April 5th, 2010 | by elisabeth | published in ubicomp | Comments Off on Two ubicomp tales
The NY Times recently published two stories on opposite sides of the ubicomp — distributed human computing — spectrum. On the one hand, there’s the tale of the “human-flesh search engines” in China. The term was apparently meant to refer to the fact that humans are the searchers, but it increasingly means that humans are […]
March 8th, 2010 | by jennifer | published in cloud, cybersecurity, Facebook, Future of the Internet, ubicomp | 3 Comments
A roundup of happenings that bear on the issues in The Future of the Internet — Canadian Android Carrier Forcing Firmware Update. A Canadian carrier wanted users to download a firmware upgrade that fixed a glitch prohibiting users from dialing 911, so it made the upgrade mandatory. Seems reasonable. But it bundled in an update […]
January 27th, 2010 | by elisabeth | published in censorship, Future of the Internet, Generativity, iphone, kindle, ubicomp | 3 Comments
The Extraordinaries Haiti Earthquake Support Center. A followup post on the Extraordinaries’ efforts to use ubiquitous human computing to help find missing people after the Haiti earthquake — a positive vision inspired by JZ’s nightmare scenario of crowdsourced secret police work. Did they succeed? “Yes and no”—but, as they detail, there’s obvious potential for future […]
January 17th, 2010 | by elisabeth | published in ubicomp | 7 Comments
In talks about ubicomp, JZ gives an example of a worst-case scenario involving ubicomp platforms. He imagines that the Iranian government could use Amazon Mechanical Turk to identify dissidents, simply by posting pictures of protestors and ID-card pictures of the adults in the country, then asking Turkers to match protestor pictures to ID-card pictures. Voila—and […]
December 30th, 2009 | by elisabeth | published in Android, cybersecurity, Future of the Internet, iphone, ubicomp | 1 Comment
Flurry: App Store Sees Record Breaking Christmas. Great article collecting sales and market share numbers for the App Store and Android Market. Quick summary: App Store grew 51% (!) from November to December, Android Market 22%; App Store has 13x as many downloads as Android Market (apparently not everyone is as concerned about openness as […]
December 28th, 2009 | by elisabeth | published in iphone, ubicomp | 10 Comments
Our worries about ubiquitous human computing*—summarized in this earlier post—fall into two broad categories. First, there are potential bad effects on the workers, since traditional labor-law protections may not apply in cyberspace. Second, there are potential bad effects on the world. One example that JZ has given in talks is that lobbyists could pay workers […]
November 10th, 2009 | by elisabeth | published in Future of the Internet, ubicomp | 7 Comments
Those of you who follow Professor Zittrain’s work know that he’s been writing and thinking about ubiquitous human computing for the last several months. Another name for it might be distributed human computing: the phenomenon of disaggregating a task into component pieces and then parceling them out around the world. Perhaps the best-known example is […]
