Now they have gone a step further, they can just film a performance and extract all the movements and facial expression to reproduce or change it to their own desire.

If anyone has seen some movies like Total Recal, Equilibrium or read 1984, you can see where this how this technology can be abused. But on the other hand imagine what can be done if you manage to get some of that technology to work for the benefit of the cinema industry. It has already been used is such movies as Surrogate with a young Bruce Willis or Terminator 4 where Arnie is showing up in his young buffed self.

The possibilities to have performance of dead actors sounds very appealing to some extend. Of course Avatar also showed what can be done as a variance of this technique, the main actors are not really present on screen but it is still a very real performance that they are delivering to achieve the best possible impression of real living beings in front of our eyes.

Whether we are able to finally cross the uncanny valley is something that I don’t think we (as viewers) will realize; because we won’t be able to see the difference between real and CGI anymore.

The point is that anyone cannot do this at this time on any computer, you need a lot of processor power and a good set of specialist to map your face and build the model (which is one of the business of Image Metrics). But who can say that one day, with improvements of the technique and some increase in our every day PC, we will not be able to just pick up a web cam and have a conference call displaying the face of Gorge Bush or Sean Connery.

Just think about it :-)

“Think of it like a movie. The Torah is the first one, and the New Testament is the sequel. Then the Qu’ran comes out, ant if retcons (Retroactive continuity) the last one like it never happened. There’s still Jesus, but he’s not the main character anymore, and the messiah hasn’t shown up yet.

Jews like the first movies but ignored the sequels, Christians think you need to watch the first two, but the third movie doesn’t count, Moslems think the third one was the best, and Mormons liked the second so much they started writing fan fiction that doesn’t fit with any of the series canon.”

– Unknown Author

It’s a bit of a shortcut but it sums it up enough to make it understandable to a neophyte.

Anyway, I hope you all had a brilliant time celebrating!

So I took my phone a decided to take a picture…

Of course getting out to get something to eat people started stating the fact that snow is cold, wet and sticks to your clothes.  But I don’t care, I still like it :-)

I love her :-)

Among the conditions were such requests as a fireplace, just outside the capital city, a garage, a kitchen that has or can have a dishwasher, storage place and of course a garden. I will not list them whole here because that is not the point and it would bore you anyway. The very important thing that even if it is just a place to rent, it was very clear from the beginning that the house had to have a “soul” or something close to that idea.

We visited a first that was a wreck and where owners were probably expecting us to redo the place before they would eventually sell it. A house that made us feel like we were in a hospital as it was completely anonymous and where touching or changing anything was a sacrilege to the owners. One were there was a real bedroom and then three spaces in the attic that were promoted as rooms. A charming one from inside but where we felt like the architect had decided to put all the rules of practicality outside and where you could not fit any piece of furniture inside due to weird angles, doors, windows or even roof.

Anyway all those were close to what we wanted and we were very close to pick one of them until we fell on the house we both loved. Big rooms, garage big enough to fit a car and park one in front, massive space in the kitchen, calm neighborhood (as far as we can tell), nice place in the basement and a garden that looked like it had been untouched for years. The person from the agency told us that the owners would take care of the garden before we moved in.

We decided to put an option on it and started the painstaking process of applying for it. The questions stripped us from head to toes and I think they know us more now than we know ourselves. It took forever to have answers from the agency they seem to have a hard time to reach the owners too. Eventually we received the draft of the proposition for the contract and decided to have a last look on our way back from a week end in the Ardennes.

That is were the world seems to be filled with strange people who do not think about the consequences of their actions. I was driving at the time and missed the house… why? Because the whole garden was gone! The owners seemed to have decided to remove everything, from the trees to the hedges including the plants, and grass. The only thing that was left was the bare ground and the house in the middle of it.

I must admit, I lost it. Was it that I was tired after the trip, the look in the eyes of my girlfriend about to cry, the fact of being powerless, looking at someone destroying nature for no reason, the fear of having to find something else in a short time, loosing the dreams we had for this garden or maybe all of it put together? On the way back I even stopped the car and started kicking the steering wheel while swearing against them for such a blunt stupid act. Needless to say that I also ended up with a worried girlfriend.

Anyway, after explaining this to the agency we got an appointment with the owners and decided to have last desperate attempt to understand what was possible and how they would fix this situation. When we arrived a new very small hedge has been planted but the rest of the garden was still a pool of mud. The owner explained to us that the previous tenants had disregarded the maintenance of the garden for the last five years and had left nature take over (great, that was what we liked!).

Unfortunately there are rules that limit some things you can do around there, like the heights of a tree, hedge and so on to a maximum of two meters and the hedges and the tree were about four meters high. Trimming them to that height would have killed them (apparently) and had led to an only possible choice, removing them.

Whether we believe this story or not is another question, the thing is that we managed to have an authorization from the owner to redecorate the garden as we see fit as long as we respect the initial convention. And thus we began surfing the net for any possible plant, hedge tree that would grow fast and give life back to this deserted ground.

Since then we cannot stop looking at the garden that we see around us, the type of hedges that we see and wonder how long it would take to grow. My view of the surrounding has been completely changed and includes even more details now than before.

I will not say that this was a positive experience yet, since we are not moving in until next month if we sign the contract. But it certainly is an event that changed the way I look at nature all around. I will probably post more once we sign the contract (I keep my fingers crossed) and start the move.

I am of course referring to the biggest information network that has, in the recent years, been gathering data in the form of blogs, social networks, messaging systems that have been slowly introduced into our daily life. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for the improvements of communication flow, even if it is not always for the best. But there are some hidden aspects of this electronic distribution that I would like to share with you. I will try to split them is sections that I thought were appropriate.

Friends & Family Network

I’m personally using my mobile phone, sms, emails, skype, msn, yahoo messenger, my blog and of course Facebook to keep in touch with my friends and family. I still get the odd complains by some that I am not reachable enough. Truth be told, I could communicate more but I sometimes don’t see the point or am basically not in the mood. There is an assumption that because you can be online you should be online. It is as if they should know why you are not there.
There has been a slow development of passive aggressive relation with my close surrounding. Whether I want it or not they are present, active and sometimes giving me more info than I want. The obvious status change on Twitter or facebook is the most obvious, but it is olso valid about the amount of mail that some feel compelled to send to you. All that would be fine around a beer in a bar or as conversation at a dinner table but it becomes a lot at the end of the day.
Bu this brings another aspect, over time you are building a source of historical information on your friends that are not only vague memories from the corner of your mind, but concrete written and stored information on birthdays, weddings, holidays, private confidence and hundreds of pictures. On the other hand they will know who you are in contact with, and your details as well, if you decide to share this information.
To illustrate, I’ll take the obvious example of just adding a female friend on your list. It might just grants you the wrath of your girlfriend or wife even if it was someone you already know for a long time. Or when there is a fall out between two of you friends and one doesn’t understand why you are still in touch with the other by being invited to a party and sharing pictures, or why he/she is still listed as a friend. There are also pictures that you/they took but would rather not see being displayed to all (embarrassing or compromising).
All this information and data is available to all of us already and more is coming. With tagging systems and content flow of digital information exchanged between mobile devices, your friends will soon be able to tell where you are/were at any point of the day.

Professional Queries

This is the field that has caused countless issues for some people. Especially in the US where paranoia seems to be a national sport and spying on your colleagues, employees or contractors seems to be done on a regular basis.
Take the case of twitter where there have been stories about employees being sacked or blamed after a comment they made e.g. “calling sick today, hangover after last night party” or the typical “I hate my job”, “my boss is an idiot” or more of “been called by a headhunter, interesting offer I think I will take it”.
Those are all posted for every one to see, and most of us were under the opinion that these comments where the equivalent of stating something around the coffee corner to a few trusted colleagues and that it would remain “private”. Except that it doesn’t.
More and more company recruitment process is to first type your name in generic search engine such as goolge.com or dedicated ones such as 123people.com. Whatever comes up can be a profile, flickr pictures, a blog article, your Amazon wish list… this can be good or bad bits and pieces that will be taken into account in during the selection process, even making you failing a degree because you are just drinking.
It even gets stressful when you already have a job. Suspicions on why you cleaned up your “linked In” online curriculum, the fact your name appears on monster.com recruitment database, questions about names of people working for competitors appearing in your contact list, or pictures of you at a party chatting with some “undesirable” people (ex-employees, competitors,…)
All these pieces of information can land on your manager’s desk or head of human resource department just before your annual review, the decision to sack you or if you deserve a promotion.

Complete Strangers

I am very happy that it is not my case (and hopefully it’ll remain that way) but some of us have been stalked or pursued by strangers cherishing some weird fantasy or just plainly too curious. The easy way out of these situations, if you were aware of it in the first place, used to be either ignoring them and go home or confronting them to cease this activity by threatening them. Anything more would have to be handled by the police but these are extreme cases. This longing for watching other people has been proven by the success of all those reality shows and is still growing. It even lead to an opening of the CCTV police network to the mass so that anyone can spot a crime.
Today’s level of personal information available is a global issue; finding your phone number is a mere click away, and so is your email, home address, social status, job description, what you may be interested in… Soon enough people will not even have to know your name since a simple snapshot taken on a cell phone could be used to look you up and start the search from there. I know that I am pushing the envelope on paranoia but it is a likely scenario.
As an example, just type your full name in Google surrounded by quotes, e.g. “John Smith” with a bit of luck your favorite social network page will be listed (MySpace, Facebook, …) and switching to the picture tab, you might even find a picture of you.
First time my girlfriend tried, it was a bit strange but she was expecting the results. However, when she tried her last name and a picture of her dad was listed on the first page of the result she felt a cold shiver through her spine because he does not use social networks or post picture online.

State & Private Organization

Of course you can only imagine what could be known about you if someone working in some state or private organization combines the information mentioned above with the information available on their own system.
I am not referring to the police, or the tax department. Banks can combine it with the content of your accounts, thus knowing your revenues and spending habits by just looking at your statement (shops, rent, restaurant, loans) by extrapolating they know not only where you live but what to expect inside that place. Medical insurance company will know about your every little problem and could even know that your brother has cancer before you do; that your wife might be cheating on you because she’s taking treatment for an STD and you are not.

Conclusion

For me, it only proves that we do not have to fear the possible big brother, we all are big brothers, watching each other and having access to such a level of personal data that it is becoming very easy to know someone or for someone to know you… even if you don’t want them to.

Since the very beginning of the internet, people have been using it to distribute illegal material. It was much handier and cheaper than copying and distributing disks with application, pictures or any documents. But unless you were a tech savvy geeky student, you wouldn’t even know that this was happening right under your nose.

Most of the channels involved in the distribution of those materials required a lot of patience and a bit of luck. It usually started on IRC (chat room) where the file would be made available by hacking the IRC server and installing a robot which would distribute the files. To circumvent the restrictions imposed on these chat rooms different tricks would be used, the easiest would be splitting the file in multiple parts that would not look conspicuous.

Other means where to hack FTP web site to deposit the file or even dedicated FTP site with login and passwords which would even sometimes use a ratio that would require the user to upload something before any could be downloaded from the server.

Piracy was mostly impacting software that, at the beginning, did not even require any sort of activation or serial number. The rules changed a little once the authors started to implement some protection which improved over time, starting from simple serial to online activation, dongles or CD that have continually present to use the application. This started the competition of some very groups on the web, these program hackers would find a way to remove these protections by using some resident program to elude the application, or even reprogram the main application to remove the protection altogether. The steps required to remove those protection would sometime require a lengthy process that had to be strictly followed by the user.

As of today these groups are still active and are releasing patches and other tools to counteract the protection that legitimate software developers include in their application. However piracy acts didn’t stop there; with the arrival of a new compression algorithm for music (MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 or MP3) which reduced the required side of a song file by a factor of eleven to one, it began to slowly spread as the standard to transfer pirated music file that were ripped from CDs.

However “user friendly” piracy became a possible with the arrival of Napster. The first so called peer to peer application that was available for all to use freely. The reaction of the music industry was quite strong once they learned that music files containing songs that had not been commercially released were available on Napster.

Because Napster used a central server to store the list of songs shared at any point in time by all the machines connected to it, it was possible for the authority to shut it down, which they did! The application and web site were later bought by a company who converted it to a pay per download site. But users had a taste of the possibility of online sharing, with the introduction of this peer to peer network using indexing and resource discovery; it didn’t take long to have other servers opening up with not only music but any sort of file. This was the beginning rise of the eMule application. The problem with this protocol is that if you make a search you might find what you want or you might end up with a file that seems likes what you are looking for but contains or is rubbish.

The next and most interesting protocol using unstructured peer-to-peer systems was released by Nullsoft. The company had previously published Winamp, which was the most popular application to play MP3 at the time and one of the reasons of the widespread adoption of the mp3 standard. After this success Nullsoft had been bought by AOL and even if their new application was available for a day before the corporation decided to shut down its distribution server, the damage had been done. Users were able to reverse engineer the Gnutella protocol and publish it publicly for everyone to use. This paved the way for application such as Limewire, Kazaa and many others. The one setback with this standard was that a rare file would not always show up in the result of the search on all the peers available at the time.

That changed with the arrival of structured peer-to-peer systems which basically worked the same way as the unstructured one except that it uses a globally consistent protocol to ensure that any node can efficiently route a search to some peer that has the desired file, even if the file is extremely rare. To work you need to have a tracker server that will communicate all the seeds that have the available file. It basically provides all the computers that have either the full file or some bits of it available to download. You only need to connect to the sever tracker once to be able to download files, afterwards you don’t really need the connection anymore, unless you want to update the list of nodes where you can fetch the file from. The internet location of that tracker site and the content that will be downloaded are stored in a “.torrent” file.

To distribute those torrent file, index web sites have been created with a database listing all those torrent tracker files. By using a Torrent downloading application such as µtorrent, users just have to just click the torrent file, this would list the content that has to be downloaded and the program will then connect to the tracker sites and start listing the computers that are currently sharing these files.

This is where the Pirate Bay story starts; Pirate Bay is one of those Tracker servers, the largest open one on the net at this point in time. The Pirate Bay also offers an index service to search and find torrent files. It is very important to understand that the Pirate Bay’s servers do not hold any copyright protected material, just index of torrent files that are giving an address to connect to get the list of computers that contain some parts or all of the content listed in the torrent file.

The operator and owner of the pirate bay’s website are claiming that they have as much control over the content of the site as Google has over the content of its search engine. Both are redirecting to other places and are not storing the information themselves. But, if the pirate bay is shut down the content will remain available for those currently downloading, however it will be impossible for anyone new to get access to this material again unless it was already listing another tracker website. The argument of the industry defending copyrighted material is that the web site intentionally facilitates the access to pirated material and therefore is breaking the law. Both arguments are the subject of the court case and even if a first ruling has convicted that the owner are guilty, they are still appealing and the website is still online…

I have to admire the tenacity of these people; they have faced the biggest industries and survived up until now. It is not surprising that they have become some kind of an icon when it comes to a modern version of a pirate, defying authority and using the big brother system against itself. It also provides that sort of Robin Hood picture of stealing to the rich and giving to the poor.

“Le 22 …2 fois 2….une double fête…un annif et une crémaillère…Le but, être plus que 2 …vous pouvez venir à 2 sans demi-mesure…pour que toute la nuit ça dure…

Dites 33 le 22 pour faire un bienheureux…pour son voyage au Canada un appareil photo il lui faudra…car l’ours est peureux…un zoom il vaut mieux ! ! !

Dites 33 aussi si vous voulez une blonde, une brune, une tequila ou une NA. L’open bar, c’est notre histoire (mais pour les spaghet’, berwet !”