Science – Page 4 – A Piece, of the Sky

Google Glass should be banned, like drones are banned on military installations. Casinos and those concerned with film piracy should also ban it.

Any (LED) light, that comes on to say the device is recording, can easily be worked around by software, like the ban on facial recognition apps, that Google originally placed in the device. Just ban the whole thing.

Using this head mounted display while driving should be punished like texting and driving is now. One Google Glass app, Winky, allows people to take a picture with a wink of an eye – literally.

Note that I am not against augmented reality or virtual reality gizmos, but things like Google Glass – which can masquerade as a normal object (fomite), while surreptitiously recording visual and audio of everything and everyone, in its vicinity.

At least, it’s quite obvious if someone takes a phone out to record someone or something. The Google Glass device in effect weaponizes the user, making them an agent, for whatever ideology or motivation they happen to espouse that day. And then, all the crash reports go back to Google.

Software or malware can be installed on Google Glass too, to secretly record people typing or drawing in their phone passwords – much like a key-logging malware, that captures passwords and anything typed on a computer, a nightmare for public computer rooms.

Driverless cars are a bad idea. Ban those too. Especially on military sites. Anyone could hack one. If you’re afraid of people hacking the power grid, and other cyber-attacks or cyber warfare, why make a driverless, remote-controlled car a thing? Taxi drivers should boycott any driverless cars, like they did Uber and Lyft.

I am not against technology. However, it is my knowledge of technology and forensics that leads me to respect how powerful technology is, and how it can be misused and abused. Technology can be cool; it’s humans who can’t be trusted.

Technology is a set of tools. In the right hands, a tool can be used therapeutically or medically. In the wrong hands, technology or a viral idea is a dangerous act of terrorism, or crime, waiting to happen. Anyone can see that.

Anyone with a basic working knowledge of the human condition can see which new pieces of technology have far more potential for abuse – that outweigh any of their potential benefits. That’s just good governance and policing.

Ban driverless cars and Google Glass, without a second thought, and with no regrets. It is too easy to hypothesize what an evil person could and would do with them. Police-work is about imagining what an enemy/unsub (criminal) could do with the same tool or piece of information. Preemptive strike: just ban it.

Business-owners should be able to put up a sign saying ‘no Google Glass’ and reserve the right to escort any such person off of the premises, for the potential to illegally record people, without a warrant.

I fully support public CCTV, for its role in psychologically reducing most crime. I do not support people surreptitiously recording people, without them knowing, for whatever random motivation – especially if they are not law enforcement, with a warrant. It’s not hard to imagine. And if an average person can imagine it, a criminal or a terrorist has already built it, and tested it.

There’s been technology and software/malware that can surreptitiously activate even “off” phones, and secretly broadcast microphone audio, and front and back cam phone video, since 2003. It was used in Iraq. It’s not magic. It’s science. It’s not supernatural; it’s real life.

I am not a Luddite or a technological singularity alarmist. People will be devious, even with spears and arrows. It’s not technology that people should be afraid of, but other people. “Technology” doesn’t destroy people; people destroy people.

I am all for fast Internet and I am not a fatalist. Everything has its limits. Even good things need to be used, in moderation. Everyone has their own personal (technological) limits. It is the law’s job to corral those limits into socially acceptable boundaries, when certain technologies – Google Glass, driverless cars – have way more potential for abuse, than others.

Smart home. Internet of things. All those things can be hacked. Easily. I inherently distrust wearables. All it is, is another thing that can surreptitiously record video and audio, and a locating device. You might as well chip yourself, like a dog.

We have had microfilm since the ’50s. There are tiny cameras that can fit in pens or hollowed out books. Since at least the ’70s, you could easily wire tap a whole house. People can be recorded, without them knowing: it is public knowledge, even in commonly consumed political and intelligence pop culture fictions, like “Homeland” or “Scandal.”

Bottom line, there are some technologies more susceptible to abuse, that should be banned, limited or restricted.

Good thing Boone went with Locke, and Jack went with Kate – otherwise the story of Lost: Season 1 would have been totally different. Boone wouldn’t have died in the Beechcraft crash. Kate would have never been able to be manipulated, as much as Boone would have been. Kate felt established in the Losties’ tribe. She had tracking expertise, weapon skills and a wily mind. She would have, thankfully, told someone else about the Hatch, leading to no one dying in the Beechcraft.

However, Locke would not have wanted someone, with a mind of their own, alongside him, on this trek. Cult leader Locke needed an impressionable person, like Boone, who was desperate to prove himself. Locke recognized the same gullibility and the same deep need to matter, in himself, as Locke’s dad, Cooper, the con man, rightfully pegged in Locke. Con men and cult leaders.

The whole fascination with a frozen alternate dimension and polar bears, reminds me of the Narrator’s spirit animal dream, in the ice cave, with the penguins – a happy space, that subsequently gets invaded by thoughts of his crush. This was in the movie Fight Club. The connection between fire (or a hot jungle) and ice – polar opposites – seems to have been a big fascination, in the late ’90s. Just look at the opening sequence and thematic plot points of Die Another Day, in the 007 franchise – a film which came out around the same time.

Lost Atlantis and a nuclear submarine sound cool, but they’re not as central to the Island, as the Hatch, one of the Dharma Stations, is. This may be a confirmation bias, but all other ideas sound random, compared to the Hatch – even though frozen donkey wheels, submarines and nuclear bombs do later make it into the series. There’s a time and a place for everything.

At the bottom of the Hatch, is a lair: the underground Swan Station (swan song). A lab rat, Desmond, must press a button, every 108 minutes, or the world will end. It reminds me of an old short story, I wrote in college, before I saw Lost, of an avatar being able to restart the universe, on a set schedule, with the latest updates – like a Windows operating system. This mirrors how the Numbers and the Equation concern the end of all time, in Lost. That and electromagnetic anomalies, in this pocket dimension, are what the Dharma Initiative and Rousseau’s expedition, came to the Island to study.

The Hatch was originally going to be found, underwater – which explains, why polar bears (which can swim adeptly) or an ice bio-dome, or Atlantis, or a nuclear submarine, were supposed to be at the bottom of the Hatch. You can see strains of this, when, in later seasons, the Egyptian statue’s foot, ends up underwater. The Black Rock slave ship and Rousseau’s expedition, both shipwreck, on the island – following in the vein of a seafaring story.

By definition, Atlantis is a lost land in the Atlantic Ocean. Given all the references to LA and Sydney, – despite that one blip, about drug planes, from Nigeria – all hints and clues point to the Island pocket dimension primarily residing in the Pacific – somewhere between Australia and Hawaii. Atlantis is its own legend, a whole other set of myths – and the Island being in the wrong ocean just wouldn’t be on brand, for Lost.

Another axed idea, in the writing room, for the Hatch, was a nuclear submarine, that had run aground, and then been covered by a mudslide. Nuclear submarines, in polar waters, are thematically very Cold War (The Hunt for Red October, with Sean Connery), but the idea of how such a thing would get on the Island, and end up buried, is super unrealistic, and stretches viewers’ suspension of disbelief way too much – even for Lost. The Black Rock – a wooden slave ship and mining ship – flying through the air, on a huge wave, during a storm, and snapping the Egyptian statue, in two, at the legs – only to end up in the jungle, almost completely intact, full of un-exploded boxes of dynamite, will already be a big plot point, to swallow, later on.

The names of some the characters touch on the philosophy of the political science, of the Island. Less government is inherently better, because even though human nature is inherently flawed, more government means more people are held at the whims, of fewer people – and those leaders are inherently flawed. Rousseau, the thinker, is right in that the only solution for human nature, is to keep people as far away from each other, as possible, governance-wise. The few common goods available are governed by the Social Contract, so there is some government – but as little as is functionally possible.