Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

I got a chance to see my 5th eclipse on July 11 -- well sort of. In spite of many tools at our disposal, including a small cruise ship devoted to the eclipse, we saw only about 30 seconds of the possible 4 minutes due to clouds. But I still have a gallery of pictures.

Today marks the start of a remarkable robocar trek from Italy to China. The team from the Vislab International Autonomous Challenge start in Italy and will trek all the way to Shanghai in electric autonomous vehicles, crossing borders, handling rough terrain and going over roads for which there are no maps in areas where there is no high-accuracy GPS.

I've had a blogging hiatus of late because I was heavily involved last week with Singularity University a new teaching institution about the future created by Nasa, Google, Autodesk and various others. We've got 80 students, most from outside North America, here for the summer graduate program, and they are quite an interesting group.

I've written a bunch about my desire to be able to connect an untrusted input device to my computer or phone so that we could get hotels and other locations to offer both connections to the HDTVs in the rooms for monitors and a usable keyboard. This would let one travel with small devices like netbooks, tablet computers and smart phones yet still use them for serious typing and UI work while in the hotel or guest area.

I've proposed that the connection from device to the monitor be wireless. This would make it not very good for full screen video but it would be fine for web surfing, email and the like. This would allow us to use the phone as its own mouse, either by having a deliberate mouse style sensor on the back, or using the camera on the back of the phone as a reader of the surface. (A number of interesting experiments have shown this is quite doable if the camera can focus close and can get an LED to light up the surface.) This provides a mouse which is more inherently trustable, and buttons on the phone (or on its touchscreen) can be the mouse buttons. This doesn't work for tablets and netbooks -- for them you must bring your own mini-mouse or use the device as a touchpad. I am still a fan of the "trackpoint" nubbins and they can also make very small but usable mice.

The keyboard issue is still tough. While it would seem a wired connection is more secure, not all devices will be capable of such a connection, while almost all will do bluetooth. Wired USB connections can pretend to be all sorts of devices, including CD-Roms with autorun CDs in them. However, I propose the creation of a new bluetooth HID profile for untrusted keyboards.

When connecting to an untrusted keyboard, the system would need to identify any privileged or dangerous operations. If such operations (like software downloads, destructive commands etc.) come from the keyboard, the system would insist on confirmation from the main device's touchscreen or keyboard. So while you would be able to type on the keyboard to fill text boxes or write documents and emails, other things would be better done with the mouse or they would require a confirmation on the screen. Turns out this is how many people use computers these days anyway. We command line people would feel a bit burdened but could create shells that are good at spotting commands that might need confirmation.

Last week, on my trip to Berlin, I managed to drop my passport. I don't know where -- it might have been in the bathroom of Brussels airport trying to change clothes in a tiny room after a long red-eye, or it might have been when Brussels Air made me gate check a bag requiring a big rearrangement of items, or somewhere else. But two days later, arriving at a Pension in Berlin I discovered it was missing, and a lot of calling around revealed nobody had turned it in.

In today's document hungry world this can be a major calamity. I actually have a pretty pleasant story to report, though there were indeed lots of hassles. But it turned out I had prepared for this moment in a number of ways, and you may want to do the same.

The upshot was that I applied for a passport on Wednesday, got it on Thursday, flew on Friday and again on Monday and got my permanent passport that same Monday -- remarkable efficiency for a ministry with a reputation for long bureaucracy.

After concluding it was lost, I called the Canadian Embassy in Berlin. Once you declare the passport lost, it is immediately canceled, even if you find it again, so you want to be sure that it's gone. The Embassy was just a couple of U-bahn stops away, so I ventured there. I keep all my documents in my computer, and the security guy was shocked I had brought it. He put all that gear in a locker, and even confiscated my phone -- more on that later.

Since I'm on the road (Washington DC right now, then Berlin on Monday for a few days and then Toronto for the weekend of the 11th) I will lament on the problem I have noted before in travel power. We have to carry so many chargers. I have also found it's a pain to take them all out and put them back in again.

The lastest Facebook flap has caused me to write more about privacy of late, and that will continue has we head into the June 15 conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy where I will be speaking on privacy implications of robots.

Social networks want nice easy user interfaces, and complex privacy panels are hard to negotiate by users who don't want to spend the time learning all the nuances of a system. People usually end up using the defaults.

I don't often write about robots that don't go on roads, but last night I stopped by Willow Garage, the robot startup created by my old friend Scott Hassan. Scott is investing in building open robotics platforms, and giving much of it out free to the world, because he thinks progress in robotics has been far too slow.

As many expected would happen, Mark Zuckerberg did an op-ed column with a mild about face on Facebook's privacy changes. Coming soon, you will be able to opt out of having your basic information defined as "public" and exposed to outside web sites. Facebook has a long pattern of introducing a new feature with major privacy issues, being surprised by a storm of protest, and then offering a fix which helps somewhat, but often leaves things more exposed than they were before.

For a long time, the standard "solution" to privacy exposure problems has been to allow users to "opt out" and keep their data more private. Companies like to offer it, because the reality is that most people have never been exposed to a bad privacy invasion, and don't bother to opt out. Privacy advocates ask for it because compared to the alternative -- information exposure with no way around it -- it seems like a win. The companies get what they want and keep the privacy crowd from getting too upset.

Sometimes privacy advocates will say that disclosure should be "opt in" -- that systems should keep information private by default, and only let it out with the explicit approval of the user. Companies resist that for the same reason they like opt-out. Most people are lazy and stick with the defaults. They fear if they make something opt-in, they might as well not make it, unless they can make it so important that everybody will opt in. As indeed is the case with their service as a whole.

Neither option seems to work. If there were some way to have an actual negotiation between the users and a service, something better in the middle would be found. But we have no way to make that negotiation happen. Even if companies were willing to have negotiation of their "I Agree" click contracts, there is no way they would have the time to do it.

I've been interested in videoconferencing for some time, both what it works well at, and what it doesn't do well. Of late, many have believed that quality makes a big difference, and HD systems, such as very expensive ones from Cisco, have been selling on that notion.

A couple of years ago Skype added what they call HQ calling -- 640 x 480 at up to 30fps. That's the resolution of standard broadcast TV, though due to heavy compression it never looks quite that good. But it is good and is well worth it, especially at Skype's price: free, though you are well advised to get a higher end webcam, which they initially insisted on.

So there was some excitement about the new round of 720p HD webcams that are coming out this year, with support for them in Skype, though only on the Windows version. This new generation of cams has video compression hardware in the webcam. Real time compression of 1280x720 video requires a lot of CPU, so this is a very good idea. In theory almost any PC can send HD from such a webcam with minimal CPU usage. Even the "HQ" 640x480 line video requires a fair bit of CPU, and initially Skype insisted on a dual core system if you wanted to send it. Receiving 720p takes far less CPU, but still enough that Skype refuses to do it on slower computers, such as a 1.6ghz Atom netbook. Such netbooks are able to play stored 720p videos, but Skype is judging them as unsuitable for playing this. On the other hand, modern video chips (Such as all Nvidia 8xxx and above) contain hardware for decoding H.264 video and can play this form of video readily, but Skype does not support that.

The other problem is bandwidth. 720p takes a lot of it, especially when it must be generated in real time. Skype says that you need 1.2 megabits for HD, and in fact you are much better off if you have 2 or more. On a LAN, it will use about 2.5 megabits. Unfortunately, most DSL customers don't have a megabit of upstream and can't get it. In the 90s, ISPs and telcos decided that most people would download far more than they uploaded, and designed DSL to have limited upload in order to get more download. The latest cable systems using DOCSIS 3 are also asymmetric but offer as much as 10 megabits if you pay for it, and 2 megabits upstream to the base customers. HD video calling may push more people into cable as their ISP.

Last week, I attended a talk by Marc Raibert the former MIT Professor who founded Boston Dynamics, the makers of the BigDog 4-legged walking robot. If you haven't seen the various videos of BigDog you should watch them immediately, as this is some of the most interesting work in robotics today.

Walking pack robots like BigDog have a number of obvious applications, but at present they are rather inefficient. BigDog is powered by a a 2 stroke compressor that drives hydraulics. That works well because the legs don't need engines but can exert a lot of force. However, its efficiency is in the range of 2 gallons per mile, though this is just a prototype level. It is more efficient on flat terrain and pavement, but of course wheels are vastly more efficient there. As efficient as animals are, wheeled vehicles are better if you don't make them heavy as tanks and SUVs.

BigDog walks autonomously but today is steered by a human, or in newer versions, can follow a human walking down a trail, walking where she walked. In the future they want to make an autonomous delivery robot that can be told to take supplies to troops in the field, or carry home a wounded soldier.

I wondered if BigDog isn't trying too hard to be a mule, carrying all the weight up high. This makes it harder for it to do its job. If it could just tow a sledge (perhaps a container with a round teflon bottom with some low profile or retractable wheels) it might be able to haul more weight. Particularly because it could pay out line while negotiating something particularly tricky and then once stable again, reel in the line. This would not work if you had to go through boulders that might catch the trailer but for many forms of terrain it would be fine. Indeed, Boston Dynamics wants to see if this can work. On the other hand, they did not accept my suggestion that they put red dye in the hydraulic fluid so that it spurts red blood if damaged or shot.

The hydraulic design of BigDog made me wonder about applications to robocars. In particular, it seems as though it will be possible to build a light robocar that has legs folded up under the chassis. When the robocar got to the edge of the road, it could put down the legs and be able to climb stairs, go over curbs, and even go down dirt paths and rough terrain. At least a lightweight single person robocar or deliverbot might do this.

At the positive end of my prediction that robocars will enable people to travel in "the right vehicle for the trip" and given that most trips are short urban ones, it follows that most robocars, if we are efficient, will be small light vehicles meant for 1-2 people, with a lesser number of larger ones for 4-5 people.

Last week, Volvo was demoing some new collision avoidance features in their S60. I've talked about the S60 before, as it surprised me putting pedestrian detection into a car before I expected it to happen. Unfortunately in an extreme case of demo disease known to all computer people, somebody has made an error with the battery, and in front of a crowd of press, the car smashed into the truck it was supposed to avoid. The wired article links to a video.

There's been a well justified storm about Facebook's recent privacy changes. The EFF has a nice post outlining the changes in privacy policies at Facebook which inspired this popular graphic showing those changes.

But the deeper question is why Facebook wants to do this. The answer, of course, is money, but in particular it's because the market is assigning a value to revealed data. This force seems to push Facebook, and services like it, into wanting to remove privacy from their users in a steadily rising trend. Social network services often will begin with decent privacy protections, both to avoid scaring users (when gaining users is the only goal) and because they have little motivation to do otherwise. The old world of PC applications tended to have strong privacy protection (by comparison) because data stayed on your own machine. Software that exported it got called "spyware" and tools were created to rout it out.

Facebook began as a social tool for students. It even promoted that those not at a school could not see in, could not even join. When this changed (for reasons I will outline below) older members were shocked at the idea their parents and other adults would be on the system. But Facebook decided, correctly, that excluding them was not the path to being #1.

With Facebook seeming to declare some sort of war on privacy, it's time to expand the concept I have been calling "Data Hosting" -- encouraging users to have some personal server space where their data lives, and bringing the apps to the data rather than sending your data to the companies providing interesting apps.

I think of this as something like a "safe deposit box" that you can buy from a bank. While not as sacrosanct as your own home when it comes to privacy law, it's pretty protected. The bank's role is to protect the box -- to let others into it without a warrant would be a major violation of the trust relationship implied by such boxes. While the company owning the servers that you rent could violate your trust, that's far less likely than 3rd party web sites like Facebook deciding to do new things you didn't authorize with the data you store with them. In the case of those companies, it is in fact their whole purpose to think up new things to do with your data.

Nonetheless, building something like Facebook using one's own data hosting facilities is more difficult than the way it's done now. That's because you want to do things with data from your friends, and you may want to combine data from several friends to do things like search your friends.

One way to do this is to develop a "feed" of information about yourself that is relevant to friends, and to authorize friends to "subscribe" to this feed. Then, when you update something in your profile, your data host would notify all your friend's data hosts about it. You need not notify all your friends, or tell them all the same thing -- you might authorize closer friends to get more data than you give to distant ones.

I have written in the past about my late father's careers most of which are documented in his memoirs and other places. In spite of being almost 60 years in the past, his religious career still gets a lot of attention, as I recently reported in the story of the strange exhibit about him in the infamous Creation Museum.

Recently, two movies have been released in which he is a character. I recently watched Billy: The Early Years which is a movie about the early life of Billy Graham told from the supposed viewpoint of my father on his deathbed. Charles Templeton and Billy Graham were best friends for many years, touring and preaching together, and the story of how my father lost his faith as he studied more while Graham grew closer to his has become a popular story in the fundamentalist community.

While it doesn't say that it's fictional, this movie portrays an entirely invented interview with Charles Templeton, played by Martin Landau, in a hospital bed in 2001, shortly before his death. (In reality, while he did have a few hospital trips, he spent 2001 in an Alzheimer's care facility and was not coherent most of the time.) Fleshed out in the novelization, the interview is supposedly conducted on orders from an editor trying to find some dirty on Billy Graham. Most of the movie is flashbacks to Graham's early days (including times before they met) and their time together preaching and discussing the truth of the Bible.

It is disturbing to watch Landau's portrayal of my father, as well as that by Mad Men's Krisoffer Polaha as the younger version. I'm told it is always odd to see somebody you know played by an actor, and no doubt this is true. However, more disturbing is the role they have cast him in for this allegedly true story -- namely Satan. As I believe is common in movies aimed at the religious market, Graham's story is told in what appears to be an allegory of the temptation of Christ. In the film, Graham is stalwart, but my father keeps coming to him with doubts about the bible. The lines written for the actors are based in part on his writings and in part on invention, and as such don't sound at all like he would speak in real life, but they are there, I think, to take the role of the attempted temptation of the pure man.

Just a note that I'll be in Boston this weekend attending the 2nd day of ROFLCon, a convention devoted to internet memes and legends. They're having a panel on USENET on Saturday and have invited me to participate. Alas, registration is closed, but there are some parties and events on the schedule that I suspect people can go to. See you there.

This weekend I attended the annual "Robogames" competition, which took place here in the Bay Area. Robogames is mostly a robot battle competition, with a focus on heavily armed radio-controlled robots fighting in a protected arena. For several years robot fighting was big enough to rate some cable TV shows dedicated to it. The fighting is a lot of fun, but almost entirely devoid of automation -- in fact efforts to use automation in battle robots have mostly been a failure.

The RC battles are fierce and violent, and today one of the weapons of choice is something heavy that spins at very high speed so that it builds up a lot of angular momentum and kinetic energy, to transfer into the enemy. People like to see robots flying through the air and losing parts to flying sparks. (I suspect this need to make robots very robust against attack makes putting sensors on the robots for automation difficult, as many weapons would quickly destroy a lot of popular sensors types.) The games also featured a limited amount of automated robot competition. This included some lightweight (3lb and 1lb) automated battles which I did not get to watch, and some some hobby robot competitions for maze-running, line following, ribbon climbing and LEGO mindstorms. There was also semi-autonomous robot battle called "kung fu" where humanoid robots who take high level commands (like punch, and step) try to push one another over. There is also sumo, a game where robots must push the other robot out of the ring.

I had hoped the highlight would be the Robo-magellan contest. This is a hobbyist robot car competition, usually done with small robots 1 to 2 feet in length. Because it is hobbyists, and often students, the budgets are very small, and the contest is very simple. Robots must make it through a simple outdoor course to touch an orange cone about 100 yards away. They want to do this in the shortest time, but for extra points they can touch bonus cones along the way. Contestants are given GPS coordinates for the target cones. They get three tries. In this particular contest, to make it even easier, contestants were allowed to walk the course and create some extra GPS waypoints for their robots.

These extra waypoints should have made it possible to do the job with just a GPS and camera, but the hobbyists in this competition were mostly novices, and no robot reached the final cone. The winner got within 40 feet on their last run, but no performance was even remotely impressive. This was unlike past years, where I was told that 6 or more robots would reach the target and there would be real competition. This year's poor showing was blamed on budgets, and the fact that old teams who had done well had moved on from the sport. Only 5 teams showed up.

The robots were poor for sensors. While all would have a GPS, in 1 or 2 cases the GPS systems failed and the robots quickly wandered into things. A few had sonar or touch-bars for obstacle detection, but others did not, and none of them did their obstacle detection well at all. For most, if they ran into something, that was it for that race. Some used a compass or accelerometers to help judge when to turn and where to aim, since a GPS is not very good as a compass.

Last night, YouTube posted a note on the official YouTube Blog concerning the recent firestorm over Content-ID takedowns like the one I wrote about earlier in the week regarding my Downfall DMCA Parody.

In the post, they are kind enough to link to my video (now back up on YouTube thanks to my disputing the Content-ID takedown) as an example of a fair use parody, and to a talk by (former) fellow EFF director Larry Lessig which incorporated some copyrighted music.

However, some of the statements in the post deserve a response. Let me start first that I hope I do understand a bit of YouTube's motivations in creating the Content-ID system. YouTube certainly has a lot of copyright violations on it, and it's staring down the barrel of a billion dollar lawsuit from Viacom and other legal burdens. I can understand why it wants to show the content owners that it wants to help them and wants to be their partner. It is a business and is free to host what it wants. However, it is also part of Google, whose mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," and of course to not "be evil" in the process of doing so. On the same blog, YouTube declares its dedication to free speech very eloquently.

One of the greatest things that can give a region a sense of identity is the presence of a regional cuisine. In addition to identity it brings in tourists, so every region probably really wishes it had one.