Sunday, August 11, 2013
Test Match Special and Technological Agency
For those not familiar with international cricket’s Umpire Decision Review System (DRS), it is the process by which certain matters are decided on the field, not just by the umpires, but by a series of advanced technologies observing the game: watching, analysing, and even listening to it. Haddin was initially given not out when he appeared to be caught behind, presumably because the umpire didn’t believe he had hit the ball. But after England appealed the decision, the decision was referred to the third umpire, and DRS. A slow-motion infra-red camera known as Hot Spot, trained on the batsman from the far side of the field, showed a momentary but incontrovertibly bright dot of friction heat on Haddin’s bat as he just nicked the ball into the England wicket-keeper’s hands. Another system, not officially part of DRS but widely used by broadcasters, confirmed the decision. The Snickometer, a combination of slow-motion camera and high-quality microphone, detected an almost imperceptible but audible “snick” as the ball struck the bat’s edge. The game was England’s.
Hot Spot’s technology was adapted by an Australian broadcasting company for sporting use, but is based on pioneering military work by French scientist Nicholas Bion for tank and jet fighter tracking. The twin SLX-Hawk thermal imaging cameras at Trent Bridge were built by a British engineering company, Selex ES, which also designs laser rangefinders, radars and other sensors for planes, warships and satellites. The Snickometer was invented in the mid-90s by British Computer Scientist Alan Plaskett, who has also worked on Hot Spot. The final piece of DRS, and the best known one due to its use in Tennis and other sports, is Hawk-Eye, another product of British engineering – Roke Manor Research, based in Romsey, which also produces signal intercept systems and altimeters for drone aircraft.
Hawk-Eye uses a network of high-performance cameras to track a ball in motion, combining the footage from each one in order to create a three-dimensional representation of the ball’s trajectory. In tennis, this yields the footprints which decide whether a line call is given in or out in contested calls, and in cricket it is used to predict whether a ball deflecting by the batsman’s pad would have hit the wicket, or not. But of course, this is only a prediction, more accurate than a human eye and capable of greater accuracy than human judges, but not, in any strict sense, infallible. The complexity of the calculations used to determe Hawk-Eye’s accuracy rival those of the more famous, and equally misunderstood, Duckworth-Lewis method. (...)
And this is where sports technology begins to illuminate larger issues around human and technological agency. An unlikely champion of humanity has emerged in the person of Sepp Blatter, President of FIFA. Soccer players and fans have long called for the introduction of goal-line technology, which would be able to tell more accurately than referees if a ball had indeed crossed the line. A number of different approaches, one based on Hawk-Eye, another using chips implanted in footballs, are currently under trial. However, Blatter has long opposed these, based partly on their accuracy, but also going on the record to say that “Other sports regularly change the laws of the game to react to the new technology. … We don’t do it and this makes the fascination and the popularity of football”. What underlies this statement is a fundamental belief that sport is a human undertaking, with all the confusion, fallibility and debate that that involves. One reading is that officials are themselves part of the game, a fact of endless frustration to almost everyone involved; another that sport is inherently chance-based, and while we resist optimising participants through drugs and physical augmentations, the laws and outcomes of sport should remain human too.
by James Bridle, booktwo.org | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Chaotic Storage
How can something be random on purpose? Well, Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, stores its goods in a chaotic disorder. But only at first glance, because there’s order behind the apparent disarray. It’s called chaotic storage.
How does chaotic storage work?
A warehouse for chaotic storage – sometimes also known as random storage – is basically a shelving system holding the products. So far, it doesn’t differ from a warehouse with fix storage positions. What makes a chaotic storage system so special is the flow of material.
This starts at the goods-in section: the warehouse staff takes incoming goods to the shelving system, where they are placed in unoccupied shelf positions. Each shelf space has a unique barcode and every product as well. The staff uses handheld scanners to record the shelf space and the corresponding product, thus telling the computer, where the goods are located.
When an incoming order requires these goods to be picked, the computer compiles a picking list. It then sends order pickers to exactly those shelf spaces where the requested products can be found, according to the database. In order to keep this database current, each article that is removed from the shelf needs to be scanned again.
By the way, chaotic storage does not imply automatic storage. Although it is possible to operate a chaotic storage system automatically, it is not always the best alternative. Amazon for instance, still needs quite a lot of manpower, because a simulation of the storage processes showed that hiring warehouse staff was more economical than automation.
What are the advantages of chaotic storage?
Chaotic warehouses are much more flexible than conventional ones and can respond to changes in the product range much easier. This reduces the amount of planning, because neither the range of products as a whole nor the sales volume of particular goods need to be known or planned in advance.
In addition, chaotic storage allows to use the available storage space more efficiently, because freed-up space may be refilled immediately. In a storage system with fixed positions on the other hand, some shelf space is always reserved for certain articles, even if their actual stocks are considerably lower.
Chaotic storage is a time saver, not just when stocking up on goods but also during order picking. Incoming goods are simply placed in free spaces on the shelves. The computer will then create picking lists with optimised routes whenever someone orders products. This way, the distance the warehouse staff needs to cover is shortened. Furthermore, picking lists at Amazon are not sorted by order, which means that the picked products have to be combined to shipments in an additional step.
The amount of training required by new employees is also remarkably lower when using chaotic storage. It is not necessary for them to memorise the entire warehouse layout or even single storage locations. This will allow you to replace staff more easily or hire seasonal workers during peak times.
What are the requirements for chaotic storage?
Intuitively, most people would store similar goods together, virtually sorting them according to predefined characteristics. This would place all books in one section of the warehouse and all toys in another section.
But that’s not necessary in a chaotic storage system. The products only need to share the most basic requirements with regard to storage (i.e. temperature, humidity). Further characteristics don’t have to be considered. In a chaotic warehouse, all kinds of different articles may lie directly next to each other, such as books, toys, sport equipment, electronics, DVDs, jewellery and digital cameras.
by Torsten Reichardt, SSI Schaefer Intralogistics | Read more:
Image: uncredited
How does chaotic storage work?A warehouse for chaotic storage – sometimes also known as random storage – is basically a shelving system holding the products. So far, it doesn’t differ from a warehouse with fix storage positions. What makes a chaotic storage system so special is the flow of material.
This starts at the goods-in section: the warehouse staff takes incoming goods to the shelving system, where they are placed in unoccupied shelf positions. Each shelf space has a unique barcode and every product as well. The staff uses handheld scanners to record the shelf space and the corresponding product, thus telling the computer, where the goods are located.
When an incoming order requires these goods to be picked, the computer compiles a picking list. It then sends order pickers to exactly those shelf spaces where the requested products can be found, according to the database. In order to keep this database current, each article that is removed from the shelf needs to be scanned again.
By the way, chaotic storage does not imply automatic storage. Although it is possible to operate a chaotic storage system automatically, it is not always the best alternative. Amazon for instance, still needs quite a lot of manpower, because a simulation of the storage processes showed that hiring warehouse staff was more economical than automation.
What are the advantages of chaotic storage?
Chaotic warehouses are much more flexible than conventional ones and can respond to changes in the product range much easier. This reduces the amount of planning, because neither the range of products as a whole nor the sales volume of particular goods need to be known or planned in advance.
In addition, chaotic storage allows to use the available storage space more efficiently, because freed-up space may be refilled immediately. In a storage system with fixed positions on the other hand, some shelf space is always reserved for certain articles, even if their actual stocks are considerably lower.
Chaotic storage is a time saver, not just when stocking up on goods but also during order picking. Incoming goods are simply placed in free spaces on the shelves. The computer will then create picking lists with optimised routes whenever someone orders products. This way, the distance the warehouse staff needs to cover is shortened. Furthermore, picking lists at Amazon are not sorted by order, which means that the picked products have to be combined to shipments in an additional step.
The amount of training required by new employees is also remarkably lower when using chaotic storage. It is not necessary for them to memorise the entire warehouse layout or even single storage locations. This will allow you to replace staff more easily or hire seasonal workers during peak times.
What are the requirements for chaotic storage?
Intuitively, most people would store similar goods together, virtually sorting them according to predefined characteristics. This would place all books in one section of the warehouse and all toys in another section.
But that’s not necessary in a chaotic storage system. The products only need to share the most basic requirements with regard to storage (i.e. temperature, humidity). Further characteristics don’t have to be considered. In a chaotic warehouse, all kinds of different articles may lie directly next to each other, such as books, toys, sport equipment, electronics, DVDs, jewellery and digital cameras.
by Torsten Reichardt, SSI Schaefer Intralogistics | Read more:
Image: uncredited
FBI Taps Hacker Tactics to Spy on Suspects
[ed. Competing with the NSA to shred your privacy protection every day, so, you know, we can all be safer.]
Federal agencies have largely kept quiet about these capabilities, but court documents and interviews with people involved in the programs provide new details about the hacking tools, including spyware delivered to computers and phones through email or Web links—techniques more commonly associated with attacks by criminals.
People familiar with the Federal Bureau of Investigation's programs say that the use of hacking tools under court orders has grown as agents seek to keep up with suspects who use new communications technology, including some types of online chat and encryption tools. The use of such communications, which can't be wiretapped like a phone, is called "going dark" among law enforcement.
A spokeswoman for the FBI declined to comment.
The FBI develops some hacking tools internally and purchases others from the private sector. With such technology, the bureau can remotely activate the microphones in phones running Google Inc.'s Android software to record conversations, one former U.S. official said. It can do the same to microphones in laptops without the user knowing, the person said. Google declined to comment.
by Jennifer Valentino-Devries and Danny Yadron, WSJ | Read more:
Image: Agence France-Presse/Getty[ed. See also: Apple Patent Could Remotely Disable Protestors' Phone Cameras; The Reycling Bin is Stalking You; and Are Universities Collecting Too Much Information on Staff and Students.]
Saturday, August 10, 2013
Microsatellites: What Big Eyes They Have
People already worried about the candid cameras on Google Glass and low-flying drones can add a new potential snooper to the list: cameras on inexpensive, low-orbiting microsatellites that will soon be sending back frequent, low-cost snapshots of most of Earth’s populated regions from space.
They won’t be the first cameras out there, of course. Earth-imaging satellites the size of vans have long circled the globe, but those cost millions of dollars each to build and launch, in part because of their weight and specialized hardware. The new satellites, with some of the same off-the-shelf miniaturized technology that has made smartphones and laptops so powerful, will be far less expensive.
The view from high up is rich in untapped data, said Paul Saffo, a forecaster and essayist. He expects the new satellite services to find many customers.
Insurance companies, for example, could use the satellites’ “before” and “after” views to monitor insured property and validate claims after a disaster. Businesses that update online maps for geologists, city planners or disaster relief officials could be customers, too. The images could also be used to monitor problems like deforestation, melting icecaps and overfishing.
And food companies and commodities traders could use the images to keep track of crops and agricultural yields all over the planet, Mr. Saffo predicted.
But the images are also likely to be viewed as the latest mixed blessing by people already apprehensive of Big Brother-like surveillance in their lives.
First into space in the microsatellite business will be the San Francisco company Planet Labs, which plans to launch a fleet of 28 small satellites at the end of the year that will photograph the planet around the clock, with frequent updates. The company has already sent up two trial satellites for test runs, and will dispatch the entire set, called Flock-1, in December, said Will Marshall, a co-founder of the company and a former NASA scientist.
The Planet Labs’ satellites won’t be able to distinguish your face or read your license plate — the cameras don’t have that level of resolution. But the frequency with which images can be updated could raise privacy questions, said Timothy Edgar, a visiting fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University and a former director of privacy and civil liberties in the Obama administration.
Mr. Edgar contrasted the satellite images with those provided by Google Earth — the ones that people zoom in on to see, for example, an aerial view of their homes.”That’s just an image of your house that was probably taken a few years ago,” he said. “It may feel like you are being watched, but you aren’t. It’s just a static picture that’s most likely several years old.”
But a satellite that regularly passes over your cabin deep in the woods and photographs a car that is sometimes parked there — and sometimes not — has different ramifications. “It can show a pattern, for example, when you appear to be at home and when you’re away,” he said.
They won’t be the first cameras out there, of course. Earth-imaging satellites the size of vans have long circled the globe, but those cost millions of dollars each to build and launch, in part because of their weight and specialized hardware. The new satellites, with some of the same off-the-shelf miniaturized technology that has made smartphones and laptops so powerful, will be far less expensive.The view from high up is rich in untapped data, said Paul Saffo, a forecaster and essayist. He expects the new satellite services to find many customers.
Insurance companies, for example, could use the satellites’ “before” and “after” views to monitor insured property and validate claims after a disaster. Businesses that update online maps for geologists, city planners or disaster relief officials could be customers, too. The images could also be used to monitor problems like deforestation, melting icecaps and overfishing.
And food companies and commodities traders could use the images to keep track of crops and agricultural yields all over the planet, Mr. Saffo predicted.
But the images are also likely to be viewed as the latest mixed blessing by people already apprehensive of Big Brother-like surveillance in their lives.
First into space in the microsatellite business will be the San Francisco company Planet Labs, which plans to launch a fleet of 28 small satellites at the end of the year that will photograph the planet around the clock, with frequent updates. The company has already sent up two trial satellites for test runs, and will dispatch the entire set, called Flock-1, in December, said Will Marshall, a co-founder of the company and a former NASA scientist.
The Planet Labs’ satellites won’t be able to distinguish your face or read your license plate — the cameras don’t have that level of resolution. But the frequency with which images can be updated could raise privacy questions, said Timothy Edgar, a visiting fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University and a former director of privacy and civil liberties in the Obama administration.
Mr. Edgar contrasted the satellite images with those provided by Google Earth — the ones that people zoom in on to see, for example, an aerial view of their homes.”That’s just an image of your house that was probably taken a few years ago,” he said. “It may feel like you are being watched, but you aren’t. It’s just a static picture that’s most likely several years old.”
But a satellite that regularly passes over your cabin deep in the woods and photographs a car that is sometimes parked there — and sometimes not — has different ramifications. “It can show a pattern, for example, when you appear to be at home and when you’re away,” he said.
by Anne Eisenberg, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Matt McDonald
One-Way Ticket
[ed. Interesting dialog in the comments section.]
If you’re a state with the highest rate of homelessness in the country, you’ve got a number of options. You could build more shelters. You could enact new tax credits for the working poor. Maybe provide more counseling and other services.Or you could take the route lawmakers in Hawaii did: offer homeless residents a one-way ticket out of the state.
State legislators passed funding this year for a new program to offer one-way flights to any of the state’s estimated 17,000 homeless persons. Lawmakers appropriated $100,000 over the next two years for the “return-to-home” program, but that funding could increase if the initiative is viewed as a success.
There are many reasons why homelessness is so pervasive in Hawaii. It’s an expensive state to live in. It’s not easy to leave. There isn’t much affordable housing.
Viewed in the most charitable light, one-way flights allow homeless people who currently live in Hawaii but have a family or better job opportunities on the mainland to be able to move. Viewed more cynically, officials in Hawaii will use this initiative to coerce homeless persons into leaving, freeing the state from any further obligations to help them.
The state Department of Human Services will administer the program, but officials there worry that the program could wind up being abused by those not currently living in Hawaii. “We remain concerned this program is an invitation to purchase a one-way ticket to Hawaii with a guaranteed return flight home,” said Kayla Rosenfeld, the department’s spokeswoman.
by Scott Keyes, Think Progress | Read more:
Image: uncredited
GitHub: The Software That Builds Software
Complex, specialized tools are often made from simpler ones. Machines are built with power drills; software is built with code editors. And so the future of computing depends partly on coding platforms in much the same way that the future of the movie industry depends on camera technology.
Over the past five years, a rapidly growing San Francisco company called GitHub has become a dominant player in software development, largely because it has fine-tuned the tools used for “version control,” which is the process of logging all the changes made to a set of documents. Programs are fragile enough that even a small change—a single misplaced semicolon, for example—might cause it to crash. GitHub keeps track of those semicolons, and who put them where.
Last year, GitHub’s financial projections and cultural influence were enough to secure a hundred-million-dollar investment from Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture-capital firm that previously invested in Twitter, Facebook, and Skype. (It is Andreessen Horowitz’s single biggest investment to date, valuing GitHub at roughly seven hundred and fifty million dollars.) Today, GitHub has three and a half million users working on close to seven million projects, and it grows by ten thousand users on a typical weekday. You can find projects written in almost any programming language in existence, from common Web development languages like P.H.P. and JavaScript to the ancient low-level language Fortran, and even LOLCODE, an absurdist programming syntax jokingly assembled from LOLcat captions.
The GitHub Web site is built around an independent piece of version-control software called Git, which was created by the developer Linus Torvalds. Even before Git, Torvalds was a nerd hero. He created Linux, which is one of the most important operating systems in the world. It runs on more kinds of hardware than any other computer operating system, and it is a dominant platform for Web servers and supercomputers; it is also widely deployed on common devices like wireless routers, cell phones, and even TiVos. It is the crown jewel of the open-source-software movement, a school of thought in which even the most valuable code in a program is freely shared so it can be collaboratively improved by many developers at once.
With so many programmers working on it, building Linux is incredibly complicated, and by 2005, Torvalds and his team had decided that the existing version-control systems were inadequate. They decided to write their own. The result, which was named Git after the insult in British slang, was much more powerful than the other available options.
In other development systems, there is often a hierarchy of gatekeepers who delegate access to chunks of code. In Git, every developer working on a project can have full access to every part of the code and its history. The best ideas and the strongest code for any aspect of the project can bubble up to the surface and be approved, no matter where they originate, dramatically flattening and democratizing the development workflow. “In order to avoid all those stupid political issues, you have to basically allow anybody to make changes, and then accept them based on technical merit after the fact, rather than on some pre-approval process,” Torvalds told me via e-mail. (...)
Thinking about GitHub as a social product rather than simply a software-development platform is perhaps the best way to consider its future: the big problem GitHub solves is about collaboration, not software. “For now this is about code, but we can make the burden of decision-making into an opportunity,” Preston-Werner, the site’s founder, told the New York Times last year. “It would be useful if you could capture the process of decision-making, and see who suggested the decisions that created a law or a bill.”
Those seem like lofty aspirations, but in early May, the start-up RapGenius, which originally crowdsourced explanations of lyrics from hip-hop songs, announced its expansion into breaking news, using the same text-annotation platform it had been refining for years. RapGenius could prove useful for parsing complicated legal documents, for example, and if rap enthusiasts can build a useful platform for legal analysis, why can’t coders?
Over the past five years, a rapidly growing San Francisco company called GitHub has become a dominant player in software development, largely because it has fine-tuned the tools used for “version control,” which is the process of logging all the changes made to a set of documents. Programs are fragile enough that even a small change—a single misplaced semicolon, for example—might cause it to crash. GitHub keeps track of those semicolons, and who put them where.Last year, GitHub’s financial projections and cultural influence were enough to secure a hundred-million-dollar investment from Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture-capital firm that previously invested in Twitter, Facebook, and Skype. (It is Andreessen Horowitz’s single biggest investment to date, valuing GitHub at roughly seven hundred and fifty million dollars.) Today, GitHub has three and a half million users working on close to seven million projects, and it grows by ten thousand users on a typical weekday. You can find projects written in almost any programming language in existence, from common Web development languages like P.H.P. and JavaScript to the ancient low-level language Fortran, and even LOLCODE, an absurdist programming syntax jokingly assembled from LOLcat captions.
The GitHub Web site is built around an independent piece of version-control software called Git, which was created by the developer Linus Torvalds. Even before Git, Torvalds was a nerd hero. He created Linux, which is one of the most important operating systems in the world. It runs on more kinds of hardware than any other computer operating system, and it is a dominant platform for Web servers and supercomputers; it is also widely deployed on common devices like wireless routers, cell phones, and even TiVos. It is the crown jewel of the open-source-software movement, a school of thought in which even the most valuable code in a program is freely shared so it can be collaboratively improved by many developers at once.
With so many programmers working on it, building Linux is incredibly complicated, and by 2005, Torvalds and his team had decided that the existing version-control systems were inadequate. They decided to write their own. The result, which was named Git after the insult in British slang, was much more powerful than the other available options.
In other development systems, there is often a hierarchy of gatekeepers who delegate access to chunks of code. In Git, every developer working on a project can have full access to every part of the code and its history. The best ideas and the strongest code for any aspect of the project can bubble up to the surface and be approved, no matter where they originate, dramatically flattening and democratizing the development workflow. “In order to avoid all those stupid political issues, you have to basically allow anybody to make changes, and then accept them based on technical merit after the fact, rather than on some pre-approval process,” Torvalds told me via e-mail. (...)
Thinking about GitHub as a social product rather than simply a software-development platform is perhaps the best way to consider its future: the big problem GitHub solves is about collaboration, not software. “For now this is about code, but we can make the burden of decision-making into an opportunity,” Preston-Werner, the site’s founder, told the New York Times last year. “It would be useful if you could capture the process of decision-making, and see who suggested the decisions that created a law or a bill.”
Those seem like lofty aspirations, but in early May, the start-up RapGenius, which originally crowdsourced explanations of lyrics from hip-hop songs, announced its expansion into breaking news, using the same text-annotation platform it had been refining for years. RapGenius could prove useful for parsing complicated legal documents, for example, and if rap enthusiasts can build a useful platform for legal analysis, why can’t coders?
by Vijith Assar, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Tom Preston-Werner, the C.E.O. and co-founder of GitHub. Photograph by Jin Lee/Bloomberg/Getty.
Returning to Alter Ego - What if You Could Live Your Life Over Again?
Alter Ego was a text-based ‘fantasy role-playing game’, frequently cited as one of the best C64 games ever made. The ‘role’ was that of a person: specifically, a cisgender, heterosexual Westerner, as an only child born into a two-parent family with a married mother and father. I first read about Alter Ego in an old issue of Zzap! 64 magazine. I was immediately attracted by the tagline – ‘What if you could live your life over again?’ – and desperate to play it after Zzap! awarded it 98 per cent, stating that ‘the writer. . . displays a great sense of humour and a surprisingly perceptive view of all the problems both the young and old face in their lives’, calling it ‘original, unusual, compelling [and] varied’. There were male and female versions: the male one was released first, and it was this that I managed to find, ten years after its release – by which time the male version was a rarity, the female one virtually untraceable.
Both editions were created by Dr Peter Favaro, a clinical psychologist who interviewed hundreds of men and women about their most memorable experiences, putting those that ‘many people shared’ into the game, along with others that he devised. (Favaro also discussed an infant version called Child’s Play with Activision, but this collapsed due to financial difficulties.) He understood that Alter Ego could only ever be a small quotation of life: the instruction manual asserted that ‘Alter Ego is first and foremost a game. It was designed to be entertaining, not clinical. There are certain insights that can be gained from playing the game, but life improvement or self-analysis should never be the goal.’
The manual also said that ‘Because of the authenticity of the life experiences explored in the program, Alter Ego contains explicit material which may not be suitable for computer users under the age of 16’, and in the US, the game was not to be sold to them. There were no such restrictions in Britain, and in any case they would have been impossible to enforce by 1996, so with all this in mind, I clicked on the game’s first experience icon and threw myself into its alternative reality. (...)
From the start, your experiences were emotionally complex, weighing against playing as the nastiest, most self-destructive or irresponsible person possible – for example, in Childhood, if you opted to keep playing with a box of matches, ignoring your conscience’s repeated exhortations for you to stop, you could burn down your house. You would not be killed here (although one approach was to find all the choices that could lead to your death – I died in a car crash, took an overdose, committed suicide, ignored an ultimately fatal illness and collapsed during a senior citizens’ softball game), but you could cause considerable damage and traumatise your parents; one of the most striking moments in Alter Ego came with the ice-cold conclusion that ‘You are never punished, which somehow makes you feel worse’.
by Juliet Jacques, New Statesman | Read more:
Image: Alter Ego
The Bot Wars
State Bird Provisions, in the Fillmore district of San Francisco, was fully booked for 60 days in advance, and had been ever since last August, when Bon Appétit magazine named it the best new restaurant in the country.
No matter how many times he returned to the website, the answer was always the same: “No reservations are currently available. As tables become available, they will be shown here.”
Sure, the crispy spiced quail is “unparalleled”; yes, the rose-geranium ice cream is “a singular delight”; but could the promise of such culinary gems really rouse so many to try, every single day, that a table became literally unbookable?
Diogo wasn’t the only one having problems, a myriad of online complaints attested to that. “It’s the hardest place to get a seat in the city right now, full stop," said one. “Don’t even bother,” said another. “Tried every day last week = 0 bookings.”
Where could all the reservations be going? Were they even going up at all?
Unlike most customers, however, Diogo had another weapon in his arsenal. As a computer programmer, currently working for Twitter founder Jack Dorsey's new venture Square, he had the skills to build a bot.
“A bot is essentially a computer program that automates the process that a human would go through when making a reservations,” Diogo explained via email. This bot would scan State Bird Provisions’ reservation page at regular intervals, emailing him every time it was updated. “I set it to run once every minute.” (...)
Diogo’s dispatch from the frontlines of the new bot wars provided a rare insight into an underground community of unknown, unseen programmers who compete to build the fastest, most powerful bots in a virtual arms race.
Just as high frequency trading, via automated software, took over the financial markets in the early 2000s, the use of bots is a technique that is increasingly coming to dominate online sales of all stripes.
Diogo admits to deploying bots himself not only for dinner reservations, but to secure cinema tickets on busy opening nights and the cheapest flights to visit his family in Portugal. Anil knows of bots for “concert tickets, camping grounds and marathon registrations”. Such programs “are pretty easy to for any developer to write,” he told me.
Yet despite their ubiquity, in hacker circles there is little discussion of the ethics of bot use. There are no gentleman’s agreements to abstain from silicon wizardry when fighting it out with the general public. When there’s an online race, it’s every man for himself – and no one said the race would be fair.
by Cal Flyn, New Statesman | Read more:
Image: CJ Isherwood on Flickr, via Creative Commons
Friday, August 9, 2013
Top of the World - Moods in Black Series. Patricia Oblack.
Available from artist studio 48x55 diptych. http://pahttp://www.blurb.com/books/196889. http://www.ugallery.com/patricia-oblack
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