Meeting notice: 08-18-98 7:30 NE43-773 (545 Tech Sq.)

Suggested topic:

Recently I had a chance to see one of the famous Sony
nudecams -- the videocams that see through clothes --
in action.  If you've read the general run of press
coverage on this you might have thought that the
process, while amusing, is pretty theoretical: that
the lighting has to be right, the subject has to have
the right clothes on, the camera has to have an exotic
setup, and so on.  Uh-uh.  This device is amazing.  It
strips you bare. Doesn't seem to matter what the
subject is wearing.  It was like being at the Pink
Lady, only cheaper.

Sony says subsequent models will be modified to cripple
the nudecam feature but obviously this genii is not
going back in the bottle.  From now on most people,
especially people going to high school and college, are
going to have to make their peace with the fact that at
any time they might run into nude videos of themselves
circulating on the internet.  How the various species
of fundamentalists around the world are going to deal
with this I cannot guess.

So it seems appropriate that Foresight has set up a
special project to gather comment and support
discussion on the seesaw effects of ubiquitous
surveillance on the one hand and uncrackable codes on
the other.  You might want to take a look at
some of the documents archived here, which include
essays by such as Robin Hanson, David Friedman, John
Gilmore, David Brin, and Tim May.

Hanson suggests that uncrackable codes and ubiquitous
surveillance play off against each other: that because
we have uncrackable codes ubiquitous surveillance is
both more tolerable and more necessary (and vv).  Brin
argues that to a first approximation privacy and
accountability are inverts: "Everybody wants to see
more privacy (less accountability) for themselves and
less privacy (more accountability) for everyone else."
"Privacy as Censorship", by Solveig Singleton of the
Cato Institute, has a nice clear focus and says things
not often heard about corporate 'invasions' of privacy.

The project is also a test of Foresight's hypertext
publishing system, CritSuite. The assembled texts can
be found both with and with the CritSuite toolset.
With: http://crit.org/http://crit.org/openness/.
Without: http://crit.org/openness/

Nanonews:

Here are two items that relate (indirectly) to the
issue of ubiquitous surveillance.

Autonomous planes set to cross Atlantic. More at
http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/uwa-tcabamaa.html

Solar-powered aircraft sets flight record. More at
http://world.std.com/~fhapgood/solarplane.

Ed Council writes: the September issue of Red Herring
magazine has a short but nice overview article about
Nanotechnology. It starts on page 38 in their "bleeding
edge" special feature.


Administrivia:

I've thinking of turning these announcements into html
pages.  Would anyone object to receiving them that way?


Announcement Archive:
http://world.std.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html.

hapgood@pobox.com