This week’s topic in info3pt0 is the challenge we face as a society in retaining privacy while adopting useful new technologies, specifically the GPS in this case. The class brings up two articles and asks the question if we as a society ought to increase or decease our usage of location based technology.

GPS was intended as a military product from the start, allowing the US military to achieve pinpoint precision when planning and coordinating. It was soon declassified for civilian use and now serves as an extremely reliable source of highly accurate location information. So accurate that it often seems like my phone knows where I am to a higher degree of accuracy than even I do.

Since then, the market has been saturated with GPS enabled products from navigational devices to tablets and cell phones, its hard to find a household that does not own some sort of GPS these days. This begs the question, when does location awareness become too involved?

The articles assigned for class bring up the fact that GPSs have both beneficial and some down right creepy uses. From safely navigating a storm at sea to stalking, the GPS certainly does have a wide range of uses however there is really no way to limit society’s utilization of this tech. The market has already been saturated and its unlawful for the government to restrict who can own a GPS or what they can use it for. Therefore the burden of privacy falls on us, the individual. We are transitioning to an open society, something argued by many high profile tech leaders as mentioned in “Privacy: One Step Backward?” This is unfortunate mostly because many young people are naive and do not think they need to protect themselves, and many older people do not know how.

So where am I going with this? The original question was “Do the benefits of the technology outweigh the risks?” One just needs to look around and see that society clearly believes the benefits of knowing where you are outweigh the risks of someone else potentially knowing the same information (Otherwise they wouldn’t spend hundreds on the tech). Without GPS no only would we have to try and use maps while driving again but airplanes and boats would have to use the starts and less accurate INS systems for navigation. Our smart bombs would lose considerable accuracy and put more lives in danger than intended and overzealous parents wouldn’t be able to track their children’s driving speeds.

Now that we love our GPSs, how do we go about being safe with them? My answer for most of the world’s problems is the same; Education. Once people know what is at risk how to protect themselves, they will not be taken advantage of. A perfect example of this is Google’s Latitude service. Many people don’t know that their Androids and iPhones can be used by Google friends to track your location on a map. Its a perfect tool for parents spouses etc, but at the same time its creepy as hell. An ignorant user who accepts and enables everything on their phone may end up showing their not so good friend, Marc, that they are out of the house at a particular time providing him with all the information he needs to rob their house. If our poor friend just read some things before accepting them, or educated himself about the subject he could have avoided the situation easily.

Granted, this does not account for unlawful stalking and those overzealous parents we talked about, aside from banning the technology there is not much we as a society can do to prevent these unethical uses. However this is the problem we face with any new tech. You can’t ban the camera because it has the potential to take unethical or illegal photos, why would you do that to the GPS? With the good comes the bad.

References:
http://www.thenewstribune.com/2012/01/30/2004703/personal-use-of-gps-trackers-growing.html
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/01/25/privacy-one-step-forward/
Google Latitude: https://www.google.com/latitude/b/0

Its been almost four short years since I last posted about my ground breaking multiplayer Zune game. Since then I’ve graduated high school, held a couple jobs with Lockheed, built some sweet stuff, bought a car, flew a plane, got a motorcycle license and a whole bunch of other cool things.

This blog will be used as an “ePortfolio” for my class Information 3.0 for the rest of this semester. Its about how technology is changing our world for the better or worse and our observations. Enjoy.

The Pong has been updated once again.
Check out the Zune page to get the latest version:
http://amir.shah.org/index.php/zune-pong/

I’ve fixed the support for the Znue 30 in multiplayer along with some bugs and other small gui stuff.
Head over to the Zune Pong page to get it:
http://amir.shah.org/index.php/zune-pong/

Improved graphics
Improved layout

NOTE: Untested Multiplayer! May throw an exception!
Known Bugs: – Ball still rides paddle – Ball does not speed up

Head to the Zune Pong page to download it:
http://amir.shah.org/index.php/zune-pong/

Alright, I’ve finally added music! Music starts up when the game loads. Press left (or down if you’re holdin the Zune up/down) to change the song.

Also, some of the kinks with the wireless multiplayer are worked out.

Known bugs:
– Ball still rides paddle

-Sometimes the joining Zune throws an exception. In these cases, simply have that Zune be the host

This list is kinda short. Someone find more!

Download

I’ve done it! I’ve made multi-player Pong
I believe this is the first public, non-Microsoft multilayer Zune game. Awesome!
Its still pretty buggy and the onscreen instructions lie. Here how to make it work:

Load up the game
On host: Click play, then back
On Client: Click play, then the ZunePad

Host will start playing fist while client joins. Client will join mid-session and they will play!

Known Bugs / fixes
-No way to go back to main menu

Updates
Fixed two bugs!
Added navigation & fixed buttons to work with onscreen instructions.
Press back at any screen to go to previous screen (or pause the game)
Multi-player still has no way to quit nicely (must force quit the game)

New version us up:

Download

I’ve fixed up my pong game from last night. New updates:
Better graphics
Better collision detection
“Dumber” AI
Scores (game still lasts forever)
Menu (Note: 2p has no function yet)

New version up. Adds support for Zune 30s

>Download<

On Thursday Microsoft released XNA 3.0 CTP for early Zune programmers. I took the oppertunity to bring everyone’s favorite game to the device. Its not complete (I need to wake up fairly early to go to a study session. Exams are next week) but I plan on updating it and finishing off everything by the middle of the week. For now you can hit against an unbeatable computer opponent forever. Have fun.

>Download<

Ever wanted to watch George Lucas’ famed Star Wars reconstructed through the use of ASCII characters? Open up your terminal and type in this command:

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl


How awesome is that!