Yesterday I made a purchase at the CVS store on Edmondson Avenue in Catonsville using Google Wallet on a Nexus S 4G phone with NFC.

NFC is near field communication, an RFID technology that allows communication and data exchange between two devices in close proximity, e.g., within a few inches.

Several current smartphones have NFC chips including the Samsung's Google-branded Nexus S 4G and more are expected to include it in the coming months and years.

The first, and perhaps most significant, use of NFC will be enabling mobile phones to serve as "virtual credit cards", especially for small amounts that don't require a signature. The range of potential applications is much greater and will no doubt evolve as mobile NFC-enabled devices become ubiquitous.

Buying something at the CVS (OK, … it was candy) this way was fun. My phone made satisfying noises as it talked to CVS's payment station and the clerk, who had not had anyone use a NFC device, was properly mystified. Using it was marginally easier than swiping a credit card, but maybe even a small amount of increased convenience is worth it for such an everyday transaction.

One limitation of Google Wallet is that it currently only works with Sprint on a Nexus S 4G and with either a Citi® MasterCard® card or a Google Prepaid Card. You can load money into the latter with most any credit card and Google will get you started by adding $10 to it as an incentive.

By the way, for what it’s worth, I only recently realized that the robots in Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” were called androids and the dangerously independent new model was the Nexus-6, developed by designed by the Tyrell Corporation.

The First Baltimore Hackathon will take place on Friday and Saturday, November 19-20, 2010 at Beehive Baltimore, 2400 Boston St, on the 3rd floor of the Emerging Technology Center.

Come to build a hardware or software project — from idea to prototype — in a weekend either individually or as part of a team! While you are hacking, you’ll enjoy free food and coffee and be eligible to win prizes and awards! If you are interested, sign up and use the Baltimore Hackathon wiki to share ideas and build a team or to list yourself as available to join an existing team.

Check out the TechinBaltimore Google group for more information and discussion about the hackathon and related technology events in and around Baltimore.

Here’s a new one for the DIY movement.

Security researchers J. Alex Haldeman and Ariel Feldman demonstrated PAC-MAC running on a Sequoia voting machine last week at the EVT/WOTE Workshop held at the USENIX Security conference in DC.

Amazingly, they were able to install the game on a Sequoia AVC Edge touch-screen DRE (direct-recording electronic) voting machine without breaking the original tamper-evident seals.

Here’s how they describe what they did on Haldeman’s web site:

“What is the Sequoia AVC Edge?

It’s a touch-screen DRE (direct-recording electronic) voting machine. Like all DREs, it stores votes in a computer memory. In 2008, the AVC Edge was used in 161 jurisdictions with almost 9 million registered voters, including large parts of Louisiana, Missouri, Nevada, and Virginia, according to Verified Voting.

What’s inside the AVC Edge?

It has a 486 SLE processor and 32 MB of RAM—similar specs to a 20-year-old PC. The election software is stored on an internal CompactFlash memory card. Modifying it is as simple as removing the card and inserting it into a PC.

Wouldn’t seals expose any tampering?

We received the machine with the original tamper-evident seals intact. The software can be replaced without breaking any of these seals, simply by removing screws and opening the case.

How did you reprogram the machine?

The original election software used the psOS+ embedded operating system. We reformatted the memory card to boot DOS instead. (Update: Yes, it can also run Linux.) Challenges included remembering how to write a config.sys file and getting software to run without logical block addressing or a math coprocessor. The entire process took three afternoons.”

You can find out more from the presentation slides from the EVT workshop, Practical AVC-Edge CompactFlash Modifications can Amuse Nerds. They sum up their study with the following conclusion.

“In conclusion, we feel our work represents the future of DREs. Now that we know how bad their security is, thousands of DREs will be decommissioned and sold by states over the next several years. Filling our landfills with these machines would be a terrible waste. Fortunately, they can be recycled as arcade machines, providing countless hours of amusement in the basements of the nations’ nerds.”

Baltimoreans are lucky to have access to the new droid-based HTC EVO and Sprint’s 4G service. 3-6 Mbps to your phone! Hiawatha Bray writes avout it in a story in yesterday’s Boston Globe, 4G phone will quickly change things:

“It’s called the EVO 4G, and it’s our first glimpse at the next big thing in smartphones. When cellular carrier Sprint Nextel Corp. begins selling the EVO on June 4, it will be America’s first 4G cellphone, capable of far greater speed than the 3G iPhones and BlackBerries we have come to love.

But why fly 360 miles to check it out? Because Boston doesn’t have a working 4G network yet. Baltimore is one of about two dozen US cities where you can find one. Sprint says it’s building more 4G coverage as fast as it can; Boston is on the list for sometime this year.”

RAEng report on Social, legal and ethical issues of autonomous systems

The Royal Academy of Engineering has released a report on the social, legal and ethical issues involving autonomous systems — systems that are adaptive, learn and can make decisions without the intervention or supervision of a human.

The report, Autonomous Systems: Social, Legal and Ethical Issues (pdf), was based on a roundtable discussion “from a wide range of experts, looking at the areas where autonomous systems are most likely to emerge first, and discussing the broad ethical issues surrounding their uptake.”

While autonomous systems have broad applicability, the report focuses on two areas: transportation (e.g. autonomous road vehicles) and personal care (e.g., smart homes).

“Autonomous systems, such as fully robotic vehicles that are “driverless” or artificial companions that can provide practical and emotional support to isolated people, have a level of self-determination and decision making ability with the capacity to learn from past performance. Autonomous systems do not experience emotional reactions and can therefore perform better than humans in tasks that are dull, risky or stressful. However they bring with them a new set of ethical problems. What if unpredicted behaviour causes harm? If an unmanned vehicle is involved in an accident, who is responsible – the driver or the systems engineer? Autonomous vehicles could provide benefits for road transport with reduced congestion and safety improvements but there is a lack of a suitable legal framework to address issues such as insurance and driver responsibility.
…
The technologies for smart homes and patient monitoring are already in existence and provide many benefits to older people, such as allowing them to remain in their own home when recovering from an illness, but they could also lead to isolation from family and friends. Some users may be unfamiliar with the technologies and be unable to give consent to their use.”

The RAEng report recommends “engaging early in public consultation” and working to establish “appropriate regulation and governance so that controls are put in place to guide the development of these systems”.

rdf:SeeAlso Autonomous tech ‘requires debate’; Scientists ponder rules and ethics of robo helpers; Robot cats could care for older Britons.

(via Mike Wooldridge)

What’s in a brand? That which we call an iphone by any other name would be as cool, right?

That was then, this is now. Even Wikipedia with it’s NPOV seems to agree: “Brands have become increasingly important components of culture and the economy, now being described as ‘cultural accessories and personal philosophies’.”

Techcrunch posts about an annual ranking of brands.

“WPP subsidiary Millward Brown Optimor has released its highly regarded annual brand ranking BrandZ Top 100 (PDF), which identifies the world’s most valuable global brands as measured by their dollar value.”

As you might expect, the list includes a large number of technology companies.

“Topping the list are Internet giant Google, whose brand was valued at a whopping $100 billion, and rival Microsoft which comes in second with a $76.2 billion valuation. The report shows Google’s brand value is up from $86 billion last year (an increase of 16% in value), while Microsoft’s rose only 8% in value over the past year.
…
Other valuable top brands in technology, according to Millward Brown’s fresh ranking, include IBM ($66.6 B), Apple ($66.1 B), Vodafone ($53.7 B), Nokia ($35.1 B), Blackberry ($27.4 B), HP ($26.7 B), SAP ($23.6 B), Intel ($22.8 B) and Oracle ($21.4 B). Just outside the top 25, we find Amazon at the number 26 spot, but the company can pride itself in having the most ‘brand momentum’ – a measurement predicting short-term growth prospects – this year.

You can also download an BrandZ Top 100 iPhone App. Since I seem to have an off-brand smartphone, I can’t report on what it does.

The full 72 page BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands report has lots of interesting analysis and background information. Here’s a table of the top 20 technology companies from the report.

I admit — I was following along on engadget’s liveblog of Jobs’ WWDC keynote, looking for iPhone news. Most of what he said, though, was fairly old news to those who had been reading the tech blogs for the last month or so — 3G and aGPS, besides of course the already announced software upgrades. The big thing was the $199 price, which was out of the blue it seemed. I figured I would go out and get one pretty much as soon as they were available without having to stand in a line. The teeny voice in my head however was expressing skepticism, which eventually was proven correct. The $199 cost factors in a subsidy from AT&T, and the phone now apparently needs to be activated when bought.  No more buying it without AT&T service and then getting it unlocked.

I wonder why that is, though. The big claim is that the revenue model has changed, and so Apple no longer gets an ongoing cut of the revenue from AT&T. If so, why not also sell unlocked versions of the phone sans subsidy, like every other manufacturer ? How will this work in other countries where handset subsidies are not common ? Apparently AirTel in India is the preferred partner and will launch this phone “soon”.  So will AirTel sell it for more than $199, but unlocked ?  Maybe I can get one from them ? Or wait for Xperia X1 ? Or for TouchPro ?

A UMBC led team recently won a MURI award from DoD to work on “Assured Information Sharing Lifecycle”. It is an interesting mix of work on  new security models, policy driven security systems, context awareness, privacy preserving data mining, and social networking. The award really brings together many different strains of research in eBiquity, as well as some related reserach in our department. We’re just starting off, and excited about it. UMBC’s web page had a story about this, and more recently, GCN covered it.

The UMBC team is lead by Tim Finin, and includes several of us. The other participants are UIUC (led by Jiawei Han), Purdue (led by Elisa Bertino),  UTSA (led by Ravi Sandhu), UTDallas (led by Bhavani Thurasingham), Michigan (Lada Adamic).

Businessweek Magazine has a special set of articles on innovation in business in its April 28 issue. As in the past, they identified and tanked the 50 most innovative companies worldwide. The list of companies ranked in order are as follows

It’s gratifying to see how many of these are companies based on computing and/or communications or have a business that is largely based on exploiting the latest computing and communications technologies. I think that it is appropriate to look at IT and communications as a group, even though they are traditionally viewed as different business sectors, because the innovations in each tends to be in areas where they overlap.

The distribution of the country in which these 50 companies are based is interesting. Of course, many of these are truly multi-national corporations .

Tim’s away.
The blog is ours!
Now I can finally post about SciBarCamp, held last weekend in Toronto, and the most interesting meeting I’ve attended this millenium. Amongst its many highlights were two talks by Andrew Hessel. The first was about synthetic biology. Andrew helps run iGEM, which every year hands out “BioBricks” to high school and undergrad students around the world, and sees who can build the best genetic machines. Stunning successes have included a group of kids from Edinburgh who created a bacterium that changes the acidity of water, but only if there’s arsenic present. This enables individual wells to be tested at a cost of dimes instead of tens of dollars. (For a sickening account of why this is significant, click here, or here.) Another group invented a glowing bacterium which, I think, has a variety of computational and artistic applications.

The synthetic biology talk was part of a debate with Jim Thomas from etc, a group that monitors technology from a social justice perspective. Jim began by engendering sympathy for the Luddites, reminding us that in 1812, 14 Luddites were hanged near his alma mater in York, England. Before smashing things, Luddites would sometimes ask the people “is this harmful for the common good?”, and that’s the question Jim asked of synthetic biology. He didn’t exactly say yes, but he raised a number of concerns – security, safety, economic disruption, and concentration of corporate power. The only one which I really bought into was security; kids, as we know, do not use their creativity and hacking skills exclusively for good, and neither do adults. Part of Jim’s evidence was the case of Eckard Wimmer from Stony Brook, who built the polio virus from mail-order parts, just to show it could be done. The session ended before Andrew could respond.

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