• What is your opinion on merging spiritualism and deity worship with science and technology in the future? It seems to already be happening to a small extent, so what are the implications?  –Anonm1k3y: I consider myself a neo-Pythagorean. It’s a path through the future, but not for all.

  Kevin: I think it’s unavoidable simply because of the nature of technological development.  A large portion of spirituality involves dealing with the invisible landscape – heavens, hells, the spirits of places, personal histories – the intangible connections between things.  The general thrust of developing technologies seems to be invested in the same things — making data rich genius loci, creating an internet of things, making the implicit connections between things and people explicit.   In much the same sense that I consider most spirituality on par with a Graphical User Interface for consciousness, I think that we definitely will see new combinations of deity worship, spirituality, religion and the data-rich environment.    (A good example of a new spin on this is the sort of exotropic emergent godhead that Kevin Kelly calls the Technium and details in his book What Technology Wants.  There’s also the oft-cited rapture-style eschatology of the technological Singularity.)

• Now that it has made me sign in, let’s see if this goes through… Humans are notoriously short-sighted and focused on their lives here and now. How would you ‘elevator pitch’ such a person to open their eyes to the necessity of understanding the future? –JaymGatesHumans are notoriously focused on the present. Why should the average person care about futurism, not as a fun SF theory, but as a science/belief/way to shape the world? –Anon

  m1k3y: When the sea of change becomes a tsunami, when infrastructure collapse piles on instituational collapse, piles on social change… people will be treadying water, looking for a narrative to explain just how they came to be almost drowning. SF theory then becomes srs bsnss. Especially when the alternative is nationalistic resurgence or exceptionalist denialism.

  Would it be that surprising if strange, new (techno) religions flower when more happens in the first month of 2012 than all of 2011. Just trying explaining this year to your 2010-pastSelf.

  The present will be a tiny blip of time. Now may last 10minutes.

  The result of a 100years of SF’nal thinking will help give shape to the chaos, and that will make all the difference. Its memes will turn victims into survivors. (It was always a rescue operation.)

  Kevin: I’m of the opinion that 99.9% of “futurism” has nothing to do with the future at all, and is simply about understanding the present or the recent past.   The idea that it is focused on the future seems to simply be some slight-of-mind to soften the ontological blow that comes with the dual facts that yes, people are focused on the here and now and that they very rarely understand it.  That’s certainly the case with futurism as it manifests in the corporate world.  Douglas Rushkoff has made an excellent career of explaining the world as it was 10 minutes ago to corporations and business audiences under the guise of the “next big thing”. And that’s not a dig, either, there’s a serious need for that sort of social prestidigitation.

  Science Fiction and its forward-looking kin is a vehicle that allows artists to essentially rapid prototype and testbed futures — and if successful begin to manifest them. The space race was driven by rocket jockeys who were also often SciFi geeks — be they writers or fans. William Gibson’s vision of cyberspace informs and shapes the conversation about information technology to this day. At its best, Sci Fi is a vehicle that allows the artist to pluck things from the future so as to terraform the present.

  My elevator pitch would strangely be a sports metaphor:  ”If you don’t keep your eye on the ball, you’ll never hit anything.” And that’s really what it boils down to.  Without understanding today enough to have an idea of how to deal with the future. And I think that’s key, right there;  the ability to develop strategies for dealing with future events is vastly more valuable than the ability to predict future events.  Without understanding that, you’re just swinging blindly. Life without context is just a big mess of sound and fury and noise.  And that is no way for anyone to live their life, much less for a culture to try and navigate through the world.

• Where do you think the latest round of political protest in America and the UK (to narrow it down a bit) is heading? –DavidForbesm1k3y: The states will still exist, but UK faces further instabiliy and likely overreactions from polices. Nights of riots will return, for longer. Obama will look even worse by then, and will probably be forced out by Hildawg for re-election. For the populations, things will get ever more political, but in wildier directions. We’ll see more insane versions of Tea Party and other nationalistic manifestatians. Tactical, flash occupies, increasingly surreal, and permanent encampments as they ally with friendly pre-existing institutions (say, liberal churchs for instance).

  Equal parts new instabilities in old areas, and fresh, unanticipated cohesions at the edge of the new and the old.

• If 2012 gives us a general contraction of economic growth, the potential collapse of the Euro and a general all-around shortage of available cash, what sort of things can we be doing to minimize negative impacts? How do I buy jetpack without cash? –amkelly0m1k3y: detach, or at least insulate, yourself from the mainstream status-quo such as it existed before the beginning of the GFC.

  time rich, money poor; you mightn’t have a (full-time) job, but you will have time to pool resources with fellow travellers, scrap together equipment. start a neighbour market garden on vacant or adandoned land. swap equipment, get maximum benefit from the resources of the group using (something like) http://neighborgoods.net/. and above all else – LEARN/STUDY/PLAY.

  the further you live into the future, the more valuable you’ll be as a guide to those that follow you. (don’t buy a jetback, build a peer2peer jetpack factory)

  Kevin: Don’t concentrate on buying a jetpack, concentrate on establishing resilient sustainable communities that have the ability to construct jetpacks en masse.  Hosnestly, I think resilent sustainable communities are the key to progress in the face of  global financial collapse and the increasingly maddened anti-ethical actions of collective Large Actors (aka megacorps).  I’m not saying that you have to go off the grid into rural France a la the “Tarnac Nine“.  I mean, that’s an option, sure. But community building, even in the sprawling urban environments is key.

  The tricky part is — well, one of many tricky parts — that self-sufficiency usually looks like Crime in the eyes of the State. (And it looks like competition in the eyes of the Corporation.) Look at some of the Occupy enclaves — where it seems like their major infraction was having the gall to show that different types of urban communities were possible in front of the public.

• What new tech are you most excited about in 2012? What trend! –Anonm1k3y: Hardware and software being used, adapted, created by the independant citizens of the Ocuppy movement. Such as this new SNS http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/occupy-facebook/all/1. Definitely the emergant Drone Culture; kinect hacked quadcoptors vs predators. And DIY BioGen, something interesting should surely come from there.

  Surprise trend.. even more apocalyptic cults and new strange techno-religions flowering.

  Kevin: Drones, 3D printers that print 3d printers, the next BitCoin. If I were to be so presumptuous to declare 2012 “The Year Of…” something, I’d have to say it’s “The Year of the Superempowered meeting Outlaw Economies.”  2011 has arguably been the year of the Superempowered, starting with Wikileaks really exploding in the end tail of 2010 and steamrolling through the penetration of Anonymous into the mass culture, Arab Spring, Occupy, etc.  I think this is when groups like those and other hyperempowered individuals will really latch onto — or construct — new economies that operate parallel to state economies.  Sure, these shadow economies already exist, just ask militant hyperempowered groups like Al-Qaeda or anyone in the drug trade. But even though its future is murky, I think BitCoin was a huge sea change. While it became notorious for five minutes as the way to buy drugs online and then faded into obscurity as soon as the currency started bleeding value, BitCoin showed that a digital parallel economy could be established with an ese that probably spooked the hell out of some Nation States.

  Just like in the days when MySpace was king and it was obvious that someone was going to manage to actually do social networking right. (And hate them or love to hate them, Facebook seems to have gotten the magic formula at least mostly right.)  It’s just a matter of time before any of the groups attempting to build on BitCoin’s success manage to find a solution that sticks. And then, you’ve got hyperempowered individuals and groups who have the tools to move resources around on an unprecedented global scale.  This will put bombs in the wrong hands, and it’ll put food and resources in the right hands at an unprecedented rate.

  And to give that context, the “global black market” — or as economist Robert Neuwirth calls it, “System D”  — is already estimated at $10 trillion dollars.  Imagine being able to move even a tiny percentage of that in the form of a borderless, stateless, non-currency. If Neuwirth’s projections are right, System D already possibly represents the second largest economic system in existence. Now I’m far from a Capitalist, but the ability to render a consistent, value-retaining, non-physical, stateless currency into the hands of stateless non-hierarchical, rhizomatic organizations and collectives — a.k.a. Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, “The Protester” — seems like the very definition of a disruptive technology.

  The elevator pitch being “What if Anonymous had access to millions of dollars that were untraceable and never had to touch a bank?”

  Also:  Cheap and reliable drones.  I’m guessing there’s a 50/50 chance that “Drones” will be Time’s next Person of the Year.

• Mecha-Sterling vs GodzEllis. Who will emerge victorious? –AnonKevin: I think it’s like the tagline for the Alien vs. Predator film:  ”Whoever wins, we lose.” Or something like that. I love when Ellis writes about technology. He tends to explore things with a journalist’s eye and a romantic’s heart.  Sterling has a knack for generating likely science fictional scenarios and learning lessons from then as if they were dispatches from the near future. My favourite Ellis book is Frankenstein’s Womb and my favourite Sterling book is Shaping Things. (The latter of which is pretty much mandatory reading.)

  m1k3y: In the final seconds, when all seems lost, they will unwittingly perform a ninth level, interlocking power move summoning the transcendant object from beyond spacetime: BARBELITH.

It’s been an annual tradition for Chairman Bruce (and others) to have an extended Q&A over on the ancient and venerable The Well message boards. Bruce Sterling’s State of the World has long been an annual highlight of the season for us here at Grinding. But since it seems it’s not going to happen this year, there’s no long rambling thread of information laying out an exquisite cartography of exactly how fucked we are.

Well screw that, we say.

Here’s the deal. Ask us anything — anything at all — via our formspring account here: http://www.formspring.me/Grinding We will then answer your questions in a hopefully entertaining manner. It would be nice if some sort of intelligent conversation manifested as an emergent phenomena from this experiment, but we’re perfectly willing to let a cascade of dick, fart, and Tea Party jokes roll us into 2012.   (No, we’re not. I’m just trying to sound cavalier.)

Remember to use the Formspring account and not the increasingly compromised comments system for this. That’s http://www.formspring.me/Grinding — stay anon if you want or not. No topic is off limits, but things involving Grinding, the future, or whatnot would probably be a good idea.

Come, let us reason together! Alternatively, let us party like it’s the end of the world!!!

Recently, retail clothing chain H&M has caught a great deal of flack for using computer generated bodies in their online catalog. And while there is something to be said for looking critically at the introduction of computer-generated “perfection” into an industry already psychotically obsessed with unattainable standards of physical beauty, Coilhouse’s Nadya Lev has some relevant re-contextualization to share:

Also, this foray into the uncanny valley brings us one step closer to the age of the idoru. With teenage pop idol Aimi Eguchi, whose face is a composite of six different singers, and vocaloids (singing synthesizers) such as pigtailed holographic superstar, we’re almost there — in The Future.  And even though H&M’s online catalogue conforms to the same beauty standard as any other big fashion retailer, this technology actually has potential to subvert the paradigm altogether.

See the rest over at Coilhouse.

[See also: Building a Better Pop Star, and Building a Better Pop Star II]

Longtime readers will know by now that – scientific issues aside – some of us here at Grinding have a fondness for the “Stoned Ape” theory of the evolution of consciousness, language and technology.

The following video details a… version of that theory – with killer videodrome singularity robots, too.

“This is a clip from Duncan Trussell’s Comedy Central Pilot “Thunderbrain.” The animation and voice over was by Will Carsola from daybyday (www.livedaybyday.com) and it was produced by RZO Hothouse (http://www.hhouseproductions.com/)”

I’ve gotten a lot of mail this weekend about the supposed new “Canadian cure for cancer” and while I hate to rain on parades, I thought I’d do a bit of fact checking before getting too excited.  There were a few things that made me scratch my head when reading the initial article. (Starting with the fact it’s a four-year-old piece on a notorious Content Mill site that is just now circulating.)  So, I went to a friend of mine, who has worked extensively in the field of nuclear medicine and this is what she had to say:

If you read the article it talks about how University of Alberta scientists have used a drug called dichloroacetic acid (DCA), and according to the article, Big Pharma aren’t interested because the drug is off-patent and they can’t make money off of it. So bang, the Canadians cured cancer and no one cares.

…Except that’s not really true.

University of Alberta scientists are currently working on small-scale clinical trials of DCA; according to their most recent update, they’ve trial-ed this on five patients–five–which is not a large enough sample for us to go ahead and say that cancer has been ‘cured.’

Furthermore, they don’t go into great detail, but what they do say isn’t that they cured any of those patients. “In some patients there was also evidence for clinical benefit, with the tumors either regressing in size or not growing further during the 18 month study.” No idea how many “some” of the five patients are, but clearly at least one of the five had further tumor growth during the 18 months. There’s also a note mentioned about how it took 3 months for the drug to reach therapeutic levels; three months in a glioblastoma patient is pretty damn long (a GBM is a fast-growing brain tumor that untreated will kill you in two to four months, on average; with treatment it tends to kill you in fourteen months, and it has a ridiculously low five year survival rate. The wikipedia page gives a decent overview.)

Anyway. Point being, this ‘magic bullet’ has been trial-ed on five people at this point, and they’re still very much in the clinical trials stage. This means we’re likely years off from the point where we have to start worrying who’s going to make money off of DCA as a cancer treatment, because we’re years off from knowing whether or not it’s actually, well, a cure. (Or, like most things in cancer treatment, just a promising treatment that helps some people and has some unpleasant side effects.)

If you’re worried about whether or not they’ll be able to get adequate funding (which, in all things scientific these days, is a well-founded concern), visit the U of A team’s home page, read what they’re doing, and make a donation if you think it’s something worth exploring further. But please, for the love of god, let’s not continue to propagate mistruths and obfuscations published by a website whose advertising slogan is ‘publish easily, attract readers, earn rewards.’ There’s a reason publishing is hard, and it’s not because Big Pharma makes it so–it’s because we publish scientific results in peer reviewed journals, and they’re held to fairly rigorous standards there.

I’m under no illusion that we will see a FDA approved, Big Pharma approved cure for cancer until pharmaceutical companies can figure out a way to charge more for it than the billions they rake in from cancer treatment each year.  But it’s way too early to imply that this avenue of research is the suppressed holy grail of cancer research.   Trust me – I’ve lost my father, my sister and all of my aunts and uncles to cancer and I’ve had my own scare – when a cure is developed, no matter how off the grid it may be, I’ll be thrilled beyond words.  But an out of date, poorly researched Hubpages article misrepresenting the work of a group of hard-working scientists is no reason to uncork the champaign and thaw out the Duke…

…not just yet at least.

Flying his jet-propelled wing attached to his back, and steering only by moving his body, Rossy launched from a helicopter at 2,440 metres above the the Grand Canyon, according to his Geneva press office.

Skimming the rockscape at speeds of up to 300km per hour, Jetman sustained flight for more than eight minutes, 60 metres above the rim of Grand Canyon West before deploying his parachute and landing smoothly on the canyon floor.

[More at: swissinfo.ch]

Just stumbled upon the trailer for Adam Curtis’ new documentary – All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace and it looks, shall we say, extremely relevant to our interests.    For those unfamiliar with his work, Adam Curtis is a documentary filmmaker best known for his brilliant series of looks at modern history:  The Century of Self, the Power of Nightmares, and The Trap – Whatever Happened To Our Dreams of Freedom?   I can’t recommend those films enough for someone who wants to spend a few evenings coming to grips with what the hell happened in the 20th and early 21st centuries.   Propaganda, Psychology, Marketing, Nightmare Politics, Religious Extremism, and Game Theory – Curtis weaves them all together in a clear and concise manner into an extremely lucid and convincing secret history of modernity.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is due sometime this year from the BBC.

Woke up to an email from our friends over at Sarif Industries, this morning.  Sarif – whom we’ve covered before – has just released a video showcasing their new line of prosthetics.

Sadly, Sarif Industries is just a viral marketing site for the upcoming Deus Ex: Human Revolution video game.   Still, its a nice bit of enhancement porn to start the day with, isn’t it?

Your Friday Afternoon Movie for this week…

…yes, I AM stealing the “Friday Afternoon Movie” from COILHOUSE - we’ll keep it between us, right?

Your Friday Afternoon Movie for today is: Transcendent Man: the Life and Ideas of Ray Kurzweil.  Long time readers will know that I’m not the world’s biggest cheerleader for Kurzweil, but this documentary is still very much worth a look, even if you’re a grumpy old creature like myself.  The film is 9 parts on youtube.

Immaterials: Light painting WiFi from Timo on Vimeo.

This project explores the invisible terrain of WiFi networks in urban spaces by light painting signal strength in long-exposure photographs.

A four-metre long measuring rod with 80 points of light reveals cross-sections through WiFi networks using a photographic technique called light-painting.

Ph.D. Octopus’ Luce has a fascinating article up, concerning the social construction of Nadya “Octomon” Suleman as a selfish cyborg:

In contrast no mention was initially made of Suleman’s refusal to undergo the same selective reduction procedure. A bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania called the scandal an “ethical failure” and there were invocations only of Suleman’s obsessions, not God’s gifts. Of course Suleman embodied one of the media’s favorite objects of fascination and reproach: young, female, desirous, and with a body that performed feats unknown to natural woman. Like other media favorites, Suleman even got her own hybridized nickname, Octomom, but unlike Brangelina, the hybridity was maternal rather than romantic, interspecies rather than intra-; Octomom was part-mom, part-(marine)-beast, and implicitly part-machine.

Though at first the nickname Octomom seems to reduce Suleman to the sum of her eight kids, the focus on Suleman’s desire or “obsession” instead reduced her eight newborns to herself. The scorn heaped on Suleman’s actions carried the implication that the children should never have been born in the first place, a curious stance for a society obsessed with abortion, celebrity children, and big families like the conservative Christian Duggars and John & Kate Plus 8. But Suleman made no attempt to explain her extraordinary pregnancy outside her own personal desires, and she lacked the trappings-husband, comfortable income, religious belief-that might have normalized it socially.

As a result, Octomom became a symbol of selfish enhancement, artificial excess, and irresponsible motherhood, and a reproductive technology that has been used to conceive over 250,000 pregnancies in the United States since the early 1980s suddenly became the focus of intense public discussion, giving bioethicists a platform to point out that while IVF is widelyregulated throughout Europe, the US federal government only demands that ART clinics track their success rates.

Read the rest at Ph.D. Octopus.

[Link via Jezebel.]

NuPathe Inc, announced earlier this month that their electronic patch for Migraine treatment, Zelrix, has been accepted by the FDA for approval.  If all goes well, the transdermal drug delivery system will be available as early as this summer in the US.

From the Press Release:

Zelrix is an active, single-use, transdermal sumatriptan patch in development for the treatment of migraine. Zelrix is designed to provide migraine patients fast onset and sustained relief through a tolerable, non-oral route of administration. Zelrix may provide an attractive treatment option for many migraine patients because it avoids the need for oral administration and does not depend upon gastrointestinal absorption. Many migraine patients delay or avoid treatment with oral migraine medications as a result of underlying nausea and fear of vomiting. In addition, the reduced gastric motility experienced during migraine may affect the efficacy of oral medications. Zelrix is powered by SmartRelief, NuPathe’s proprietary transdermal delivery technology. SmartRelief consists of a controlled delivery technology that uses a mild electrical current to actively transport medication through the skin using a process called iontophoresis.

A pair of Chinese hackers, sponsored by Nokia Asia, designed this modded BMW 1 Series and cell-phone app that allows them to remote control a car with a high degree of precision.  They claim it only took them 20 days in their makerspace to whip this up.

[Via Engadget]

Posted for no other reason than I think its beautiful.  And somewhat topical.  But mostly for the beauty.  I have a tendency to forget that I’m in this game for the beauty.

[Via hitRECord]

Friday, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt spoke at a Stanford Policy Institute conference regarding the development of the US’s proposed National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace project.  During the conference Schmidt confirmed that the US Commerce Department beat out the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security to administer the initiative.

Schmidt claims that the program will be voluntary and will allow for anonymity, however, the exact format of the program is still in the drafting stages.  He was sure to emphasize, however, that he’s not talking about a National ID card.  At least, not a mandatory one:

“We are not talking about a national ID card,” Locke said at the Stanford event. “We are not talking about a government-controlled system. What we are talking about is enhancing online security and privacy, and reducing and perhaps even eliminating the need to memorize a dozen passwords, through creation and use of more trusted digital identities.”

However, it is clear from previously released documentation, that the plan, if it is initiated is to make moving on the internet as difficult as possible without Trusted ID.

In May of 2009, when President Obama announced the creation of the White House Cybersecurity Coordinator that Schmidt now holds, the “Cyberspace Policy Review” was released.  The document outlined a ten point near-term action list with number ten being:

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

What that seems to mean is best summed by io9’s Annalee Newitz:

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.”

This theory is borne out by some of the language in the current draft of the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace proposal:

This Strategy is a call to action that begins with the Federal Government continuing its role as a primary enabler, first adopter and key supporter of the envisioned Identity Ecosystem.  The Federal Government must continually collaborate with the private sector, state, local, tribal, and international
governments and provide the leadership and incentives necessary to make the Identity Ecosystem a reality.  The private sector in turn is crucial to the execution of this Strategy.  Individuals will realize the benefits associated with the Identity Ecosystem through the conduct of their daily online transactions in cyberspace. National success will require a concerted effort from all parties, as well
as joint ownership and accountability for the activities identified

The key terminology there is: “Individuals will realize the benefits associated with the Identity Ecosystem through the conduct of their daily online transactions in cyberspace.”  In short: While it won’t be mandatory, expect to have to do more legwork to do business online. It is very much like using your Facebook account to long into other services on the net.  It is simple, quick, convenient, and even sometimes security enhancing.  (My policy of only logging into Gawker sites with Facebook meant that my data was totally safe during the Great Gawker Password Leak of 2010.)  The downside is that Facebook is now my point of contact with a lot of parts of the web and I’m still using their problematic service.

More from the proposal:

Voluntary participation is another critical element of this Strategy.  Engaging in online transactions should be voluntary to both organizations and individuals.  The Federal Government will not require organizations to adopt specific identity solutions or to provide online services, nor require individuals to obtain high-assurance digital credentials if they do not want to engage in high risk online
transactions with the government or otherwise.  The Identity Ecosystem should encompass a range of transactions from anonymous to high assurance.  Thus, the Identity Ecosystem should allow an individual to select the credential he or she deems most appropriate for the transaction, provided the credential meets the risk requirements of the relying party.

So you’d only need Trusted credentials if the places you’re interacting with require them – which, since there’s money in it for them, many private-sector entities will be gladly complying with.  Sure, you can still post here or 4chan or wherever with an anonymous ID, but if you want to do business with iTunes, Paypal, ebay or move goods and services via the net, you’ll need a Trusted ID.  You’ll likely see a stratification with social services as well with TwitterTrusted and FacebookTrusted accounts having their content prioritized over non-Trusted or anonymous users.  In addition, on Friday, Google announced it was testing email authentication with its Google Apps business clients.  Imagine not being able to send email that would make it past the spam filter if it wasn’t from a GoogleTrusted account.

One thing is clear from reading the supporting documentation and that’s that the US Government itself will not be the ones managing and implementing this program.  The plan is to create guidelines regarding what a Trusted Identity means and how it works and then have that system rolled out and implemented by private-sector partners.  In essence, it’s not the government controlling your identity on the internet, it’s the government selling your identity to corporations so they can control it.   Which, honestly, I think might be an even more frightening prospect.

There is a lot of information out there on this initiative, I encourage you to check it out for yourselves.

[io9: President Obama Welcomes the Cyber State]

[Grinding: What Does Obama’s Identity Management Vision Mean?]

[Grinding: The Grim Facebook Future]

[The Cyberspace Policy Review (pdf)]

[National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (pdf)]

This isn’t our normal sort of news, but I figured I’d showcase it anyway given my own recent spat of Autosuperheroic and Real Life Superheroes posts.

Over at Bleeding Cool, they have a fascinating tidbit about “The Punishers” – an alleged cadre of rogue police officers.

Shortly after the beating a Milwaukee Police Department commander investigated a suspected rogue group of officers known as “the Punishers,” who wore black gloves and caps embossed with skull emblems while on patrol, according to newly released documents.

Capt. James Galezewski wrote in 2007, “This is a group of rogue officers within our agency who I would characterize as brutal and abusive.. At least some of the officers involved in the Jude case were associated with this group, although there is reason to believe the membership extended beyond those who were convicted in the case.”

The piece goes on to describe how many of the alleged members had Punisher tats, and other assorted bits of Frank Castle paraphernalia that they often took with them on the job – not the least of which are the skull-emblazoned caps they wore on duty.  This, if it is true, is a good example of the dark side of the autosuperheroic urge. While cops playing vigilante isn’t new by any stretch of the imagination; cops playing The Punisher while playing vigilante is.

Yes, we can all be Batman but within that same current are the same kind of fascist undertones that superhero comics have always wrestled with, and nothing says that better than cops uniting under the flag of Frank Castle to bust a few heads.

[Via Bleeding Cool]

Ultraportable pocket ECG?  Yeah there’s an app for that.  Well, an app and a special case for your iPhone 4. (The biofeedback app is pretty cool as well.)  The iPhonECG will debut at the CES show in Las Vegas next week. The intent is that it will be available to consumers and not just medical professionals.