Technology

 by Brendon J. Wilson

To Infinity…

You know what I love about Silicon Valley? When you go to an event at a place like the Computer History Museum to hear someone talk about something like the exploration of Mars, it’s not some guy from the local university. It’s a guy from NASA. In fact, it’s Peter Theisinger, the former Project Manager for the Mars Exploration Rover Project. You can’t beat that – and hey, even if it was just a guy from the local university, the local university is Stanford, so that wouldn’t have been too shabby either.

Peter delivered a pretty detailed and animated retelling of the history of the Mars Rover project, starting with the conception of the project shortly after the Mars Polar Lander splattered into the surface of Mars due to a are-we-using-meters-or-feet? software error. The pace of the project sounds absolutely breakneck – missing the launch window means you can’t launch for another two years.

Peter Theisinger, former Project Manager for the Mars Exploration Rover ProjectThe technological challenges overcome by Peter’s team to get to Mars were just incredible. Sure there were the mundane problems – like, “Whoops! The other airbag we were hoping to salvage and use from another mission appears to be irreparably damaged!” Then there were the other, slightly more difficult issues, such as “Gee! We have to slow the spacecraft from 12,000 mph to Mach 2, at which speed we need to deploy a parachute without turning it into Cheese Whiz!” Despite all of these setbacks, including the positively suicidal entry, descent and landing sequence dubbed the “Six Minutes of Terror“, and the parachute design (solved using the wind tunnel at NASA Ames Research Center, just up the road from our apartment), all of these problems were solved in time for the launch.

Except the software for the robot – that was developed en route to Mars.

Is it just me, or is this a damning statement on the state of software development? “We can send a robot to Mars, but we can’t develop the software for the robot prior to the launch date!” Oh well, at least they got the units right this time – they chose feet, right? No, wait! Meters! Aaaaaah!

Peter closed the evening on a mixed note. First, he talked about why NASA works on these projects: to inspire others, especially kids, to get interested in science. Great stuff. But then he talked about a team member whose son graduated school one month, got married the next, got deployed to Iraq in the third month, and was killed in action in the fourth. It was the flag from his son’s casket that graced the wall of the control room during the landing of the Mars rovers.

I’m not sure how I was supposed to feel about this piece of information – it seemed incongruous. It made me feel vaguely uneasy. Was Peter’s message “the world’s a bad place, we’re trying to make it better, we wish this stuff didn’t happen”? Or was it “we have to stop the terrorists and we support our military despite the costs?” I’m not sure – in the absence of additional clues, I think I’ll choose to interpret it solely as Peter’s recognition of another, less technological yet considerably more daunting, social challenge the team had to overcome to be successful, and that all of humankind has to overcome as we hurtle through space on our journey to infinity.

in Technology 3 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Tagging Humans

I was thinking evil thoughts today. Really evil. A species of malevolent ruminations worthy of a pension-raiding, investor-swindling, mother-selling, capitalist bastard. The variety of mental transmissions that tickle the antennas of card-carrying, tin-foil hat wearing, professional paranoids everywhere, inducing ulcers, panic, and cerebral aneurisms.

I was thinking about tracking every noteworthy individual on the planet.

Everyone has been focused on the looming RFID revolution. Whether here or abroad, retailers are tripping over themselves for the chance to shave an extra tenth of a point off the cost of selling you underwear by reducing or eliminating supply chain costs. In the process, a lot of people have been getting concerned about RFID’s potential to violate personal privacy, with concerns ranging from the bland (RFID in that shirt from Benetton will be used to sell you more crap) to the downright diabolical (RFID will mark you for death).

But why bother waiting for RFID, when nearly every person in North America owns a cell phone – a piece of radio hardware that actively emits a unique radio signature? Only a hapless introvert doesn’t own a cell-phone these days – like me! Those individuals that don’t own a cell phone probably don’t buy much stuff anyway – like me! – a capitalist bastard wouldn’t care about these individuals anyway.

Already, we’ve seen cell-phone based location services for tracking teenagers, or 911 calls. But all of these use some form of GPS-enabled or cell-tower enabled triangulation technology – I’m talking about something much simpler: a receiver that detects cell phones at close range (a few feet) and decodes the cell phone’s unique identifier, and a glob of software to cram that the unique identifier into a database. Imagine the possibilities:

  • Track movement through a store: a store could scatter a number of these receivers throughout a store, gaining insight into how customers move through a store, and which areas customers never visit. It would also enable the store to infer which products customers appeared to be interested in (based on where they stopped within the store) but didn’t purchase – opening the possibility for an individually tailored marketing campaign.
  • Reconcile data: though large chains can already reconcile credit card information to gain a more complete profile of their customers, what if the customer pays cash? Data loss! By tracking the customer on an ongoing basis, a store would be more likely to eventually be able to tie cash purchases to a particular person – sooner or later, the customer will use a credit card, thereby enabling their cash purchases to be tied to the credit card owner.
  • Figure out which customers not to sell to: on a larger scale, a mall could offer this service to all of its merchants – if you’re Old Navy, why would you try to sell jeans to a customer that you know just came from the Gap and already bought a pair of jeans there? Maybe you should try to sell them a shirt instead.
  • Grouping purchases: who comes into the store with whom? Who does the purchasing? Additional demographic insight abounds.
  • Fraud prevention (this one from Ashley): Once a cell phone is mapped to a person, it’s a simple task to figure out whether or not the person presenting the credit card needs to be subjected to additional scrutiny. After all, if the person at the cash register is carrying a cell phone with an identifier that doesn’t match that the one associated with the credit card, chances are you’ve got yerself a fraud.

The more I think about it, this isn’t really evil. Actually, it’s tedious – really, really tedious.

Do we really need to gather more data? Especially when it’s data that someone will never look at, never analyze, and never use to stop interrupting me with ads for stuff I would never buy in a million years? Probably not. Yes, there will probably be some privacy violations; however, as Scott McNealy said, you have zero privacy anyway. And if he’s wrong, well, I can only say this: if the Department of Defense can’t track its expenses, what chance does it or other corporations have of effectively tracking individuals by RFID, cell phones, or any other means?

To those that have grandiose visions of gaining insight into the consumer soul through technology: good freaking luck. To those that would worry about Big Brother leering over your every move: they already do it, they’re bad at it, and frankly your life just isn’t that interesting – relax.

in Technology 4 comments