Produced and hosted by Jon Gordon, Future Tense brings you the latest technology topics in daily five-minute capsules. From electronic privacy and digital democracy to spam and computer worms, Future Tense keeps you up to date on the rapidly changing world of technology.
Future Tense is heard in the United States during broadcasts of the CBC's As It Happens.
The Digital Collection System Network, or DCSNet, allows for the monitoring and recording of land lines, cell phones, push-to-talk phones, and text messages.
Steven Bellovin, a computer science professor at Columbia University, is worried the system lacks adequate security to prevent insiders from stealing information.
AT&T is dropping it's time-of-the-day service in California and Nevada, which the phone company says are the last states where customers can call to learn the exact time.
Soon the familiar voice of the time lady will be gone, and it feels like the passing of an era, according to David Lazarus of the Los Angeles Times.
Two legal research services, LexisNexis and Westlaw, dominate the legal information marketplace. Users pay dearly for searchable access to the decisions of state and federal courts. Now two Internet-based projects are seeking to provide much of the same information for free. The goal of both Public Resource and AltLaw is to give Americans greater access to the laws of the land.
The Academic Film Archive collects and preserves the educational films that were once show in schools and other settings. The group screens a limited number of films -- mostly in its home base of San Jose, California and St. Louis. Now it's seeking donations from the public to help digitize the films and post them to the 'Net.
A program to pinpoint the source of Wikipedia edits indicates that alterations to the online encyclopedia have come from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Vatican, the Republican and Democratic parties, as well as Microsoft, Apple and Dell - all of whom either changed entries to make themselves look good, or enemies look bad.
WikiScanner creator Virgil Griffith, who's set to enter graduate school at Cal Tech, says he came up with the idea when he heard about congressional staffers who whitewashed their bosses' Wikipedia entries.
The death of a man named Joybubbles in Minneapolis earlier this month put the spotlight on phone phreaks -- a group of people who took great joy in hacking the country's telephone system back in the late 1960s and 70s.
Phil Lapsley, who's writing a book on phone phreaks, says telephone hackers are the forefathers of computer hackers.
Today's report was going to about this. That was before the external hard drive that stores Future Tense audio files experienced a catastrophic failure. So today we have a cautionary tale about the need to back up your critical data.
Guest: Julio Ojeda-Zapata of the St. Paul Pioneer Press
In 2004 and again in 2005, the Pentagon sponsored a race for driverless vehicles across desert courses. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, dreamed up the Grand Challenge race as a way to advance the science of robotic vehicles for military use.
This year, the race is re-named the DARPA Urban Challenge. At a qualifying race in October, 36 driverless cars will race through Victorville, California. Then in November, the top 20 cars will compete for a two million dollar prize.
Guest: Grayson Randall, leader of the Insight Racing team
The TV ad for Apple's fresh new crop of computers features rotating iMacs against a white backdrop, set to a catchy techno-funk-flavored tune.
The song, "Exodus Honey," is by Honeycut, a Berkeley, CA indie band that released its debut album last September.
In an age when music sales have dried up, Honeycut lead singer Bart Davenport says struggling bands need to find revenue where they can. Apple, he says, is a perfect fit.
August 15, 2007
Design firm answers blogger's plea to design better devices for diabetics
Design firm Adaptive Path has answered a call by diabetes blogger Amy Tenderich to come up with a medical device that's better, smaller, and sleeker than those currently on the market. It's called the Charmr. It's a design only, but Tenderich believes the Charmr or something like it will make it to market.
There's been a steady climb over the past ten years in the amount of time people spend consuming media. The average person chews up about 10 hours a day now listening music, watching television, surfing the Internet and scanning billboards, according to the annual communications industry forecast by Veronis Suhler Stevenson. But now for the first time since 1997, per-person media use dipped. Are we at a media saturation point?
Somewhere around a half million motorcyclists from around converge in the tiny town of Sturgis, South Dakota this week for the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. That leaves many more motorcyclists who wish they could go.
That's a potential market that longtime Harley Davidson advertising firm Carmichael Lynch recognized as they set up a live internet camera feed of the event running ten hours a day. Carmichael Lynch took the innovative step of wrapping the feed in a Harley Davidson banner ad format and incorporating the whole package into a widget, in this case a Google Gadget, that people can stick on their computer desktop or their MySpace page. Carmichael Lynch online media manager Chris Wexler says the cam gadget is very popular. It requires at least 8 people in Sturgis, another eight to ten people at the office handling technical details, plus several Harley Davidson web site technicians. The feed from Sturgis is on a delay to guard against transmitting anything too family unfriendly.
Depending on how it works out, this could be a new wave in internet advertising according to Aram Sinnreich, managing partner at the media and entertainment consulting firm Radar Research.
It took Apple's iTunes music store three years to reach the one billion songs downloaded milestone. Just a year and a half later iTunes passed the three billion songs mark. Apple has now become the third largest music retailer in the world, behind Wal-mart and Best Buy, two stores in the physical world whose music sales are primarily in the form of CDs.
Mike McGuire, research vice president for media services at Gartner, Inc. He says the rapid and continuing growth of iTunes doesn't appear to be slowing down, but there are some competitors on the horizon.
Mike McGuire researches the online and digital media industries for Gartner. Amazon is also working to launch an online music service that, unlike iTunes, doesn't limit the devices the downloads can play on. Digital music sales are up almost 50 percent this year, but music sales in general are down 16%. And although the number of legal music downloads is growing, a survey by Entertainment Media Research this summer reveals the number of illicit downloads also took a hefty jump from last year.
Cell phone communication near downtown Minneapolis jammed within moments of the bridge collapse. Rescuers and law enforcement officers sprung into action but needed street maps, ongoing traffic information and a way to monitor the site. The resulting communications demands put the city of Minneapolis' fledgling wireless network to the test. Within an hour of the disaster, the head of USI Wireless, the company responsible for the network, opened the system to free access and got an effort going to install additional access points around the bridge site that weren't already covered. The number of wireless users in that part of the city jumped six fold overnight. The city-wide wi-fi network isn't scheduled to be finished until the end of the year. The downtown area was the first to be built.
Minneapolis information officer Lynn Willinbring says this is not how she would choose to test the system's effectiveness, but is pleased with how it worked out.
Craig Settles, a consultant with Successful.com and author of Fighting the Good Fight for Municipal Wireless, also praised the city's response. He said this was the first major test anywhere of a municipal wireless system during a crisis.
Cell phone pictures posted to photo sites like Flickr became the world's ground level insight into the London subway bombings. Craigslist bulletins became a lifeline for citizens of New Orleans and their worried families after Hurricaine Katrina. When the bridge fell in Minneapolis last week, some of the first images people saw of the disaster were amateur video on big news networks like MSNBC.
Cole Naymark lives two blocks from the bridge and was there with a camera within ten minutes of the collapse. One evening he was watching TV with his roommate, the next morning, he was talking live to the nation. Naymark, a mechanical engineering student at the University of Minnesota, says he would have posted the video on YouTube had the cable network passed on it. He didn't try and sell the video, saying it didn't feel right to profit from the tragedy.
CNN's effort to tap into saavy eyewitnesses is called I-Report. It's been around for a year. Similarly, Fox news collects viewer pictures and eyewitness accounts in its uReport.
David Erickson of St. Paul operates the Internet Marketing blog e-Strategyblog.com and is amazed by the explosion of citizen journalism whether its on Boing Boing or ABC. He says the amateur reporting, though, grips viewers with its decided lack of professional quality.
The Minnesotans who documented Wednesday's collapse of the I-35W bridge proved again, just as in the aftermath of the London underground bombing and other disasters, that journalism can be an activity as much as it is a profession.
The FCC cleared the way for the sale of valuable airspace used by cell phone and other wireless device users. After pressure from consumer groups, the commission attached conditions that anyone buying the sections of airspace must allow customers to pick which phone goes with a particular service. It promises to greatly increase choices. But consumer groups won only a partial victory. The FCC declined to adopt two additional open access provisions that would have blown broadband service competition wide open. Google joined the consumer groups and was poised to be a key player in the so-called "third pipe" of Internet access. Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge laments what she says is a lost opportunity for consumers.
