Luke Maurits

Yesterday my wife and I used the money from our tax returns to each purchase an Asus eeePC. Most geeks reading this will already by familiar with the eeePC, the ultra-portable and ultra-cheap Linux-powered notebook that caused a lot of fuss when it debuted last year for the astonishing price of AU$500. It’s a very appealing unit for Linux/Unix geeks, not just because of its low price tag but also because its a very rare case of a notebook computer where all of the functionality – including the wireless networking, integrated webcam and ACPI features – can be enjoyed on a Linux system right out of the box. I’ve wanted one for a very long time.

I have been excited about the eeePC concept (to be fair, I really mean the “sub-notebook” or “netbook” concept, which is realised or soon to be realised by machines other than the eeePC) ever since I learned of it, because it is a step toward the vision of [ubiquitous computing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquitous_computing) and it makes possible a lot of household uses for a PC which are handy but utterly impractical with a desktop PC or full-sized laptop. For example, it has been possible to find databases of recipes on the web for years, but the eeePC, on account of its incredibly small size and mass, makes it practical for the first time to find a recipe and then carry the screen displaying it right into the kitchen. The eeePC eliminates the need to print out or rewrite Google map directions, at least for trips that will be shorter than the battery life, because it is small enough to easily just take in the car with you. Heck, it’s possible that with a USB GPS receiver and a bit of technical skill you could use an eeePC as an improvised in-car navigation system. With a wireless internet connection it can sit on the lounge room coffee table and act as a TV guide or display console game walk-throughs. Furthermore, its cheap enough (with the 7 inch screened version now less than AU$400) that a middle class household can realistically aspire to own 2 or 3 or 4 of them, which can “live” in appropriate parts of the house or car for their respective functions. I believe intuitively that there are a lot more really useful uses for the eeePC than I could think of off the top of my head right here and right now.

I expect my first eeePC project to be a sort of intelligent alarm clock. I have a love/hate relationship with sleep. I hate it in the sense that I’m never ready to go to sleep at the time needed to stay in sync with most of the world’s 24 hour cycle, but I love it in the sense that once I’m sleeping I’m reticent to stop. As such, I don’t fare too well with conventional alarm clocks – that is, those in which snoozing the alarm and deactivating it are equally as easy. I’m liable to deactivate the alarm without any conscious thought and wake up hours later wondering what happened and if I missed anything important in the meeting I was supposed to be in at 10am. An alarm system where I can snooze easily but actual deactivation requires something difficult – say, physically getting out of bed and using my desktop computer to remove a small file which the alarm process on the eeePC periodically checks via HTTP over a wireless network connection. Not only would an eeePC facilitate this sort of alarm deactivation asymmetry, but it gives me much more control over the actual alarm sound thank could otherwise be obtained, and I’m thinking of writing a script which uses Flite (a small, fast, free speech synthesis engine) to read out pertinent things fetched from the web – the day’s weather forecast, perhaps a list of news headlines, or the details of any emails I’ve received while asleep.

If I go ahead with this I’ll make an entry and post the source. I hope that it will be only the first of a number of rewarding eeePC projects, a hope that I am sure will be helped toward fruition by the (seemingly, after 2 days exposure) solid eeeUser site.

In December 2007 I started writing this horribly incomplete proto-draft of an essay on “cryptographic cameras”, a concept inspired entirely by Bruce Schneier’s paper “An Authenticated Camera“. In April 2008 I was inspired to finally getting around to finishing this paper when a move by the NSW police raised again for me the potential social importance of the widespread adoption of cameras with cryptographic authentication possibilities.

That essay of mine sits still horribly incomplete today, shortly after the blogosphere, and later the mainstream media, became abuzz over the fact that a photo recently released by the Iranian government purporting to show successful test missile launches had been, rather obviously, Photoshopped to show one more missile than was actually launched.
Here is the photo the Iranians release. The “Little Green Footballs” blog (which I was pointed to by Reddit) has an article with a static picture showing the cloned exhaust plumes, and “Suitably Flip” has an animated version, which I personally find less enlightening. Mainstream coverage is available at the BBC and the Daily Telegraph, amongst other places.

This revelation is an even better example than the NSW police situation of why some sort of cryptographic photograph authentication technology is important, and probably just as good an example of this as Adnan Hajj’s doctored photos from Beirut in 2006, which are the (only) example currently present in my proto-draft. Perhaps a lesser example is the controversy surrounding photographs of the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Firdus Square, Baghdad. I say “lesser” because it is not immediately apparent that cryptography can guard against careful selection of camera angles and positions, although as products like Nintendo’s Wii console bring down the cost of accelerometer-based motion sensing devices (like the Wii Remote) I suspect that a good authenticated camera system could in fact detect this sort of manipulation. Perhaps a solution based on some sort of miniature, internal magnetic compass could suffice here as well. I’ve not given the details tremendous consideration, but I am digressing enough as it is.

The above examples (and perhaps more that I’m unaware of – comments welcome!) make it abundantly clear that, in this age of Photoshop, to assume photographs shown in the mainstream media are undoctored or accurately indicative of true events requires an entirely unjustified level of trust in that media. For every poorly executed and blatantly obvious manipulation like Iran’s missiles or Hajj’s Beirut, there is an unknown number of better executed and yet to be uncovered manipulations that currently enjoy status as fact. This knowledge must necessarily damage the credibility of photography in mainstream media for any critically thinking person. More worryingly, this trend can only reasonably be expected to continue.

Embedding cryptographic processors into digital cameras can reverse this trend, and further more it is probably the only technological solution which can reverse it. Once there exist cameras which can provide digitally signed copies of a photo (to establish a lack of subsequent doctoring) and digitally signed meta-data (to establish the time, location – via GPS – and orientation – via accelerometers or compasses – of the photo), and these cameras are available en-masse for even as much as a few thousand dollars, then it can and should be considered extremely suspicious for any professional media outlet to not make this supporting evidence available to the public. I honestly believe that such a cost is eminently achievable: Nokia’s N95 mobile phone already contains an integrated GPS receiver, a camera and an accelerometer and, according to this Cnet review, cost just $1379 Australian a little over a year ago. Obviously professional media photography would require a better quality camera component, but the rapid progress of the mobile phone industry will continue to drive the price of this technology down, to the point where it seems realistic to expect these capacities to be available in a good professional camera for a few grand in just a matter of years. A proof of concept implementation for $10,000 today is unquestionably possible and would help to get us there faster.

Not only would an investment in this sort of technology help to salvage the credibility of professional journalism and help us to spot falsified governmental saber-rattling, but it would open the doors to trustworthy citizen journalism, increase the trustworthiness of crime scene photography used in criminal trials and quite likely a whole host of other things I can even think of.

I really need to finish that essay.

Random and unrelated link drop: Donald Knuth’s infrequently asked questions.