Apple Goes to War

Via Slashdot, Newsweek reports that the US Army is issuing iPod Touches and iPhones to troops in the field as standard equipment. The uses are diverse and fascinating, from pulling down live video feeds from drones to calculating ballistics trajectories and looking up etiquette for cultural encounters. This is real science fiction stuff. Live video from above you? That's pretty out there.

What's also interesting, of course, is that living in New York City, the damn iPhone is completely ubiquitous. It's shocking how many people have those things. Their attraction is their versatility. An iPhone is really just a small computer with a great interface, and it's amazing that they are proving useful for everyone from yuppies to teenagers to soldiers in Afghanistan.

Bullying 2.0

A jury in Los Angeles has convicted a woman for accessing information on a website in violation of its terms of service. She was convicted of three misdemeanor charges, reduced by the jury from felonies. The woman convicted, Lori Drew, was charged because she created a MySpace account and used it to convince her daughter’s nemesis, Megan Meier, that a made up boy liked her. When Drew sent Megan a message that said, “The world would be a better place without you,” Megan hung herself.

Other than the substantial “ick” factor of the whole sordid affair, the prosecution claims Drew “violated federal laws that prohibit gaining access to a computer without authorization.” I’m not convinced that this actually is applicable to what happened here. The whole thing underlines the fact that technologies have been moving faster than the laws that should govern them. What Drew did is certainly wrong, in a moral sense, but I don’t know that it violates any specific law, let alone the one she was charged with:

Legal and computer fraud experts said the application of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, passed in 1986 and amended several times, appeared to be expanding with technology and the growth of social networking on the Internet. More typically, prosecutions under the act have involved people who hack into computer systems.

I’m not a lawyer, and Drew’s defense would seem to rest on a kind of backseat, “I’m not touching you,” finger a centimeter away kind of argument. Instead of trying to shoehorn people into violating laws that don’t really apply, we need to work on sensible laws for crimes as they arise. Besides, I can’t imagine that the Drew family’s trips to the supermarket are a whole lot of fun just at the moment. The whole thing just leaves a bad taste in my mouth, both of prosecutorial overreach and grandstanding, and of … well, I don’t know exactly what you’d call what Lori Drew did. “Shameful” and “disturbing” don’t quite do it justice.

The President Has Added You as a Friend

The soon-to-be Obama administration has a plan to use its ten million strong email list once it takes up residence at the White House, according to the Washington Post. The Post suggests that we could see weekly addresses via streaming video or other vague and largely unspecified “new media” ideas. I can’t see this evolving into a kind of White House-sanctioned Daily Kos, but it is an interesting development. I could easily see Obama using their lists of emails to solicit political pressure on Congress. It’s going to be an interesting development to watch, and with the massive success of Obama’s fundraising, I doubt that anyone is going to let this drop off the map.

It also mentions that the Obama campaign used their email list as collateral for a loan that they didn’t end up taking out. That just seems insane. It’s unbelievable how much further out ahead of the game the Obama team was compared with everybody else.

You Will (Eventually)

Getting away from the war for just a bit, there’s a very cool interactive graphic in the NY Times today. It has images of Edward Hopper’s paintings of Cape Cod, along with photographs of the subjects now. There are audio statements from people who are related somehow to the subjects. It’s a very nifty little doohickey, and if you like the art of Edward Hopper, it’s well worth five or ten minutes to check it out. It’s impressive how little the area has changed since the first half of the 20th Century when Hopper was painting.

This is the kind of stuff I’m glad to see coming out finally. It’s interesting to look at the past’s view of the future, seeing what happened, what didn’t and why (touch screens are inconvenient, but drive-through toll booths are here to stay). It’s taken a while for major news organizations to utilize the internet in more interesting ways, beyond simply putting out their old content, but they are finally wrapping their heads around it.