Since I'm on the road (Washington DC right now, then Berlin on Monday for a few days and then Toronto for the weekend of the 11th) I will lament on the problem I have noted before in travel power. We have to carry so many chargers. I have also found it's a pain to take them all out and put them back in again.
The lastest Facebook flap has caused me to write more about privacy of late, and that will continue has we head into the June 15 conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy where I will be speaking on privacy implications of robots.
Social networks want nice easy user interfaces, and complex privacy panels are hard to negotiate by users who don't want to spend the time learning all the nuances of a system. People usually end up using the defaults.
I don't often write about robots that don't go on roads, but last night I stopped by Willow Garage, the robot startup created by my old friend Scott Hassan. Scott is investing in building open robotics platforms, and giving much of it out free to the world, because he thinks progress in robotics has been far too slow.
As many expected would happen, Mark Zuckerberg did an op-ed column with a mild about face on Facebook's privacy changes. Coming soon, you will be able to opt out of having your basic information defined as "public" and exposed to outside web sites. Facebook has a long pattern of introducing a new feature with major privacy issues, being surprised by a storm of protest, and then offering a fix which helps somewhat, but often leaves things more exposed than they were before.
For a long time, the standard "solution" to privacy exposure problems has been to allow users to "opt out" and keep their data more private. Companies like to offer it, because the reality is that most people have never been exposed to a bad privacy invasion, and don't bother to opt out. Privacy advocates ask for it because compared to the alternative -- information exposure with no way around it -- it seems like a win. The companies get what they want and keep the privacy crowd from getting too upset.
Sometimes privacy advocates will say that disclosure should be "opt in" -- that systems should keep information private by default, and only let it out with the explicit approval of the user. Companies resist that for the same reason they like opt-out. Most people are lazy and stick with the defaults. They fear if they make something opt-in, they might as well not make it, unless they can make it so important that everybody will opt in. As indeed is the case with their service as a whole.
Neither option seems to work. If there were some way to have an actual negotiation between the users and a service, something better in the middle would be found. But we have no way to make that negotiation happen. Even if companies were willing to have negotiation of their "I Agree" click contracts, there is no way they would have the time to do it.
I've been interested in videoconferencing for some time, both what it works well at, and what it doesn't do well. Of late, many have believed that quality makes a big difference, and HD systems, such as very expensive ones from Cisco, have been selling on that notion.
A couple of years ago Skype added what they call HQ calling -- 640 x 480 at up to 30fps. That's the resolution of standard broadcast TV, though due to heavy compression it never looks quite that good. But it is good and is well worth it, especially at Skype's price: free, though you are well advised to get a higher end webcam, which they initially insisted on.
So there was some excitement about the new round of 720p HD webcams that are coming out this year, with support for them in Skype, though only on the Windows version. This new generation of cams has video compression hardware in the webcam. Real time compression of 1280x720 video requires a lot of CPU, so this is a very good idea. In theory almost any PC can send HD from such a webcam with minimal CPU usage. Even the "HQ" 640x480 line video requires a fair bit of CPU, and initially Skype insisted on a dual core system if you wanted to send it.
Receiving 720p takes far less CPU, but still enough that Skype refuses to do it on slower computers, such as a 1.6ghz Atom netbook. Such netbooks are able to play stored 720p videos, but Skype is judging them as unsuitable for playing this. On the other hand, modern video chips (Such as all Nvidia 8xxx and above) contain hardware for decoding H.264 video and can play this form of video readily, but Skype does not support that.
The other problem is bandwidth. 720p takes a lot of it, especially when it must be generated in real time. Skype says that you need 1.2 megabits for HD, and in fact you are much better off if you have 2 or more. On a LAN, it will use about 2.5 megabits. Unfortunately, most DSL customers don't have a megabit of upstream and can't get it. In the 90s, ISPs and telcos decided that most people would download far more than they uploaded, and designed DSL to have limited upload in order to get more download. The latest cable systems using DOCSIS 3 are also asymmetric but offer as much as 10 megabits if you pay for it, and 2 megabits upstream to the base customers. HD video calling may push more people into cable as their ISP.
Last week, I attended a talk by Marc Raibert the former MIT Professor who founded Boston Dynamics, the makers of the BigDog 4-legged walking robot. If you haven't seen the various videos of BigDog you should watch them immediately, as this is some of the most interesting work in robotics today.
Walking pack robots like BigDog have a number of obvious applications, but at present they are rather inefficient. BigDog is powered by a a 2 stroke compressor that drives hydraulics. That works well because the legs don't need engines but can exert a lot of force. However, its efficiency is in the range of 2 gallons per mile, though this is just a prototype level. It is more efficient on flat terrain and pavement, but of course wheels are vastly more efficient there. As efficient as animals are, wheeled vehicles are better if you don't make them heavy as tanks and SUVs.
BigDog walks autonomously but today is steered by a human, or in newer versions, can follow a human walking down a trail, walking where she walked. In the future they want to make an autonomous delivery robot that can be told to take supplies to troops in the field, or carry home a wounded soldier.
I wondered if BigDog isn't trying too hard to be a mule, carrying all the weight up high. This makes it harder for it to do its job. If it could just tow a sledge (perhaps a container with a round teflon bottom with some low profile or retractable wheels) it might be able to haul more weight. Particularly because it could pay out line while negotiating something particularly tricky and then once stable again, reel in the line. This would not work if you had to go through boulders that might catch the trailer but for many forms of terrain it would be fine. Indeed, Boston Dynamics wants to see if this can work. On the other hand, they did not accept my suggestion that they put red dye in the hydraulic fluid so that it spurts red blood if damaged or shot.
The hydraulic design of BigDog made me wonder about applications to robocars. In particular, it seems as though it will be possible to build a light robocar that has legs folded up under the chassis. When the robocar got to the edge of the road, it could put down the legs and be able to climb stairs, go over curbs, and even go down dirt paths and rough terrain. At least a lightweight single person robocar or deliverbot might do this.
At the positive end of my prediction that robocars will enable people to travel in "the right vehicle for the trip" and given that most trips are short urban ones, it follows that most robocars, if we are efficient, will be small light vehicles meant for 1-2 people, with a lesser number of larger ones for 4-5 people.
Last week, Volvo was demoing some new collision avoidance features in their S60. I've talked about the S60 before, as it surprised me putting pedestrian detection into a car before I expected it to happen. Unfortunately in an extreme case of demo disease known to all computer people, somebody has made an error with the battery, and in front of a crowd of press, the car smashed into the truck it was supposed to avoid. The wired article links to a video.
There's been a well justified storm about Facebook's recent privacy changes. The EFF has a nice post outlining the changes in privacy policies at Facebook which inspired this popular graphic showing those changes.
But the deeper question is why Facebook wants to do this. The answer, of course, is money, but in particular it's because the market is assigning a value to revealed data. This force seems to push Facebook, and services like it, into wanting to remove privacy from their users in a steadily rising trend. Social network services often will begin with decent privacy protections, both to avoid scaring users (when gaining users is the only goal) and because they have little motivation to do otherwise. The old world of PC applications tended to have strong privacy protection (by comparison) because data stayed on your own machine. Software that exported it got called "spyware" and tools were created to rout it out.
Facebook began as a social tool for students. It even promoted that those not at a school could not see in, could not even join. When this changed (for reasons I will outline below) older members were shocked at the idea their parents and other adults would be on the system. But Facebook decided, correctly, that excluding them was not the path to being #1.
With Facebook seeming to declare some sort of war on privacy, it's time to expand the concept I have been calling "Data Hosting" -- encouraging users to have some personal server space where their data lives, and bringing the apps to the data rather than sending your data to the companies providing interesting apps.
I think of this as something like a "safe deposit box" that you can buy from a bank. While not as sacrosanct as your own home when it comes to privacy law, it's pretty protected. The bank's role is to protect the box -- to let others into it without a warrant would be a major violation of the trust relationship implied by such boxes. While the company owning the servers that you rent could violate your trust, that's far less likely than 3rd party web sites like Facebook deciding to do new things you didn't authorize with the data you store with them. In the case of those companies, it is in fact their whole purpose to think up new things to do with your data.
Nonetheless, building something like Facebook using one's own data hosting facilities is more difficult than the way it's done now. That's because you want to do things with data from your friends, and you may want to combine data from several friends to do things like search your friends.
One way to do this is to develop a "feed" of information about yourself that is relevant to friends, and to authorize friends to "subscribe" to this feed. Then, when you update something in your profile, your data host would notify all your friend's data hosts about it. You need not notify all your friends, or tell them all the same thing -- you might authorize closer friends to get more data than you give to distant ones.