Two Slashes

Technological advancement is great, isn’t it?  After all, it paves the way for an easier, more-enjoyable life, and it often does so in comfort.  It’s not every day, though, that said advancements are labeled terrorist tools by the U.S. Army.

According to a draft of one of the Army’s latest reports, Twitter, GPS, and voice-changing software are among the newest and hippest tools in a terrorist’s arsenal.  Yes, that’s right, things you probably wouldn’t find your neighborhood technophile without.  (Alright, maybe the voice changer is a stretch…)  Given this, the typical “terrorist profile” must include compulsive tweeters who have a tendency to get lost and then use one of those toy voice-changing bullhorns to ask directions of random strangers.

Considering the ridicule the U.S. Armed Forces is probably facing for a lack of their common sense, I’ve decided to list off a few of my own believed “terrorist tools.”  These are things that probably should have made that list as well for the sake of completeness.

• Just as Twitter allows one to follow to-the-minute updates of what their friends are saying and doing, why couldn’t RSS FEEDS function in a similar manner?  After all, they’re more or less the same thing (without the social aspect).  Subscribed to a feed put forth by their superior, your terrorist can act on whatever orders he’s been sent in seconds.
• For things that aren’t text or would be better consumed client-side, BITTORRENT would be a plausible option.  WIth the BitTorrent protocol now featuring encryption, the ability to run through Tor (and other anonymous proxies), the infinite file size limit, and the lower distribution costs resulting from its use, it’s already a great method for distributing intelligence.  Combine that with the RSS feeds I mentioned above, and BitTorrent becomes the ultimate way to keep your undercover operatives fully informed.
• To prevent any information from being leaked to the world at large, a private virtual network would be a great way to make sure information stays “in the family.”  Therefore, tools like HAMACHI are terrorist tools as well.  In addition to allowing remote support or remote LAN matches in your favorite video game, Hamachi provides a great end-to-end encrypted virtual network perfect for those building blueprints.
• There’s nothing like immersive training to make sure the trainee knows what things are going to be like in the field.  The NINTENDO WII provides a reasonable platform for combat training, given that it’s a cheap motion-sensitive platform with plenty of combat-oriented accessories available from your local GameStop.  Who said the Wii was just for kids?

Considering I use Twitter, RSS feeds, BitTorrent, Hamachi, I’ve messed with GPS systems, and I’ve played the Nintendo Wii, I should probably be looking behind my back everywhere I go at this point, as should at least three-quarters of the company I keep, lest we be mistaken for some terrorist cell and wake up in a detention center for questioning.

@bomb Countdown 5 minutes.

This morning, my friend Tyler over at TechSpansion announced that he’s dropping their entire product line and closing up shop.

Normally I wouldn’t care, but TechSpansion is a notable exception for their iSquint, VisualHub, and AudialHub applications for OS X, which are considered by many to be the best and easiest way to convert video and audio on the Mac platform and the inspiration for my previously-halted h.26easy project.

I wish Tyler the best, and hope that his future pursuits are fruitful.  And as for iSquint, VisualHub, and AudialHub, they will be missed.

One of the side effects of the open-source movement is that it allows unprecedented access to what were once privately-used development builds and “test-level” software not traditionally fit for or distributed in hopes of public use.

I myself have taken advantage of this situation, adding the latest builds of Firefox, Thunderbird, Witty, and other products (some well-known, some off the beaten path) to my arsenal.  And I haven’t done this out of hopes that there won’t be problems, or simply because the new versions are “expected to fix outstanding bugs” (that’s a fringe benefit, people), but more so because the latest builds are increasingly and surprisingly mature and well-tested.  (And besides that, who could resist getting all of those new features ahead of the curve? )

At one point, the words “alpha”, “beta”, “testing”, and “development” (stop me anytime) scared people away from software and service simply because the connotation those words carried was one of buggy, incomplete, untested software.  While to some people, the meaning of these words has not changed (and I can think of “a few good reasons”™), these words are being turned into extraneous, meaningless descriptors of the applications everyone uses and loves, tacked into the name much in the same way Web 2.0 “dictates” misspelled words and dropped vowels.  (Flickr anyone?)

As Justin Cox so eagerly pointed out at the end of August, G-Mail has been in beta since it was announced, and Google doesn’t seem ready to remove the label just yet, either.  My point here is that even though the concept and implementation of G-Mail is littered with reminders of its perpetual development, it is still one of the most popular web-mail platforms available today in direct contradiction to the connotations of the “beta” label.

Google is not the only company riding the “always-in-development” bandwagon, either, but they’re definitely one of the most notable, given that they’ve taken beta software to an extreme.  According to this article, almost half of the projects they have their finger in are in some non-finalized state.

While many popular applications apply the “always-updating, always-improving” philosophy, it would be great to one day leave the computer running every night, and come back to find that my operating system has updated itself and made the experience better than it was the day before, with new features and bug fixes provided in a sort of seamless transition.  Unfortunately, I don’t think this is going to happen anytime soon because it doesn’t work too well with either of Microsoft or Apple’s business models, and I don’t see them changing their behavior anytime this decade.

Ah well, I can dream*, can’t I?

*Dreaming is in beta, with an anticipated final release date of <undetermined>.