Sundown, Friday, March 19 to Sundown, Saturday, March 20

Join us in fighting back against the tidal wave of technology taking over society and our lives. Are you sick of having conversations with people with their noses buried in an iPhone? Are you that person?

Put down the cell phone, stop the status updates on Facebook, shut down Twitter, sign out of e-mail and relax, as part of our National Day of Unplugging.

People across the nation will tune out to reclaim time to slow life down and reconnect with friends, family, the community and themselves for 24 hours, starting at sundown, Friday, March 19. The Sabbath Manifesto’s principles were created for individual styling, but for one day we are asking you to take on the challenge of Principle Number 1: AVOID TECHNOLOGY. Let us know how you interpreted this Principle.

For anyone who has read Cory Doctorow’s Makers (and if you haven’t then I urge you to. It’s free under a Creative Commons licence) the idea of a self-replicating 3D printer will not come as a surprise. However, there is still something mind-boggling about seeing one in action and thinking through some of its potential uses.

That was the treat in store for Dev8D participants today when Adrian Bowyer from the University of Bath demonstrated the RepRap. It’s a 3D printer that will not only print out plastic objects – from children’s shoes to doorhandles – but will also print out most of itself. As Bowyer says, “anyone with a RepRap can make one for a friend!” What’s more, as it is licenced as open source, under GPL, with all the instructions available online, anyone with a RepRap can make one for a friend for free and with their own modifications and improvements.

The RepRap can currently copy about half of its own parts and the others (such as nuts and bolts) are almost entirely available from general hardware stores with a couple of specialist components needing to be bought online. At its print rate of about 19ml an hour, it takes around 2.5 days to replicate itself. It costs about £300. To put that in perspective, the cheapest commercial 3D printer costs over £10,000. On top of that, non-open source 3D printers only allow their own, branded plastic cartridges to be used – at an inflated price. And, of course, the machines do not self-replicate.

“Companies have no commercial interest in making a machine that copies itself - as a company it’s the last thing you want your machine to do,” explains Bowyer.  “But the fact that it is not a commercial entity does not mean that it’s not in the interests of the end user.”

And the potential for the end user, particularly if that user is in a developing country, is where it gets really exciting.  At the moment, the objects people are making and sharing (see http://www.thingiverse.com) are interesting but are limited by the constraints of the material the RepRap can use (it works with a plastic, polylactic acid, made from starch). When the RepRap can deal with multiple materials, such as electronic components, the landscape will really open up.

“One of the things about making stuff is that you need a lot of capital to make almost anything – it could cost thousands or millions of pounds to set up a screwdriver factory, for example -  but a printer like this allows you to make them for a couple of hundred pounds. A small community could start putting a foot on the first rung of the manufacturing ladder and the ability to start manufacturing with low capital costs brings considerable benefits to the world’s poorest people,” says Bowyer.

“As it’s all open source they can do it without spending a penny apart from the materials and nobody can take it away from them – it’s on the web and all over the planet and nobody can kill it off,” he adds.

There will undoubtedly be some commercial interests who might be very keen to try to kill off the self-replicating 3D printer. Bowyer compares the impact that printers like the RepRap will have on the manufacturing industry with the effect new digital technology had on photographic film. The difference is that, in this case, it won’t be one industry completely replaced by a technical innovation but chunks of all industries that are affected.

“It will be difficult to put this genie back in the bottle,” he says. “Industry will divide into two camps, just like with music and MP3s: those who embrace it and can see how they might benefit from having their designs replicated, and those who don’t and try to fight it.”

And what of Cory Doctorow’s point that “printing AK-47s is so much weirder and more interesting as a futuristic effect of the 3D printer than printing trademarked objects will ever be”? Is Bowyer concerned that he might have made a monster?

Bowyer smiles and takes a philosophical approach to the issue. “Every technology humanity has ever created has been used to make weapons. If I really wanted to cause mayhem, I’d buy a lathe, not one of these. But having said that, yes people may use this to make weapons but it is also human nature to make far more ambulances than we make tanks. It will not change human behaviour but will allow them to behave in different ways. There will be more medical equipment printed than weapons.”

All photos by Ben O’Steen, licensed under Creative Commons

Of all modern technology I think 3D printers are the one that is most mind-boggling in its possibilities.

Those of us who live and breathe technology often accuse the rest of the planet of being populated by spoonfed idiots who have problems comprehending their DVD player, let alone the way that technology is changing the world around them.

Usually, our reactions are an overstatement - just a matter of a people needing a little more hi-tech literacy, and our anger borne from having to provide computer support to all manner of friends who haven't worked out that they should probably try turning it off and on again.

But sometimes your worst fears are given a real form - when you see the responses what is a browser, for example, or as shown by a little incident when the site ReadWriteWeb wrote about Facebook.... with hilarious consequences.

Yesterday RWW wrote a post about how Facebook was partnering with AOL, in a way that would make the site's login procedure more powerful than ever before - headlining the story "Facebook wants to be your one true login".

Suddenly, thanks to the magic of Google, that post became the most heavily-featured result for searches like "Facebook login" - which caused all kinds of confusion.

It looks like a number of users clicked on the top result, expecting to be taken to Facebook's login page (also known as, erm, facebook.com) and instead being presented with this ENTIRELY DIFFERENT site.

The post now has a comment thread of around 300 posts, many from disgruntled Facebook users who have clicked and can't work out what's happened to the site they know and love.

assorted comments by Facebook users who did not realise they were on a different website

While some of the comments are from jokers, many appear to be genuinely confused users. It's the sort of thing that makes you despair - when can't even work out they're not on the site they think they are, let alone understand that they could always reach Facebook by simply typing the address into the browser.

But, lest we simply laugh at the failure of the great unwashed to get the web, let's take a couple of serious points away from the whole thing.

First, it's a bit of a failure on Google's part. If Facebook users want to log in to the site, and Google's returning something that isn't Facebook's front page, then they're not delivering useful search results. That's not great for Google.

Secondly, perhaps we should refigure our idea of how many people actually use the web in this way. While the confused commenters largely seem to be middle-aged non-web-literate people, that doesn't mean they're stupid - just ill-informed.

As Matt Haughey, who runs community site Metafilter, said: "Laugh all you want about ReadWriteWeb, but two weeks ago I watched a 35 year-old friend with a PhD go to Facebook by googling 'facebook login'."

By Jonathan Fildes Technology reporter, BBC News

Hi-tech helps Iranian monitoring The new cyber battlefield in Iran

Euro MPs have "strongly" criticised telecoms firm Nokia Siemens Networks for providing "surveillance technology" to the Iranian authorities.

In a resolution adopted on Wednesday, the MEPs said the hardware was instrumental in the "persecution and arrests of Iranian dissidents".

But Nokia Siemens said that the implication that it had provided censorship technology was "wrong"

It has previously said that it had installed "lawful" technology in 2008.

"We will be clarifying any inaccuracy in their understanding of our business in Iran with the European Parliament," Ben Roome of the firm told BBC News.

Nokia Siemens said the technology that it had installed was similar to that used "in all EU member states and the US".

Mr Roome stressed that the technology not used to monitor, filter or censor the internet.

"When you set up a modern network - as an operator - if you want a licence to operate you have to have a standard surveillance capability in the network," Christina Dinne, also of the firm, said.

Net benefit

Nokia Siemens told BBC News that it had provided "very basic surveillance" capabilities to Iran Telecom in 2008. The product is called Monitoring Centre and can be used to monitor local telephone calls.

"You can't track keywords," said Mrs Dinne.

Google says its Gmail traffic has dropped sharply in Iran

Details of Nokia Siemens activities in Iran first came to light in June 2009 when media reports accused the firm of helping the Iranian government intercept communications.

Technology - such as mobile phones - were widely used in protests following Iran's disputed election.

"We are, of course, aware of reports from Iran, and condemn any abuse of communication technologies that may have taken place," said Mr Roome.

"We strongly believe that mobile networks enhance individuals' lives, promote transparency, and empower citizens with effective means of feedback.

"In Iran they have clearly played a pivotal role in their ability to communicate, organise, and share their story with the outside world.

However, the MEPS called on the EU to ban similar exports to "governments and countries such as Iran".

The statements were part of a wider resolution that included a call for Iran to "restore the transparency of its nuclear programme".

Iran has said that it has begun a new phase of uranium enrichment at its Natanz plant.

The Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced the country has produced its first batch of uranium enriched to 20% at a rally marking Iran's revolution.

The anniversary is the most important day in Iran's political calendar.

The opposition Green Movement is also trying to stage counter-demonstrations.

In the past these have been coordinated via social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook as well as through e-mail and mobile phones.

Reports suggest that the internet has been throttled with services such as Google's Gmail service markedly reduced.

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

First, they teleported photons, then atoms and ions. Now one physicist has worked out how to do it with energy, a technique that has profound implications for the future of physics.

In 1993, Charlie Bennett at IBM's Watson Research Center in New York State and a few pals showed how to transmit quantum information from one point in space to another without traversing the intervening space.

The technique relies on the strange quantum phenomenon called entanglement, in which two particles share the same existence. This deep connection means that a measurement on one particle immediately influences the other, even though they are light-years apart. Bennett and company worked out how to exploit this to send information. (The influence between the particles may be immediate, but the process does not violate relativity because some informatiom has to be sent classically at the speed of light.) They called the technique teleportation.

That's not really an overstatement of its potential. Since quantum particles are indistinguishable but for the information they carry, there is no need to transmit them themselves. A much simpler idea is to send the information they contain instead and ensure that there is a ready supply of particles at the other end to take on their identity. Since then, physicists have used these ideas to actually teleport photons, atoms, and ions. And it's not too hard to imagine that molecules and perhaps even viruses could be teleported in the not-too-distant future.

But Masahiro Hotta at Tohoku University in Japan has come up with a much more exotic idea. Why not use the same quantum principles to teleport energy?

Today, building on a number of papers published in the last year, Hotta outlines his idea and its implications. The process of teleportation involves making a measurement on each one an entangled pair of particles. He points out that the measurement on the first particle injects quantum energy into the system. He then shows that by carefully choosing the measurement to do on the second particle, it is possible to extract the original energy.

All this is possible because there are always quantum fluctuations in the energy of any particle. The teleportation process allows you to inject quantum energy at one point in the universe and then exploit quantum energy fluctuations to extract it from another point. Of course, the energy of the system as whole is unchanged.

He gives the example of a string of entangled ions oscillating back and forth in an electric field trap, a bit like Newton's balls. Measuring the state of the first ion injects energy into the system in the form of a phonon, a quantum of oscillation. Hotta says that performing the right kind of measurement on the last ion extracts this energy. Since this can be done at the speed of light (in principle), the phonon doesn't travel across the intermediate ions so there is no heating of these ions. The energy has been transmitted without traveling across the intervening space. That's teleportation.

Just how we might exploit the ability to teleport energy isn't clear yet. Post your suggestions in the comments section if you have any.

But the really exciting stuff is the implications this has for the foundations of physics. Hotta says that his approach gives physicists a way of exploring the relationship between quantum information and quantum energy for the first time.

There is a growing sense that the properties of the universe are best described not by the laws that govern matter but by the laws that govern information. This appears to be true for the quantum world, is certainly true for special relativity, and is currently being explored for general relativity. Having a way to handle energy on the same footing may help to draw these diverse strands together.

Interesting stuff. There's no telling where this kind of thinking might lead.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1002.0200: Energy-Entanglement Relation for Quantum Energy Teleportation

Copyright may not be perfect, but when applied with common sense, it's the best system we've got

Cory Doctorow

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 26 January 2010 16.40 GMT

Article history

Tyre tracks in the snow – not the Peter Zabulis version. Photograph: Graham Turner

On 5 January, the Independent's website ran a photo uploaded to the Flickr image-sharing site by user Peter Zabulis. Zabulis flagged his photo of a snowed-over field as "all rights reserved," and he took exception to the Independent's use of the image without permission, and he wrote to them to tell them so.

Exception turned to outrage as a terse note from the Independent claimed that by posting the photo to Flickr, Zabulis had not asserted his copyright (whatever that means) and thus copyright had not been breached. The ensuing debate – including a public pillorying of the Independent for failing to grasp the nature of Flickr, copyright and photographer's rights – generated a lot of heat, but not much light (one bright spot: the Independent paid Zabulis and apologised to him).

Debates about copyright fall apart when they're pitched in terms of absolutes: "Copyright prohibits all copying", or "Non-commercial copying is always legal". Copyright started life as an industrial regulation that set out the rules governing the relationship between different actors in the supply-chain of the "creative industries" (originally just publishing, later music, film, software and many other industries).

Much of copyright was created by simply enshrining existing business practices into law – for better or for worse. Many artists have pointed out that copyright, even at its best, can present a playing field tilted in favour of the companies that shepherded its passage into law.

Theoretically, copyright also bound the activities of non-industrial actors – fans, audiences, readers, people who were whistling in the shower. But practically speaking, the average person would virtually never interact with copyright: first, because the personal means of interacting with copyrighted works (reading books, listening to records) did not involve making copies, and second, because when copies were made, they were invisible to the copyright industries' radar. No one was going to come by your office to look for photocopied Garfield cartoons stuck on your cubicle.

Which isn't to say that there weren't a myriad of rules, formal and informal, governing the use of creative works by individuals. Certain songs could be sung at the pub, but not in front of a nursery school.

Recounting the plot of last night's TV show to a mate was permissible, but spoiling the ending wasn't. Tracing a library book illustration for a science project was OK: cutting up the book was not. Pretending to have made up a ghost story that you read in a Poe collection was plagiarism, not culture.

Now, thanks to the internet (which runs by copying things, and which makes all those copies visible with a simple search) copyright has been stretched to cover both industrial and non-industrial uses of creative works, and what's more, the definition of industrial and non-industrial has become a lot fuzzier.

We're trying to retrofit the rules that governed multi-stage rocket ships (huge publishing conglomerates) to cover the activity of pedestrians (people who post quotes from books on their personal blogs). And the pedestrians aren't buying it: they hear that they need a law degree to safely quote from their favourite TV show and they assume that the system is irredeemably broken and not worth attending to at all.

It's an impossible situation. As an author, I depend on there being some rules of the road when I negotiate with my publishers, and it's in every commercial creator's interest to try to find a moderate, coherent copyright rule that avoid dumb absolutes in favour of nuance and fairness. I don't pretend that I have all the answers, but here's some of the principles that I think a good copyright system must embrace if is to succeed. Many of these principles are already in various nations' copyright rules as part of "fair dealing" or "fair use," but these user-rights in copyright are complex and difficult to navigate and vary from country to country.

As we on the internet create the norms that will be enshrined in future copyright, here's what I think we should keep in mind: "All rights reserved" doesn't cover commentary or reportage. If the Independent had been commenting on Zabulis's photo ("Witness the interplay of lights and darks" or "Area man sneaks into snowy field, takes photo for proof") then reproducing as much of Zabulis's photo as they needed to in order to report thoroughly on the subject should be fair game. Likewise, Zabulis was in the right to reproduce a screenshot from the Independent's website in order to show people how his image had been taken without permission.

Commercial and non-commercial are different. While there's a lot of grey area between "commercial" and "non-commercial", there are also some bright lines. Newspapers should have to pay photographers for stock images; kids working on school reports (and other non-commercial users) should be able to clip images and use them for without negotiating a rights agreement with a copyright holder.

Incidental use isn't infringement. If Zabulis's photo had included a blowing piece of trash bearing a copyrighted work (say, a copy of the Independent), he should still be allowed to sell and publish his photo without the Independent's permission. Incidental copying includes (for example), Google copying every page on the web in order to create an index of the words on those pages.

Some commercial copying is OK. For example, when a giant movie studio sits down to create a movie (whose copyright they will eventually defend with the atavistic savagery of a maddened grizzly), the designers for the film will create a series of "mood books" filled with clipped, scanned and copied text, images, even video clips, to help the design team agree on the look and feel of the movie. The studio doesn't and shouldn't need permission to make these uses, though they are commercial and involve copying. There are many other cases like this, from pasting articles into an email you send to your boss to photocopying an inspirational text and tacking it up in the break room. They share one common trait: they don't displace any revenue for the rightsholder.

When copyright cartels endanger a new medium, their copyrights should be converted into economic rights or thrown out. This principle is as old as sound recordings: when the sheet-music publishers refused to license their work for records, the state intervened and forced them to sell at a fixed rate. Today, many copyrights are relegated to economic rights: a performer has the right to be compensated for the playback of his CD in a shop, but not to stop the shop from playing the music. Copyright's purpose is to promote participation in culture: where refuseniks subvert that goal, their copyrights should be limited.

This is just a partial list, and it may strike you as radical. But before you dismiss it, consider this: most copyright systems are supposed to work this way in theory. But between corporate bullies who like to assert that "all rights reserved" means that no one is allowed to do anything without permission, and personal theories of what copyright means based on half-remembered lectures from the company lawyer, we treat copyright as absolute. And when we do, we turn a system with a real purpose (providing a framework for participants in creative businesses) into a caricature of itself, one that no one can respect.

A Turko-German consortium has announced a liquid glass product "that will revolutionize everything" (it's a "new kind of glass," as Mr Wolfram might put it). Seriously, it sounds like the applications for this stuff are endless, and yes, that's what everyone said about aerogel and the Segway, but maybe this time... They're shipping to the UK soon, but "many supermarkets, may be unwilling to stock the products because they make enormous profits from cleaning products that need to be replaced regularly, and liquid glass would make virtually all of them obsolete."

Goddammit, Big Detergent is screwing up my future again!

Spray-on liquid glass is transparent, non-toxic, and can protect virtually any surface against almost any damage from hazards such as water, UV radiation, dirt, heat, and bacterial infections. The coating is also flexible and breathable, which makes it suitable for use on an enormous array of products.

The liquid glass spray (technically termed "SiO2 ultra-thin layering") consists of almost pure silicon dioxide (silica, the normal compound in glass) extracted from quartz sand. Water or ethanol is added, depending on the type of surface to be coated. There are no additives, and the nano-scale glass coating bonds to the surface because of the quantum forces involved. According to the manufacturers, liquid glass has a long-lasting antibacterial effect because microbes landing on the surface cannot divide or replicate easily.

Other organizations, such as a train company and a hotel chain in the UK, and a hamburger chain in Germany, are also testing liquid glass for a wide range of uses. A year-long trial of the spray in a Lancashire hospital also produced "very promising" results for a range of applications including coatings for equipment, medical implants, catheters, sutures and bandages. The war graves association in the UK is investigating using the spray to treat stone monuments and grave stones, since trials have shown the coating protects against weathering and graffiti. Trials in Turkey are testing the product on monuments such as the Ataturk Mausoleum in Ankara.

The liquid glass coating is breathable, which means it can be used on plants and seeds. Trials in vineyards have found spraying vines increases their resistance to fungal diseases, while other tests have shown sprayed seeds germinate and grow faster than untreated seeds, and coated wood is not attacked by termites. Other vineyard applications include coating corks with liquid glass to prevent "corking" and contamination of wine. The spray cannot be seen by the naked eye, which means it could also be used to treat clothing and other materials to make them stain-resistant. McClelland said you can "pour a bottle of wine over an expensive silk shirt and it will come right off".

Spray-on liquid glass is about to revolutionize almost everything (Thanks, Rick!)

So true...

Google has a cool little surprise in store for heavy e-mail users (and Mac owners): Google E-mail Uploader for Mac. It’s a free app that can archive your old e-mails from Apple Mail, Eudora and Thunderbird on your Google Apps e-mail account.

It’s actually a great idea; chances are that in the pre-cloud era, you’ve had tons of e-mail stored somewhere in your desktop e-mail client. Now, you can move everything to the cloud in one easy step.

If you’re a Windows user, check out the previously available Google E-mail Uploader for Windows. Unfortunately, you can only upload your e-mails to Google Apps e-mail accounts, not your gmail.com or googlemail.com accounts.

[Beautiful Google hard disk illustration courtesy of Joy of Tech]