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Korea has amazingly high penetration rates for broadband and cellular service. It’s cheap, fast, and widely available, and has been for several years now. This has made Korea a lead market for trying out new wireless and online services. Streaming broadcast and video-on-demand for all national networks is the norm. Next up: building a centrally planned, wired city called New Songdo, which will implement many of the ubiquitous / pervasive computing ideas that have been floating around for a while but never attempted at this scale:
New York Times:
A ubiquitous city is where all major information systems (residential, medical, business, governmental and the like) share data, and computers are built into the houses, streets and office buildings. New Songdo, located on a man-made island of nearly 1,500 acres off the Incheon coast about 40 miles from Seoul, is rising from the ground up as a U-city.
…
In the West, ubiquitous computing is a controversial idea that raises privacy concerns and the specter of a surveillance society. (They’ll know whether I recycled my Coke bottle?!) But in Asia the concept is viewed as an opportunity to show off technological prowess and attract foreign investment.
…
“New Songdo sounds like it will be one big Petri dish for understanding how people want to use technology,” said B. J. Fogg, the director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University.
If so, it is an experiment much easier to do in Asia than in the West.
“Much of this technology was developed in U.S. research labs, but there are fewer social and regulatory obstacles to implementing them in Korea,” said Mr. Townsend, who consulted on Seoul’s own U-city plan, known as Digital Media City. “There is an historical expectation of less privacy. Korea is willing to put off the hard questions to take the early lead and set standards.”
I think projects like these are going to need something like the AttentionTrust Recorder, or at least an OFF button, to let people see what’s being monitored about themselves and to manage how the information is made available. Without it, this might be a really cool place to visit but not somewhere you’d want to live.
(via TechDirt)
I stopped by the BlackDog booth at Linux World today, initially drawn in by the spectacle of Tux the Linux Penguin riding on BlackDog’s mechanical bull. Not something you see every day.
The whole scene at the BlackDog booth had sort of a early dot-com boom circa 1996 feel to it. Here’s a company I’ve never heard of, with a relatively huge booth and lots of happy staffers recruiting riders for the mechanical bull, but almost no one bothering to mention what they were actually selling, other than large posters announcing “The World’s First Linux Server that will take You for a walk”. It took me a bit of effort to find a person who could explain what they were selling.
The BlackDog server turns out to be an interesting hybrid of a putting Linux on a USB flash device and putting an embedded Linux into a USB device. The actual device is around the size and weight of a pack of cards, and runs Debian Linux on a 400MHz PowerPC, drawing power from the USB interface. The announced ship date is September 1, 2005, at $199 for 256MB or $239 for a 512MB model. Both models include a fingerprint scanner, 64MB RAM, and a SD/MMC expansion slot.
Unlike the SoulPad, BlackDog is intended for use with a Windows or Linux system that’s already running. In their booth demo, when the device is plugged in, it launches an X server on the WinXP host system, which is then used as the display for applications residing on the BlackDog server.
A few considerations come to mind:
- Since there’s no network interface, this can’t be used as a Linux server in the typical sense, i.e. plugged into the network on its own. It could probably be connected to a powered USB hub for power and a network connection, but this doesn’t appear to be its design target.
- Fast startup time – in their booth demo, the environment hosted on the device came up a few seconds after plugging in the USB cable. I’m guessing that the WinXP autoplay was previously configured to run the X server from the USB flash file system on hotplug detection. In any case, it’s a lot faster than cold-booting Linux or Windows.
- Since it relies on the host computer for human interface (display, keyboard, and mouse), it’s not quite as secure as it might look. One issue I worry about in public internet cafes and other shared-computer environments is the growing presence of keyloggers. Spyware-infested public computers are fairly common in my unscientific poll (i.e. places I’ve stopped, mostly in Asia). So my working assumption is that anything I type on a public computer is visible. That would still apply to applications hosted on the BlackDog server, since it can’t do anything about securing the human interfaces on host system. This is one of the reasons I’m mostly considering bootable Linux environments for use in unsecured environments.
It seems like a neat gadget. I’ll have to think a bit more about what it’s actually good for.
The BlackDog team is apparently looking for ideas as well. They’re starting a developer contest in September when the product is shipped, with a $50,000 prize. A lot of money for a product that appears to be in the “interesting-linux-hacker-widget” category. I suspect the total product revenue for some products in this space are less than $50K.
Turns out they’re part of Realm Systems, which received $8.5 million in funding last January, which is why they can afford a huge booth that doesn’t tell anyone what they’re doing, and offer $50K for a developer contest.
Hint to Realm’s marcom team: The mechanical bull was a lot of fun, but it would be good to mention what you’re selling once in a while…
See also: SoulPad, Rabbit Ethernet, SSV Embedded, PicoTux, Engadget, discussion at Slashdot
There have been some articles posted over the past year or so about putting a bootable OS image onto USB for bringing along a personal desktop environment without the personal computer. This project at IBM research looks like they did a thorough job, putting not only the operating system and desktop applications on the USB storage, but also providing a mechanism for persisting the session state, i.e. you can “hibernate” your session back to the USB device.
Since the only requirement is that the storage device is both large enough for the system, and is a bootable device, a wide range of USB storage devices can be used, including MP3 players such as the iPod.
The PC boots an auto-configuring operating system from the SoulPad, starts a virtual machine monitor, and resumes a suspended virtual machine that has the user’s entire personal computing environment, which includes the user’s files, user’s operating system, installed applications, desktop configuration as well as all running applications and open windows. Essentially, SoulPad enables a user to hibernate a PC session to a pocket form-factor device and carry the device to some another PC and resume his session on that PC. SoulPad has minimal dependencies on PCs that can be used to resume a user session. In specific, PCs are neither required to be network connected, nor have any pre-installed software. The only requirement is the support of a high speed local connection to a SoulPad device for an acceptable suspend/resume times and acceptable runtime performance. Our approach differs from Internet Suspend/Resume in several ways: we do not require a known software stack on the PC and also do not rely on network connectivity to fetch suspended virtual machines. In our first prototype, we installed the SoulPad software stack on off-the-shelf hard disks with USB 2.0 interfaces
Doesn’t look like they’re distributing the bits at the moment. An attendee at a presentation on the SoulPad says that “IBM did state there are a number of software licensing issues”. Hope they find a way to make it available. And change the name.
In the meantime, I’ve been looking at simpler USB-based solutions such as Flash Linux (build your own), or Computer-on-a-Stick (buy prebuilt, $149, including the USB stick). I find I’m reluctant to use computers in public internet cafes for much other than general web surfing, so it’s hard to travel without a notebook. Something like this plus SSH and VPN would make using public hardware and network much more palatable.
Video clip (14MB, wmv)
Presentation on SoulPad at ACM MobiSys 2005
via Engadget
Ho John Lee | June 10th, 2005 | 8 comments
An interesting thread on Google Answers, regarding what services are available to track the current location of a cell phone. (via del.icio.us).
For about $200.00 ICU, Inc. offers to locate a cellular telephone by
pinging the phone – a kind of triangulation process similar to the one
I mentioned earlier. Ms. Landers explained that the cell phone appears
as a ‘blip” on a screen. They provide the service 24 hours a day, 7
days a week in order to help locate missing persons, fugitives,
cheating spouses, etc. They regularly serve bondsmen, authorities,
investigators and many others. You will receive the results within 7
to 10 minutes of a successfully completed ping that will indicate
within approximately 50 feet, where the phone was located at the time
of the ping.
I.C.U. Inc.
http://www.tracerservices.com/cpl.htm
http://www.tracerservices.com/cplfaqs.htm
Aside from the cell phone tracing, the list of services on the I.C.U. Inc web site makes for fascinating reading.
Update: 08-15-2005 23:59 – Came across the CellTrack project, which is developing a free, open source cell phone tracking system (presently for GSM). It requires installing a client application on the phone, however, so it’s not useful for finding someone who doesn’t want to be found. (screenshots here)
Also came across this paranoia-inducing clip at Instapundit:
THEY CAN HEAR YOU NOW: When I was in Beirut in April one of the leaders of the Cedar Revolution, Nabil Abou-Charaf, told me that Syrian intelligence agents used cell phones to “spy” on people.
“You mean they monitor your phone conversations,” I said.
“No,” he said. “They can listen to us all the time even when we’re not using the phone.” He could tell I didn’t believe him. “We know as a fact they can do this.”
Still, I didn’t believe what he said about spies using his cell phone as a bug. If the cell phone is off or just sitting there it isn’t transmitting a signal.
Looks like I was wrong. Julian Sanchez at Hit and Run points out this chilling excerpt from a story in last week’s Guardian.
The main means of tracking terrorist suspects down has been the monitoring of mobile phone conversations. Not only can operators pinpoint users to within yards of their location by “triangulating” the signals from three base stations, but – according to a report in the Financial Times – the operators (under instructions from the authorities) can remotely install software onto a handset to activate the microphone even when the user is not making a call.
I’m sure the police love this feature. Police states apparently love it, as well.
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