Future Technologies

Of surveillance, gigalapses, and our trust in the Cloud.

By Charlie on 07 August 2009

BOSTON, USA – I want to bring up two things for discussion today: the end of the world and the quantified self. One is about all information disappearing, the other, about all information appearing. What ties them together is the future of the Web.

Intrigued? I hope so. Read on.

Ka. Boom.
The big news yesterday was the end of the world as we knew it. Well, not that bad, but close enough for all of you who spend time on Facebook, Twitter, and a gaggle of Google sites. As I write this, there is an idea as to what might have happened. One thought is that a particular individual was targeted by ruthless hackers who, instead of targeting the individual, targeted all the services that individual used.

While I think it makes for a great story, I’d like to think they targeted me, since I, too, use many of those services that went down. Or maybe they were targeting you.

Nonetheless, I am reminded of an article from Dec 1995 where Bob Metcalfe predicted a “catastrophic collapse” of the Internet in 1996. And, when the “gigalapse,” a billion lost user-hours, never happened (though there were megalapses), he ended up eating his own column in which he had made the failed prediction.

How did you cope with the big slowdown yesterday? What do you think was the real (or fake) reason for it?

Know yourself
Putting aside the talk of inaccessible data, you may have noticed I have periodically pointed out interesting articles on self quantification. Sensors and wireless chips are getting more versatile, and there are many stories of ubiquitous measurement and life-streaming, or, continuous transmission of contextual and vital information out into the Cloud.

Julian Bleecker has a nice analysis of the surveillance issues in two science fiction movies. He looks at them, both from their design perspective (how does the director portray the concepts in the movies) and from the philosophical perspective (what is the meaning of all this surveillance).

I’ve watched both movies. To me, Final Cut hit closest, since many years ago I used to work on Lifeblog, very much a prototypical life-streaming app that captured your messages and media for you to review in a timeline.

Indeed, the concept of life-streaming or life-blogging or even close observation of one’s actions, has just been getting stronger. The latest article I read on this discusses a pill with a chip to report if it has been swallowed. The article [via freegorifero] also goes on to list many other applications, all of which entail some sort of measurement and outright surveillance “for the good of the patient.”

How far will we go letting ourselves be watched and measured? And will we be streaming everything onto the Web?

Not a cloud to be seen
That leads me to my final thought for the day: our growing dependence on the Cloud, placing our software and data out there on servers we access over the Internet. I am sure that those who could not get to their data yesterday just sat back an twiddled their thumbs. But what if it were a life or death thing? Or if the whole stream were lost?

Being a bit of an optimist, I think we’ll eventually learn how to make the Cloud more reliable, though I am enough of a realist to know that things will be broken and lost along the way.

Where do you stand on this?

Image from asoct28

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Phil Says:
August 7th, 2009 at 12:21 pm

You’re blowing my mind, Charlie!!

Ms. Jen Says:
August 8th, 2009 at 8:14 am

At what point, when we compute / share / create / record in the cloud do we accept that it is ephemeral and can be lost or disrupted at any time? Are our pixels like shifting sand that could be blown away at anytime?

During the Twitter Brown Out yesterday, I checked back a couple of times, and then shrugged my shoulders as it reminded me of the days when Ruby on Rails kept failing Twitter and we would get the Fail Whale. It was 2007-2008 all over again.

But at what point do all of us or any of us take control of our own data stream? I do a month triple backup: I make sure everything I have done is backed up to my laptop, to an external drive, and to a cloud service. I know folks who print out their blogs on top of a double/triple back up. Then again I know others who never back up & when they lose their data, they just shrug as it can be found again or one just moves on as it never seemed real to them in the first place.

;o)

Mike Reply:
August 14th, 2009 at 8:28 pm

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Phil Says:
August 10th, 2009 at 7:56 am

I’m waiting for better ownership of my network of relationships. Currently Facebook seems to own it.

Why am I using only a minuscule amount of the services out there? Because few, if any, of my friends are on there.

I have 500+ friends on FB. If I could have 500+ friends on ANY online service, I’d probably be using it.

But FB owns that data (yes yes I know, Facebook Connect). But I’d love to see my network of relationships go open one day, so that ALL services can have access to them.

Grimsight Says:
August 10th, 2009 at 1:06 pm

I do feel that everybody’s got it backwards and cloud computing is heading in a flawed direction.

Instead of popping my data into the cloud, I want to own my own cloud. Or clouds and have them talk to one another. And I may let it play with other people’s or public clouds if I want to, but I should have a choice.

Consider a simple piece of data, my phonebook. One of the data I used to own which has been clouded. In the days of old, the phonebook lives in my mobile phone and when I lose it, it’s gone. Then I could back it up on my PC, but still the data belongs to me, physically. I mean its in my PC which is in my room, which is in my house.

Now, my phonebook lives in the cloud. In Google’s Gmail contacts. It’s somewhere in some server but I don’t know where. Even if it burns to the ground in a raging forest fire I won’t know. I feel like I’m trusting somebody with something I own, with no promise he’ll be nice to me forever. All in return for the convenience of the cloud.

What do I want?

I still want to own my phonebook, and all my data, physically. In my mobile phone, in my PC, in a harddisk, in a home server, whatever. If it burns, I know who did it, it’ll have to be me. What the nice guy I trust can do is, let me access my data on my phone on my PC, or whatever from whatever.

In fact, lets make it simpler. I want to own all my data on my mobile phone, because it is the one device that goes everywhere with me. Nokia, make my phone the cloud server and make everybody else talk to my Nokia phone.

How’s that for paradigm shift thinking?