Four short links: 5 October 2015

Semantic Sensors, Broadening "Sensor," Moving Fast, and Presidential Campaigns

  1. Semantic Sensors (Pete Warden) — tiny, cheap, all-in-one modules that capture raw noisy data from the real world, have built-in AI for analysis, and only output a few high-level signals.
  2. What if People Were Sensors, Not Things To Be Sensed? (Cory Doctorow) — Even in the Internet of Allegedly Free Things, humans and comput­ers are adversaries. Medical telemetry and implant companies envision selling shockingly intimate facts about your body’s internal workings to data-mining services and insurers. Car companies see their vehicles as platforms for gathering data on your driving, on traffic patterns, and on the sense-able facts of the streets you pass by, to sell it to, you guessed it, data-mining companies and insurers. John Deere has argued that its tractors are copyrighted works, and that it, not the farmers, own the soil-density data collected by the torque sensors on the wheels (it sells this data to Monsanto, which charges farmers for the right to know about it).
  3. Move Fast and Break Nothing (Zach Holman) — the first step is identifying what you cannot break.
  4. I’m Trying to Run for President But the Democrats Won’t Let Me (Larry Lessig) — A “democracy” in which 400 families give 50% of the money in campaigns is not American democracy. It is a banana republic democracy.
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