Thing #6: coming at ya sideways

"The Street finds its own uses for things - uses the manufacturers never imagined."
-William Gibson: Burning Chrome, 1982

from: The street as platform, by Dan Hill
"... in the municipal library ... the large external LED display hoisted over the door at huge expense conveys the volume of ISBNs of books being swiped by librarians inside the building, in real-time. Part of an installation by students at the local art college, the most popular genres of books taken out, inferred from the aggregate of ISBNs and cross-referenced with Amazon, are displayed every five minutes via a collage of randomly-selected movie clips from YouTube that match broadly that same genre and keywords (filtered for decency and sensitivity by bespoke software which is itself receiving updates, detailing what is considered obscene at this point). Currently, a 2-second sequence of a close-up of David Niven’s nose and moustache from The Bridge Over The River Kwai morphs into the bulging right arm of Sylvester Stallone in Rambo, cradling a stolen Soviet rocket launcher. The patterns of clip consumption at YouTube twitch accordingly.

Looking up at the display in fascination and bewilderment, an elderly lady stumbles over a pothole in the pavement. Helped back to her feet by a younger man, she decides to complain to the council about the pothole. The man suggests he can do that right now, from his iPod Touch and using the library’s open public wifi, by registering the presence of a pothole at this point on the local problems database, Fix My Street. The old woman stares at him quizzically as it takes him fifty seconds to close the website he had been looking it on his mobile (Google Maps directions for “hairdressers near SW4”, a phrase he’ll shortly have to type in again, having neglected to bookmark it) and access fixmystreet.com. He spends the next few minutes indicating the presence of a pothole outside the library on Fix My Street (unaware of the postcode, he has to select one from a few possible matches on street name), before he moves on, satisfied with his civic good deed for the day. The elderly lady had long since shuffled off, muttering to herself. Although Fix My Street smartly forwards on all issues to the corresponding council, a beleaguered under-trained temp in the also underfunded 'pavements team' is unaware of fixmystreet.com and unable to cope with the levels of complaint, and so the pothole claims five more victims over the next two weeks until someone rings up about it.

The LED display board can also sniff what is being accessed via the library’s public wifi network, and displays fragments of the corresponding text and imagery. It switches briefly over to this mode, in order to denote that Fix My Street was being accessed, and displays some details of the transactions detailing the pothole issue. Before flicking back to the YouTube x ISBN installation, the display then conveys some information from the local council about a forthcoming street upgrade, blissfully unaware of the possible connection to be made between that and the pothole. Unfortunately, at that point, the pale sunlight hits the screen at such an angle that it cannot be read by two hurrying passers-by anyway. The display then dissolves into a slow pan across Keira Knightly’s delicately arched eyebrow from Pirates of the Caribbean.

In the swinging briefcase of one of the passers-by, an Amazon Kindle e-book reader briefly connects to the public library - having previously visited the library, the owner had registered the public wifi in her settings. It commences a rapid-fire series of handshakes with Amazon’s systems, swapping personal details back and forth with user profile information, and thus beginning to download a new book by Ian McEwan to the device. Despite the wealth of metadata in this rich stream of data, the Kindle’s closed system means that the library’s databases, and LED display installation, cannot possibly be made aware of this literary transaction being conducted using its infrastructure. Either way, with seven seconds the Kindle user is out of range and the download automatically fizzles out, settling back to wait for the scent of open wireless."
http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2008/02/the-street-as-p.html

"Vernor Vinge is not the first to link spells with encrypted codes. The first books of modern cryptography were penned back in the 15th century by Johannes Trithemius, the Abbot of Würzberg. Though Trithemius was a monk, he was also a hard-core magician, and his Steganographia and Polygraphiae were simultaneously works of encryption and theurgy - the art of invoking gods and spirits. Trithemius's simple transpositional schemes were designed to control demonic entities who formed a kind of astral Internet, allowing the mage to communicate messages at a distance and to know everything that was going on in the world. Trithemius was no pagan witch - in fact, he encouraged the Church to burn them. Historians still can't decide whether Trithemius was disguising his magic as cryptography or vice versa, but the National Security Agency finds his works important enough to display them at its museum in Washington, DC."
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.07/technopagans.html?pg=11&topic=

True Names Vernor Vinge
http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/rickard/TRUENAMES.pdf

The printer’s devil—and the promise of e-books, By Lancelot Kirby
http://www.teleread.org/blog/2008/11/19/the-printers-devil-and-the-promise-of-e-books/

-we don't need no stinkin' IM:

TECHGNOSIS: MAGIC, MEMORY, AND THE ANGELS OF INFORMATION By Erik Davis
"And Trithemius directed his demonic codes towards a curious goal:
long-distance telepathic communication. Properly directed, he claimed his
seals and spells invoked Saturn's angel Oriphiel, who would create an
astral network that delivered messages anywhere within twenty-four hours,
a guarantee worthy of Federal Express. And nor was Trithemius's
astrological magic limited to communication alone--as D. P. Walker noted,
"it was also the means of acquiring universal knowledge, 'of everything
that is happening in the world.'" [23] Trithemius thus aimed his coded
ethereal communications towards the grandest dream of the Hermeticum: to
know everything instantaneously, and thereby, presumably, to know God."
http://www.digital-brilliance.com/kab/techgnos.txt

"And Trithemius's eerie passages about communicating one's thoughts over distance with the use of spirits were probably his inside joke about what his code could accomplish...When Trithemius said that people can send messages without using letters he probably just meant they could use number codes instead."
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B06EFD6113DF937A25757C0A96E958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

"His Steganographia was circulated while the manuscript was still in composition and John Dee, who owned the largest private library in England copied at least half of it in 1563."

A famous cryptographer of the 16th century, Blaise de Vigenere (1523-1596) wrote 'Tracte des Chiffres' (in which he used a Trithemius table):

"All nature is merely a cipher and a secret writing. The great name and essence of God and His wonders -- the very deeds, projects, words, actions, and demeanor of mankind -- what are they, for the most part, but a cipher?"