Hans Muller's Blog

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Is the Future Going to Happen Somewhere Else?

I noticed that Chris Campbell's blog often includes a note about what music he was listening to as he wrote. This seems like a nice personal touch so I thought I'd copy it. I'm listening to a funny John Prine song about predicting the future and the chorus goes like this:

We are living in the future, I'll tell you how I know
I read it in the paper fifteen years ago
We're all driving rocket ships and talking with our minds
Wearing turquoise jewelry and standing in soup lines

A long time ago, when I was in college, I had a front row seat for the final act of the Disappearance of the Steel Industry in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. It had become cheaper to manufacture steel elsewhere and to have the work down by other people. It never occurred to me that the industry I was hoping to join might suffer the same slow fate. Of course it is, just as surely as one can increase profits by cutting costs. Last week the local paper's technology section included a column that gleefully warned the "Larry Lunchpails" of Silicon valley that their mid-level technology jobs were headed to Beijing and Bangalore. This is hardly a breaking story, in fact I noticed that the most popular java.net blog from August is a call to arms about the very same topic.

If current trends persist, one has to wonder what will become of the software engineering business here in Silicon Valley. Will an aging Ross Perot announce that he has finally found the source of the "giant sucking sound" he first heard back in 1996? Will some industry pundit finally be right about the biotech industry? Will there be souplines? I'm thinking that the answer can be found in Microsoft's market share and in computer viruses.

Microsoft's software runs on more than ninety percent of the computers connected to the internet. It has become the dank fetid breeding ground for computer viruses, a mosquito infested swamp that needs to be drained. And why are our Microsoftware computers so vulnerable? Why is it that each successive computer plague leaves an even bigger infestation than the last one? It's not (just) because Microsoft has a unique talent for creating the gaping security holes that computer viruses flow through. It's because their success has created a monoculture and any farmer will tell you that monocultures are highly susceptible to disease epidemics. Our computer farm lacks variety. Which brings me back to Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley is a diverse place. We're multicultural on many levels, from the places we come from to the places we think technology should go. Silicon Valley boosters will tell you that we're more innovative or that we work harder (but please don't say "work smarter") or that the entrepreneurial spirit is stronger here than anywhere else. I'm glad to believe that it's all true however I think the reason we're going to thrive in spite of the gravitational pull generated by lower costs is because of our differences. I don't know what idea is going to trigger the next economic boom however I'm confident that creative thoughts buzzing around in the brain of each technology dreamer here in Silicon Valley are unique. Most of those ideas will fuel little more than insomnia however thanks to large numbers it's inevitable that a few of them will be great. Insanely great. And because they're here, the individuals who possess the great ideas will not be able to avoid bumping into neighbors and friends and aquaintances who will help them get the next gold rush rolling. Right here.

Traveling Under the Watchful Eyes of the Big Brotherhood

I'm in Dublin Ireland this week for the GNOME Users and Developers Conference (GUADEC, pronounced "gua-dac"). It's a long way from Santa Clara California, not just in terms of hours and miles but in terms of queues and security checkpoints. Security has been tightened at airports by scanning luggage and people and shoes and by repeatedly checking one's boarding pass and photo ID.

Within the last couple of a months a proposal to enhance security at government sites by installing tens of thousands of web cams and deploying an army of eyeballs to watch them (from home!) has been widely reported. Most reports come with a subtitle like "Is this nuts or what?", however I have to admit to finding the idea intriguing. Despite 25 years of computer vision research, the human visual system is still the most effective way to distinguish an image of an intruder at the border of some restricted area from a deer or a tumbleweed or the wind and shadows. Webcams are cheap and, in theory, there's a Big Brotherhood Eyeball Workforce eagerly waiting to watch them.

Back in the 1960s Peter Graves' Impossible Mission force wouldn't have thought twice about penetrating a security system that required one to fabricate a photo-ID and a paper boarding pass. I can't imagine that modern bad guys would find the problem any more difficult. On this trip to Dublin, while I was waiting to have my papers checked, I thought about how one could apply RFID and The Brotherhood to the problem. RFID is "Radio Frequency Identification" a technology that's used for tracking individual products (like cans of beans) or packages or cattle. An inexpensive - about 5 cents - chip is attached to a paper tag along with a tiny anttena coil. An RFID reader hits the tag's antenna with a radio signal which powers up the chip and causes it to transmit it's unique 64 bit ID number.

So here's the idea. Make a digital photograph of every passenger when they first arrive at the airport and give each passenger a RFID transponder card. That initial check-in would be the only time the passenger would need to show their photo-ID, although aiport might make a photograph of that too, to enable a double check. Security people manning checkpoints with RFID readers would see each passenger's picture along with their ticket information. So passengers wouldn't have to repeatedly fumble for ID's and boarding passes. The passenger images would only be hours to minutes old, so checking would be much easier than eyeballing a 10 year old passport photo. RFID cards are cheap, likewise for database entries.

Once you've got a system that can passively identify passengers and is armed with a picture of every one of them, the job of watching would be easy to deploy on the net. The same eyeball army that might watch the fences at secure government sites, could also be employed matching faces at airport checkpoints or even on security cameras monitoring the wide open spaces within the air transportation system. Gadget freaks should find comfort in the fact that security guards could use PDAs (even their mobile phones!) to keep tabs on the flow of faces.

There are plenty of reasons why this would never work. The physical and software infrastructure problems are considerable. Although there's nothing fundamentally technically challenging about creating a system that stores ticket info and picture or two keyed by a dynamically allocated ID, it's easy to imagine the project being hamstrung by mundane problems like cabling, mounting web cameras, even getting passengers to hold still for a minute. And those problems pale by comparison to the privacy issue cyclone that such a system would inspire.

So I'm here at GUADEC and in case you haven't guessed, jet lag has me up early enough in the morning to record this lunacy. While I'm here, I hope to talk with GNOME developers about the prospects building more GNOME desktop applications in Java and for extending same in Java. The GNOME 2.2 release includes a bunch of new integration points for extending Nautilus and the Panel, I'm also hoping to develop a better understanding of how Java might be used in that context and with the venerable Bonobo component infrastructure. Java is widely used on Linux, more than any other language per a recent IDC report. In terms of Linux desktops, notably GNOME desktops, it's harder to say how prevalent Java is - since the whole point is creating applications that are not specific to any platform. By the end of this week's GUADEC conference, I hope to have a better feel for how well Java is working for GNOME.

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