Looking out over the DMZ into the drab proto-industrial North Korean villages along the border.

With the death of North Korean dictator and “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il, I join the rest of the world in welcoming this early Christmas gift… at least I hope that it proves to be so.

Egypt’s Mubarak is gone but the country is less stable; post-Qadhafi Libya’s political course is still an open question. So uncertainty is the only safe prediction about North Korea’s near-term political environment. But no nation’s people have endured such unrelenting deprivations (mass starvation, no fuel) for so long in the post-World War II era.

I have no special insight into North Korea’s future. My only DMZ visit on the Peninsula, with a close-up look at Panmunjeom and beyond it “the last Stalinist state on earth,” was in 2006 (see my photos and observations here).

But I have noted the Western-education background (and apparently technologically-intensive current activities) of “The Great Successor,” Kim’s son Kim Jong-Un. One can understand the intense focus which Western governments have trained on the younger Kim’s background and activities, for any clues into his plans – and the plans of those who surround him, or potentially could rival him.

Only a year ago, in October 2010 SCIENCE Magazine published a short but interesting story on Kim Jong-Un, asking “Will Korea’s Computer-Savvy Crown Prince Embrace Reform?”

According to internal North Korean propaganda, informants claim, Kim oversees a cyberwarfare unit that launched a sophisticated denial-of-service attack on South Korean and U.S. government Web sites in July 2009. South Korea’s National Intelligence Service blamed the North, which has not commented publicly on the attack. Kim Jong Un’s involvement cannot be confirmed, says computer scientist Kim Heung-Kwang, founder of North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity, a group of university-educated defectors that raises awareness of conditions in the North… But it’s plausible: Kim claims that Kim Jong Un was tutored privately by a ‘brilliant’ graduate of Universite Paris X who chaired the computer science department at Kim Chaek University of Technology in Pyongyang before disappearing from public view in the early 1980s.” [emphasis added]

To get a feel for how the North’s military has gone about organizing for cyber activities, the best unclassified source I know of remains Christopher Brown’s 2004 Naval Postgraduate School thesis “Developing a Reliable Methodology for Assessing the Computer Network Operations Threat of North Korea.” Brown wrote, by the way, that his thesis was an attempt “to prove that a useful methodology for assessing the CNO capabilities and limitations of North Korea can be developed using only open source information” (emphasis added). Brown also wrote about the early personal role of Kim Jong Il’s eldest son Kim Jong Nam in establishing the priority of computer network operations among military activities (Nam once headed a North Korean intelligence agency, though in recent years he dissipated into a South-Park-like role as a casino-loving playboy).

More recently, there’s information on North Korea’s cyber hacking military units here, where StrategyPage.com concluded (in 2009) that “North Korea is something of a museum of Stalinist techniques. But it’s doubtful that their Internet experts are flexible and innovative enough to be a real threat.”

The contrary view, with a heightened state of alarm about North Korea’s capabilities and intentions, runs through Richard Clarke’s 2010 book Cyber War, where he recounts breathlessly the Soviet-Olympic-style recruitment of “elite students at the elementary-school level to be groomed as future hackers.” In a publicity interview for the book, Clarke told Forbes magazine: “if you ask who’s the biggest threat in the sense that they might use their abilities, it might be North Korea. First, they’re crazy, and second, they have nothing to lose.”  Even China’s People’s Daily English-language version carried a dire summary in December 2010 of North Korea’s aggressive cyber intentions, “Cyber Attack from Pyongyang: South Korea’s Nightmare?”

I hope and expect that cyber activities will not be the immediate focus of the new post-Kim Jong Il leader. Certainly regime transition and  consolidation of authority is the first priority. So far, two days after the actual death, we’re seeing a mannered roll-out of news and propaganda consistent with the clockwork transition from “Great Leader” Kim Il-Sung to his own son in 1994.

Everyone’s watching….

My stroll over to the far side of the famous Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) table, where I was testing the patience of the MP breathing down my neck.

With Luis Ruvira, President of the Argentine American Dialogue Foundation, after my speech at the Argentine Council on International Relations

I’m traveling in Argentina this week, on a trip sponsored by the U.S. Department of State in their official Speaker’s Program. The U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires had requested of DoS an American technology speaker “who can talk about technology innovation and bleeding edge kinds of things.  The goal is to highlight the role that innovation and technology plays in creating a better society.” I was delighted to accept the invitation when asked by my friend Lovisa Williams of the State Department’s Internet Steering Committee.

Most of the trip is being spent in Buenos Aires, second largest city in South America – so large it is constitutionally recognized as an autonomous federal entity alongside the 23 Argentinian provinces, with its own government ministers and municipal administration. I am also enjoying side visits to Rosario and La Plata, large cities and provincial capitals. I’ll write about several aspects of the trip separately.

Working together to cram in a series of whirlwind meetings have been my excellent co-hosts, the U.S. Embassy and the respected Argentine American Dialogue Foundation. Below are the highlights of the visit, plucked from my official agenda:

Monday 9/19: Meeting with the Minister of Education for Buenos Aires city and visit to the Escuela Gauchos de Guemes school which is studying the social and educational benefits of having given each child their own netbook. Tour of the Universidad Abierta Interamericana (UAI) (the Open InterAmerican University), visiting their robotics labs, meetings with engineering students, and a separate meeting with authorities from the university and national civil servants. Meeting with Pedro Janices, National Director at the National Office for Information Technologies (executive-branch component of the President’s Office; Pedro has been called “the Argentine CIO,” and has worked with the first U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra.)

Tuesday 9/20: Public speech at the Argentina Council for International Relations (CARI, one of the most important think tanks in Latin America), topic: “Governments 2.0 and the impact of new technologies.” Lecture at the American Club of Buenos Aires, with participating companies from the American Chamber of Commerce of Argentina, members from the academic sector and public servants (including the Head of International Relations of the National Ministry in Science and Technology). Tour of the Supreme Court of Argentina, meeting with Deputy Chief Justice Highton, who was the first woman appointed to the Court (under a democratic government).  Videoconference lecture on “Innovation and Government” at the National Technological University (UTN), transmitted live to 13 campuses of the University in the interior of the country.

Wednesday 9/21: Trip to Rosario, second largest city in Argentina and capital of Santa Fe Province. Visit and tour of largest tech firm in Rosario, Neoris; lunch with Neoris Latin American President Martin Mendez.  Meeting with the Secretary of Production and Local Development for the city of Rosario, subject “Creating conditions for local technology-industry growth.” Meeting with Rocio Rius of the Fundacion Nueva Generación Argentina (Argentina New Generation Foundation). Lecture at the Universidad Abierto Interamericana (UAI) campus in Rosario on new technologies and their impact on government; audience of authorities and students from UAI and other universities, faculty from the Engineering School, and also local public servants.

Thursday 9/22: Trip to La Plata, capital city of Buenos Aires Province.  Meeting with Governor Daniel Scioli (Vice President of Argentina 2003-2007) and other provincial civil servants, including Undersecretary of Institutional Relations, Director of Interministerial Relations, and Chief of Cabinet.  Public Lecture at the National University of La Plata, guest of Dean of the Informatics Faculty.

Friday 9/23: Participate in opening ceremonies in Buenos Aires of the IX Congreso Internacional en Innovación Tecnológica Informática (CIITI, Ninth International Congress on IT Innovation). Visit to Universidad Argentina de la Empresa, (UADE, Argentine University of Enterprise), meetings with faculty/students from Government, Law, and Engineering departments, and tours of laboratories. Lecture at the American Club of Buenos Aires. Meeting with Director of the Business School at Argentine Catholic University, and Dean of the Faculty of Economic Sciences. Private meeting at Embassy with U.S. Ambassador Vilma Martinez. Panel speaker on “Ciberculture Y Gobierno” (Cyber-culture and Government) at the IX Congreso CIITI with international panel.

I’ve been on several other State Department-sponsored trips before (to Mexico and, many years ago near the end of the Cold War, to the Soviet Union), but I must say that this frenetically busy jaunt through lovely Argentina may be my favorite. I’ll write more over the next few days.

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MSR natural-user-interaction immersive technologies

WIRED Magazine’s online site ran a great long profile of Microsoft Research late yesterday, with interviews and project features: “How Microsoft Researchers Might Invent a Holodeck.”

I have written about or mentioned all of the individual projects or technologies on my blog before, but the writing at WIRED is so much better than my own – and the photographs so cool – that I thought I should post a link to the story.

Some excerpts:

REDMOND, Washington — Deep inside Microsoft is the brain of a mad scientist.

You might not think so, given the banality of the company’s ubiquitous products: Windows, Office, Hotmail, Exchange Server, Active Directory. The days are long past when this kind of software could light up anyone’s imagination, except maybe an accountant’s.

But Microsoft has an innovative side that’s still capable of producing surprises. In fact, Microsoft spends more than $9 billion a year, and employs tens of thousands of people in research and development alone. While most of that goes toward coding the next versions of the company’s major products, a lot gets funneled into pure research and cutting-edge engineering.”

The article highlights the collaborative focus of MSR work:

Building 99 is a think tank in the classic sense: It’s a beautifully-designed building packed to the gills with hundreds of scientists — about half of Microsoft’s researchers work here. In the middle is a tall, airy atrium designed by the architect to facilitate collaboration and the kind of chance meetings that can lead to serendipitous discoveries.

And the author, Dylan Tweney (@dylan20 on Twitter) adds some valuable historical Silicon Valley context:

In fact, you only need one hit to make billions of dollars in research pay off, even if you waste the rest of the good ideas. As Malcolm Gladwell argued recently, Xerox, which is often derided for failing to take advantage of a series of amazing inventions at its Palo Alto Research Center, actually saw huge returns from just one invention: the laser printer. Against that, it’s not necessarily a bad thing that Xerox PARC was home to hundreds of useless research projects, or that Xerox never figured out what to do with some of its research, like the graphical user interface.

Great piece – and yet again underlines why I like my job – which includes addressing that last line, “figuring out what to do” with this research. (And so, back to work.)

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Here’s a neat example, “a just-for-fun experiment from the guys at Laan Labs” where they whip up a neat Augmented Reality recipe: take one iPad, one Kinect, and stir:

Some technical detail from the Brothers Laan, the engineers who did the work:

We used the String Augmented Reality SDK to display real-time 3d video+audio recorded from the Kinect. Libfreenect from http://openkinect.org/ project was used for recording the data coming from the Kinect. A textured mesh was created from the calibrated depth+rgb data for each frame and played back in real-time. A simple depth cutoff allowed us isolate the person in the video from the walls and other objects. Using the String SDK, we projected it back onto a printed image marker in the real world.” - source, Laan Labs blog.

As always, check out http://www.kinecthacks.com/ for the latest and greatest Kinect hacks – or more accurately now, the latest cool uses of the openly released free Kinect SDK, available here.

There are several quiet projects underway around the DC Beltway to make use of the SDK, testing non-commercial but government-relevant deployments – more detail and examples at the appropriate time. We will eventually release a commercial SDK with even more functionality and higher-level programming controls, which will directly benefit government early adopters.

In the meantime, I may report on some of the new advances being made by our research group on Computational User Experiences, who “apply expertise in machine learning, visualization, mobile computing, sensors and devices, and quantitative and qualitative evaluation techniques to improve the state of the art in physiological computing, healthcare, home technologies, computer-assisted creativity, and entertainment.” That’s a rich agenda, and the group is in the very forefront of defining how Natural User Interaction (NUI) will enhance our personal and professional lives….

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In my line of work I most frequently encounter the ampersand in the common phrase “R&D” for research and development, although I notice that with texting and short-form social media the ampersand is making something of a comeback in frequency of use anyway.

Below is a neat infographic demonstrating the & in R&D, from a Microsoft perspective. To quote the Microsoft team which produced it:

We get a lot of questions about what Microsoft does with the more than $9 billion we invest in R&D every year. There’s a lot of research for sure, but most of that investment goes toward development. With 850 Ph.D.-level researchers in Microsoft Research and around 40,000 developers in our product teams, that should give an indication of how we balance that $9 billion between research and the development of shipping products. I call it small r and big D.

The Research part of our R&D has a stunningly broad remit across technology areas.  MSR has active projects in computational science, machine learning, semantic computing, data visualization, quantum computing, bioinformatics and biomedical computing, speech technologies, nanotechnology, robotics, sensors, and many more topics (see more information here).

The Development component of our R&D is even larger, and includes advanced work on next versions and future roadmaps for products you already see shipping such as Bing, Kinect, the Azure Cloud, Windows, Office, SQL, Exchange, Lync, etc.

But those two components can come together, and collaboration between them is absolutely critical.  The “&” can create magic when one or more research areas bears fruit in a way that makes commercially viable sense for a product team to adopt – or to create an entirely new product area. Kinect is a now well-known successful example, and consequently has officially become the fastest-selling consumer electronic device of all time.

The infographic describes several recent examples which make this a pretty exciting place to work – the kind of place where colleagues sometimes do answer the question “What are you working on?” with a profound and funny answer: “the future.”

Click the graphic to expand to full-size for reading:

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But I’m going to be talking about “mobile” in a different way than others still use the term, i.e. they focus on a handheld device, while I will be focusing on the mobile citizen. As I have said before I don’t believe our future involves experiencing “augmented reality” by always holding up little 3-inch plastic screens in front of our faces. Natural user interfaces and immersive computing offer much more to how we access computational resources – and how technology will help us interact with one another. Here’s an example, in a story from the past week.

Sometimes long tectonic shifts reveal themselves in snapshot “key-frame” moments. Last week on April Fool’s Day 2011, many observers of the tech industry – and lots of just plain web fans – took notice of Microsoft’s reemergence on the innovation front in a rapid two-step punch/counterpunch over something as simple, and complex, as personal use of immersive Augmented Reality (AR).

In its tradition of April Fool’s jokes, Google went to great effort with the “launch” of its Gmail Motion Beta, and “now you can control Gmail with your body.” A splashy video featuring lots of Google employees acting out the part of gesture-recognition-pioneers, composing and sending emails using body movements, hand and facial gestures. Drew a small chuckle of amusement.

But it also drew the immediate notice, and bemusement, of millions of fans of Microsoft Kinect (launched before Christmas last fall and now the fastest-selling consumer electronics device in history). They instantly thought, as I did, “Why is Google taking a slightly less-than-gracious swipe at Kinect?” The Goog’s effort seemed almost resentful, and mocked the advances in gesture recognition and natural user interaction (NUI).

Immediately, Kinect users responded (the thing only costs $149, so it’s attractive to researchers and innovative hackers), and I’ve now seen several impressive Kinect hacks duplicating the Gmail Motion beta – that is, making real what Google thought was a fictional prank. For a good example, see here for Cnet’s coverage of the quick work by Evan Suma, a postdoc researcher at the University of Southern California, who created his working prototype within 30 minutes, and took another 90 minutes to make a video of him using it. Media coverage of that quick cycle seemed to get as much or more coverage as Google’s original prank!

I believe that episode underlines the inherent attraction and enormous potential of NUI, which is playing more and more of a role in Microsoft’s research and future product development. I’ve written recently about that potential (see “Air Everything“), and see more evidence every day.

Check out this great new work by students at the MIT Media Lab, combining Kinect and videoconferencing in a wonderful new immersive way. The project site is at “Kinected Conference,” where they describe their use of the embedded audio and depth sensors in the Kinect device:

We explore how expanding a system’s understanding of spatially calibrated depth and audio alongside a live video stream can generate semantically rich three-dimensional pixels containing information regarding their material properties and location. Four features are implemented, which are “Talking to Focus”, “Freezing Former Frames”, “Privacy Zone” and “Spacial Augmenting Reality.” – MIT Media Lab Kinected Conference Project

Check out the impressive video:

Note the thoughtful work by the MIT researchers into the interpersonal aspects of communication, incorporating their intuition and research findings on social interactivity. The implications are much vaster than simple use and control of your email inbox.

The best thing about the explosion in NUI-hack creativity is that we are now just weeks away from the Spring release of the Kinect SDK, a non-commercial Kinect for Windows software development kit from Microsoft Research. While we plan to release a commercial SDK with even more features, this SDK will be a starter kit for creating rich natural user interfaces via access to deep Kinect system information such as audio, system application-programming interfaces, and direct coding control of the Kinect sensor.

I’m excited by the work that’s already begun to explore the social implications of NUI, and (in my arena) the opportunities to advance citizen-government interaction for disadvantaged communities through pervasive immersive interactivity.

Note to Google: This episode demonstrates what William Gibson famously said: “The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.” Someday it will even come to Mountain View!

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That’s one way of looking at modern life, as if drowning in too much data. Perhaps there’s another, driven more by longer memory, and analysis “à la recherche du temps perdu.”  Let’s set down some facts, past and present, and see if any lessons emerge. With apologies to Mark Twain whose forward to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn reads:

“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. By Order of the Author”

Once upon a time, not so long ago (the 1980s), the United States armed Afghan “rebels” against an oppressive central government and its foreign puppetmaster patron, the Soviet Union. The rebels pre-existed the foreign involvment; in fact there is difficulty finding a historical point in the region’s history when there weren’t “rebels” against anyone claiming to be “the government.” (If it’s easier for you, imagine the residents of the hills of Kentucky and West Virginia.)

The Soviet Union’s military leadership had studied closely the American experience in the Vietnam War, and one of its lessons was that militarily the U.S. Army’s counter-insurgency strategy actually worked well, emphasizing mobility and rapid application of lethality at earliest detection of enemy movement. Whack-a-mole can actually work when you have a god’s-eye-view of the theater, and ubiquity – defined in part as lots of helicopters. The lesson the Red Army also learned was that superior firepower has successful but ugly results, but then the USSR had little domestic opposition to worry about… until Gorbachev’s policy of Glasnost opened a flood of internal debate and opposition.

Anyone who saw the movie Charlie Wilson’s War (or who read the book) knows the basic story of what happened in the Afghanistan war in the 1980s: the Soviets tried to use helicopter-mobile warfare against the mujahedeen rebels; the United States “secretly” armed the rebels with portable anti-aircraft weaponry and training optimized to kill helicopters; and the rebels wound up forcing the Soviets to give up and withdraw, as their Kabul puppet-government fell.

кто кого?

Flash forward to today, April 6 2011, and the announcement in the Russian media: “Russia to Supply Military Choppers to Afghanistan.”  Now, the helicopter purchase shouldn’t exactly be a suprise, to those who have been following events closely. Indeed, at the Lisbon Summit, NATO leaders approved “the development of an NATO-Russia Helicopter Maintenance Trust

Mi-17 / Russian designation Mi-8M

Fund in 2011 to support the Afghan Armed Forces to operate its helicopter fleet more efficiently” (from the official communique). The best coverage of the ins and outs of this on-again, off-again “fund” and its origins is coming from Roger McDermott, longtime Russian military watcher at the University of Kent and the Jamestown Foundation, as in his early piece dissecting Russian sources on the emerging helicopter topic back in 2009. Last summer, when DoD first began the acquisition with NATO funds, U.S.-based Sikorsky actually protested the purchase and argued instead for their Sikorsky S-61.

One Russian source today quoted Afghanistan’s Air Force Chief of Staff General Abdul Wahab Wardak as saying: ”As I told the Americans, the contract is about to be signed. We will deliver 21 Mi-17 helicopter. We expect that the machine will start to arrive at the end of the year – we are very much needed. Mi-17 is better adapted to our conditions than any other helicopters, and our pilots are familiar with. We flew on them since 1980. I myself have learned to fly them [in] the Soviet Union, so I know what I’m saying.”

Last November, in an interview with Russia’s Interfax news agency, Afghanistan’s Foreign Minister Zalmay Rassoul spoke frankly about his government’s rationale for them:

Question: Afghanistan is interested in acquiring Russian helicopters, and  it has been announced that a special international trust fund is to be  established for this purpose. Is Afghanistan considering purchases of other  military hardware from Russia?

Answer:You know that Russian helicopters are adapted very much to  Afghanistan geography [LS: stop with the humor, you're killing me] and we have a lot of Afghan pilots who know about Russian helicopters. So definitely we need these helicopters and we are looking forward  to having these helicopters, spare parts, and the training of pilots for these  helicopters. The Russian Federation is also supplying the Afghanistan police  with Kalashnikov machine-guns and other light weapons, and the prospect of  further military cooperation is in discussion.

Question: How many helicopters should be supplied to Afghanistan  within the financing to be provided for [by] the trust fund?

Answer: We do not know exactly but there‘ll be about twenty  helicopters or something like this.

Perhaps the only constant in modern life is the Afghan presence of Russian helicopters. The only surprise may be in who is paying for them. As Lenin asked, Who-whom? Another official Kremlin news outlet, Voice of Russia, almost had a gloating wink in its “voice” with its account today:

Russia and the United States have agreed the terms of a contract for the delivery to Afghanistan of 21 Russian-made Mi-17 military helicopters.

Moscow and Washington are due to sign the contract shortly. According to the Moscow-based Kommersant daily, Moscow will thus earn 367.5 million dollars.

The issue was originally negotiated by Moscow and NATO, with the alliance trying to persuade Russia to supply the choppers free and thus contribute to stability in Afghanistan.

But Russia never took the proposal seriously, so the United States joined the talks and suggested paying for the delivery of the entire consignment.

By the way, the “related story” highlighted next to that one on Voice of Russia? “NATO Kills 3 Civilians in Kabul.” Chalk that placement up as serendipitously strategic communications.

If I were writing this just a few days ago on April Fool’s Day, I would conclude: “It is obvious that the Obama Administration has embarked on a brilliant maneuver combining Bismarckian diplomacy with international deception on an impressive scale. The United States is suckering the Russians into providing a fat new target for the Afghan mujahedeen, and we will slowly but surely sneak out of the country, leaving several years’ worth of anti-helicopter weapons for whichever stripe of Afghan combatant gets to them first.”  Worthy of a Gogol comedy.

Libya through a Cracked Mirror

What does any of this have to do with Libya? Nothing. That’s a completely different situation. And as my Pentagon friend said, Libya is much more complex than anything before. This may help a simpleton like me: using a separate sheet of paper for Libya, I will simply begin keeping lists of “government forces,” “international coalitions,” ”U.S.-backed rebels” and so on.  Oh, and I’ll down a stiff shot of vodka at the first mention of Russian helicopters….

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But one thought I had in watching the video was, why do I need to be holding the little device in front of me, to get the benefit of its computational resources and display? I’ve seen the studies and predictions that “everything’s going mobile,” but I believe that’s taking too literally the device itself, the form-factor of a little handheld box of magic.

I actually see a slightly different future path, one in which we’ll take advantage of computing resources and digital services all around us, in a supercharged immersive environment of virtual computation. I don’t mean Second Life, where you have to log-in to a virtual world divorced from your real environs; and I don’t mean a world like Tron (I haven’t seen the sequel yet, but will; the first one came out when I was an excitable college senior looking to the future). Instead, we are rapidly integrating immersive computation all around us, in our everyday world, and fairly soon we won’t need to pull out a smartphone to see it.

Here’s what I mean: I’m pretty sure this is exactly what everyone has always thought “playing air guitar” should be like:

This work, by London-based developer Chris O’Shea, represents yet another private-hack application using Microsoft Kinect as the platform for sensing, ranging, and interacting with 3D virtual environments.

Communication and Collaboration

Did I say interacting “with” virtual environments? How about interacting “in” them, as in this stunning example which highlights the potential for uses in professional collaboration in immersive spaces, along with virtual-object-manipulation. Unlike Second Life, you don’t control an avatar with a keyboard or mouse – you essentially are the avatar (hmm, there’s a movie-idea in that).  Also note at the beginning the funny hat-tip to the classic movie Office Space - apparently even Martian cubicle-workers have to deal with the iconic TPS reports:

There has been an explosion in Kinect-hack activity in the past month, an “OpenKinect” brushfire, with individual developers doing work on Microsoft platforms and on a host of others, like libfreenect/python, openCV, OpenFrameworks, Apple’s OS X and even iPad.

One of my favorite examples so far is work at the Georgia Tech College of Computing, where researchers have built the Kinect American Sign Language Recognizer, with impressive lab results so far using Kinect with gesture-recognition driving Hidden Markov Models (HMM). One huge human-level advance is that in previous automated examples using earlier pre-Kinect technology, the deaf children in the study had to wear cumbersome, unnatural headgear and wrist-mounted 3D accelerometers. That requirement is gone now, as you can see in the research video here.

Other inventive examples include controlling a hands-free web browser, an artful “invisibility cloak” use, and nifty ideas highlighted in Kinect Hack Prize Competitions and this combo-video of “12 Best Kinect Hacks.”

The company’s position on these hacks has been “cautiously supportive,” one might say:

“Kinect was not actually hacked,” said Microsoft program manager Alex Kipman, speaking on NPR’s Science Friday with Ira Flato last week. “Hacking would mean that someone got to our algorithms, that sit inside of the Xbox, and was able to actually use them, which hasn’t happened. Or it means that you put a device between the sensor and the Xbox for means of cheating, which also has not happened. That’s what we call hacking, and that’s why we’ve put a ton of effort to make sure it doesn’t actually occur.”

“What has happened,” continued Kipman, “is someone wrote an open source driver for PCs that essentially opens the USB connection, which we didn’t protect by design, and reads the inputs from the sensor. The sensor, again as I talked earlier, has eyes and ears, and that’s a whole bunch of noise that someone needs to take and turn into signal.”

Microsoft Game Studios manager Shannon Loftis weighed in as well, noting that “as an experienced creator, I’m very excited to see that people are so inspired that it was less than a week after the Kinect came out before they had started creating and thinking about what they could do.”

“So no one’s going to get in trouble?” asked Flato.

“Nope, absolutely not,” replied Kipman.

– PC World, 11/22/2010

Uses in and for Government

These hacks demonstrate that every so often computing takes a “fun” turn again, delighting and enticing a new generation of whiz-kid programmers and developers.  As you might expect, there’s also been activity among developers in the government space, and I’m fascinated by the possibilities already emerging on white-boards or dev-laptops in areas like education and government training, health-care applications, and easier and more user-friendly government/citizen interactivity in general.  My friend Chris Niehaus, Director of Microsoft’s Director of U.S. Public Sector Innovation, has explored many of the state-of-the-art possibilities and social implications in health and medical care, and O’Reilly Radar’s Alex Howard has written about other non-gaming areas where Kinect immersion could take hold.

National-security areas of interest are already being explored in robotics, ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance), and military command-and-control apps. Here’s a public example I can share: folks at UC-Berkeley’s EE/CS Department, in the Hybrid Systems Lab STARMAC Project, have experimentally hacked up a Quadrotor UAV with an onboard Kinect Sensor, to demonstrate the off-the-shelf quality of environment-sensing and remote control:

The Road Ahead

The future will definitely feature incredibly powerful government uses (alongside commercial uses) of innovative human-computer-interaction (HCI) and natural user interfaces (NUI).  And the v. 1.0 Kinect will eventually be surpassed by improved Microsoft iterations, and likely compete in a healthy market of alternative hardware enabling depth-sensing and touch-free interactivity.

As that happens, we’ll see and use Air Everything - or almost everything – and we’ll like it, and then in many circumstances we’ll forget we’re even using room-based or location-embedded computing resources.

Here’s an analogy from a century ago: In the early days of home-delivered electricity, there was enormous awareness of – and fear of – the power coursing through wires behind floorboards and across walls. The early electrical plug-in outlets were frightening objects and the source of great parental anxiety and dangerous childhood experimentation. But eventually, with the new technology integrated into home design, with buried power lines and power-grids incorporated into urban architecture, we lost sight (literally) of the electricity being transmitted all around us. Now, things just “turn on.” NUI will become that carefree.

To keep up with the pace of activity around the Kinect platform, check these sources periodically: KinectHacks.net and its frequent updates; and the YouTube channel of UC-Davis computer science professor and Kinect sensei Oliver Kreylos, whose videos are a mix of eye-popping functionality and behind-the-scenes programming explanations.

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 An online friend, Larry Sanger, today posted some very thoughtful remarks from a unique perspective – as a cofounder of Wikipedia who obviously is offended among other things by the misleading use of “Wiki-” in the Wikileaks name.  But he makes some other profound points as well. He offered to have them reposted, which I have done below. Reader comments are welcome, either below or as always by email.



A comment on Wikileaks

Larry Sanger
November 29, 2010

Over the weekend, I wrote a series of Tweets inspired by Wikileaks’ then-upcoming release of U.S. diplomatic communiqués.  This caused quite an uproar, with people insulting me vociferously and demanding that I explain myself.  (A few people were supportive, and thanks to them.)  I am not going to write a whole essay in defense of my views; I don’t have the time either to write one or to deal with the inevitable aftermath of such an essay.  Actually, I wish I didn’t have to do even the following, because I’m busy with various new educational projects, and I have no desire to make myself into a political pundit.  But I suppose at this point it is my duty to post at least the following; I think I’m in a position where I could do some good, so I had better, if I want to follow my own advice.

Rather than write a long essay, I will put down just a few paragraphs explaining my views a little better.  This is obviously not, nor is it intended to be, a complete defense of the position I’ll briefly describe.  That I leave to the policy wonks.

Here are the “offending” Tweets (from Nov. 25-26):

I’ll go ahead and say the obvious: Wikileaks is an enemy of the U.S.—and not just the government. Deal with them accordingly.

How does Wikileaks repeatedly get massive troves of classified material?

Did a person or group in the U.S. govt have access to ALL these docs & leak them to Wikileaks? If so, that person or group is traitorous.

@wikileaks Speaking as Wikipedia’s co-founder, I consider you enemies of the U.S.—not just the government, but the people.

@wikileaks What you’ve been doing to us is breathtakingly irresponsible & can’t be excused with pieties of free speech and openness.

First, let me say that my main complaint is against releasing secret diplomatic communiqués, not against Wikileaks’ other work, which is less important for purposes of this discussion.  Also, when I said I was “speaking as Wikipedia’s co-founder,” I was distinguishing wikis generally from Wikileaks, which is not a wiki.  I was and am not speaking for Wikipedia, but only for myself.  To those who said that they’d stop contributing to Wikipedia, you might not know that I left Wikipedia a little over a year after I got it started, and have since founded a competitor.  I’m no longer even the editor-in-chief of this competitor; I’m now working on brand new things.

My argument is quite simple and commonsensical.  It goes something like this. (A policy wonk would be able to explain this better than I could, but I’m in the hot seat so I’ll have a go.) Diplomatic communiqués are secret precisely because they contain information that it would be dangerous, or stupid, to make public. They disclose names and quotations that, for reasons either obvious or quite impossible for us to know, might get people killed. They also contain reports of actions that might lead to serious repercussions. They might even pinpoint locations of secret installations that might come under attack. They recount discussions of important plans and personalities—information that, if known to the wrong people, might lead to various military excursions, including war.

Does that sound acceptable to you?  Let’s put it this way.  Wikileaks’ actions, by releasing so much consequential, incendiary information, could easily lead to the deaths of people all around the world, and not just Americans. It could destabilize foreign relations that it benefits no one to have destabilized. It could—probably will not, but given that these are secret diplomatic communiqués in a very complex world, could—lead to war.

I find it incomprehensible that Wikileaks and its defenders are not given pause by such obvious considerations. I find it sad that so many people are not able to grasp such arguments intuitively.  Perhaps they ignore them, or perhaps they only pretend that such considerations do not exist.

Now, let’s talk about three common fallacies about Wikileaks’ latest disastrous actions. Again, this is going to have to be brief.

Fallacy: we can already see (less than 24 hours after release) that the leaks have no damaging information, and the information in the first leaks (about Iraq and Afghanistan) did not lead to any deaths. Well—not yet they didn’t, not as far as we know.  But there is a big difference between the Iraq and Afghanistan leaks and the latest leak.  Since the latest leak contains huge numbers of secret diplomatic communiqués, they do, of course, concern intelligence.  Wikileaks’ defenders seem not to realize the cumulative nature of intelligence.  Intelligence-gathering is like detective work.  In a detective story, often it is one tidbit of information that sheds light on a case and blows it wide open.  Similarly, a communiqué that looks to the uninformed to be completely innocuous might turn out to be exactly the tidbit needed for enemies of the U.S.—and others—to inflict death and serious destruction.  It amazes me that otherwise intelligent people, including journalists, think that they can make such judgments, let alone promote their obviously amateur judgments online.  This does not speak well for the judgment of the New York Times’ editors.  To their credit, others, such as the Washington Post, would not make deals with Wikileaks.

Fallacy: the United States is an “empire” and needs to be reined in. Exposing the inner workings of this government’s foreign policy is a good thing. It’s not a bad thing that the leaks damage U.S. interests, because U.S. interests are contrary to the interests of a lot of the rest of the world.  This argument is made by two different groups of people who are best addressed separately.

On the one hand, people on the radical left are of course deeply opposed to the American system of government. I am not one of these people—though occasionally, as an open-minded philosopher, I have considered some such people as my personal friends. Anyway, these people naturally regard the U.S. government, the main defender of this much-hated system, as enemy #1 in world politics.  I don’t.  Obviously, radical leftists will be among Wikileaks’ most vociferous supporters in the latest leaks, precisely because they want the U.S. undermined.  As a patriotic, loyal American citizen, I do not want my country undermined, and I’m not ashamed to say so.  Taking this openly pro-U.S. stance as I do, radical leftists cannot be expected to treat me nicely.  Fortunately, I couldn’t care less about what they think, when they use playground insults and attempt to bait me into stupid exchanges of sentiments.  I’m not about to enter an exchange with such people about the merits of the American system and hence the defensibility of undermining it.

On the other hand, there are plenty of liberals, libertarians, and social democrats who support Wikileaks. My views are closer to theirs.  I agree with them that, as a rough generality, leakage of government documents is a good thing for open government, free speech, and democracy.  This is why, when Wikileaks first appeared, I was cautiously supportive.  But it is perfectly consistent for liberals, libertarians, and social democrats—and conservatives too, of course—to draw the distinction between positive leaks that improve government and irresponsible leaks that do nothing but cause all sorts of harm and pointless chaos.  If you are an anarchist, you might celebrate all leaks, but most of us aren’t anarchists and are capable of making intelligent distinctions between good and bad leaks.

Let me put this another way.  There are a lot of things that the U.S. State Department does that democracy-loving people across the political landscape can agree are positive, or at least supportable.  But some of those things have to be done in secret.  That is the nature of diplomacy, espionage, and foreign policy in the real world, which is a dangerous, complex world.  To leak three million communiqués potentially undermines everything positive that the U.S. can do in the world.  Come on, folks—can’t you see that?  It should be obvious, and it’s very disappointing that it isn’t more so to liberals.  Unless you count yourself as one of the aforementioned radical leftists, who want to see the U.S. lose, period, then you cannot support Wikileaks’ action.  It is completely unsupportable.

Fallacy: Wikileaks is a force for openness and transparency.  Openness is good.  (Oh, how can a founder of Wikipedia fail to realize this?  The horror!)  There are some people who think that all of government should be conducted “in the open,” always.  Such people remind me of my radical libertarian friends: their theories sound nice, beautiful even, but they quite stubbornly refuse to take seriously the reasons for the things they criticize.  The fact is that some, only some, of democratic government has always been conducted without public exposure.  In this brief comment, I cannot elaborate the reasons for occasional government secrecy, but I’ll give you a hint: it has to do with privacy, public safety, and national defense.  I disagree with those people who want government to be so “open”—open far beyond anything any government has ever experienced, open far beyond anything widely thought to be required—that they are perfectly willing to undermine privacy, public safety, and national defense in order to secure that openness.  Such people are ideologues, and they are fun for other ideologues to argue with, and occasionally for philosophers too, but they can be safely ignored by more sane, grounded people and those with little time on their hands for philosophy.

Finally, Julian Assange is no hero.  He is a twit.  He should not be made into a liberal icon.  He gives hackers a bad name.  He and his organization are indeed enemies of the U.S. government and the people represented by that government; they should be stopped, and they richly deserve to be punished for this latest leak.  And that goes double for the person or people in the U.S. government who leaked the documents in the first place.  None of these people deserve your support any longer.

- Larry Sanger, http://www.larrysanger.org/wikileaks.html

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