Anand mentioned the (alleged) British spy rock as a good example of an advance that pervasive computing technology has wrought.

Russia’s state security service has accused British diplomats of spying in Moscow using electronic rocks. It’s an obvious hack, when you think about it — a bluetooth enabled PDA in a hollowed out rock could be used to drop off or pickup heavily encrypted documents from spys as they stroll by. The only problem would be power. Such a bluetooth rock would be much better than Alger Hiss’s pumpkin patch.

In an infamous spy case from the early days of the cold war, US State Department official Alger Hiss was accused (by a young Richard Nixon!) of passing documents via rolls of microfilm secreted in a hollowed-out pumpkin on his Maryland farm. But, technology marches on, with wireless rocks replacing pumpkins.

The March of Progress
1948	2006
In 1948 Alger Hiss was accused of transferring secrets using microfilm in a hollowed out pumpkin.	In 2006 the British were accused of transferring secrets using a wireless enabled PDA in a hollowed out rock.
cost: low encryption: no durability: low models: Jack-o’-lantern, squash vulnerable to: rodents, fungus, kids pluses: organic, biodegradable negatives: decay, rot	cost: medium encryption: yes durability: high models: igneous, sedimentary vulnerable to: bluejacking, spyware pluses: tetris, plays mp3s negatives: heavy

A group of UMBC students working with Professor Zary Segall have built a prototype music player that senses its user’s emotional state and level of activity and picks appropriate music. The prototype system uses BodyMedia’s SenseWear, which detects continuous data from the wearer’s skin and wirelessly transmits the data stream to the xpod prototype. The physiological data includes energy expenditure (calories burned), duration of physical activity, number of steps taken, and sleep/wake states. A neural network system is used to learn associations between these biometric parameters and the user’s preferences for music and the resulting model is then used to dynamically construct the xpod’s playlist. Read more about the xpod prototype in this recent paper:

XPod a human activity and emotion aware mobile music player, Sandor Dornbush, Kevin Fisher, Kyle McKay, Alex Prikhodko and Zary Segall.

XPOD is a prototype portable music player that can sense a user’s context — what she is doing, her level of activity, mood, etc. — and that to refine its playlist. The device monitors several external variables from a streaming version of the BodyMedia SenseWear to model the user’s context and predict the most appropriate music genre via a neural network.

German engineers are working on a new smart car that knows how to find empty parking spaces and park itself.

Parkmate, which is expected to be available from 2008, is part of a battery of technology being developed by Siemens VDO, one of the world’s major suppliers of in-car electronics.

I heard a report on 411-Song on NPR this morning and it’s a clever idea and an impressive technical accomplishment (I think, anyway).

“How many times have you heard a song and wished you knew who it was or wished you could get it before you forget it? Now you can, just call (866) 411-SONG, here’s how: * Hear a song you love; * Call (866) 411-SONG; * Wait for the beep and hold your cell near the music for just 15 seconds; * We identify the song and send you a text with all the song info (artist and song name) and a link to GET it.”

They claim a database of 2.5M songs with a focus on pop rather than classical, jazz or fringe music. You can try it for free, but after that it’s $.99 a song or $3.99 a month for all you can eat.

NMK, the company behind 411-song, has licensed the proprietary audio recognition technology from Shazam, which offers a similar service in the UK and some other countries.

I wonder how long it will be before the Google offers such a service?

Here is what a smart doorknob can do.

“When you approach the door and you’re carrying groceries, it opens and lets you in. This doorknob is so smart, it can let the dog out but it won’t let six dogs come back in.

It will take FedEx packages and automatically sign for you when you’re not there. If you’re standing by the door, and a phone call comes in, the doorknob can tell you that ‘you’ve got a phone call from your son that I think you should take.”

This smart doorknob is part of a MIT research project called “Internet of Things” (see IHT). An interesting thing about this system is that it relies on the extensive usage of RFID tags. When it comes to RFID technology, some people are very worried, and some others are very excited.

The Internet of Things is the seventh in the series of “ITU Internet Reports” published since 1997 by the UN’s International Telecommunication Union. The report will be available in mid November and include chapters on enabling technologies, the shaping of the market, emerging challenges and implications for the developing world, as well as comprehensive statistical tables covering over 200 economies. Here’s an AP story about today’s announcement at the World Summit on the Information Society [2] in Tunis.

Machines and objects to overtake humans on the Internet: ITU, AP, Nov 17

Machines will take over from humans as the biggest users of the Internet in a brave new world of electronic sensors, smart homes, and tags that track users’ movements and habits, the UN’s telecommunications agency predicted.

In a report entitled “Internet of Things”, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) outlined the expected next stage in the technological revolution where humans, electronic devices, inanimate objects and databases are linked by a radically transformed Internet.

“It would seem that science fiction is slowly turning into science fact in an ‘Internet of Things’ based on ubiquitous network connectivity,” the report said Thursday, saying objects would take on human characteristics thanks to technological innovation.
…more…

Shanghai might be China’s business hub, but getting to a meeting on time has always been a problem because of the high demand for taxis. Starting this week, Shanghai residents can now hail a taxi using their mobile phones and a new wireless short message service (SMS).

The Shanghai Taxi Control Center has launched a “Booking Taxi Via Short Message” service to ease citizens’ transportation needs.

After citizens input their name, location, destination and starting time, and indicate the traffic details nearby, they only need to send the message to 96965. The control center will relay them with a message to confirm the booking and then send a taxi to the required place within 10 minutes.

Source: ChinaTechNews.com

The Financial Times has a good article on the way mobile communications is changing modern life. The long articlew covers wifi, mobile phones and a lot more and looks at their impact around the world.

Mobility Special: Plugged into it all
By Richard Waters, Financial Times, 11 Nov2005
…
Tools such as e-mail and instant messaging may have been around since the dawn of the internet era, but it has taken a wireless communications revolution to turn them into a constant and inescapable fact of life for a growing part of the population. WiFi networks - a low-cost technology that can beam large chunks of data over short distances using part of the radio spectrum that was previously the preserve of gadgets such as garage door openers and baby monitors - assure the digitally addicted of a permanent and ubiquitous connection to the wider world. At the same time, more versatile mobile phones have turned text messages into the communications tool of choice for teenagers in Asia and Europe, if not yet the US, while also bringing e-mail to many handsets. For those in the grip of these new networks, life has changed. There’s no such thing as solitude any more, no fragment of time that cannot be filled with digital chatter
….

A common observation is that the things people seem to enjoy most (e.g., food, drink, sex) are not envisioned as part of Heaven. I guess we shouldn’t expect wifi or good mobile phone coverage there either.

Microsoft research has and interesting project called VirtualWiFi — a virtualization architecture for wireless LAN (WLAN) cards for Windows XP.

“It abstracts a single WLAN card to appear as multiple virtual WLAN cards to the user. The user can then configure each virtual card to connect to a different wireless network. Therefore, VirtualWiFi allows a user to simultaneously connect his machine to multiple wireless networks using just one WLAN card.”

A prototype implementation is available for XP. This allows you, for example, to make an ad hoc connection to another computer will simultaneously making an infrastructure connection to a AP for internet access.

It can play games. It can play your Movies. It can play your music. It can view photos. It can read Ebooks. It runs on just 2 AA batteries - And it can do all this in the palm of your hand or on your TV screen. GP2X is a linux handheld with two 200mhz CPU’s with 64meg of RAM, custom graphics hardware and decoding chips and a slot for SD cards. Price? $189 US! (preorder).