There’s already been plenty of talk about 3D-printing entire buildings, but those ambitions may not remain strictly earthbound for too long. According to a new report from Phys.org, the European Space Agency and partners from London-based architecture firm Foster + Partners have begun to explore the feasibility of 3D printing a life-sustaining base on the lunar surface.

Of course, lunar dust on its own wouldn’t exactly make for the best building material, prompting the parties involved to look at ways to bolster the durability of their would-be moon base. Simulated moon dust was then combined with magnesium oxide and a “binding salt” to help the concoction settle properly, and the whole process is apparently capable of working in the vacuum of space thanks to a crafty approach to extruding liquids on the lunar surface.

Early concept designs from F+P feature a large weight-bearing dome along with a “cellular structured wall” to help protect inhabitants from ambient radiation and micrometeoroid strikes. There’s still a dearth of practical issues that need to be explored, but the printing process seems to work well enough on Earth.

“Our current printer builds at a rate of around 2 m per hour, while our next-generation design should attain 3.5 m per hour,” said Enrico Dini, founder of UK 3D printing company Monolite. He went on to say that the process of completing an entire building would take about a week, though whether or not that same timeframe could apply to actual lunar construction remains to be seen.

Granted, the notion of buliding a moon base out of the moon itself seems more than a little out there, but it’s really just a modern twist on an well-worn concept. Concepts like the Mars Direct plan (first conceived in the late 80s/early 90s) took a similar approach to managing fuel for long-term Mars missions. Under it, an unmanned vehicle would be sent to Mars and would use a cache of hydrogen and an onboard nuclear reactor to help create methane and oxygen for use as return fuel for a later manned mission. With weight being one of the biggest limiting factors when it comes to space travel, the ability to craft a habitable environment almost exclusively with materials found at the landing site could dramatically ease the process of establishing long-term enclaves off-world.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I love the Internet so much. America’s netizens have demanded that President Obama consider building the legendary Star Wars Death Star and the White House has responded. Not surprising, they have thoughtfully rejected the request, claiming it would cost an estimated $850,000,000,000,000,000 and that “the Administration does not support blowing up planets”. The White House was forced to offer an official response to arguably the silliest question in American history since the petition garnered the requisite 25K signatures on the WeThePeople petitioning system.

A serious mistake, Mr. President. You can never have enough planet-sized lasers – nbcnews.to/WZqSvf #starwars

—
Darth Vader (@darthvader) January 12, 2013

After a groundswell of media attention cast a spotlight on the Administration’s delayed response to the petition, the good folks in the Executive Branch finally caughed up an equally silly blog post, “This Isn’t the Petition Response You’re Looking For.”

“The Administration shares your desire for job creation and a strong national defense, but a Death Star isn’t on the horizon,” wrote Paul Shawcross is Chief of the Science and Space Branch at the White House Office of Management and Budget. In addition to a reasonable aversion for mass genocide, Shawcross worried that the costly weapon has a well-known vulnerability. “Why would we spend countless taxpayer dollars on a Death Star with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship?”

The White House did exploit the soon-to-be viral blog post to plug the administration’s own space agenda, including the International Space Station and the mars rover. We are aware this post conveniently doubles as a very clever marketing gimmick, but its too deliciously silly not to report (it also speaks to the oddities that the government must deal with when they experiment with open government initiatives).

Finally, we get the feeling that the super-geeky blog post was a labor of love. “Remember, the Death Star’s power to destroy a planet, or even a whole star system, is insignificant next to the power of the Force,” concluded Shawcross.

Read the full post below:

“The Administration shares your desire for job creation and a strong national defense, but a Death Star isn’t on the horizon. Here are a few reasons:

• The construction of the Death Star has been estimated to cost more than $850,000,000,000,000,000. We’re working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it.
• The Administration does not support blowing up planets.
• Why would we spend countless taxpayer dollars on a Death Star with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship?

However, look carefully (here’s how) and you’ll notice something already floating in the sky — that’s no Moon, it’s a Space Station! Yes, we already have a giant, football field-sized International Space Station in orbit around the Earth that’s helping us learn how humans can live and thrive in space for long durations. The Space Station has six astronauts — American, Russian, and Canadian — living in it right now, conducting research, learning how to live and work in space over long periods of time, routinely welcoming visiting spacecraft and repairing onboard garbage mashers, etc. We’ve also got two robot science labs — one wielding a laser — roving around Mars, looking at whether life ever existed on the Red Planet.

Keep in mind, space is no longer just government-only. Private American companies, through NASA’s Commercial Crew and Cargo Program Office (C3PO), are ferrying cargo — and soon, crew — to space for NASA, and are pursuing human missions to the Moon this decade.

Even though the United States doesn’t have anything that can do the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs, we’ve got two spacecraft leaving the Solar System and we’re building a probe that will fly to the exterior layers of the Sun. We are discovering hundreds of new planets in other star systems and building a much more powerful successor to the Hubble Space Telescope that will see back to the early days of the universe.

We don’t have a Death Star, but we do have floating robot assistants on the Space Station, a President who knows his way around a light saber and advanced (marshmallow) cannon, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is supporting research on building Luke’s arm, floating droids, and quadruped walkers.

We are living in the future! Enjoy it. Or better yet, help build it by pursuing a career in a science, technology, engineering or math-related field. The President has held the first-ever White House science fairs and Astronomy Night on the South Lawn because he knows these domains are critical to our country’s future, and to ensuring the United States continues leading the world in doing big things.

If you do pursue a career in a science, technology, engineering or math-related field, the Force will be with us! Remember, the Death Star’s power to destroy a planet, or even a whole star system, is insignificant next to the power of the Force.

Paul Shawcross is Chief of the Science and Space Branch at the White House Office of Management and Budget“

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Those who dreaded the ‘Silicon Valley’ reality TV series that aired this past year on Bravo did not have much to worry about after all. The show received mostly negative reviews and had a lackluster performance in the ratings department, and it doesn’t seem likely to return — at least not to chronicle the tech scene here in California.

But today we got word of a new TV show also dubbed ‘Silicon Valley’ that seems like it should be really worth watching. The PBS history series American Experience has made a new documentary focused on what fueled the fire for Silicon Valley and the modern tech industry’s earliest days — the founding of Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 by the then 29-year-old Robert Noyce, an icon in Silicon Valley who a young Steve Jobs later counted as a key mentor.

We’ll have to wait until February 19th to see the whole thing, which seems really far away but will actually be here before we know it (can you believe it’s already late December, time flies, I’ll be 90 before I know it, etc.)

But in the meantime, embedded above is a short trailer, and below is the plot synopsis the show’s publicity arm is sending around. It all looks pretty fascinating, and should be a great way for us relatively wet behind the ears Silicon Valley newbies to learn the real history of the early industry mavericks who paved the way to today.

“In 1957, before Apple and Google, before stock-option millionaires and billionaire venture capitalists, a group of eight brilliant young scientists defected from the Shockley Semiconductor Company — the first company to work in the field of silicon semiconductors — in order to start their own transistor company. The “Traitorous Eight,” as they were dubbed, created Fairchild Semiconductor, a company whose radical innovations helped make the United States a leader in both space exploration and the personal computer revolution, transforming the way the world works, plays and communicates. Their leader was 29-year-old Robert Noyce, a physicist with a brilliant mind and the affability of a born salesman. Over the next decade, Noyce ran the new company and co-invented the integrated circuit, which would become an essential component of modern electronics including computers, motor vehicles, cell phones, and household appliances. Told through the story of Noyce, who went on to found Intel, Silicon Valley is a vibrant examination of the rough-and-tumble early days of the high tech industry and the thrilling interplay of cutting-edge science and high-stakes business that defines the unique culture of Silicon Valley. Directed by Randall MacLowry, Silicon Valley premieres on American Experience on Tuesday, February 19, 2013 from 8:00 to 9:30 p.m. ET on PBS (check local listings).

On October 4, 1957, the young founders of the newly minted start-up heard some startling news: the Soviet Union had just launched the first artificial satellite into orbit around the earth. With the United States scrambling to catch up, the timing couldn’t have been better for the upstarts at Fairchild. Eisenhower quickly launched NASA and the nation’s new obsession with technology provided the opportunity of a lifetime. In less than two years, Noyce would co-create a groundbreaking invention that would help put men on the moon. But Noyce’s innovation — the integrated circuit — would have an impact far beyond the Apollo program. The integrated circuit, also known as the microchip, would re-shape the future, making possible the invention of smart phones and digital video recorders, pacemakers and microwaves possible, and launching the world into the Information Age.

Not only did Noyce’s invention transform the world, his management style launched the unique business culture for which Silicon Valley would come to be known — openness over hierarchy, risk over stability, jeans over suits. This revolutionary new style continued at Noyce’s next venture, Intel, which in 1971, introduced the world’s first microprocessor, the driving force of every digital product we use today, and the heart of a 100-billion-dollar industry.

An eye-opening look at the birthplace of the modern technological era told by the people who shaped it, Silicon Valley is a fascinating reminder of how a few brilliant iconoclasts transformed a rural farmland into one of the most exciting, innovative and influential places on earth.”

Photo via The Computer History Museum

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Tim Westergren is founder and chief strategy officer of Pandora. Follow him on Twitter. 

Of all the activities at Pandora, witnessing the impact of our personalized radio on the careers of working musicians is the most gratifying. Over the last 12 years we have assembled over a million analyzed songs in the Music Genome Project, representing more than 100,000 artists, the majority of which are independent working musicians.

Today, more than 95 percent of those songs play every month. As Pandora’s listenership has achieved significant scale – now streaming more than 1.2 billion hours to about 60 million listeners every month – a very exciting vision is coming into focus for how personalized radio can improve the fundamental dynamics of this industry for artists.

What we’re beginning to witness is the potent combination of scale, data, and one-to-one communication. Since 2005, we have registered more than 175 million listeners in the U.S. In addition to ZIP codes, age, and gender, these listeners have shared their personal musical preferences to the tune of more than 20 billion “thumbs” up and down. Pandora has become a window into American music fans. Never before has there been a platform capable of delivering the music of tens of thousands of artists to the right audience at scale; and never before has there been a platform of this size and sophistication to activate fans on a national and local level.

We see Pandora as a powerful resource to be shared with artists to help them reach their fans and build successful careers. We’ve begun sharing our data with a steady stream of artists who have come through our offices. When one artist came through recently, we sat down and looked at the map of their top 10 markets on Pandora. They told us that they only received traditional FM radio play in just one of these 10 markets. In other words, this popular band relies on Pandora, and not FM radio, in nine out of their top 10 markets.

When the lead singer of another band visited us last year, he learned that they had never toured in what Pandora showed was one their top markets – Salt Lake City. Since then, he reported back that the data was right: they booked a stop there for the current tour and played to a packed house of true super fans.

As live performance becomes an ever more important part of artist income, especially for independent artists, there is nothing more valuable than data and technology that can help artists expand the repertoire of cities where they can perform to sizeable crowds. The larger the number, the more often you can play without saturating any given market.  That was always a great challenge when I was in a band. Cultivating a new market is a time-intensive and expensive proposition. The bands who did it were true road warriors and spent many years playing to virtually empty rooms.

One strategy bands employ is to open for local bands who have already established an audience (and reciprocate when that band comes to their home city). Technology now allows us to do that much more easily. Artists could use the intelligence of the Music Genome Project and the insights from listener thumbs to combine the fan bases of two complementary bands. It’s a perfect way to plot a joint tour – maybe even a traveling festival. We know that bookers are already making use of Pandora to book opening acts, but this kind of tool could make the process much more efficient.

And this isn’t just theoretical. We’ve experimented a number of times with this technology. In July we put on a show with Walk the Moon at the Key Club in Los Angeles. After sending emails to listeners that had thumbed up their music on Pandora that lived within driving distance of the club, almost a thousand people showed up. We’ve done the same for Aimee Mann, Dawes, Train, Portugal. The Man, Theophilus London, and more.

What makes this all the more exciting is when you consider that Pandora still only represents around 6.5 percent of total radio hours. What if Internet radio had 65 percent of the hours? Multiply these numbers by 10, and imagine a world in which every talented artist would be heard by all of the listeners who might like their music. And every time an artist played a show, all of the listeners in the vicinity of that show knew they were performing and had an easy way to buy a ticket. This has always been the great promise of the Internet and it’s within our grasp.

Pandora is on track to pay over $250 million in royalties to performers this year, but that represents just a small part of the benefit of Internet radio. Ultimately, artists thrive based on their ability to attract and cultivate a loyal fanbase – and there is no better place to find that fanbase than on radio where 80 percent of music listening still takes place. By adding connectivity, and the ability to communicate directly with individual listeners, Internet radio opens up a world of opportunity for all artists that has never existed before.

Everyone stands to gain from a large and healthy Internet radio industry that can truly put the power of data and technology in the hands of working artists everywhere.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

iZettle — often called the “Square of Europe” for being an early mover on its dongle-based mobile payment service for small merchants — is definitely getting down to business. Today, the Swedish-based startup announced that it has finally exited its beta phase across the rest of its Nordic footprint of Denmark, Finland and Norway, including a launch of its Android service, and come up with a workaround to accept Visa payments in those markets once again.

That means its card readers are now available for anyone to use with and iOS or Android device — priced at €24 but free when users redeem a voucher to use the service — and users can once again accept any card over iZettle — as long as users don’t mind bypassing the card reader to do it.

The news comes on two other big developments for iZettle in the last few weeks: an injection of cash from American Express, an official launch in the UK partnering with new 4G operator EE, and a launch in Germany partnering with T-Mobile (which is a partner in the EE JV as well).

In all cases, iZettle takes a 2.75% commission on all card transactions.

iZettle says that the Visa workaround will work like this: instead of using the chip-based card reader, users will be directed via a text message to a secure site, where they type in their card details. Yes, it sounds a little cumbersome, especially compared to the zippy process of inserting a card, scrawling your name across a touchscreen, and going. “While it’s not our preferred solution, it is compliant with all Visa Europe’s regulations,” iZettle notes on its blog.

From what I understand, this is still a work in progress and a further solution may come into play later. Payleven, the Rocket Internet-incubated competitor, has produced a separate device where users can enter their PINs to process card payments, and while this is one option for iZettle, it takes longer to develop and produce these.

In the meantime, this move in the Nordics was an essential one for iZettle, which is now sitting on a decent amount of funding (€42.6 million), but has a lot of competitors breathing down its neck, yet for now still is in the clear in terms of Square or Paypal’s here coming into Europe and picking up users simply on brand recognition and financial heft.

The full blog post is below:

First of all, we’d like to send one enormous thank you to all our Nordic neighbours. These last few months, your patience, encouraging words and use of our service have kept us going through many long nights. Today, we’re over the moon to finally be able to bring some good news to you: We’re ready for an official launch in Denmark, Finland and Norway!

This launch means we have three pieces of good news to share:

• Now anyone can sign up and get their hands on a chip-card reader! Simply sign in to your portal to get an Original Chip-card Reader or an Audio Jack Reader for Android and iPhone 5.
• We’re finally releasing iZettle for Android in Denmark, Finland and Norway.
• As of right now, both old and new iZettlers will be able to take Visa payments! Check out the Help page to find out exactly how it works.
So please go ahead, download the app from the App Store or Google Play, get your very own chip-card reader and spread the word that now anyone can take card payments.

Thank you ever so much for your support.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

High-tech watches are, arguably, a dime-a-dozen. But the Division Furtive electro-mechanical watch is something special. Built using a series of Swiss micro-motors (or LEDs), the face displays the time by moving little indicators along a sliding scale. You can see the day, date, time, day of week, time zone, phase of the moon, and a chronometer (along with a battery indicator) on a face that looks like it should be used to deflect Blofeld’s cat.

You can also set the watch by flashing it with a smartphone screen. Using a light sensor, the watch will “read” the flashes on the screen and synchronize itself with your phone. The company is making two models: the 40, which uses LED lights in place of motors, and the 46, which will include the motors.

Designed by Gabriel Menard, the entire project is currently ratcheting up in expectation of a December launch although the mechanical version will come later. “Over the last 18 months, I’ve designed, prototyped and built a novel wrist watch that has linear cursors instead of rotating hands,” said Menard. “I know only two other watches that do this…they’re selling for 250k$ while mine is priced at $3,600.”

$3,600 a little rich for your blood? The Kickstarter project is for the LED models only and pledges start at $190 and includes an etched serial number on the side of the case. You can reserve a 46 for a mere $73 and pay for and receive it when Menard completes them. He’s looking for £20,000 and is at about £2,000 right now.

My watch blogger buddy Patrick has been following these guys for a while and he’s come away impressed. At 50mm it’s wildly huge and the markings may be a little busy but definitely offer a sense of mystery and mayhem. At less than $200 for a custom, limited-edition watch, the 40 won’t steer you wrong and the mechanical sounds amazing once it’s complete. It’s no Golden Gun, but it’s still pretty cool.

Project Page

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Likened to a space race, there are a whole bunch of startups trying to solve the problem of how to ‘try on’ clothes online. And for the online fashion industry, it’s a big problem, too. The inability to see if a garment actually fits before making a purchase, not only lowers conversion rates, but is also seeing return rates as high as 70%, an expense that online retailers can ill afford. Arguably, however, no one has landed on the moon, quite yet, and the virtual fitting room market is still wide open.

One startup that thinks it’s well-positioned to do so is the UK’s Metail, which launched a partnership with Warehouse (owned by the Aurora Fashions Group) last week, following a successful trial of its virtual fitting room solution with retailer, Tesco. We’re also hearing that a commercial trial with Rocket Internet’s Zalando in Germany could be announced as early as tomorrow, signaling Metail’s first International customer, while closer to home it’s added another client in the form of Shop Direct. That’s a pretty impressive roster for a startup that, I’m guessing, you probably haven’t heard of.

Metail’s purposely been flying under the tech press radar, says CEO and co-founder, Tom Adeyoola, and has effectively been operating in “stealth mode” since it was founded in January 2008. Rather than courting PR, the company has been concentrating on building relationships across the fashion retail industry and developing its technology.

“We’ve not wanted to make bold claims or over-hype expectations about our product in the meantime”, he says.

That product is a virtual fitting room based on Metail’s 3D visualisation technology, which enables a clothes shopper to upload a photo and dial in a few basic measurements to create a virtual representation of themselves (a ‘MeModel’) so that they can ‘try on’ garments virtually. It’s an approach which, on the surface, is attempting to be simpler than competitors, but under the hood is no mean feat.

“We’re the only people in the world who allow you to build accurate 3D versions of yourself from basic information and a photo”, claims Adeyoola. “Metail’s competitors offer expensive robotic mannequins, web measurement tools and dress-up dolls but none have the “wow” factor that comes with creating a virtual you, with dress size and fit information so personally tailored.”

To pull this off, Metail doesn’t rely on CGI. Instead, each garment is professionally photographed and digitised so that they look “exactly” as they do in-store, surfacing “every wrinkle, pleat and fold”. However, getting that process to scale is quite an undertaking.

“One of the company’s key challenges has been to design a fast, cheap method of stocking the online fitting room with clothes. This means photographing garments and turning them into 3D digital images ready for customers to add to their MeModels”, says Adeyoola.

Along with those claims, Metail’s team (on paper, at least) is equally impressive. Chief Scientist and co-founder is Duncan Robertson. Following a Ph.D in Computer Vision at Cambridge University, he founded Redimension Ltd, a consultancy focused on solving specialist computer vision problems for the likes of Microsoft and Samsung. This included being involved in Microsoft Research’s work on the Kinect. Meanwhile, Adeyoola himself is an Economics graduate from Cambridge, and has a career that spans a number of positions in the technology industry, most recently as Head of Gaming at Inspired Gaming Group. Overall, the company’s headcount is at around 27 and features 5 Ph.Ds. Its offices are split between London’s Silicon Roundabout and an R&D-focussed base in Cambridge, UK.

Interestingly, for a startup that has, until now, remained so stealthy, Metail has raised a decent £2.7 million, though this doesn’t include any institutional funding, as such. Investment came initially via a ‘friends and family’ round in October 2008, followed by funding from a number of Angel investors in March 2010. In addition, Metail recently won a TSB R&D grant and has received R&D tax credits.

“We will shortly be looking to raise our first institutional round to scale the business”, says Adeyoola.

To that end, the company is already generating revenue from those retailer partnerships (it makes money on every purchase that comes via its virtual fitting room), while in terms of scale, a user only has to create their MeModel once as it’s portable across supporting sites.

Metail’s competitors already include the likes of TrueFit, MyShape, Clotheshorse, True & Co., Fitiquette, and Fits.me — and Adeyoola acknowledges that the company has yet to completely solve the virtual fitting room problem.

“We focused on the least sexy part and asked ourselves ‘how do we get the digital photography cost down so we never have to charge retailers for it?’”, he says. “The research and development team is working 15 months ahead on our version of digital photography so we can fully automate our 3D garment models.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

What do you do after you spend years working on very serious, infrastructure problems supporting Gmail and literally hundreds of millions of users globally?

You build a drawing app. Or at least that’s what Gabor Cselle did after he stopped being an Android and Gmail product manager, following an acquisition into Google two years ago. He and co-founder Jeremy Orlow had been working on Gmail and Chrome respectively.

“We just wanted to do something fun. Something that would make our friends smile and feel really lightweight,” Cselle said. “This is the simplest idea that we could come up with. We literally were just like: What is something that will delight people?”

So they created DrawChat.

In DrawChat, you can send friends silly sketches or even draw all over existing photos from your camera. It’s goofy, and a bit reminiscent of DrawSomething, the game that was acquired by Zynga earlier this year in the $180 million OMGPOP deal. But it also feels a bit like Pair as well, since you have these long very, visual records of conversation with friends and family.

Most of my drawings look pretty terrible given the limited screen size and well, the limitations of drawing with your finger. There are different colors to choose from and plenty of backgrounds like photos on the moon and people looking angry or surprised.

The app spreads virally through text messages (not through Facebook yet, since they’re waiting on the social network’s deep integration into iOS 6). If you send a drawing to a friend who doesn’t have the app, they’ll see a preview of the picture and be prompted to download the app.

Cselle has a specialty in mail and messaging after working on Gmail, then enterprise-focused mail startup Xobni, and then his own mail search startup Remail, which was bought by Google. But he’s clearly taking a break from e-mail.

“If you want to build something in e-mail or a new way to handle task management, it’s going to take you a year,” he said. “We wanted to do something quick and fun.”

Indeed. Cselle, Orlow and another co-founder Chloe Bregman built the app in about five weeks from start to finish.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The power of the internet lies in its near-infinite mutability. It’s an edifice of information being added to and sculpted by as many hands as there are eyes viewing it. Truly democratic and increasingly accessible, it will soon be the vector for most communication that takes place on our world.

But its mutability is also a weakness, as so many great strengths are. The weakness arises from a lack of permanence: it is impossible to make an indelible mark.

Lack of permanence! you say. Why, I can request 500 pages of data on file at Facebook, and the NSA is building a profile on me that includes every cookie I’ve ever been issued. True, but the data itself is impermanent. Vulnerable in a dozen ways to being rewritten, manipulated, retouched, softened, or otherwise reduced from a record to a falsification.

The data we create today is not etched in stone but “writ in water.” The benefits of this we have seen, and monumental they are, but soon we will know its danger, too.

The chocolate ration has been increased

Broadly speaking, the potential for fraud on the internet is as great as the potential for good, but the idea of this article isn’t to enumerate the many ways in which data can be manipulated for nefarious purposes. The problem lies at a higher level of organization: higher than engineering (e.g. “video is too high-bandwidth”) but not quite philosophical (e.g. “why should we pay for software”). It’s simply this:

There is no simple and reliable way to tell whether the information you are looking at has been altered in any way. Every word, every image, every byte has to some significant degree an unknown provenance.

There are some ways to be reasonably sure about some things, to be sure, like the complicated sub pixel breakdown to which photographs can be subjected, or textual analysis, or timestamps. But like all countermeasures these are soon defeated, and you’re back to where you started.

It’s not a problem unique to digital data; counterfeiting and data manipulation go back to prehistory. We don’t have to solve the problem of human iniquity. But it would be nice if there was some way of ensuring that any given portion of data, be it text, image, moving image, audio, or what have you, has remained undisturbed since it was set down.

In a way it becomes a philosophical problem here at last, but one that ends in a sort of informational nihilism. How can you really be sure something is original? How do we know someone hasn’t modified the Constitution, replaced the surveillance tapes, bribed the scholars, a la George Orwell? That way lies madness. But it is practical to want to know whether a news report you just read was changed after publication, or whether a photo has been retouched in any way.

Of course it’s not always necessary to know these things. With very little in the way of real integrity, the internet has come extremely far. Just as it is not necessary to have every exchange of goods notarized and every conversation recorded, it’s not necessary to record everything on the internet in some irreversible, indelible way. But it’s troubling that even if we wanted to write something in stone, there is no established way to do so.

It’s for this reason that the cautious (and indeed, the paranoid) are unwilling to renounce local storage. And although you may not ever understand the technology you use, you at least can ensure to your own satisfaction that your data is yours, and furthermore is the same as it was last week.

Write-only memory

It is not a fundamental limitation of the internet or computing, which means that eventually it will be solved. Will there be data centers stacked high with write-only solid-state storage where the data is seared permanently into nano structures? Will a distributed network check the internet’s sums at the drop of every packet? Will people just have to trust each other?

For now the web of trust suffices, but when a murder trial hangs on information that one party says was manipulated and the other says is original, trust is no longer an option. Originality must be proved, or manipulation disproved, beyond a reasonable doubt. And doubts are becoming ever more reasonable; how many pictures have you heard of recently in news reports that have been modified in nontrivial ways to advance a political agenda? Wars have been started over less.

As the virtual world continues to merge and integrate with the real, they both take on each other’s aspects. In the case of the visual and physical vocabulary of computers, it reaches back to the earliest compatible representation of the concept, as I wrote last month in Iconoclasm. And why should there not develop an analog for authenticity that does not rely on an authority or certificate? I know a mountain is old not because a geologist tells me so, but because it is self-evident that mountains are old, just like it’s self-evident that you can’t touch the moon (well, most of us can’t), that you can’t pick up a house, that you can’t breathe in water.

A real and powerful mechanism for establishing authenticity must be a cornerstone of the internet if it is to be used with confidence in matters of gravity. How it will ultimately work will likely be a surprise, but as with most interesting developments in technology, today’s fantasy is tomorrow’s necessity.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As I write this, NASA’s Curiosity rover is hurtling through space as it has been for the past eight months, but that all changes tonight. With any luck (scratch that — with a staggering amount of luck), that Mini Cooper-sized envoy will survive its tricky seven minute atmospheric entry, after which it will roam the Martian surface conducting a slew of science experiments for nearly two years.

It’s all arguably important stuff — what Curiosity finds could be instrumental to understanding the origins of the planet, not to mention that it could help pave the way for a manned mission — but I have to wonder how many people living in this age of distraction actually give a damn.

who cares if there was life on Mars? just a waste of more money—
Harry Quick (@HarryQuickk) August 04, 2012

I think NASA is a waste of money. Who cares about Mars…—
DYL∆N THE VILL∆IN (@Dylan_James99) August 02, 2012

“@woahlulu: Does anyone know what tome curiosity lands on Mars tomorrow?” Who cares—
Adan N. (@TitoTarintino) August 05, 2012

NASA, to its credit, has been doing what it can to drum up interest in the mission. There’s (curiously enough) a Twitter account for the rover, which can be seen chatting it up with Neil deGrasse Tyson and providing status updates in the first person. Oh, and the organization will be streaming the night’s events, offering up a glimpse inside the human drama of mission control.

On some level though, I can’t blame those who don’t care. NASA’s recent history with Mars has been a spotty one — after a string of successful fly-bys and probe landings in the early-to-mid 70s, NASA returned to the red planet with the Pathfinder mission in 1997 (I was in third grade at the time, and utterly, utterly enthralled by the whole thing), but such incidents seem to be the exceptions. According to Reuters, 26 out of 40 Mars missions have either gone awry or gone up in (perhaps not always metaphorical) smoke — not terribly heartening odds, especially since Curiosity’s landing is going to be one of the trickiest yet.

Failure, sad to say, is most definitely an option.

That’s to say nothing of the fact that there’s just so much stuff going on right now. The Olympics. The mess in Syria. Tropical storms. Even decidedly niche events like the Apple v. Samsung weigh heavily on some people’s minds. And, you know, some people are only concerned with what’s going to be on television tonight. There’s nothing wrong with that either.

There’s also a slight sexiness problem. Now, putting a man on the moon — that was something that really brought people together. If you’ll forgive me for sentimentalizing a moment I (nor many of you) weren’t a part of, that day in July 1969 pushed us all forward, if only just a little bit. Perhaps naturally, landing a car-sized robot on the surface of another planet just doesn’t seem as weighty or substantial, despite the sheer complexity of what’s involved and what it could lead to. We didn’t put our footprints on Mars. We haven’t put lives on the line. Not yet, anyway.

So, yes, there are plenty of reasons why people can’t be bothered to care about rover wheeling its way around a planet that’s roughly 35 million miles away. But if you find yourself feeling a twinge of curiosity about that relatively tiny machine born of lofty ambitions, here’s why you should care about what happens tonight.

First off, humanity is reaching out to plop (fine, another) something of its own creation onto another world. Just think about that for a minute. Louis C.K. has a great bit (that many of you have probably already seen, so indulge me) about how a guy he sat next to on a plane was moaning about flaky in-flight WiFi while he was encased in a streamlined metal tube powering its way through the friggin’ sky at 600 miles per hour. The point is, there’s a tendency for people to get wrapped up in the earth-bound, and it’s always nice for a change of pace.

What’s more, with Curiosity, NASA’s not just reaching toward the heavens — it’s planning to learn as much as it can from them. You have to admit, there’s something more than a little wonderful about that. There’s untold value in what we can learn from Curiosity, though the information the rover is able to glean may not be immediately useful. What’s the point in learning about Mars’ past? To expand upon the corpus of human knowledge! To understand our crazy, hectic, beautiful universe even a fraction of a percent better.

Even so, those findings could have a practical impact on future Mars missions, both those envisioned by NASA and those in the growing commercial space movement. Will this ridiculous landing scheme work? If it does, you can bet someone will try it again some day. Of course, not every company in that field needs the coaxing. SpaceX founder Elon Musk seems to look at Mars much in the same way — it’s a goal to be met because it’s there, waiting for us to set foot on it.

“That’s always been a goal of SpaceX,” Musk recently told the L.A. Times. “We’re hoping to develop the technology to do that in probably 12 to 15 years.”

And that’s just one facet of his ambitions for mankind’s space-faring future. Musk said back in March that one of his company’s ambitions was to establish a long-term colony on the red planet. His declaration smacks of hubris — all SpaceX can do now is dock with the International Space Station — but it’s exactly that sort of thinking that helps push through the myriad roadblocks that such a project would almost definitely encounter.

In the end, Curiosity could be the harbinger of big, big things to come. On the other hand, it could crash and burn on the Martian surface, signaling the abject loss of $2.5 billion. Either way, tell me that’s not something worth caring about.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch