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American Professors Margaret Fleck and David Forsyth are looking for ways of putting their Naked People Finder - a search engine for nude figures - to commercial use. While most existing image-finding programs use a mix of image analysis and caption-text analysis to find specific images, the two researchers have developed a program that uses image analysis alone. The program could be useful for anyone who wants to avoid or seek out certain types of pictures on the Net, said Fleck, of the University of Iowa's Computer Science Department. "It's up to the end user how to apply this general-purpose tool. Central authorities don't have to make these decisions for us." She and Forsyth have already been contacted by a couple of parties interested in commercialising the program, but wouldn't say who they were. The Naked People Finder begins by looking for images with regions that have colours and texture resembling skin of any pigment. It then runs its limb-detecting algorithm on the skin-like regions of pictures. "If it finds a skin-coloured cylinder, it looks for another cylinder nearby," said Forsyth, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley's computer science department. The ultimate goal of Fleck's and Forsyth's research is to create a program that can examine an image file and then "tell you what's in it - if it contains a person, or two jaguars, or something else," said Forsyth. He decided to use naked people for his first test application because of "the large sample set - I got it from the Net." Another reason is that "nobody is going to get interested in a program that finds pictures of horses." The program does a pretty good job. In a test set of 4,854 images (565 images of naked people and 4,289 control images), "the system marked 43% of the naked people images as containing naked people. By contrast, it marked only 4% of the other images as containing naked people," explained Fleck. The 4% mistake batch included images "with the right colour and elongated shapes", Fleck said, such as "stalactites, pumpkins and desserts - especially pinkish-coloured ones". - Mark Frauenfelder |
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Like they say, privacy will be one of the biggest issues of the next century. And they don't come any more private than Thomas Pynchon, cult author and celebrated recluse. Like J. D. Salinger, Pynchon has assiduously avoided publicity, with such success that he has become the object of rumours ranging from the unlikely (Pynchon and Salinger are the same person) to the absurd (Pynchon was the Unabomber). Hunted doggedly by journalists, academics and the bloke from my local bookshop - who swears blind that some time during the mid-'80s, Pynchon came in and bought some postcards - the author has made absence a major part of his literary identity. Award-winning books like V and Gravity's Rainbow are based on mystery, lack and disappearance. So maybe it's a little disappointing that Pynchon has been found - using the Net.On "an openly accessible online service that uses a cross-referencing of credit-card and phone numbers," New York magazine took "about ten minutes" to unearth America's most celebrated literary recluse. Pynchon lives with his wife and child in a Manhattan apartment block. The magazine trailed him on a trip to the health-food store with his son, Jackson. So, with not a bang but a whimper, one of the great literary detective stories comes to an end. Meanwhile, I've been typing "Lord" and "Lucan" into every search engine on the planet. No luck so far, but watch this space.
- Hari Kunzru
Wired's Monthly Giveaway
Psst! Want to know how to make money on the Web? Thought so. The Web usually cuts out middlemen, but there's one service gap in the British market which is crying out for an entrepreneurial soul to plug it. And it's blindingly obvious: railway timetables.With the chaotic deregulation of the rail service there has for some time been no central source of timetable information. Coordinating the various rail operators to provide an accurate up-to-the-minute account of their services is impossible. Getting a dead-tree document that's not out of date before it hits the shelves is a nightmare. On the Web, updates and corrections are dead simple. There are no printing or distribution costs. What could be easier?
Forget expensive online subscription services. A free Web site, funded by advertising, would bypass all that nonsense. It would be a major source of ad revenue and would require relatively little in the way of coding or administration.
That is, if you can persuade whoever runs our railways to release their jealously-guarded copyright information.
- Mo Kaye, with thanks to Paul Carter
Tired
Wired
Pocahontas Urusei Yatsura Referring to the 1890s Referring to the 990s Learning Leaning Selective slowness Total speed Mac/Be OS OpenOS Team players Free electrons Champagne socialists DotCommunists Spam kings Bankrupt spam kings Global Business Network Emergency Broadcast Network Iridium Gregnik WIPO database protection Foreign Web spiders lurking behind firewalls Suburbia The Pearl River delta
Why leave space travel to governments? Shouldn't everyone get a look-in? Since launching its Independent Space Programme in April 1995, the Association of Autonomous Astronauts (AAA) has resolutely challenged the state monopoly of space. "We have initiated a Five-Year Plan by which we hope to establish a global network of local community-based groups dedicated to building their own spaceships."John Eden and Jason Skeet, representatives of two London AAA groups, are defiant in the face of their government-funded oppressors. Says Skeet, "We will leave NASA behind."
"The cost of space travel is falling all the time. The information you need to build your own rockets, if that's what you're into, is freely available. It's like computers in the home. Not so long ago the whole notion of a 'personal computer' would have seemed ludicrous. Now we take it for granted."
To spread the word, the AAA has declared an information war "to create new concepts of space and of space travel". They are working on a Web site (online sometime in February at www.deepdisc .com/aaa) that posits a future in which the untenanted space station Mir becomes a squat. And unlike previous space races, conflict is not the point. "We're not actually fighting against anything apart from gravity." Contact them on AAA@uncarved .demon.co.uk or AAA@pHreak.intermedia.co.uk. The AAA's First Annual Report is available for £2.50 from Inner City AAA, BM Jed, London WC1N 3XX, UK, Earth.
- Jamie Cason
Internet marketing consultant Audri Lanford started Internet ScamBusters last year with her partner and husband, Jim, "after we became furious coming across scam after scam" on the Net. The zine/Web site is an action-alert network that digs up dirt on Net and phone fraud, ranging from "services" that charge astronomical prices for domain name registration to rip-off artists who team up with Caribbean-based companies to rake in crooked pay-per-call charges.The Lanfords, who make their living offering "results-based, satisfaction-guaranteed Net marketing" advice to businesses that are migrating to the Net, publish an issue of ScamBusters whenever they learn of a new rip-off scheme, usually from people who enter the "Scams on the Net" contest.
The Net is a fertile ground for rip-offs, Audri says, because "it's easy to be anonymous, it's cheap to do huge distribution, and it's easier to be dishonest when you are not dealing with people directly." But, she adds, the vast majority of Web sites are run by honest people - there's "no reason to panic" about being scammed.
- Mark Frauenfelder
Our token technophobe
The august Lord Hamilton is a worthy Ludd. Hamilton, who presides over the Court of Session in Edinburgh, has effectively made the World Wide Web illegal. Resounding huzzahs from luddites everywhere.M'Ludd granted the dead-tree Shetland Times an interim interdict against the electrons-only Shetland News. Now the Web-based News can't quote the Times' headlines, nor make links to its site. Since it started a year ago, the News had carried a headlines page with its own stories and headlines from the Times site. These linked readers to the actual Times stories. News editor Dr Jonathan Wills told Wired, "We trebled the Times site's readership." The Times clearly felt that the two-person News team was exploiting its reporters' hard work to make their site look better. Proprietor Robert Wishart says, "Despite the rubbish Wills has been spouting about restricting free access to the Internet, censorship and such like, this is a simple question of whether or not his activities amount to an infringement of our copyright."
The case rests on a mess of legal technicalities, including a working definition of the Web as a type of "cable TV", and whether clicking on someone else's headline is breach of copyright or just a reference. Regardless of the final outcome, this wireless peer can doze in his armchair, safe in the knowledge that the future won't come to Shetland, for a while at least.
- Mike Holderness. Additional reporting by Clive Gringras, vitriol by Hari Kunzru
"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts.... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...."
William Gibson, NeuromancerBut what does cyberspace actually look like? Artist and photographer Carey Young (c.young@rca.ac.uk) decided to find out. She took a series of abstract architectural photographs and sent them to authors and artists, including Gibson himself, Peter Lamborn Wilson, Doris Lessing, Kim Stanley Robinson, J. G. Ballard and Stelarc. Here are some of their reactions, as well as a picture amalgamated from the most positive responses (above). Synners author Pat Cadigan was so enthusiastic about the idea that she has agreed to let Young "be her eyes" on a project to produce a more specific and personal vision of cyberspace. - James Flint
Thank you for the photographs, but I'm afraid thatnone of them resembled my image of cyberspace - whatever that is - Sorry, JG Ballard
It hints at complexity while suggesting much is hidden, unknown. Iain Banks
An agenda would be to construct virtual spaces which curve, throb, mutate, create a terrain for alien experience. Stelarc
Looks more like a network or web not a thing. Robert Anton Wilson
Information is commutative and associative - there isn't any up or down or right or left - there is only information, more information, or less information. Viewed from outside, one piece is undistinguished from another - as is the case with the human mind, information only works when it is open. Pat Cadigan
Abstract, no sense of scale, ambiguous angles, not organic, an artefact, partially out of focus, light and shadow, 'grid' motif. William Gibson
I like number 9 because it suggests the emptiness at the heart of this concept. There is no such thing as Cyberspace, it is a category error. When people try to think Cyberspace they're really trying to conceptualize the postmodern global capitalist order and locate themselves there. Kim Stanley Robinson
I am very sorry, but I don't feel sympathetic to this idea. These are beautiful photographs, but I feel visions of the future can't really be confined in this way. Doris Lessing
More UK Net-censorship silliness. Safety-Net, the much-vaunted censorship company created by Internet entrepreneur Peter Dawe, looks like it may be stillborn. At least it has a new name. After receiving representations from SafetyNet plc, Dawe's newest Net venture has been renamed the Internet Watch Foundation. Unfortunately, its name may be the least of the new organisation's troubles. Internet Watch looks likely to be sidelined by other anti-Net-porn initiatives and slowed down by sheer lack of expertise. Its staff seems not to understand the Internet, nor what is required to control people who use the Net to circulate illegal material. I-Watch's chief executive, David Kerr, has been seconded from Cambridgeshire County Council, where he headed the Policy Unit. His recruitment can't be based on his prior Net experience - which consisted of occasional surfing and the odd email - but he was Peter Dawe's boss when Dawe was a humble council accountant. Working for Kerr are two administrators, neither of whom has Internet experience, while as we went to press the key post of technical director had yet to be filled.It also seems that the people at I-Watch don't trust the technology they are seeking to control. The technical director ad was posted to the uk.jobs.offered group on Usenet - but email applications will not be accepted. And while the telephone hotline service (ring in and nail an obscene site) is live on (01223) 236 077, the fax, email and Web site are all in the tray marked "pending". Not exactly the wired watchdog the establishment was hoping for.
- Tom Cooper
Britain's government has finally woken up to the digital revolution. The discussion paper, "Government Direct" envisions a world in which - hold onto your seats - citizens interact with their government electronically, rather than on forms scrawled in triplicate and then lost in the bureaucracy. Nice idea, but unfortunately they're only halfway there. Whitehall understands the benefits of efficiency, but not the possibility that new ways of communication might lead to totally new forms of democracy. If a wired government is going to mean more than email tax returns, our leaders will have to realise it's time to use the power of networks to involve everyone in governing themselves.- John Browning
Jargonsnatching
Blatantly ripping off items from this column, without a hint of attribution. "Did you see all that word-for-word jargonsnatch in The Observer last week? Well out of order!"
Emotaggin
Using HTML tags in email to indicate the state of mind of the writer. "No, seriously,Azeem hasn't got a bad word to say about anyone ."
NASCII
Art porno images rendered in simple ASCII text.
Serendipity Search
An Internet search that uncovers interesting and valuable information that was not intended in the original search. "I found this really cool site on tiki collecting during a serendipity search."
Tetwrist
A repetitive strain injury acquired after extended play of addictive puzzle games, such as Tetris.Ta muchly to all jargon watchers at Wired and elsewhere, on both sides of the Atlantic, and to the little fishies of haddock.