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Life bits, tracking, and bit literacy
Dec 4, 2006
Bit literacy is really beginning to pop in the technology media. The Economist reports on the coming "life bitstream":
From The phone of the future:
[S]tudies show that people read around ten megabytes (MB) worth of material a day; hear 400MB a day, and see one MB of information every second. In a decade's time a typical phone will have enough storage capacity to be able to video its user's entire life... such "life recorders" will be used for everything from security to settling accident claims with insurance firms.
Then in Tracking your every move, the Economist reports on a new wireless service:
For $10 a month, parents can call up the location of their child's handset from their own mobile phones, or from a PC. The child receives a message saying that the handset's position has been requested, and the parents receive an address, or a marker on a web-based map, giving the child's location.
For an extra $10 per month, they can sign up for Child Zone, a service that, among other things, fires off an alert when a youngster (or, at least, the youngster's handset) strays outside a specified area.
Finally, the New York Times wonders in Open-Source Spying how the US's spy agencies should engage the increasing "information glut":
Intelligence hoarding presented one set of problems, but pouring it into a common ocean, Meyerrose realized soon after moving into his office, is not the answer either. “Intelligence is about looking for needles in haystacks, and we can’t just keep putting more hay on the stack,” he said. What the agencies needed was a way to take the thousands of disparate, unorganized pieces of intel they generate every day and somehow divine which are the most important.
My own response to all this is coming, soon, in book form. I'll be done writing Bit Literacy soon.
