News By Graham Templeton Dec. 31, 2013 3:55 pm
The defining reaction to the past months’ myriad revelations about the NSA has not been anger, nor dismay, nor even self-righteousness, but resentment. It seems that people don’t think there’s much practical upshot to their everyday lives — most of us don’t use the phrase “Kill the President,” and when we do it’s usually about a game of*Battlestar — but the practical is only one side of this issue. The emotional side, which says that information should be private even if it’s totally innocuous, seems to be the side that’s ruling the debate.
That being the case, many people are looking for a way to vent their frustration. You could certainly make a fairly vanilla political action message, carry a sign or wear an eye-catching t-shirt, but these are both cliche and not as reflective of the real emotion underneath. How do you tell the world what you think of NSA spying without getting all caught up in discussions about the programs and their alleged secret successes?
The Wearable Futures Conference, and a new group called SuperFlux, has an answers. Open Informant is a one-two punch of hardware and an application that brings that hardware into your larger social ecosystem. The smartphone app searches your communications for information of a type the NSA might want to know — say, if you’ve ever used the words “violent overthrow of the government” — and displays them proudly for all to see. If you don’t happen to use such phrases all that often, don’t worry; if no suitable examples present themselves, the app will pull together heavily edited snippets to create quotes where none were before.
The words displayed are often cheeky, ranging from “bomb,” to “ricin,” to “Western imperialists.” One possible flaw in the design of the badge, which is ostensibly about raising awareness about the dangers posed by the NSA, is that it is not immediately obvious that the NSA is the target of its satire. For most strangers on the street, someone wearing this badge simply has murder-related words on their chest. This does not seem like a particularly pointed sort of social commentary.
The full code and physical plans are available on GitHub — and currently nowhere else. This open-source project isn’t available for purchase yet, and might never be. The plans are fairly simple though, primarily requiring and Arduino board with a Bluetooth module and an e-ink display — though with a bit of tampering, a less expensive screen would probably do. With the recommended components, the thing will run you somewhere in the realm of $250.
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That being the case, many people are looking for a way to vent their frustration. You could certainly make a fairly vanilla political action message, carry a sign or wear an eye-catching t-shirt, but these are both cliche and not as reflective of the real emotion underneath. How do you tell the world what you think of NSA spying without getting all caught up in discussions about the programs and their alleged secret successes?
The Wearable Futures Conference, and a new group called SuperFlux, has an answers. Open Informant is a one-two punch of hardware and an application that brings that hardware into your larger social ecosystem. The smartphone app searches your communications for information of a type the NSA might want to know — say, if you’ve ever used the words “violent overthrow of the government” — and displays them proudly for all to see. If you don’t happen to use such phrases all that often, don’t worry; if no suitable examples present themselves, the app will pull together heavily edited snippets to create quotes where none were before.The words displayed are often cheeky, ranging from “bomb,” to “ricin,” to “Western imperialists.” One possible flaw in the design of the badge, which is ostensibly about raising awareness about the dangers posed by the NSA, is that it is not immediately obvious that the NSA is the target of its satire. For most strangers on the street, someone wearing this badge simply has murder-related words on their chest. This does not seem like a particularly pointed sort of social commentary.
The full code and physical plans are available on GitHub — and currently nowhere else. This open-source project isn’t available for purchase yet, and might never be. The plans are fairly simple though, primarily requiring and Arduino board with a Bluetooth module and an e-ink display — though with a bit of tampering, a less expensive screen would probably do. With the recommended components, the thing will run you somewhere in the realm of $250.
More...
