Generic Infrastructures [2]

Rob van Kranenburg

PDF [296 KB]

Part 1

teaching kids to program

“To allow citizens to participate fully in a media-saturated society, it’s crucial that they are media-wise. Citizens who are not media competent will find themselves excluded from parts of society. The council prefers the term ‘media wisdom’ to ‘media education’ because the latter focuses on everyday practice, in addition to the government exclusively acting on school education, children and adolescents, supply and protection.” Media Wisdom 2005, Council for Culture, The Netherlands

“There's more to worry about on the web than predators and viruses. We're giving everyone access to our personal lives. It's easy to get an account with almost any social-networking site, and we've learned from chat rooms, it's easy to pose as somebody else. It's easy, then, to get added to a friend list (especially with the 'more friends the better' attitude of current social-networking sites). Suddenly, that 'friends only' stuff is pretty much public”. Nigel Smart, Hexus

In the 2005 Advisory Report, ‘Media Wisdom’ the Dutch Council for Culture – for which I acted as external expert - proposed to broaden the term Media Education into the term Media Wisdom. This shift in perspective is prompted by:

“social and cultural changes, acknowledging that we see an increasing ‘mediatisation’ of society and culture. Media are affecting almost every corner of society. The media are becoming context, content and intermediaries of information knowledge and experiences. Media affect how people communicate, what about, what they value and the extent they feel connected. Media, whether old media or new, analogue or digital, play a significant part in all of those ways. Media have become our environment, rather than being just elements in our surroundings...”

The report stresses the inevitable character of this process of mediatization, claiming it is partly the result of receding government; states privatizing once core tasks:

“The growing influence of media also has an impact on democratic institutions and the meaning of modern citizenship. Citizens are becoming more responsible for themselves and the role they play in society. This is partly an autonomous process, which they choose themselves, and partly a process instigated by measures taken by a receding government [1]. This is possible thanks to the media, and in particular the possibilities opened up by the internet.” [2]

partly autonomous (the process of techné as outsourcing our memories from the pencil to the blackberry).

All things tend to disappear, and especially things man made. 'Ephemeralisation' was Buckminster Fuller’s term for describing the way that a technology becomes subsumed in the society that uses it. The pencil, the gramophone, the telephone, the cd player, technology that was around when we grew up, is not technology to us, it is simply another layer of connectivity. Ephemeralisation is the process where technologies are being turned into functional literacies; on the level of their grammar, however, there is very little coordination in their disappearing acts. These technologies disappear as technology because we cannot see them as something we have to master, to learn, to study. They seem to be a given. Their interface is so intuitive, so tailored to specific tasks, that they seem natural. In this we resemble the primitive man of Ortega y Gasset:

“...the type of man dominant to-day is a primitive one, a Naturmensch rising up in the midst of a civilised world. The world is a civilised one, its inhabitant is not: he does not see the civilisation of the world around him, but he uses it as if it were a natural force. The new man wants his motor-car, and enjoys it, but he believes that it is the spontaneous fruit of an Edenic tree. In the depths of his soul he is unaware of the artificial, almost incredible, character of civilisation, and does not extend his enthusiasm for the instruments to the principles which make them possible.” [3]

This unawareness of the artificial, almost incredible, character of Techné – the Aristotelian term for technique, skill – is only then broken when it fails us:

“Central London was brought to a standstill in the rush hour on July 25 2002 when 800 sets of traffic lights failed at the same time -- in effect locking signals on red.” [4]

Every new set of techniques brings forth its own literacy: The Aristotelian protests against introducing pencil writing, may seem rather incredible now, at the time it meant nothing less than a radical change in the structures of power distribution. Overnight, a system of thought and set of grammar; an oral literacy dependant on a functionality of internal information visualization techniques and recall, was made redundant because the techniques could be externalised. Throughout Western civilization the history of memory externalisation runs parallel with the experienced disappearance of its artificial, man made, character. An accidental disappearance, however much intrinsic to our experience, that up till now has not been deliberate:

“The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” [5]

Remember that car in Delhi? We see the car, the engine and the tools to fix the engine, put it in the car and….drive. We see code, protocol and procedure. Would you not agree that mastering code, protocol and procedure is key to being mediawise [6]?

As early as the 70s Seymour Papert outlined a constructionist approach (learning by making) by aiming to make children “builders of their own intellectual buildings”:

“In particular, the goal was to enable children to discover geometric knowledge on their own. The computer was to serve as a powerful tool with which the children could formulate algorithms to create certain patterns and test these algorithms. The point here is that children program the computer, that the children are in control of what they do. In most educational situations where children come into contact with computers – i. e. programmed instruction, computer aided instruction – the relationship is reversed: The computer programs the child.” [7]

He created the language Logo created as a dialect of the LISP programming language: a general-purpose language. The resulting “Turtle Geometry” involves programming a turtle, either a robotic one drawing on the ground, or a virtual one drawing on the screen.” Seymour Papert suggested making the thought processes required when programming an educational goal [8]. It is about time to take his advice. In Why Johnny Can't Code, the article [9] that inspired BASIC-256 [10], David Brin describes his long journey to find a computer that runs BASIC to show his 12 year old son some clear lines of code. Finally he buys a Commodore 64 on ebay and is able to do BASIC textbook exercises:

“Those textbook exercises were easy, effective, universal, pedagogically interesting – and nothing even remotely like them can be done with any language other than BASIC. Typing in a simple algorithm yourself, seeing exactly how the computer calculates and iterates in a manner you could duplicate with pencil and paper – say, running an experiment in coin flipping, or making a dot change its position on a screen, propelled by math and logic, and only by math and logic: All of this is priceless. As it was priceless 20 years ago. Only 20 years ago, it was physically possible for millions of kids to do it. Today it is not.”

Today we are in the worst situation imaginable. Our global and undisputed computing paradigm posits that computing processes are successful only in as much as they disappear from view. Our design focus is ever more following Philips untenable but seductive ‘sense and simplicity’ resulting in the-bug-as-a-feature-design of the Ipod Shuffle. Our educational system is following this systemic hide-complexity strategy that favors the large industrial labs, IT conglomerates and above all their clinging to notions of IP and the patent that are firmy tied [11] to their notions of doing business and making money. And our users, us? We are YOU, the most influential person of the year 2006, according to TIME Magazine. You fill the Wikipedia entries in your spare time, you blog your daily activities, you co-bookmark on de.l.i.c.i.o.u.s, upload your photos to flickr, you buy mating gear in Second Life, and mark your position on Plazer or Google Earth. You fill out the forms. Isn’t it time you start questioning the principles behind the formats? And, to make matters even worse, your naïve ideas of sharing are corrupting notions of privacy, transparency and informational architecture symmetry:

“Showing off your drinking triumphs to your friends? What if prospective employers are watching? As these sites continue to grow in popularity, so too does the value of the information on them to parties other than those directly involved. Parents can see what their children really get up to at Uni'. Teachers can see what their pupils really think. Potential employers can profile applicants based on their online braggings and other shenanigans. While much of the content might be taken humorously amongst friends, other parties might not see it that way.” [12]

According to Professor Nigel Smart (Computer Science, Bristol) there is a “deep societal problem emerging of people giving up their privacy without realising it. There's little point in worrying about ID cards, RFID tags and spyware when more and more people are throwing away their privacy anyway. And the potential consequences are dire.” [13]

Late November 2006 I accompany my friend Bas with his two children Marieke and Lies to their basischool in Tilburg, the Netherlands. Walking into Marieke’s classroom, age 8, I notice that at any given moment before class really starts over one third of the group, and mainly all boys, are standing, crouching or sitting behind the three computers in the room. It is very unlikely they will ever see the inside of that computer, very unlikely that they can take it apart, very unlikely even that this computer as a tool will be seen as anything other that something aiding the teacher, something to play a game on, or chat to friends in other schools. Although it is highly likely that these kids will be on the receiving end [14] of new technologies, at the very moment that they are growing up and susceptible to all kinds of new languages we learn them how to read, write and talk and we do not take advantage of this intuitive moment to teach them what makes the core of their world tick. This is not simply amazing. It is criminal.

“Social networking users need to take a step back and think about just what they're posting onto the Internet. It'll probably be too late for a number of people, and it'll take a lot more 'victims' of the lack of privacy before most users actually start heeding these warnings. Just beware that anything posted online to your friends now, could very easily come back to haunt you in days, months, or even years to come.” Steve Kerrison

“In medical school, professors insist that students have some knowledge of chemistry and DNA before they are allowed to cut open folks. In architecture, you are at least exposed to some physics. But in the high-tech, razzle-dazzle world of software? According to the masters of IT, line coding is not a deep-fabric topic worth studying. Not a layer that lies beneath, holding up the world of object-oriented programming. Rather, it is obsolete! Or, at best, something to be done in Bangalore. Or by old guys in their 50s, guaranteeing them job security, the same way that COBOL programmers were all dragged out of retirement and given new cars full of Jolt Cola during the Y2K crisis.” David Brin

"Electronic techniques recognize no contradiction in principle between transmitter and receiver. Every transistor radio is, by the matters of its construction, at the same time a potential transmitter; it can interact with other receivers by circuit reversal. The development from a mere distribution medium to a communications medium is technically not a problem. It is consciously prevented for understandable political reasons. The technical distinction between receivers and transmitters reflects the social division of labor into producers and consumers." [15]

generic infrastructures [16]

“Imagine a great metropolis covering hundreds of square miles. Once a vital component in a national economy, this sprawling urban environment is now a vast collection of blighted buildings, an immense petridish of both ancient and new diseases a territory where the rule of law has long been replaced by near anarchy in which the only security available is that which is attained through brute power. Such cities have been routinely imagined in apocalyptic movies and in certain science-fiction genres, where they are often portrayed as gigantic versions of T. S. Eliot’s Rat’s Alley. Yet this city would still be globally connected. It would possess at least a modicum of commercial linkages, and some of its in- habitants would have access to the world’s most modern communication and computing technologies. It would, in effect, be a feral city. Admittedly, the very term “feral city” is both provocative and controversial. Yet this description has been chosen advisedly. The feral city may be a phenomenon that never takes place, yet its emergence should not be dismissed as impossible. The phrase also suggests at least faintly, the nature of what may become one of the more difficult security challenges of the new century .Feral cities, as and if they emerge, will be something new on the international landscape. Cities have descended into savagery in the past, usually as a result of war or civil conflict, and armed resistance groups have operated out of urban centers before. But feral cities, as such, will be a new phenomenon and will pose security threats on a scale hitherto not encountered. It is questionable whether the tools, resources, and strategies that would be required to deal with these threats exist at present. But given the indications of the imminent emergence of feral cities, it is time to begin creating the means”. [17]

[18]

In the coming decade there are 4 parallel trends whose relationship will determine the politico-technical landscape and our agency as individuals in this landscape:

1. convergence of systems of control
2. overdependency
3. fringe economies
4. make generation goes local

1. convergence of systems of control [19]

[20]

In September 2005 HP released the iPAQ hx2000 series Pocket PCs equipped with Windows Mobile 5.0 OS. The HP hx2790 -part of the hx2000 series - offers a biometric fingerprint sensor. In March 2005 OMRON Corporation announced "OKAO Vision Face Recognition Sensor", a face recognition technology which can be implemented in PDAs, mobile phones or other mobile devices with a camera function [21]. Lenovo, China’s biggest PC manufacturer which bought Thinkpad [22] in 2004, sold its one millionth biometric laptop in December 2005. Casio Computer Corp. has developed a fingerprint sensor layered on top of a 1.2-inch LCD screen, “providing a convenient way for phone makers to incorporate biometric security into their handsets." [23]

Two major reasons for the growing success of biometric interfaces cluster around endpoint security: password management and convenience in financial transactions.

Password management. According to Will Sturgeon, “A growing number of large end-user organisations are making the switch to biometrics-based solutions to overcome the perennial problems users continue to have with passwords.” [24]
Mitsubishi Securities uses biometrics on their trading floor. “People across the organisation have about 12 passwords to remember so a single sign-on biometric keyboard has proven very popular," according to Graham Yellowley, IT director.
A survey among 1,700 enterprise end users in the US found that more than a 25% of respondents manage more than 13 passwords at work, and 88 % are frustrated with password management. This results in employees writing down passwords “or saving them locally on a spreadsheet or document.” (Sturgeon)

Financial comfort: Pay By Touch [25] enables shoppers to pay through fingerprint verification, no cash, no swiping, claims: "This is one of the rare times where you can deliver identity theft prevention for the shopper, better security in terms of fraud for the retailer and increased convenience." November 2006, a Harris Interactive Survey announced that in a survey of 2000 72% stated that fingerprint-scanning ATMs would give them “a positive or very positive feeling toward their bank.” [26] Over 30.000 biometric fingerprinting accessible ATM are planned in Japan for 2007. For these banks the profit works two ways; they counter the rising cost of card misuse, which is estimated at 6% and they offer their customers convenience and security. The banks have reported “low false rejection rates, which may reflect the market’s admission that fingerprint technology has improved since banks last considered this application nearly ten years ago.” [27] A recent TRUSTe survey even goes so far as to claim that 82% of Americans support the use of biometric identification on passports [28]. A pilot program is getting set to “install 15 biometric ATMs at "village kiosks in five districts across southern India." [29]

On June 28 2009 all EU members are required to store fingerprints of their citizens (and children up to 12 years [30]), with face recognition as the primary biometric identifier on the second generation of EU passports, the ePass:

“9403/1/06 REV 1 kin/DJW/moc 3
DG H I LIMITE EN
3. Solution proposed for setting the minimum age

In order to achieve as uniform a procedure as possible in the European Union, the solution for the two types of biometrics should be as follows:

Scanning of the facial image
0 to 12 years of age: the Member State may itself decide on storage in the
chip, on the basis of national legislation

from 12 years of age: compulsory

Scanning of fingerprints
from 12 years of age: compulsory
up to 12 years of age: storage is permissible if provided for by national
legislation. [31]

“2 Biometrics
2.1 Primary biometric – Face
2.1.1 Standard compliance
• ICAO NTWG, Biometrics Deployment of Machine Readable Travel Documents, Technical Report, Version 2.0, 05 May 2004 [3]
• ISO/IEC 19794-5:2005, Biometric Data Interchange Formats – Part 5: Face Image Data [4]
2.2 Secondary biometric – Fingerprints
2.2.1 Standard compliance
• ICAO NTWG, Biometrics Deployment of Machine Readable Travel Documents, Technical Report, Version 2.0, 05 May 2004 [3]
• ISO/IEC 19794-4:2005, Biometric Data Interchange Formats – Part 4: Finger Image Data [5]
• ANSI/NIST-ITL 1-2000 Standard “Data Format for the Interchange of Fingerprint, Facial, Scarmark & Tattoo (SMT) Information”; FBI: Wavelet Scalar Quantization (WSQ) [15]” [32]

The EU IST project SecurePhone [33] (research and commercial application based [34]) employs face and fingerprints to enable the user to digitally sign audio, text or image files, providing proof of their origin and authenticity:

"As far as we know there is no other biometrically-enabled digital signature application available for mobile devices that can guarantee security by storing and processing all sensitive information on the device's SIM card," explains SecurePhone technical coordinator Roberto Ricci at Informa in Italy. "Because biometric data never leaves the device's SIM card and cannot be accessed, except by the verification module which also runs on the SIM card, the user's biometric profile is completely safe. This is important to meet the highest privacy requirements." Although existing communications infrastructure based on the GSM, GPRS and UMTS mobile systems provides a secure means of communication, it lacks any robust method of user identification. Text, audio and image files can be sent by anyone to anyone with no authentication and there are no guarantees the person you are talking to in a phone conversation, if you've never met them before, is really who they claim to be.”

The net result of this convergence comfortingly acquiesces the biggest fears of both industry in general (IP) and national and federal states and state-like structures (identity). It makes sure who is who and at the same time it makes sure who is talking to whom. It neatly freezes both content and context in between the points of access (going online and going mobile) and the points of identification and authentication (who you are). Any kind of p2p activity is logged and traceable, not to your ISP but to you directly. It discourages experiments and works against creative and innovative acts of the rising make generation that cover the grounds in between structured discourses and operating systems.

“According to Citibank, biometric ATMs "have been tailored to meet the needs of the under-banked, lower income segment" and will feature "voice-enabled navigation facility aimed at illiterate customers," Moneycontrol reports. "Citibank plans to establish a network of 25 to 35 such ATMs within a year," for now in Mumbai and Hyderabad. But Citibank it isn’t simply targeting "illiterate customers" in rural areas of India. "The latest – and arguably bigges t – player to enter the biopayment game is none other than Citibank Singapore, which has been quietly distributing fingerprint readers to area businesses for the past month," reports Portalino. "Right now only Clear Platinum card holders have the option of going biometric, and since this group includes heavy representation from the tech-savvy 25 to 34-year-old demographic, it seems that Citibank is taking the right approach to ensure widespread adoption."Note how forking over your biometric data is characterized as an "option," a lifestyle choice for the sake of convenience”. [35]

2. overdependency

In the US blackouts of 1965, 1977, 1996 40 million people lost power for as long as 25 hours [36]. The Northeast Blackout of 2003 was the largest with financial losses estimated at $6 billion USD [37]. The 2003 Italy blackout [38] lay Italy powerless for 9 hours. On December 26 a 7.1 earthquake in the Southern parts of Taiwan wrecked the fiber optic cables that secured telecommunications “shattering the supposed invulnerability of the internet to withstand large-scale disasters:” [39]

Hello Nettime, [40]

You might have heard. On Tuesday night (26 Dec) a series of earthquake in
Taiwan snapped underwater cables connecting Hong Kong, Taiwan and China to North America, Japan and Korea. (About 5 cables were damaged including the APCN2 and Sea-Me-We3 lines )Thus disrupting the internet phone services, internet access, slow e-mail traffic (or zero-e-mail traffic for some places). According to the Chunghwa Telecom Co. and Singapore Telecommunications Ltd. , it may need weeks to resume full Internet and phone services in Asia. I shuddered in fear when I heard this. This is the biggest technological disaster which affected the whole of Asia-Pacific. With some news headlines calling this event the Cyber-tsunami (what the?) Ironically, few weeks ago, the Singapore government was offering Free Island-Wide WIFI services for all Singaporeans. Now with all the WIFI we got, we are still stumped by the stark reality of the Internet. Internet is made up of physical Internet cables and vulnerable to earthquakes, shark bites and fishermen.
Yours
Woon Tien Wei

[41]

[to be continued....]

Notes

1) See Chapter 2. [back]

2) Council for Culture 2005 Advisory Report on Mediawijsheid . Excerpts from the letter by the Council for Culture (Raad voor Cultuur), accompanying the 2005 Advisory Report on Mediawijsheid (literary: ‘media wisdom’). The letter and report were submitted to the Minister of Education, Culture and Science (Dutch: OCW) and the Chairs of the Houses of Parliament. The Advisory Report was entitled Media Wisdom: The Development of New Citizenship (Mediawijsheid: De ontwikkeling van nieuw burgerschap). [back]

3) Gasset, Ortega Y, The Revolt of the Masses, p.67. [back]

4) Lightly, Adrian, adrian@pigeonhold.com Subject: Gridlock as 800 London traffic lights seize: "The worst gridlock the capital has seen for years was caused by a computer which crashed as engineers installed software designed to give pedestrians longer to cross the roads.". Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2002 09:55:35 +0100 [back]

5) Weiser, Mark "The Computer for the Twenty-First Century," Scientific American, pp. 94-10, September 1991. [back]

6) Especially when handbags become media? [back]

7) Papert, Seymour (1980) Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas New York: Basic Books. Review by: http://www.elearning-reviews.org/reviewers/reichert-raimond/ Reichert, Raimond (2004-08-10)
http://www.elearning-reviews.org/topics/technology/interactive-environments/1980-papert-mindstorms/ [back]

8) Raymond Reichert writes: “His idea is eloquently expressed by Donald Knuth (1974): “It has often been said that a person does not really understand something until he teaches it to someone else. Actually a person does not really understand something until he can teach it to a computer, i. e., express it as an algorithm. […] The attempt to formalize things as algorithms leads to a much deeper understanding than if we simply try to comprehend things in the traditional way.” [back]

9) Why Johnny can't code.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2006/09/14/basic/print.html BASIC used to be on every computer a child touched -- but today there's no easy way for kids to get hooked on programming. By David Brin. [back]

10) BASIC-256 is an easy to use version of BASIC designed to teach young children the basics of computer programming. It uses traditional control structures like gosub, for/next, and goto, which helps kids easily see how program flow-control works. It has a built-in graphics mode which lets them draw pictures on screen in minutes, and a set of detailed, easy-to-follow tutorials that introduce programming concepts through fun exercises. http://kidbasic.sourceforge.net/ Daniel Ajoy da.ajoy@gmail.com to LogoForum. [back]

11) http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20061225,00.html [back]

12) By Steve Kerrison: “I don't have a FaceBook account, or a MySpace login. I do have a blog, but it's work-related” http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=7499 [back]

13) By Steve Kerrison: “I don't have a FaceBook account, or a MySpace login. I do have a blog, but it's work-related” http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=7499 [back]

14) “Japanese authorities decided to start chipping schoolchildren in one primary school in Osaka a couple of years ago. The kids' clothes and bags were fitted with RFID tags with readers installed in school gates and other key locations to track the minors' movements. Legoland also introduced a similar scheme to stop children going astray by issuing RFID bracelets for the tots.” Top 10: The best, worst... and craziest uses of RFID They've put a chip where? By Gemma Simpson and Jo Best Published: Thursday 30 November 2006. [back]

15) Source:
http://excerpter.wordpress.com/2006/10/21/hans-magnus enzensberger-constituent s-of-a-theory-of-the-media-1970/ ( via Jerneja Rebernak). [back]

16) This term engendered in a conversation with Ben Schouten. [back]

17) FERAL CITIES, Richard J. Norton, NAVAL WAR COLLEGE REVIEW http://www.nwc.navy.mil/press/Review/2003/Autumn/pdfs/art6-a03.pdf [back]

18) http://blogsimages.skynet.be/images/000/740/509_4f2c5212f31b9e7f94d67911885e2cbc.jpg [back]

19) http://www.physorg.com/news3233.html [back]

20) http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/333/C4734/ [back]

21) http://www.physorg.com/news3233.html [back]

22) “ThinkPads were built exclusively for businesspeople, with some of the best business-class features available. Traditionally black in color, ThinkPads feature innovative (and in some cases, unique) elements, including the TrackPoint pointing device; a keyboard light placed atop the LCD screen for working in dim environments; arguably the best keyboard available on a laptop; the Active Protection System, a device that detects when a ThinkPad is falling and shuts the hard drive down to prevent damage; and a biometric fingerprint reader. Many of these features are branded as ThinkVantage technologies.” http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-3126_7-6438939-1.html [back]

23) InfoWorld, Posted by Richard on October 6, 2004 11:45 AM http://www.byz.org/~rbanks/movableType/webLog/trends/archives/001870.html [back]

24) Biometrics curing password headaches. And boy do we hate PA55w0RD5... By Will Sturgeon Published: Wednesday 28 September 2005 Story URL: http://software.silicon.com/security/0,39024655,39152802,00.htm [back]

25) “Pay By Touch's patented biometric services enable shoppers to quickly access personal accounts using a finger scan to identify themselves, make purchases and earn rewards. The use of pay-by-touch fingerprint systems coincides with the use of other biometrics in financial transactions.” NSIDE FINANCIAL SERVICES Investors feel good about Pay By Touch Becky Yerak Published December 29, 2006, byerak@tribune.com [back]

26) http://www.storefrontbacktalk.com/securityfraud/good-news-for-fingerprint-fans-maybe/ [back]

27) Fingerprint Cards AB (publ), corporate identity no 556154-2381 Half-yearly interim report January - June 2006. [back]

28) TRUSTe has announced the results of a consumer survey that concludes that eighty-two percent of Americans support the use of biometric identification on passports, three-quarters of Americans support the addition of biometric information to driver's licenses and nearly as many (72.6 percent) support adding it to Social Security cards. Three out of five Americans support adding biometric data to credit cards (64 percent) and debit cards (62 percent), but are much less likely to want that information on a retail store loyalty card (27 percent). This corresponds to other findings in the survey that 76 percent of respondents trusted banks and financial institutions "always" or "most of the time" as compared to 41 percent of respondents trusting retail stores "always" or "most of the time." http://www.paymentsnews.com/2007/01/study_finds_maj.html [back]

29) Thumb-Print Banking Takes India, By Scott Carney| Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Jan, 19, 2007, http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,72284-0.html; http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/21/biometric-atms-coming-to-rural-india/ [back]

30) From 2009 children could be obliged to give fingerprints. EU states will be free to fingerprint children from day one of their life as soon as it is technologically possible. EU documents revealed by Statewatch say that - "scanning of fingerprints: up to 12 years of age.." should be possible "if provided for by national legislation..." "From 12 years of age:" it shall be "compulsory" (EU doc no: 9403/1/06) "The decisions are being made in secret meetings based on secret documents - people and parliaments are to have no say in the decision" says Statewatch.
If the vision of these documents (EU doc no: 9403/1/06 and EU doc no: 10540/06) will be realised European children would be subjected to compulsory fingerprinting under laws being drawn up by the European Union.The documents, from the European Commission, say that children as young as 5 will have to attend a fingerprinting centre to obtain an EU passport from June 2009. The resulting biometrics, scanned digitally, could be made available globally. [back]

31) COUNCIL OF THE EUROPEAN UNION Brussels, 26 June 2006 (27.06) (OR. de)
9403/1/06 REV 1 LIMITE FAUXDOC 9 VISA 135 COMIX 463 http://www.statewatch.org/news/2006/jul/9403-rev1-06.pdf [back]

32) Biometrics Communication infrastructure-EU passport EU-Passport-Specification Working document. Biometrics Deployment of EU-Passports.EU – Passport Specification Working document (EN) – 28/06/2006 This document describes solutions for chip enabled EU passports, based on the EU document [1] titled „Council Regulation on standards for security features and biometrics in passports and travel documents issued by Member States. The document is based on international standards, especially ISO standards and [back]

33) http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/projects/SecurePhone/ [back]

34) Despite SecurePhone's focus on research, Projectleader Ricci notes the the resulting application is commercially appealing and that the project partners are planning a further project with the aim of bringing the technology to market. "We would probably aim at the niche markets at first, such as busy executives, e-government or e- healthcare, and then expand from there," he says.
http://www.21stcentury.co.uk/technology/biometrics-for-mobiles.asp [back]

35) Media Cranks Up Hard Sell of Biometric and RFID Microchipped Future
Kurt Nimmo. December 2, 2006. Article nr. 28704 sent on 03-dec-2006 01:43 ECT
www.uruknet.info?p=28704 [back]

36) http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/08/14/power.outage/ [back]

37) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_North_America_blackout [back]

38) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Italy_blackout [back]

39) From URL: http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/eastasia/view/249603/1/.html
Telecoms services in Asia could take weeks to fully return By Channel NewsAsia's Taiwan Correspondent, Ken Teh | Posted: 28 December 2006 2215 hrs [back]

40) From: tien@dangermuseum.com Subject: <nettime> Asia's Cyber tsunami, The day that the internet stopped, again. Date: Thu
28 Dec 2006 21:23:24 GMT+01:00 To: nettime-l@bbs.thing.net
Reply-To: tien@dangermuseum.com [back]

41) “The city was without its omnipresent hum of taxis, airplanes, people and trains. It was as if the city itself had gone to sleep.” http://johnwehr.com/blackout/5.html [back]