Scans
Making Privacy Pay
The National Security Agency and the FBI are unleashing bloodhounds in cyberspace, but Sameer Parekh wants to help you throw them off the trail. He sees it as a race against time. "The government is trying to outlaw privacy. We need to put privacy-enhancing technology in place as soon as possible. If we get there first, it won't make any difference what laws they pass.
Sameer's elfin face looks even younger than his tender age of 22. And while he is usually polite and soft-spoken, his steely resolve makes itself evident when he discusses his beliefs about civil liberties. "The reason I've made a business out of privacy is that otherwise it's just a hobby. And hobbyists can't create an effective, reliable infrastructure for personal privacy.
Sameer means business - both figuratively and literally. His business, in this case, is C2Net, a start-up software company and Internet service provider. C2Net's stated mission is to "preserve privacy on the Internet." If you're trying to keep a low profile, C2Net can set you up with an anonymous Internet account, a pseudonymous server, or a remailer interface.
Why all the fuss about privacy? Whenever you surf the Web, you leave behind all sorts of juicy information about yourself. Web site sysops - and anyone lurking between you and the site you are browsing - can find out what type of computer you're using, your email address, and what other Web pages you've visited. Hardly the kind of stuff you'd want a direct marketer or government snoop to know about.
One of Sameer's remedies for this information hemorrhage is called the Anonymizer - a site at www .anonymizer.com/ that enables you to browse the Web with complete anonymity. Best of all, this privacy won't cost you a dime. While Sameer looks for advertisers to carry the water for anonymous users, C2Net is supporting the Anonymizer as a public service.
Sameer learned about controversy at an early age. As a teenager, he campaigned against drug laws and published an antidrug law newsletter. His free speech foray was rewarded with regular visits to the principal's office. Despite the pressure, Sameer continued to make waves by publishing his newsletter.And today, he's still making waves. Of course, every time some government comes up with a new way to diddle with your privacy, Sameer will have to think up a new way to stop them. But the smart money is betting on Sameer.
Sandy Sandfort
Griot Gets a Betacam
Michael Smith is not a Hollywood star. But it's not the draw of riches that drives the independent documentary director. It's the message.
Smith, 31, sees himself as the digital incarnation of a griot, the nomadic storyteller of West African lore who carried oral history from village to village. Most black people are shut out of traditional filmmaking because of its massive cost, Smith says. But the home videocamera has helped open up the American mediasphere to alternative viewpoints. Smith's recent film, Jesse's Gone, shot entirely with a Sony Betacam, looks at the life and death of Jesse Hall, a young rapper from Oakland, California, who was killed in 1992.
More important than technology, Smith argues, is the need to nurture basic writing skills within the black community. "We need to teach kids how to write a coherent story before anything else," he says.
Charlie LeDuff
Sweating Out Your Drug Test
The next time you see someone wearing an adhesive patch on their arm, don't assume it's there to help them quit smoking. PharmChek, a drug-detecting patch developed by Sudormed Inc. of Santa Ana, California, absorbs molecules of substances like marijuana, PCP, amphetamines, opiates, and cocaine given off in perspiration.
Users wear the tamper-proof patch for up to seven days, when it is sent to a lab for testing. Don't bother trying to escape detection by refusing to exert yourself for a week. "You're always sweating. You'll lose 600 milliliters just sitting at room temperature for 24 hours," says Don Schoendorfer, vice president of research and development at Sudormed.
PharmChek is being evaluated in 36 federal probation sites across the US. But for now, if the idea of getting caught toking up makes you sweat, then avoid getting slapped with a PharmChek patch.
Dave Cravotta
Follow That Car!
orget about hailing a cab at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport. Officials there have refined a computerized taxi dispatch system that eases traffic congestion and cuts down on squabbles between competing cabbies.
But having their every move tracked over a fiber-optic network doesn't sit well with some old-school drivers. "Our movements are controlled by the machine, and I don't like it," says an emphatic Syed Hussain.
Big Brother syndrome aside, however, most drivers don't mind having transponders mounted on the windshield behind their mirrors and enjoy not having to physically hold their place in a line of waiting cabs anymore. "Everybody knows we need the computers now," says Sammy the Greek, a 41-year veteran driver of the Minneapolis airport circuit. "Anybody who doesn't like it is wrong in the head."
Timothy Broeker
Suburbia Meets the Final Frontier
Is the banality of ordinary television programming getting you down? Why not try tuning in to signals from an extraterrestrial civilization with your backyard satellite TV dish?When the US Congress cut off funding for NASA's search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) in 1993, professional researchers scrambled for private financing. The congressional move also led to the formation of the SETI League, a group of amateur radio astronomers headquartered in Little Ferry, New Jersey. Executive director H. Paul Shuch often livens league meetings with a song: "My satellite antenna is pointed at the sky/ But I'm not watching television, let me tell you why/ I'm searching for existence - proof of any alien race/ By sifting through the microwaves that fall from outer space."
Using a standard backyard satellite TV dish, a microwave receiver, a pre-amplifier, and a computer, Shuch has been scanning the cosmos for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. A professor of electronics at the Pennsylvania College of Technology (part of Penn State), he has taken a leave of absence to head the SETI League.
"For about US$2,000, you can build yourself a really good SETI station," Shuch says. "You can pick up MTV at the same time you listen for extraterrestrial intelligence because the signals don't interfere with one another - you just stick a second feed horn onto your dish.
The SETI League's grand goal is to develop Project Argus, its coordinated search, into a worldwide network of 5,000 dishes that will scan the sky for alien beacons arriving from as far out as 200 light-years. With 387 members now in 17 countries, the league has 24 stations online or under construction.
One station is operated by Rachel Tortolini, a family practice physician in Oahu, Hawaii. "I was just looking for a hobby to take my mind off medicine," she says. "I mostly buy surplus.I picked up a 10-meter diameter dish at scrap metal prices." Tortolini says, "The dishes remind me of big flowers pointing their petals to the skies, waiting to receive whatever's out there. There's nothing between my dish and the end of the universe."
Dave Cravotta
Twentieth-Century Tricorder
our throat is swollen, and it hurts like hell. At the doctor's office, a culture swabbed across a computer chip reveals "strep throat" within seconds. The technology may resemble a Star Trek tricorder, but it's here - now.
Invented by San Diego-based Nanogen, the system - dubbed APEX - can detect multiple diseases on the spot. It works by placing a patient sample on the surface ofa special Nanogen chip. Woven into the surface of the chip are DNA strands called capture probes that interact with patients' DNA, triggering a positive reading if the probes detect DNA that match the illnesses - like strep throat - they're programmed to detect.
It's a marriage built in biotechnology heaven. "Right now, you go to the doctor's office with a sore throat, he takes a swab, hands you some antibiotics, and tells you to call in two days," says Nanogen president Tina Nova. "With APEX, the sample can be placed on the chip, and within minutes it will test for strep culture or any other respiratory disease.
Nanogen's APEX scanner isn't as flashy as Doctor McCoy's medical tricorder - requiring direct contact with human tissue instead of a casual wave over the body - but Nova nevertheless predicts it will revolutionize diagnostic medicine. "We're using electronics as the basis of our science," she says, adding that her technology could pose a competitive threat to conventional test tube laboratories, where results can be late and are occasionally wrong.
Nanogen broke onto the scene three years ago, and the not-yet-public company is still waiting for its invention to go to town. But that's normal for the US$10.8 billion biotech industry, where research and development can often last a decade or more, and cost millions, before products are ready to hit the market. The APEX system still must pass an FDA testing regimen specially designed for the hybrid silicon-DNA technology. Nova predicts a lab-ready prototype by 1997 and a marketable version a few years later.
Nova's third venture in eight years, Nanogen has made her the envy of fellow scientists and the darling of biotech investors. "My specialty is the start-up phase. They know I'll work 12 hours a day, eight days a week to get it right."
Lauren Barack
The Network Is the Instrument
What happens when a bunch of high tech musicians link their computers together? You get The Hub - the most wired band around. Since the late 1980s, these six musicians have been using networked MIDI systems to create spontaneous digital musical productions. Inspired by jazz groups like the Art Ensemble of Chicago and electronic pioneers John Cage and Xenakis, The Hub produces a strange mixture of improvisation and programmed music.
During Hub jams, the musicians write music programs using their own software, and a central "hub" computer coordinates the interaction. One machine may send out a melody while another delivers the rhythm or pitch. Says Tim Perkis, a software developer and Hub member, "The Hub is about redefining a social context for music making."
The Hub is evidence that the medium is indeed the melody - the networked "instruments" invent the process while the musicians input the variables. How does the music sound? Well, let's just say you've never heard anything like it. Hayley Nelson
The Kingdom of José Cuervo
Get on a plane, take a boat, or swim, for all it matters. Head to 62 degrees 4' west longitude and 18 degrees 6' north latitude, into the heart of the West Indies, to an 8-acre island where the average temperature is 75 degrees Fahrenheit, the average rainfall is 35.6 inches, and the average drink is a José Cuervo margarita. Congratulations. You've landed in The Republic of Cuervo Gold: A Nation of Untamed Spirits.
Yes, Cuervo Tequila bought an island off the coast of Tortola and declared independence. Once inhabited by the Arawak and Caribe Indians, the island was later "discovered" by Columbus, though it sat empty for much of the last 300 years. After Cuervo bought the place for an undisclosed sum, the company petitioned the United Nations for nation status. When it was ignored, the company held a protest rally. Later it tried to send a volleyball team to the Olympics, and when ignored again, Cuervo held another rally. Meanwhile, the island is no longer empty. Today it is margaritaville and without a doubt, one of the biggest advertising gimmicks in history.
Cuervo calls it "the spiritual homeland for the Cuervo lifestyle." Its plan for the coming year is to establish itself as a legitimate island nation - a process that so far has included setting up an Office of Propaganda, appointing MTV's Dan Cortese as ambassador to the United States, and declaring an iguana named JC Roadhog as mascot.
Sure, the campaign is clever. When Cuervo comes to your Friday night bar with a big banner that reads, "Don't Just Stand There, Defect Now!" it's tempting to say "Hell yes! Where do I sign?" Yet the whole concept also raises the chilling prospect that someday multinationals will become governments, make their own laws, and rule whole countries by corporate fiat.
But for now, Cuervo isn't interested in such nagging concerns. Ask Scott Mueller, Cuervo's public relations manager, what he thinks of the politics of the gesture, and he glibly replies, "Our political platform is frozen or on the rocks."
The huge leap from business to nation-state has been taken, but it's unlikely many people will notice or care. That's largely because it's funny, it's Cuervo, and shucks, we've all been drunk on Cuervo. But what about the next corporation that decides to go on an imperialist buying spree? What about the company without a sense of humor, that isn't ecofriendly, and that wants to do a lot more than party? What then?
Steven Kotler
Luddite Grrrl
Our entire civilization is addicted, meaning it cannot function without its use of all technologies," says neo-Luddite social critic Chellis Glendinning.Glendinning, author of My Name Is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization, is a psychologist and leader in the field of ecopsychology, which holds that the mind and nature are inseparable. She insists technology isn't all it's cracked up to be. "Native peoples are far more healthy and integrated, and they function on a higher level than societies dominated by technology."
The author/psychologist doesn't suggest we all run to sign up for recovery programs like Technologists Anonymous. She believes the cure for techno-addiction lies in deep healing through culture creation, political action, and challenging established social structures. Funny, that sounds like something we might say.
Marissa Raderman
