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Digital gear is getting cheaper, smaller and better all the time, from cameras and MP3 players to the latest little netbooks and GPS units. Every gadget and gee-gaw has its obvious function, but it's in the not-so-obvious combinations of these new technologies that we find the excitement and eternal newness that we seem to crave. We also find some real silly ideas, along with good ones that we grow tired of, so there is a constant influx of "new and improved."
For instance, Chrysler says that it will start a build-to-order program in 2009, for 2010 models, offering a 3G-to-Wi-Fi device that will let you cruise the highway and surf the net at the same time. Drivers can use voice commands to perform common functions wired into the auto systems, while passengers can link up to cyberspace with any Wi-Fi-capable PDA, iPod, computer or other high-tech doohickey. Think of all the combinations possible with all these devices.
Still, one of the more intriguing possibilities combines a losing idea of Bill Gates' that no one even talks about anymore. He first brought it up in the mid-1990s, but it was quickly laughed away. However, the jabbermeisters of the Internet are starting to percolate on the subject again, since it is apparent that Microsoft "researchers" never stopped working on it up there in the Pacific Northwest.
The following was posted this past April on Splashdot.ord ("News for nerds, stuff that matters"):
Microsoft researchers are developing a way to enable you to capture every moment of your life and store it on your computer. The principal researcher with Microsoft's research arm, Gordon Bell, is developing a way for everyone to remember those special moments. The nine-year project, called MyLifeBits, has Bell supplementing his own memory by collecting as much information as he can about his life. He's trying to store a lifetime on his laptop. He's gone on to collect images of every Web page he's ever visited, television shows he's watched, recorded phone conversations, and images and audio from conference sessions, along with his e-mail and instant messages. Calculating that he saves about a gigabyte of information every month, he noted that he tries to only save photos of a megabyte or less. Bell figures one could store everything about his life, from start to finish, using a terabyte of storage.
Six months of replies and ripostes has created a very entertaining web page, and all of the objections that could be raised against this, well, "totalizing" notion probably have been raised. Number crunchers dispute the storage calculation, while privacy advocates had a score of targets among those few hundred words. Yet this kind of thinking should concern everyone, because the relentless march of progress will make the equipment needed to pull off a MyLifeBits-type operation, like all digital toys and tools, cheaper, smaller and better as time passes.
Completing the circle No, the article didn't get off track. It just took a while to get around the subject's ever-widening circle. Remember the new Chrysler options, the roving Wi-Fi and the voice-commanded, total-digitized multimedia experience? Now consider, too, that you will be able to outfit your car with a back-up camera from the option list - and if the car companies don't add a camera up front for you, you can just get the Voyager Pro and record video, time and GPS location to an SD card (with capacities up to 8GB and 16GB, depending on whether you use the SD or SDHC format).
So, let's add it all up. With off-the-shelf tech gear, and build-to-order components from the car manufacturer, you can record everything you do in or out of your car. But I can hear some of you asking, Why not just say you can record your whole day and be done with it, what's this about the car?
The car is the Trojan Horse. Car cams are the way to make this kind of activity acceptable. Look at the history of vehicle video, as a subset of the history of video security and video surveillance: As soon as the technology got cheap enough, video cameras started being installed in police cars. They have proven invaluable, and not just in apprehending drug runners on I-95 in Florida or coyotes careening through the desert with a pickup bed full of day laborers. The recordings have also nailed cops in the act of brutalizing women drivers and tipping over soda machines.
Ways and memes So we may know how this meme, this new and almost subconscious cultural acceptance of "a recorded life," propagates. First it's in the cars, then everywhere else. Let's step back and think where this could lead. The first thing you should consider, which is actually one of the things most people never consider at all, is how easy it is to edit, delete, add to, subtract from or otherwise alter a digital video file, with or without audio. An artsy-techie geek (may I coin an acronym here, ATG?) can, without too much trouble, show you crashing your 1998 Jeep Cherokee into the side of the Pentagon. And hey, isn't that Dick Cheney riding shotgun?
Computer forensics being what it is - a new discipline whose good guys have to learn some dirty doggone stuff to be leading edge - there is just no way that the average person will be able to authenticate a digital pic or video clip. The trust level, initially, will be nil, nada, zero, zip and fuggedabowdit. And that's not all, of course. The quirky nature of the enterprise suggests a boatload of lawsuits - curious, spurious and no doubt furious, as well - over copyrights, trademark infringement, invasion of privacy and (naturally) discrimination, sexual harassment and racism.
Chinese Menu Gadget Development All of these things happen. Every bad thing that can occur in the world, does. Of course there are people who videotape movies in the theater, use ethnic slurs, peek up women's dresses and don't return wallets they find on the bus. They are going to have a lot of editing to do, unless they get the "voice-command option" and walk around all day half-barking "Start!" and "Stop!" orders to their shirt-button zoom-lens recorders.
In fact, this may be just Chinese Menu Gadget Development at work once again. Some of these technology combinations may just be solutions in search of very specific (picayune?) problems, while others are just downright silly. There may be some use for front- and rear-facing cameras in autos, inasmuch as providing additional viewing capability to a driver is a good thing. You may even have a good reason, from time to time, to record the images being captured by one or both cameras.
You also may be well served from time to time by a portable videorecorder, but not necessarily a tiny spycam on your baseball cap or behind your second shirt button. And you certainly don't need one that's always on. And that's because, you see, most of what happens in our lives is routine, uneventful, mundane, even silly and pointless - hardly the sort of material most people want to memorialize. Think of it this way: When everyone in class gets an "A" there is no more better, worse, average or "needs improvement"; when everyone is an "honored student" at Podunk Middle School you can bet there are no real "honor students" there; and if everything is accorded the status of a recorded "life highlight," then, of course, there are no highlights. In this milieu there is nothing special, period.
The default position There are five or six more articles brewing to take care of all the tangents leading off from this one. We've just barely touched on the legal issues involved, and had room for only brief mentions of the political, psychological, emotional and technological facets of the issue. Yet we can still come to one important conclusion here, and that concerns the "default position" that we would assign to such devices as we use for video security, video surveillance, self-defense, property protection and even personal picture taking.
Since most of our day is pedestrian stuff; since most of what we say is not the least bit memorable; since we already know what the hallway from the bedroom to the living room looks like; and since it doesn't take much effort in the age of cellphone cameras and $9 one-use videocams to snap a pic or shoot a video of something really special - for all these reasons and so many more, dear reader, the default position for any sort of MyLifeBits unit should be "off."
By Scott McQuarrie, representing the EZWatch Pro brand, a leading provider of computer based Security Cameras for business, commercial and government applications.
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