All items by Alistair Croll

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September, 2014 was unusually cold for Boston. The chill from the Charles drifted in through an open window and slid across the floor of the one-bedroom apartment. Special Agent Ross took in the mess of books, records, and DVDs scattered around the room, framing the dead body of Janet Somers.

Back at the office, he started filing in the forms of the homicide report, detailing the execution-style killing—one shot to the back of the head—and signs of struggle. He’d barely had time to fetch a fresh cup of coffee when the PDA on his hip started buzzing. “Ross.” he answered curtly, annoyed by yet another interruption in what was already looking like a long day.

“This is Mike Lynch. I work for the U.S. Marshals,” explained the caller. “You filed the homicide report on Janet Somers, right?”

“Sure. You knew her?” asked Ross.

“Detective Ross, I work in Witness Protection. It’s not that I knew her, so much as I tried to make the world forget her. Based on what happened today, it sounds like I failed,” said Lynch.

“Yeah, it looked like a professional job: one shot to the back of the head at close range. What’s up?” asked Ross.

“I need you to tell me what music Janet listened to,” Lynch replied.

Ross scowled at the thought of spending hours in Janet’s frosty apartment. “Oh, come on. She’s dead. What difference does that make?”

“Listen, we’ve had six other killings this week. Same M.O. I need your help here.” replied Lynch.

And I thought I was having a bad week, muttered Ross under his breath.  “All these victims were under your protection?”

“Nope, none of them were,” said Lynch. “But the other six victims were all women in their mid-thirties, like Janet. They were all killed, execution-style, late at night, just as Janet was. And most importantly, all six of them liked the same music.

Ross took a sip of coffee and furrowed his brow. “I don’t get it,” he said, “what does their music have to do with it? You don’t shoot people for bad taste.”

“Listen, Ross,” growled Lynch, clearly annoyed. “If Janet liked the same music as the other six, then that means the killer’s using wishlists, iTunes, Last.fm and other online services to find people we’ve spent years working to hide.” The Marshal paused, letting it sink in. “We can change their faces, their cities, their jobs — but we can’t stop them listening to shitty music. And that might just get them killed.”

The US Witness Protection Program has hidden nearly 20,000 people since it was launched in the 1970s. So far, nobody in its custody has been harmed, despite Hollywood’s love of this plot device. Witnesses change their names, their appearance, and even their jobs — anything to hide their past. But can we hide who we really are?

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You are what you click

We all love our devices — a properly configured laptop, a familiar game controller, or a mouse that fits just so, are extensions of ourselves.

As it turns out, that may be more than mere metaphor.

A recent piece in Wired studied the way our brains work with computer mice–and what happens when those mice don’t work properly. When the mouse was responsive, our brains treated it as an extension of ourselves; when it malfunctioned, we became consciously aware of it and treated as an external “thing.”

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One of the problems with virtual reality is navigating it: How do you make it feel like you’re walking around? Short of jacking into the spinal cord, Matrix-style, this has always stymied interface designers.

Popsci is reporting that a hotel in Vegas will soon offer immersive VR built on the Virtusphere, a human-sized hamster ball that calculates position from sphere rotation–like being inside a giant trackball. 360 Virtual Ventures is commercializing the technology for installations like the one at the Excalibur.

Here’s a video showing the device in action:

Dim lights

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How Apple knows what you like

This MIT technology review explains how the iTunes Genius feature works, parsing millions of iTunes users’ libraries to generate suggestions and recommendations. One of the observations: we’re not unique and special snowflakes. No matter how individual you think you are, you’re part of a large online group.

Discovering the hidden or “latent” factors in your data set is a handy way to reduce the size of the problem that you have to compute, and it works because humans are predictable: people who like Emo music are sad, and sad people also like the soundtracks to movie versions of vampire novels that are about yearning, etc. You might think of it as the mathematical expression of a stereotype–only it works.

Recommendation engines are notoriously difficult to get right, as the Netflix Prize proved.

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Open social data is a Wild West for many companies, with Google, Facebook, and dozens of social monitoring tools rushing to map our relationships and lives before legislation catches up with them. But by mapping data captured across open Wifi while taking Street View maps, Google may have triggered our legislative immune system.

Australian joins German police in investigating the privacy breach (which is nothing new — war-driving is a common practice; it’s just been hard to prosecute people for it.) Australia seems an unlikely defender of surfers’ rights, since it’s busy blocking Internet access; by contrast, Germany’s enforcing safe surfing by its citizens, making Wifi passwords mandatory — which would have prevented the Google breach. This is also the first step in making Wifi owners accountable for everything that crosses their network.

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Existentialists will have a field day with this one: According to ScienceDaily, an EU research initiative called FuturIcT (a “knowledge accelerator” funded by, among others, billionaire investor George Soros) aims to create a really accurate version of Simearth. By mining many sources of data and simulating them in a supercomputer, the project hopes to understand financial, social, and economic forces in the real world. They call it a “knowledge collider.”

One use for such data is to anticipate and mitigate economic melt-downs, something that’s increasingly likely with real-time trading engines that amplify mistakes and market fluctuations. But why stop at economies? A simulator like this could predict political outcomes, something that’s long been speculated in science fiction, from the Delphis in Shockwave Rider to the real-time polling in Neal Stephenson’s frighteningly prescient Interface.

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John Gilmore once said, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” And when people are connected via the Internet, it’s hard to put obstacles in their path, too. Take this case of a Latvian photographer prevented by security guards from taking pictures of a building.

A few tweets and one 40-person Flashmob later, we have more photographs — and probably many more people aware of the situation — than we ever did before.

(BTW, the server is slow at best, so you may have to be patient.)

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An interview with James Burke

When I was very young, a TV series called Connections changed my life. It was an ADHD-filled ride through history and science, showing us how everything we took for granted stood on the shoulders of giants.

I just found this interview with the author and narrator of that series, James Burke, conducted by Gartner. It’s a great read; if anything, Burke has underestimated the pace of change.

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Techcrunch has a writeup on Windows Live Essentials’ new Photofuse technology, which lets you pick from several similar pictures and create a new, optimal one. When revisionist editing gets this simple, poidh doesn’t apply any more.

Complete writeup on Techcrunch.

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Got a problem with the way someone thinks? Then you’ll love social networks like Facebook, because they give you easy ways to harass your ideological opposites.

Search makes it easy to find someone you disagree with. Once you’ve found your ideological target, get your friends to report them, and let the automated antispam systems do their work. ReadWriteWeb has an example of groups reporting someone in order to wrongfully shut down their online accounts already.

How did we get here?

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