Security Card as the “obvious” form of ID, it took years for it to evolve from a simple social assistance card to an “identity management vision.”

Just as the (currently, temporarily scrapped) National ID card system would have been carried on the backbone of private interests, it’s entirely likely that any form of identity policing on the internet would end up being, by and large, maintained by a pre-existing entity in the private sector.   At first glance, a Facebook/US Government partnership seems unlikely, but does it really?   Newitz is right in claiming that this is exactly what happened with the Social Security Card.  This little white and blue piece of paper that most Americans posess quickly became a universal form of ID even though it was never intended to act as such.  (And in fact the card insists that a SSN is not an ID.)     And there are many, many companies that are currently using Facebook as identity sourcing or are looking at doing so.

Why not link your email addresses and your paypal accounts and your amazon information and your bank information to your Facebook account.  It’s safe and private, right?   While you’re at it, why not link your biometric information to your email account to your facebook account?  (Here’s the fun part — a lot of people already do that, and expect to see more push for email-based biometric security in the next year.)

Facebook is just one likely candidate for an increasingly likely scenario, and that scenario is one in which the powerful anonymizing factor of the internet is slowly reduced via public-private partnerships.  Partnerships which will be based on “convienence” and public safety.

On the bright side, Obama claims that he still supports net neutrality:

“Our pursuit of cybersecurity will not include — I repeat, will not include — monitoring private sector networks or internet traffic,” he said. “We will preserve and protect the personal privacy and civil liberties that we cherish as Americans. Indeed, I remain firmly committed to net neutrality so we can keep the internet as it should be, open and free.”

But those aren’t very comforting words when they’re released next to a document that encourages us to look back to the cold war, and discussed the importance of selling the idea of a national security cyber-threat to the American People.  It’s easy to say “I remain firmly committed to net neutrality…” but harder to accomplish when your policy documents outline how to convince the Internet-using populace  to allow internet regulations and promotes solidifying “who is in charge” of the internet.  (Those are just a few of the gems I noticed on a quick skim.)

Am I being reactionary?  Maybe a little.  But while the Obama adminstration has talked a good game regarding electronic civil liberties, he certainly hasn’t actually backed up the talk with actions, yet.  In fact, he’s done just the opposite with his support of enhanced wireless wiretapping powers and his appointment of MPAA/RIAA and staunch anti-P2P advocate Joe Biden as his VP.    While I’m not quite ready to go down to my local teabaggers meeting just yet, It’s obvious that electronic privacy is going to be an interesting minefield to watch Obama walk through.

On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.  Except Facebook.  And Linkdin.  And the FTC and LexisNexis and the CIA and the NSA and SEC.  Oh, and 4Chan.

From Mark Vanderbeeken at core77.com:

You are being watching from inside your own blood. A prototype has been developed:

At the upcoming ILSI-Biomed Israel 2009 conference (June 15-17 in Tel Aviv), researchers from the Medical Robotics Laboratory at the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) will be showing off a microrobot called ViRob, that has only a 1millimeter diameter and can crawl through vessels and cavities, when controlled by an external magnetic field. The big idea behind the ViRob device is that it can be used to deliver pharmaceutical payloads to precise locations or pull a microcatheter through tortuous terrain.

Link and photo via medgadget.com.

Not sure? Both were done with SLR cameras instead of video cameras. From core77.com:

Object convergence of a different sort. Nowadays technology is blurring the line between SLR cameras and video cameras, not only in the physical design of the cameras themselves, but the post-processing tech that enables us to do things like create video by piecing together stills.

…[the] two videos embedded below are different in that they were rendered out of still frames. The first is more sober and meditative, and the second one is a totally nutty must-see–it was shot tilt-shift style, and viewing it makes us look, well, small as a species.

From cnet:

The EyeStop is a touch-screen bus shelter that monitors environmental conditions and real-time bus movement and also provides information and communication tools that can interact with your cell phone.

The EyeStop, which has touch sensitive e-Ink screens as well as LEDs, features a bus map plotting locations in real-time, e-mail and Web access, tools for planning a best route and getting directions, a community bulletin board, and, of course, a place for silent video advertisements. It will also use sensors to monitor and display local air quality.

Riders can choose to have their local EyeStop bus stop sync with their cell phone. The EyeStop you normally frequent, for example, could twitter you that your usual bus is running late that morning.

Intended for tourists as well as locals, the EyeStop tools will be accessible in several languages.

…

The bus shelter and bus pole versions of the EyeStop will power themselves with solar energy, but they won’t be one-size-fits-all.

Each EyeStop will be customized by a computer program that takes into account the stop’s immediate surroundings. As a result, each can be built to fit into the existing space using steel, glass, and gray stone local to Florence. The software also considers maximum sunlight exposure for the location to determine power generation needs.

via chris arkenberg

Bitter? You might have a reason to be:

You know them. I know them. And, increasingly, psychiatrists know them. People who feel they have been wronged by someone and are so bitter they can barely function other than to ruminate about their circumstances.

This behavior is so common — and so deeply destructive — that some psychiatrists are urging it be identified as a mental illness under the name post-traumatic embitterment disorder. The behavior was discussed before an enthusiastic audience last week at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Assn. in San Francisco.

The disorder is modeled after post-traumatic stress disorder because it too is a response to a trauma that endures. People with PTSD are left fearful and anxious. Embittered people are left seething for revenge.

“They feel the world has treated them unfairly. It’s one step more complex than anger. They’re angry plus helpless,” says Dr. Michael Linden, a German psychiatrist who named the behavior.

Words from the LA Times, link via /..

Link via pinktentacle.com.

Created by Lone Stidsen, link via mocoloco.com.

A beautiful piece of kinetic art, video from makezine.com.

From Vice Magazine:

Ever wondered how a Brazilian without a source of disposable income or a reliable drug connection gets high? Us too. So we asked some buddies of ours down there to sate our curiosity. They gave us three simple recipes for frying up neurons that can be made with crap lying around the house. Just so we’re on the same page, we are not to be held responsible if you try these out and end up catatonic. Seriously, do not do this. We are NOT telling you to do this. Bad things will happen to you and we will not apologize to your mom when you become a drooling vegetable.

Link via disinfo.com.

An alternative for moving information, from newscientist.com:

Web, file transfer, email and peer-to-peer networks all use TCP, which ensures that data packets are received securely by making the sender wait until the receiver returns a “got it” message. If no such acknowledgement arrives (on average 1 in 1000 packets gets lost or corrupted), the sender’s computer sends the packet again. This scheme is known as TCP’s retransmission mechanism – and it can be bent to the steganographer’s whim, says Mazurczyk.

Their system, dubbed retransmission steganography (RSTEG), relies on sender and receiver using software that deliberately asks for retransmission even when email data packets are received successfully. “The receiver intentionally signals that a loss has occurred. The sender then retransmits the packet but with some secret data inserted in it,” he says in a preliminary research paper (www.arxiv.org/abs/0905.0363). So the message is hidden among the teeming network traffic.

Could a careful eavesdropper spot that RSTEG is being used because the first sent packet is different from the one containing the secret message? As long as the system is not over-used, apparently not, because if a packet is corrupted the original packet and the retransmitted one will differ from each other anyway, masking the use of RSTEG.

One application of the RSTEG technique might be to help people in totalitarian regimes avoid censorship. The Warsaw team plans to demonstrate it at a workshop on network steganography in Wuhan, China, this November. “We are aware that organising this event in China may be not only a scientific challenge but also a political one,” says Mazurczyk.

From LATimes:

Today, construction officially began on the cultural complex on the Persian Gulf city-state’s Saadiyat Island. French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, crown prince of Abu Dhabi, presided over the ceremony.

Designed by French architect Jean Nouvel, the civic area will span 260,000 square feet and comprise  pavilions, plazas, canals and alleyways. (About 65,000 square feet will be dedicated to exhibitions.) A dome 590 feet in diameter will hover over much of the complex.

thanks for the tip-off b1ndychld!

From Inhabitat:

Doomsday devices they are not – these seed-sowing plant bombs are one design team’s weapon of choice in the fight against global desertification. Consisting of a biodegradable shell loaded with a potent payload of plant capsules and nutrient-rich artificial soil, Seedbombs are designed to be dropped out of planes to help slow the spread of desert regions that are growing due to deforestation and other man-made causes.

The Super Soaker holds liquid, but who said it had to be water?

Link and video via disinfo.com.

Not quite St Thomas Institute, but chilling enough:

Link and photo via the atom.com.

Thanks to LBA for the link!

Made by Antoine + Manuel, via mocoloco.com.