I - Face it, 1984 was an underestimate.

Google making app that would identify people's faces

George Orwell wrote the book "1984" to highlight the decline in personal privacy and the rise of government intrusion into the lives of the citizens. Somehow I think he was a bit conservative in his evaluation of what was going to come. When I read an article like this - knowing that the technology is not only out there, but being widely used by police forces and businesses already - I have to wonder just how soon we will be without freedom of any sort other than what the "powers that be" are willing to grant us.

We already have red light cameras that identify our license plate and mail us a ticket. How long before every illegal action is filmed and the perpetrator identified by the computer? Sounds OK, until you think about the number of people who look similar. Eyewitness testimony is the least reliable when it comes to identifying criminals, is the computer going to do better? More to the point, what else can be done with this?

The government knows what car you drive and where you live, thanks to DMV records. Combine that with every other bit of data about you that is floating around and there is reason to start getting paranoid. Do you own a gun? The state knows that, even if you think that they don't. It's quite simple, if you have ever bought a hunting license or gotten a concealed weapons permit they can be pretty confident that you own one or more. Now lets put a camera outside every gun store and we have an even easier way to identify that particular dangerous element.

Maybe you just like to try to tweak the local politicos on one subject or another. With a bit of technology they can follow you from one surveillance camera to another until they catch you doing something they don't like - and it doesn't take any people to do it, just a faceless computer. Now it is cheap and easy to keep tabs on all sorts of people you previously would have ignored. Eventually you can monitor everyone in the country to make sure they aren't doing anything questionable (by government standards).

But the government is only half of this equation. The other part is that this is very useful for companies trying to sell their products. They can now cross-reference you to your interests for more tightly targeted advertising and then use what they learn about you from other sources to manipulate you to buy (or to support them in other ways - think of subtly coercing the majority to forgive BP for the Gulf oil spill). The more they know about you the more they can influence you. Once again, this doesn't take a single person to do it, it is all done by a computer program mining the internet for data about you.

These things are here. We can't un-ring the bell, we just have to learn how to adapt to a society where it is virtually impossible to do anything that is not only recorded somewhere, but is actively used to track you, manipulate you and quite possibly to oppress you.

Orwell missed by a few years, but in a lot of ways he was a pretty good prophet.

I - More Wikipedia Wonderings

Is Wikipedia a Victim of Its Own Success?

I notice right away that the dateline on this article is September 28th, a day which is still 5 days in my future. Odd, but not particularly significant.

I admit that I love Wikipedia. I read every article that I see that mentions it and have been known to spend hours just clicking from article to article as my attention wanders. Of course I used to take the encyclopedia off the shelf as I was growing up and just read an entire volume cover to cover, so this isn't really new behavior, but it is a lot easier to do on Wikipedia. Most of the article (which you probably need to read before my comments make sense) is pretty obvious to me. When a community gets big it needs more structure to make it work. No surprise then that Wikipedia keeps adding layers. Likewise, as the cost of failure rises the investment in preventing failure will rise as well. In the wiki-world cost of failure is the loss of trust in the information you are presenting. When Wikipedia became the most frequently referenced site for finding information they stopped being the Wild-Wiki-West and had to become Boston downtown. Stuff has to be right when millions of people are looking at it.

The thing that did catch my attention was the last couple of paragraphs where the entire future of Wikipedia was being called into question. Quite simply, I can't see Wikipedia going away. There is too much there. Someone will make the effort to keep it alive one way or another, maybe not in quite the same environment, but it will be there and will still be accepting information because too many people around the world are hooked on quick access to reasonably accurate data about virtually everything. I'm hooked to the point that I'd even pay for access if that is what it took to keep it there (and especially to keep it growing and accurate). The web is full of information, Wikipedia currently provides the best way to actually distill facts from the cloud. Unless someone finds a revolutionary new way to do that I see Wikipedia continuing as long as the web exists.

R - TweakGuides

TweakGuides is a web site devoted to making things better - or at least making your computer system run better. I haven't read most of the gaming stuff, since I don't do computer games, but the bits on optimizing Firefox and dealing with some of the Vista annoyances are good. If you are into trying to squeeze the most performance out of your system that you can then I'd say give it a spin.