The four women who were promoted--Amy Hood, Julie Larson-Green, Lisa Brummel, and Tami Reller--are now in four of Microsoft's 13 Executive Vice President positions. The move has already garnered some positive press for the tech giant, which is not altogether undeserved.

But if you cast an ever-so-slightly critical eye at the facts, there's still plenty of room for improvement. First of all, three of these new executives are in positions that don't directly touch on any Microsoft development teams: Brummel is EVP, Human Resources; Hood is EVP and Chief Financial Officer; Reller is EVP, Marketing. Only Larson-Green, in her position as EVP of Devices and Studios, which oversees the Xbox and Surface, is directly responsible for development teams and has a software development background.

While we certainly applaud any lifting of the glass ceiling for women within Microsoft, it’s also fairly self-evident that to get more women programmers, big-cap companies may need more women managing programmers. In fairness, only four of Microsoft's 14 executive positions (counting CEO Steve Ballmer) are explicitly development-related. The 1:3 women to men ratio fits company-wide and even industry-wide trends, which I've previously covered in this tracking story. (To see stats, scroll down to the entry below entitled “Hard Numbers.”)

Still, it's not all fun and games for Larson-Green. In fact, it's games that have already presented one major headache. After it was revealed that she would be stepping in for Don Mattrick in charge of Xbox, online news comment threads were filled with all manner of vitriol aimed at Larson-Green for nothing more than her gender. It’s well-documented that gaming is a particularly male-dominated subset of the technology world, with plenty of room for improvement, but frankly we didn’t expect this severe a reaction.

Company-wide, Microsoft’s employee gender breakdown is under 25% female, and while the company doesn’t offer gender breakdowns by job title, I’d wager that the ratio of females in programmer roles to non-programmer roles is much lower than the same ratio for male Microsoft employees. (The disparity is likely offset in the overall numbers by Microsoft’s enormous publishing, marketing, and publicity arms, which in most large companies are traditionally more populated by women.) Microsoft isn’t a lone pariah of gender inequality in the tech world--it’s just archetypal of the sort of frat-like companies we hope will change.

Previous Updates

Why Can’t Female Tech Founders Get Funding?

July 16, 2013

Ross Baird founded the Village Capital startup accelerator program four years ago to assist mission-driven companies tackling major social problems, who might not otherwise get access to capital. At the end of each program, the 15 or so companies in a cohort select two of their peers to receive a $50,000 investment.

Now he has a problem. Roughly half of the 250 Village Capital alumni companies have a female cofounder, but those companies are 50% less likely to get follow-on funding than those with all-male founding teams. This is in spite of the fact that female-led Village Capital companies are 15% more likely to be profitable and 78% more likely to be selected by their peers for investment.

“The process favors entrepreneurs who are more substantive and less flashy,” says Baird. “We find that women tend to under-promise, over-deliver, hit milestones but are maybe not as free to brag about themselves up on stage. Men, and I say this fully aware of being one, will oversell anything. Women undersell and this is a problem particularly in fundraising across our alumni. The shift in power dynamic in peer selection corrects for some of that. One of our female entrepreneurs has said that she often felt like she didn't get a fair shake in the traditional investment process in that she wasn’t really given the time to demonstrate her value, to demonstrate what she was creating.”

Baird thinks that the power imbalance between investors and founders is a bad thing for everyone. “Many startups are trying to figure out what investors will invest in. There is an overemphasis on 'What do investors like?' and less emphasis on 'What value can we provide to the world?' Raising money should not be your primary goal as a startup. We say that if you build a company which solves a major problem and people are willing to pay you to get the problem solved then investment will come. Investment is the result of achieving your goals. It shouldn't be the goal itself.”

As a result, Village Capital’s program concentrates on customer validation, acquisition, and revenue rather than pitching to investors. On top of the peer-to-peer review process, this emphasis on customers may favor women. “'We will get as many users as possible and we will figure out how to monetize them later' is not in the long term a successful business strategy. A lot of what we do in the program is distinguishing between customers and users. In the peer-to-peer process, customer acquisition rather than user acquisition is rewarded,” says Baird.

That peer-to-peer review process involves three open peer ranking sessions where each company ranks the others based on team, product, customer, financials, scale, and return of capital. The final session results in the selection of the teams which get an investment. Baird insists that that process is more productive for everyone than the traditional investment model.

“In the prize mentality or the ‘get the investment’ mentality in a startup competition, two people get funding, 15 people get skewered and ripped apart by people trying to make themselves look good, and the non-winners just don't get anything,” explains Baird. “In the peer-reviewed process everyone gets something out of it. Entrepreneurs when they give feedback to each other are very thoughtful because they care a lot about each other and if they are unfair to each other it comes back to them. The process is productive even for the non-winners.” Could this emphasis on collaboration, rather than competitive pitching, be the key to the success of female entrepreneurs in the Village Capital program?

When I ask Baird to choose his favorite Village Capital graduate he doesn’t hesitate. “Kickboard. Peer selected from the first program. The founder is a woman who is a teacher and coder and she has a data management process which allows teachers to manage student performance data so they can improve teaching. She didn't set out to be an entrepreneur. She built this as a teacher to solve problems for other teachers.”

Kickboard founder Jen Medbery tried to get the company off the ground for a year before finding Village Capital. Four years later Kickboard has raised $2 million in mainstream capital. “To see her not raising funds in the traditional angel investment world but being the overwhelming favorite of her peers, getting her first investment peer selected and becoming incredibly successful in solving major problems in U.S. education is a story I am really excited about,” says Baird.

This Simple Toy Shows Why Girls Hate Engineering

July 10, 2013

Growing up in Ireland my three siblings and I had a favorite game; We called it James Bond. One of us would play the coveted role of secret agent, and the remaining siblings tried to stop them from snatching some top secret papers.

The twist? We’re all sisters--not a James in the bunch.

As children, nobody ever told us that it was strange for four girls to impersonate James Bond plots. Yet we girls do get the message early and often that engineering is not something for us. The CEO of website builder Moonfruit, Wendy Tan White, recently described in the Guardian how she speaks at schools about careers in technology:

"Raise your hand if you want to work in technology," I ask students. Predictably, but sadly, no hands go up. But when I ask girls to raise their hands if they like Facebook, every arm in the room reaches for the sky. The "geeky" label is still attached to technology in schools, so it's little wonder that students can be indifferent to the subject: it's not presented in a way that's appealing.There needs to be a greater focus on showing what technology allows you to do: cross geographical boundaries; make stuff; unleash your creative side; talk to friends; and share your latest musical creation.

That brings us back to Goldie Blox, a construction kit for girls from the age of six up. CEO Debbie Sterling is herself a Stanford engineering graduate, and after talking to young girls about the toys they love most, she came to a realization: Girls love to read because they love stories. My sisters and I were all voracious readers. “Most construction and engineering kits, which are touted as ‘technical and numerical toys,’ don’t include the storytelling that appeals to many girls,” reports Forbes.

So Sterling designed a kit to be used in conjunction with a story book starring a girl inventor called Goldie who builds machines in order to solve problems, in the first book a spinning machine to help her dog chase his tail.

With the Spinning Machine, Sterling introduces girls to the idea of a belt drive and the concept of tension by using a plastic pegboard, spools and ribbon to teach them how to turn one and then multiple wheels as part of a story involving Goldie’s dog Nacho and several other characters.

GoldieBlox reached its $150,000 funding target in the first four days of a Kickstarter campaign last year (It eventually raised $285,811) and Toys ‘R’ Us will stock the $29.99 “GoldieBlox and the Spinning Machine” in more than 600 stores.

This is a generalization of course--but girls are often more interested in machines and technical systems when they are placed in a larger context, where there’s a problem to be solved or an obvious benefit to society. It’s no coincidence that women study medicine in much higher numbers than engineering, even though both tracks are technical; It’s obvious that doctors help people.

Girls don’t just want to have fun--they want to know why.

Why Aren’t All Executives Female?

June 25, 2013

Last month we took a statistical look at how job titles break down by gender. This month we’re looking at why women are not represented at the highest levels of their work sectors. (Read back through our previous updates below if you need to get caught up.)

A study published in the May issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin may help. It seems to suggest that women don’t take as much credit for their work as their male counterparts, undervaluing their contributions to a project when working with men. From the article’s abstract:

Women gave more credit to their male teammates and took less credit themselves unless their role in bringing about the performance outcome was irrefutably clear (Studies 1 and 2), or they were given explicit information about their likely task competence (Study 4). However, women did not credit themselves less when their teammate was female (Study 3).

The full study is unfortunately behind the ivory tower academic paywall, but Wired U.K. has more details on the study and noted that “teamwork is an essential component to most professional roles, so if women repeatedly undervalue themselves in group situations, in front of coworkers and employers, it could be extremely detrimental to overall job progression.”

This study offers a strong, plausible reason for why women are not as likely to be recognized as leaders in their workplaces: You often have to speak up for your accomplishments in order to advance in your career.

Another bit of research put out last week in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology reveals that female scientists (evolutionary biologists, in the case of this study) don’t present their work at conferences as much as their male colleagues. Apparently, women are underrepresented even in relationship to the gender gap that already exists in science fields. In other words, the percentage of female conference presenters is even lower than the percentage of female scientists.

Apparently, one of the main causes of this underrepresentation was that women turned down conference speaking invitations at nearly twice the rate (50 percent) as men (26 percent). One of the study’s main authors, Dr. Hannah Dugdale, elaborated on the implications of the study's findings:

“It’s important that we understand why this is happening and what we can do to address it--high-quality science by women has low exposure at the international level, and this is constraining evolutionary biology from reaching its full potential. We’re currently investigating the reasons behind this lower acceptance rate--it could relate to child-care requirements, lower perception of scientific ability, being uncomfortable with self-promotion--there are many potential contributing factors.”

It could also be related to the social psychology study above: If women don’t feel as confident in their accomplishments, then they may feel underqualified to speak at international conferences.

Obviously neither of these studies look directly at gender dynamics in the software development space. But looking at both of these studies, it seems like some aspects might apply to software while others might not as much. For instance, it’s definitely true that women coders are underrepresented in conference keynotes. And the observation of Dugdale’s coauthor, Dr. Julia Schroeder, that “[f]ewer women in top positions mean fewer female role models for students who aspire to be scientists” certainly rings true in the software world as well.

On the other hand, depending on what type of developer someone is, they might work on their own a large part of the time, possibly even freelancing from home. In that case, the social psychology of attributing success to male colleagues isn’t as relevant. Of course, many developers work in corporate office jobs where that dynamic could very much still be at play.

In other news, the fact that half of NASA’s eight newest astronaut trainees are women, selected from a pool of over 6,100 candidates, is a good sign. It shows that some progress is being made in STEM fields more generally, especially considering the fact that until now only 10.7% of the people who have been in space are women. With NASA astronauts being the elite of their fields, not to mention role models for every third grader in the country, having more women in space certainly bodes well for the prospect of more role models for women interested in STEM careers.

Minding The Gap: How Your Company Can Woo Female Coders

The software industry has a gender problem. Men far outnumber women, and while most of those men like (dare we say delight in?) having women around the office, the cool-bro rock star nerd culture makes it harder to attract, hire, retain and--most important--listen to women engineers. We'll be tracking successes, conflicts, and visionaries in this vein, and narrate as the status quo changes. We won't stop tracking this story until there are as many women working in software as men.

Why Don't Women In Tech Speak Up?

We’re not the only journalists tracking women’s roles in technology. Laura Sydell, a longtime technology reporter for NPR, covers the intersection of technology and culture, and we caught her story a few weeks ago about the changing lives of female programmers. We asked her to give us the behind-the-scenes scoop on her recent piece profiling prominent developer Sarah Allen, who led the team that created Flash video and now runs a mobile app design firm. Sydell has seen the reality of ingrained sexism and thinks that building momentum is the only way to undo industry habits.

“My take is that it’s about visibility,” Sydell says. “I mean who do you hear about in the news? Who do you see in the news? Twenty percent of programmers are women—that’s a significant number,” Sydell says. But where is the coverage?

One obstacle is that women in tech are sometimes reluctant to talk about sexism (“like it’s a disease they might catch” says Sydell.) She speculates that pointing out a gender disparity at their jobs may not feel like it will ultimately benefit their personal situation. “This doesn’t mean they don’t experience sexism,” Sydell says. “They just want to fit in and they’re working hard to get ahead.”

If her sources are mum about office sexism, Sydell says, they’re even less open about the flaws they see in hiring practices. “I have had some off the record conversations where people are like, ‘well I’m afraid to hire a woman if she’s around childbearing age because we can’t afford for somebody in a startup to take maternity leave.’ But nobody says, ‘I don’t want to hire a man of childbearing age.’”

Some Invisible Factors At Play

It makes sense that one obstacle to women’s proliferation has stemmed from a lack of computer science exposure in childhood, which can lead women to feel like they are at an insurmountable disadvantage once they start college. Expanding curriculum options and entry-level college courses, efforts being tested at schools like Harvey Mudd in California, may be one solution for leveling the playing field.

“You know unfortunately my take is that a lot of people who get into computers and programming start before college,” Sydell says, “which often does turn out to be young guys and so the women end up feeling intimidated.”

And it seems like computer science and engineering may currently be taught in a way that caters to how men think and conceptualize problems. “I remember people saying that for some reason guys are much more willing to work in the abstract for longer,” Sydell says. “I don’t know why this is, but women like to see pretty quickly that something they’re building is having an effect.”

This perspective could ultimately be a strength that draws women to coding, though, if other barriers are addressed. “It’s not that they can’t do the abstract,” Sydell says, “but once they see that programming can have this immediate effect they get more interested in it.”

Getting Private Views Out There

While reporting for her recent piece, Sydell attended a 25-person mentorship event with Sarah Allen for young entrepreneurs. After the event, the only three women in attendance came over to Allen and started chatting. “None of them talked about discrimination really,” Sydell says, but “they did talk about how they sometimes felt isolated. They all mentioned that in school they sought out a female colleague for support.” Yet even this small and understandable measure, they feared, could have unintended consequences. “They also debated whether it was possible to do too much networking with other women,” explains Sydell. “The problem is that the men have the larger networks and so you don’t want to limit your connections.”

Sydell has seen progress as an increasing number of hard working and qualified women enter tech, but she has also concluded that only a sustained, concerted effort will continue to draw women into the field. “I think one of the most important things that Sarah Allen said is find an industry where there isn’t sexism. If you get up to the higher echelons of anything the world is sexist. And the more money that’s involved, the more it seems to be guys. And what’s up with that?”

What It Feels Like To Be A Woman Programmer

We don’t hear from the women who are actually working in software often enough. Ellen Ullman, a former software engineer, recently penned an opinion piece in the New York Times called “How to be a ‘Woman Programmer’.” It’s an important firsthand account of what it actually feels like to be a woman working in technology--invaluable for men like me who will never subjectively know that actual experience.

I looked around and wondered, “Where are all the other women?” We women found ourselves nearly alone, outsiders in a culture that was sometimes boyishly puerile, sometimes rigorously hierarchical, occasionally friendly and welcoming. This strange illness meanwhile left the female survivors with an odd glow that made them too visible, scrutinized too closely, held to higher standards. It placed upon them the terrible burden of being not only good but the best.

Other parts of her article resonate with what we recently found in the gender gap by job title breakdown from Bright Labs: namely, that the more technical a job within the tech sector is, the wider the gender gap tends to be.

We get stalled at marketing and customer support, writing scripts for Web pages. Yet coding, looking into the algorithmic depths, getting close to the machine, is the driver of technology; and technology, in turn, is driving fundamental changes in personal, social and political life.

But perhaps the biggest takeaway for me and other male allies to women working in software, is this: It’s important to talk about the challenges facing women in software, but it’s just as important to recognize the achievements of women engineers as programmers, not merely as trailblazers. Ullman writes:

But none of it [experience as a programmer] qualified me as extraordinary in the great programmer scheme of things. What seems to have distinguished me is the fact that I was a “woman programmer.” The questions I am often asked about my career tend to concentrate not on how one learns to code but how a woman does.

Hard Numbers: The Actual Percentages Of Women In Tech Roles

Bright Labs has released new research to Co.Labs about which roles are most male-dominated, and some patterns begin to emerge.

This is one of the most complete snapshots of the gender gap in technology employment we’ve seen so far. Co.Labs readers have been eating up the slices of data on the gender gap we’ve been dishing out. It’s clear that "women in software" is a topic that begs for more coverage. So we got in touch with our friends at Bright Labs to provide us with some previously unreleased numbers on what the actual gender breakdown is by job title.

The first thing to keep in mind with these numbers is that job titles can be pretty arbitrary and may not actually reflect the kind of work being done by any given individual. With that said, there are a couple of interesting trends worth highlighting here. But first, the stats:

Let’s break down these numbers. First of all, it looks like tech support positions tend to bubble up and be the most of a dudefest: IT support, computer technician, network technician, and desktop support technician are all more than 90% male. Does this mean corporate suits feel more comfortable talking to a male IT geek about their problems with Outlook than a female IT worker? Or perhaps the IT help desk is a particularly unfriendly place for women to integrate? Either way, it’s important to note that these numbers are domestic; it would be interesting to see the gender breakdown in outsourced IT, or internationally.

On the other hand, “analyst” positions like data analyst, help desk analyst, and senior programmer analyst tend to be the least--though are still significantly--male-dominated, floating between 53.8% and 75% male. With these numbers, we’re starting to see a clearer picture now: The less a job deals with the back end of a development environment or network infrastructure, the more open (for whatever reason) it is to women working in that role.

One final interesting data point to note is that senior software developers are 89.5% male, while plain old software developers are only (“only”) 78.1% male.

What’s the gender breakdown for these positions like in your company? What do you make of these numbers? Do you have your own research you’d like to share? Tweet @jcassano and @FastCoLabs with your facts, insights, and opinions.

Why The Developing World Needs Women To Be Online

Want to improve economic conditions in developing countries? As usual, the best approach is to focus on women.

If women can’t get online, then there’s no chance they’ll get a job in software. Here at Co.Labs we’ve been on a number-crunching bit when it comes to women in software. So far we’ve taken a look at two important slices of data: perspectives on obstacles to getting more women in tech and how new tech jobs are mostly going to men. Now we take a look at the third piece of the puzzle: the gender gap in accessing the Internet.

Earlier this year, Intel released a massive study crammed full of useful research. It’s a lot to digest, so we’ve pulled out some of the most provocative trends.

The report focuses on women’s access to the World Wide Web, particularly in developing countries. One consistent but unsurprising pattern is that the less economically well-off a country or region is, the wider the digital divide between women and men tends to be.

On average across the developing world, nearly 25 percent fewer women than men have access to the Internet, and the gender gap soars to nearly 45 percent in regions like sub-Saharan Africa. Even in rapidly growing economies, the gap is enormous. Nearly 35 percent fewer women than men in South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa have Internet access, and nearly 30 percent in parts of Europe and across Central Asia. In most higher-income countries, women’s Internet access only minimally lags that of men’s, and in countries such as France and the United States, women's access, in fact, exceeds men's.

Intel stresses that this is bad for business for two main reasons: first, the loss of revenue from online transactions and second, the reduction in economic opportunity for women who might use the Internet to find work. According to the report, there will organically be 450 million new women online by 2016--the report’s main recommendation is to boost this number by another 150 million in that time period. This will reportedly open up market opportunities of at least $50 billion.

Intel’s researchers also home in on the fact that 30% of women with reliable Internet access have used it to search for jobs or otherwise improve their economic standing. A lot of efforts to overcome the digital divide work narrowly on just getting more people online. That’s great, to be sure. But in a section called “not all access is equally empowering,” the authors write:

The Internet can convey numerous benefits to women, but unlocking these benefits depends on how deeply women engage online. “Fully engaging” on the Internet requires feeling conversant--knowing what to look for, how to search, and how to leverage networks, knowledge and services--as well having fast, unrestricted, reliable access.

Our study showed that the longer a woman had been using the Internet, the more likely she was to report concrete benefits such as earning additional income, applying for jobs, and helping with her studies. Users with multiple platforms to access the Internet were also more likely to report these concrete benefits than users of either computers or mobiles only.

The report also features an interesting breakdown of the different demographic groups and how they are likely to access the Internet: computer-only, mobile-only, or multi-platform. In general, mobile-only users are younger women who use the Internet daily, but are unlikely to use it to apply for a job. Computer-only users (laptop or desktop) tended to be middle-income female homemakers and often use the Internet for education and study. Multi-platform users, naturally, tended to be wealthier women who use the Internet daily and are likely to use it for education and shopping.

How one accesses the Internet also affects one’s attitudes about it. Women who access the Internet through both mobile and computers, for instance, hold the strongest belief that Internet access is a fundamental human right. This suggests that there’s a positive feedback loop at work: The more regularly women access the web, the more they begin to see it as an integral piece of social fabric--something that everyone needs to be a part of.

This is good to know because if we’re serious about overcoming the gender gap in software, the first job needs to be getting more women around the world online. Computer programming is a skill that any individual, with enough access, can learn on their own to improve their economic standing. This is true even--and perhaps especially--in the developing world. If the next wave of new computer programmers is going to come from outside developed countries, then it’s imperative to get more women online now so that they can enter the job market on equal footing.

Is The Tech Gender Gap Widening?

Despite all of the increased attention the gender gap is receiving, new data suggests that it might be widening rather than shrinking. Spoiler alert: We need more women engineers.

The data doesn’t lie. For all the talk about tech becoming a less male-dominated space, women are still a vast minority in the industry. In fact, recent data from Bright.com suggests that the gender gap is widening--at least momentarily.

We recently covered a survey by the freelancing site Elance, an online marketplace for self-employment. That survey mostly focused on the attitudes of men and women freelancers towards how tech can become more open to women. A new survey from job search platform Bright tackles the nitty-gritty details of who’s actually snagging new tech jobs.

The number of jobs in the technology sector has grown a substantial 3.8% nationwide in just the first four months of 2013 (compared to the last four months of 2013). In April 2013, some of the known tech geographies where among the fastest growing regions in tech, including San Jose, Austin, San Francisco, Boston and Seattle, however other areas less well-known for their tech jobs also displayed strong growth, including Oklahoma City, Kansas City, Tucson, and Indianapolis.

Nothing new there. We know that tech is one of the country’s fastest-growing sectors, and that it tends to grow the most in traditional geographic hotbeds like the Bay Area. It is interesting to see that New York’s much-touted “Silicon Alley” didn’t make the growth cut while Kansas City continues to explode under the influence of Google Fiber.

The real question we’re interested in is, who are companies hiring to fill all these new jobs? The report tackled this question head on:

These jobs are trending to favor male job seekers. While the tech sector is predominantly male overall, an estimated 71% male, the titles displaying the largest increase in available jobs have also trended towards male-dominated roles, including Systems Administrators (89.7% male) and Senior Software Engineers (77.1% male).

Let’s take a moment to unpack these numbers. We know that men account for about three out of every four people working in tech right now. On top of that, the job areas that grew the most in the first four months of 2013 tended to favor men by an even larger percentage than the industry as a whole. If this trend keeps up, the gender gap may end up widening rather than shrinking, despite heightened awareness of the issue.

To be clear, we know the problem is probably even worse than it seems because a lot of the women who are counted as working in the tech sector often work in PR, HR, or marketing. The answer shouldn’t be to just keep hiring women in those roles. According to Bright Labs, the most in-demand job titles in April 2013 were all technical positions. Companies need to hire women engineers if they want the gender gap to shrink.

The war for engineering talent is so hot that companies are trying everything to lure top candidates. Sometimes, these incredible bonus packages are a great way of finding talent who will fit in with the team. Other times, the tactics become so gimmicky and specific that they’re almost guaranteed to screen out a diverse set of candidates.

Take, for example, Saatchi and Saatchi Tel Aviv’s recent decision to screen candidates for a software engineering position by conducting interviews inside Diablo III.

The idea to test skills like teamwork and thinking under pressure using a video game is worth exploring. The U.S. Army, for example, uses video games to help train soldiers how to recognize friendly people from insurgents disguised as civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Choosing a specific game with no relation to the job other than the CEO’s preference, however, was probably not the way to go if the company wanted to have any shot at hiring a woman. Technology is already a male-dominated field, especially in Israel. Moreover, Diablo III’s playerbase is 69% male, meaning that by choosing the game you’ve already narrowed down the pool to an incredibly homogenous group.

Even if you did find a qualified woman gamer-developer, there’s another problem with conducting in-game interviews that most men would never even think about. Due to a combination of their relative scarcity and the anonymous nature of online gaming, women who play Internet games and identify themselves as such face a constant barrage of sexist trash-talking from their male counterparts. The problem is so severe that some women have created entire sites to document the misogyny they face playing online on a regular basis. Given the stigma attached to female gamers, it wouldn’t be shocking if women didn’t want to participate in an interview where their potential boss was giving them orders over the same system so many jerks use to berate them.

Although it’s tempting to search for new and inventive ways to find candidates, companies have to be careful not to automatically weed out too many qualified candidates just by the interview criteria. There’s a fine line between offering perks that help you find someone who will fit well on the team and searching for such specific traits that you’re almost guaranteed to find someone exactly like yourself. Unfortunately, Saatchi crossed that line.

This update was contributed by Gabe Stein.

According to a survey conducted by Elance, the greatest deterrent to getting more women in technology fields is a lack of female role models. Elance is a popular platform for freelancers, so survey respondents come primarily from that share of the tech marketplace. And some questions are specific to working from home. Still, it’s probably a safe assumption that a lot of the same trends apply for women working in technology fields whether remotely or in-office.

It’s definitely worth reading through the results of this (fairly short) survey. Here are three stats we’ve pulled out for you:

• 66 percent say that for women to be successful in tech will require equal pay for women and men with same skillsets
• Only 22 percent of respondents believe technology needs to be made more “glamorous” or “cool” in order to appeal to women
• 80 percent are “optimistic” or “extremely optimistic” about the future of women in technology

Female readers: Do these figures resonate with you? The most interesting stat here is the one about unequal pay, because it demonstrates that the women responding to this survey expect to get paid less off the bat, even in more progressive companies. Also--it’s telling that nearly a quarter of respondents don’t find technology “cool enough” to compete with careers in more feminine organizations. Help us unpack what these stats mean by sharing your take on Twitter.

A recent NPR segment, “Blazing The Trail For Female Programmers,” profiled the lead developer of Flash video, Sarah Allen. It’s part of an ongoing NPR series called “The Changing Lives of Women.” NPR talked with Allen about what it means to work in a field where only 20 percent of her peers are women.

Today Allen is CEO of mobile design & development outfit Blazing Cloud. In addition to Blazing Cloud’s volume of work speaking for itself, Allen is also getting business from startups who value their genuine emphasis on diversity, as opposed to just hiring women as “window dressing.”

Allen reflects on the decades she spent being the only woman on a development team and how things still haven’t changed too much. She tells a story about being being one of six women at a 200 person Ruby on Rails conference a few years back. Coming out of that experience Allen started RailsBridge, an organization aiming to increase diversity in tech through free workshops for “women and their friends.”

She also emphatically makes the point that the issue is a lack of supporting for women who already want to get into tech:

We've really proven that demand is not a problem. Every single workshop we've ever held has had a waiting list.

There are lots of other interesting moments in this quick 8-minute segment: According to NPR, the proportion of women studying computer science has actually decreased since the mid-20th century (that’s ponderous stat #4, for those counting). While you’re listening, also check out the April 29th broadcast of NPR’s All Things Considered for a complementary segment about Harvey Mudd’s efforts to get more women in computer science degree programs.

Should all-male software companies be on some kind of wall of shame? Here at Co.Labs we’ve celebrated the success of specific companies that have actively sought to increase diversity within the programming community. But what about those companies with particularly egregious records? Is it really so bad to have an organization that’s all one sex?

The creators of a blog called 100% Men think so, which is why they’ve put the spotlight on IFTTT, Posterous, Autonomy (an HP subsidiary), and the dating site Couple.me--all of which boast about as much gender diversity as a Freemasons meeting. (In fairness, Posterous was only 100 percent men as of 2011, and the company is being shuttered anyway, but to their credit they now they have two women on staff: one engineer and the office manager.)

It seems like a total no-brainer for a dating product to have a gender mix on the design team, doesn’t it? Perhaps that’s why no one’s heard of Couple.me. Read previous updates to this story below.

Rails Girls Summer of Code (RGSoC) was started by Berlin Rails Girls organizers to help Rails Girls get into open source, a focus that distinguishes it from Google’s original Summer of Code. Ruby on Rails is a full-stack development language that you can learn more about here.

Just as in Google Summer of Code and Ruby Summer of Code, students will be paid so they're free to work on Open Source projects for a few months. Unlike those programs, the Rails Girls Summer of Code is about helping students to further expand their knowledge and skills by contributing to a great Open Source project (rather than producing highly sophisticated code).

Targeting women in tech is great, and helping them become active, productive members of the vibrant Rails and open source communities makes this program particularly exciting. To get involved as a student or mentor, write to summer-of-code@railsgirls.com or catch RGSoC on Twitter.

Stacey Mulcahy wrote a letter to her 8 year old niece and posted it online. Why does that matter? Well Mulcahy—aka @bitchwhocodes—is a developer who has personally come up against the shortcomings of the tech community when it comes to gender equality. Inspired by her 8-year-old niece’s decision to become a game developer when she grows up, Mulcahy wrote this letter“to a future woman in tech.” It’s full of hopes for her niece and for the developer world in general:

I hope that when you attend a meeting that is mostly male, that you never get asked why you are not taking meeting notes. I hope you say "fuck this" more than "it's okay".

...I hope that skill will always be held in higher esteem than your gender--if you had no skill, you would not be part of the discussion, and your gender is simply a modifier.

...I hope that no one ever tells you to "deal with it," "relax," or "ease up" because you refuse to laugh at something that simply is not funny.

...I hope that you attend conferences and find yourself complaining about long lines for the bathroom.

A lot of the lines in this letter will be familiar with anyone who follows even the slightest the grievances of women in tech. But it’s a powerfully original way of framing the issue, by focusing on the positive vision of the kind of developer community Mulcahy would like to be a part of, rather than just railing against the shortcomings of the one that currently exists—it's empowering. (Hat tip to @NGA_Anita.)

We can talk about the gender divide in tech all day, but it’s also important to celebrate the achievements of women in software. In fact, if it weren’t for the work of one woman, Ada Lovelace, computers as we think of them today might not exist. Lovelace worked closely with Charles Babbage on his early mechanical computer designs. Although today Babbage is considered the "father of computing," it was actually Lovelace who is believed to have written the first computer program. She also imagined computers as more than just calculating machines, influencing the thought of several pioneers in modern computing.

Stevens Institute of Technology is holding a conference celebrating the achievements and legacies of Ada Lovelace on October 18, 2013. Proposals for papers are due May 14. From the institute:

An interdisciplinary conference celebrating the achievements and legacies of the poet Lord Byron’s only known legitimate child, Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852), will take place at Stevens Institute of Technology (Hoboken, New Jersey) on 18 October 2013. This conference will coincide with the week celebrating Ada Lovelace Day, a global event for women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). All aspects of the achievements and legacies of Ada Lovelace will be considered, including but not limited to:

• Lovelace as Translator and/or Collaborator
• Technology in the Long Nineteenth Century
• Women in Computing: Past/Present/Future
• Women in STEM
• Ada Lovelace and her Circle

So if you care about women in software, then, now, or in the future go ahead and submit a paper. It’s a good way to honor the legacy of the world’s first coder -- a woman.

Previous Updates To This Story

For those who missed it, "donglegate," as Wired dubbed it, is the latest blowup after a display of sexism in the coding community. Although some people, including women in tech, took issue with the way Adria Richards handled the situation, Wired's Alice Marwick puts it in context very bleakly:

Regardless of the nuances of the incident, the fact remains that Richards faced a gargantuan backlash that included death threats, rape threats, a flood of racist and sexually violent speech, a DDOS attack on her employer--and a photoshopped picture of a naked, bound, decapitated woman. The use of mob justice to punish women who advocate feminist ideals is nothing new, but why does this happen so regularly when women criticize the tech industry? Just stating that the tech industry has a sexism problem--something that's supported by reams of scholarly evidence--riles up the trolls.

Jezebel also chimed in, pointing out the how these kinds of jokes are possible and seem normal because of how much of a dudefest tech is. It seems particularly egregious that these guys made these jokes right when the speaker was talking about bridging the gender gap in tech.

Richards was distracted, mid-seminar, by a couple of tech bros sitting behind her making some shitty sexual puns about "dongles" and "forking." (She blogged about the full chronology of events here.) Richards did not enjoy the jokes. She especially did not enjoy the disrespect shown to the speaker, who happened to be specifically, at that moment, addressing programs designed to make the tech community more welcoming to women. Meanwhile, in the audience--Richards's photos reveal a sea of men--a couple of dudes felt 100% comfortable cracking the kind of crude jokes that people generally reserve for their home turf. And that's because, to a lot of dudes, tech is a space owned by men.

Bruce Byfield, who has written extensively on all things free & open source, gives an overview of sexism in the FOSS community. As a subset of the broader development community, FOSS has a lot of great things going for it because of its transparency and emphasis on collaboration. Unfortunately it still shares many of the same problems when it comes to gender. Byfield takes an informative look at initiatives that are trying to fix the gender imbalance, like the Geek Feminism Wiki, Ada Initiative, and Ubuntu Code of Conduct.

Carla Schroder credits Ubuntu for its all-purpose code of conduct, which she calls "a radical departure from the dominant 'freedom to be a jerk' ethos that prevailed before." As a result, Schroder adds, "Ubuntu has also attracted large numbers of contributors and users from more diverse walks of life than other distros.

However, in the last two years, FOSS feminism has paid special attention to anti-harassment policies for conferences. Most of this work has been developed by the Ada Initiative, an offshoot of the Geek Feminism Wiki, which has developed templates for policies that can be used either unmodified or as starting points for discussion.

The rationale offered for this emphasis is that anti-harassment policies can be a starting point for changing other aspects of the community.

All in all a thorough and well-reasoned piece worth a read (even if the pagination on datamation is ridiculously annoying).

Ashe Dryden, a Drupal and Rails developer, did the software community a huge favor by starting to answer the question "How can I help tech be less sexist?" She gives concrete, applicable steps that people can take to make conferences more diverse, like:

Anonymize and remove gendered pronouns from abstracts/bios before handing the data over to your proposal review committee. Someone who is outside of your proposal reviewing committee should be assigned this task.

Pretty simple, but makes a huge difference. Dryden's post is full of tidbits like that. It also includes a pretty thorough list of different marginalized populations, going far beyond gender diversity to include, for example, physical disability and economic status. But women in tech is still the focus of what Dryden is writing about.

The headline of this article in Forbes elides individual (and organizational) responsibility by saying that women are "accidentally" excluded from tech. That said, it still makes a great point that tools like Codecademy are democratizing technology and thereby removing a lot of the traditional barriers to women, like it being hard to find mentorship in a boy's club.

Dani Landers, a transgender woman game developer, gives an account of how her identity informs her game design decisions in Bloom, a game currently vying for funding on Kickstarter.

It's no secret that the games industry, by and large, lacks diversity. In this case, that is gender diversity. This is actually a huge shame as it limits the stories and points of views different types of people bring to the collective table of gaming.

Landers contrasts the way she handles representation of female characters and motherhood with the way major video game studios do, which is pretty obvious in her artwork.

The differences in the way I create concept art and models is pretty self-explanatory. Basically, notice how the female characters aren't half naked with giant breasts? Yea, this is a pretty easy one to be aware of...I'm kind of surprised this is even "different" to treat them with that level of respect.

The influential gaming site Penny Arcade picked up the story, with a really interesting take on how gaming can be a safe haven for certain marginalized populations.

Games themselves may offer a safe place for transgender, genderqueer, questioning, or other LGBT community individuals, but the gaming community has been less receptive. When Landers was promoting her game in one gaming community forum, users hijacked the thread and began posting "tranny porn," telling Landers she should find new work in the adult film industry.

Articles and features on gaming sites that bring up gender representation of any kind, be it transgender or otherwise, is typically met with the 'Why is this important?' 'How is this relevant to video games?' style responses. It should be apparent by now that games can be far more than just entertainment to some individuals. To some, it's a necessary escape, or a safe haven where the question of "Who am i?" can be safely explored.

So, a pretty prime example of women being reduced to sexual objects in the technology world is this article on Complex, "The 40 Hottest Women in Tech". At first glance the article is a weird mix of acknowledging sexism in tech followed by outright sexism from a publication covering tech. It begins:

Technology has been a boy's club for most of its existence. Just another unfortunate repercussion of the patriarchy. But that's been slowly changing, and over the last decade we've seen a number of wonderful, intelligent, and cunning women make inspiring strides in the field of technology. Through web development, social media, space exploration, and video game design, we see the world of tech becoming a more equal playing field. Here are 40 women we admire doing work in the field of innovation.

Followed by a slideshow of scantily clad women or typical "hot" women, including noting that one of them was a Playboy playmate. Commenters on the piece were justifiably outraged, writing:

How can you open with "sure, tech hasn't been friendly to women for ages, but it's better now!" and then proceed to objectify the women who have fought through this bullshit? Do you not see that you're only perpetuating the toxic culture?

And:

Funny you would mention patriarchy in your opening paragraph, then proceed to perpetuate it by subjecting all of the hardworking and talented women in this field to, effectively, a 'hot-or-not' list. Shameful.

It turns out, though, that the author of this piece didn't want it turn out that way:

I was assigned to write the 50 Hottest Women in Tech by Complex and it really bummed me out, because the idea of perpetrating the same old gender divisions in an area like tech - which has predominantly been a boy's club throughout history - seemed like kind of a messed up thing to do. It represents the most banal form of internet content that exists. But it's hard to say no to a paycheck.

So what I tried to do was see if it was possible to make something called "The 50 Hottest Women in Tech" earnest and empowering and an actual good thing. I pretty much only included normal looking women, who were involved in something really crucial or exciting in the tech space. I made no allusions to their looks in the blurbs, and ended up with simply a long list of very exciting women.

Of course when the piece actually ran, I discovered that over half of the women I had included were replaced with people like Morgan Webb, complete with the usual lascivious dialogue. Sigh. It's hard to win when you're writing for Complex, but please know that I tried.

That explains why tech-entertainment celebs are mixed in with actual female technology innovators like Gina Trapani and Marissa Mayer. It's the mark of a bad publication that it would not only assign a piece like this in the first place but that it would so drastically alter it after the fact. Fortunately, people in technology fields weren't buying what Complex was selling, as evidenced by this tweet and this tweet:

Stay tuned as coverage continues!

[Image: Flickr user Drazz]

On the face of it SnappyCam, a $1 iOS app, is like many similar "continuous shooting" apps that try to emulate the ultra-rapid frame capture sequence that happens when you hold down the shutter on a good DSLR. But then you discover its performance, and your mind should boggle: While Apple's own camera system can manage a full-frame 8-megapixel photo capture rate of around four or five frames a second, SnappyCam can pull 20 full-resolution camera shots off the sensor and into the iPhone's memory in the same interval.

How did developer John Papandriopoulos manage this?

It's actually very simple. Instead of using built-in code inside iOS and his app, he took the image-capturing part of SnappyCam right back to first principles. When you snap a photo using your smartphone, the sensor captures light and turns it into a numerical array that matches the intensity of light hitting each colored pixel. The phone takes this array, comprising millions of numbers, and compresses them using a standard algorithm--typically JPEG--so that they take up far less room in the limited space in the device's menu. The photo hardware components in this process are typically quite speedy nowadays, but the image processing pieces don't necessarily match this speed, partly because of the limited processor power of a phone, and the fact the hardware is having to do a lot of different processes on a relatively simple slice of silicon.

Speaking to TechCrunch, Papandriopoulos explained that he recently realized that he could achieve huge efficiencies in this process if he applied some thinking to the JPEG compression system itself. Specifically he coded a unique discrete cosine transform algorithm. The DCT is one of the tricks that JPEG compression uses to make images smaller than a raw bitmap. The JPEG format uses a normalized two-dimensional DCT based on academic work published in 1974, and like any Fourier-like compression it turns a complex signal (the raw image) into a simpler string of numbers that describe the transform of the signal (the smaller encoded image file). The coded algorithm to create JPEGs is, of course, well known and reused endlessly across all sorts of different devices running on different operating systems inside different hardware. That's why it's a standard.

Instead Papandriopoulos and team hand-coded a compression algorithm that used more efficient code methods to calculate DCTs, ones that were optimized for the Arm hardware on the iPhone. In fact the code for the entire app is optimized precisely for the power of the dual core processors in the iPhone 5.

Effectively SnappyCam uses a unique JPEG compression engine that's tuned for the vehicle it's running in--its code grabs an image from the iPhone's sensor, compresses it as fast as possible, shifts it into memory and then returns to grab more sensor data as quickly as it can. Much quicker than Apple's own code does.

And this last point is interesting. Apple's code is written by Apple's own expert coders, who are familiar with every detail of the hardware and software of their own device. But by starting at first principles of what his app is all about, Papandrioupoulos reminds every developer that there's plenty of room for innovation even in a densely populated field, if you turn your usual expectations on their head and think about the fine details, then get seriously nerdy with your code for a moment.

[Image: Flickr user Don McCullough]

GitHub hosts millions of repositories in a plethora of languages. We decided to put together a list of the highest-velocity, most popular projects--a charge that was harder than we anticipated. GitHub calls out leading projects, but as we learned putting together this article, measuring interest and activity in a particular repository is actually trickier than it seems. GitHub allows users to star projects, indicating enthusiasm but not necessarily participation. And you can fork a repository but never contribute any pull requests, making the number of forks an unreliable indicator as well. Then there are repositories that have thousands of commits but only a few contributors. Let's dig into the methodology first.

How We Calculated This List

GitHub’s Explore section shows trending repositories based on forks and stars today, this week, and this month but not further in the past. Most trending projects are written in GitHub’s most popular language, JavaScript. GitHub Archive records the public GitHub timeline and makes it available via Google BigQuery for further analysis. We used a rather unscientific combination of BigQuery queries on forks and push events over the last six months, trending project data for the last month, and plain old journalistic interest to pick 11 projects to watch across GitHub’s most popular languages: JavaScript, Ruby, Java, and Python. The projects are listed in alphabetical order.

Bootstrap

Originally developed at Twitter, Bootstrap is a JavaScript project billed as a sleek, intuitive, and powerful front-end framework for faster and easier web development. It has been trending not just this month but since the start of the year, and has racked up 54,185 stars and 18,237 forks on GitHub. Bootstrap contains HTML and CSS templates and dozens of reusable JavaScript components for icons, dropdowns, navigation, alerts, and popovers to help build user interfaces quickly.

Django

Django is another web framework, this one written in Python, which started life as an internal project for the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper back in 2003. It was designed to make web development fast enough to meet the deadline demands of the newsroom and manage content in particular. It’s a classic MVC framework now widely used within the journalism world (The Guardian, The Washington Post and The New York Times) and beyond in sites like Instagram. Still a trending Python project in the last month, it has well over 10,000 commits. Incidentally, one of the creators of Django,Adrian Holovaty, later created Chicago Crime Maps, one of the pioneering pieces of work in data journalism.

Flask

Flask is a Python project which has been forked a lot this year. Another web development framework, it’s described as a “microframework based on Werkzeug, Jinja2, and good intentions.” Werkzeug is a web server gateway interface utility library for Python while Jinja2 is a templating language for Python, modeled after the aforementioned Django’s templates. Some argue that Flask is easier to use than Django and therefore a better choice for beginners.

Game of Life

Game of Life is a Java project which has racked up large numbers of forks this year. It’s a simple online version of mathematician John Horton Conway's geek favorite Game of Life, a cellular automaton which illustrates how complex patterns can emerge from the implementation of a few simple rules. The Game of Life consists of an infinite two-dimensional grid of square cells, each of which is in one of two possible states, alive or dead. Every cell interacts with its eight neighbors, by apply four rules such as “any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies”simultaneously to every cell. This particular implementation is used as a demo application in a book on Jenkins, which is a continuous integration tool.

Homebrew

Homebrew is a package manager for OS X which installs the stuff you need which Apple didn’t. Written in Ruby, it was still trending this month despite being around since 2010. OS X already has two package managers: Fink and MacPorts, but installing and creating packages was still hard to manage. Homebrew is a simple wrapper behind the UNIX configure that aids in making install processes. A Homebrew formula is a simple Ruby script and the core of HomeBrew itself consists of only a few hundred lines of Ruby. Homebrew’s GitHub respository has 2,945 contributors and over 10,000 commits.

Probabilistic and Bayesian methods for Hackers

This snappily titled project is an interactive online book written in iPython (Python for interactive computing) which gives an introduction to Bayesian methods and probabilistic programming. It emphasizes coding first and math second and has proved very popular with GitHub users who have bestowed 3,748 stars on it this year. Bayesian inference uses Bayes' rule, which is used to update the probability estimate of a hypothesis as additional evidence is acquired. It’s extensively used in Statistics and Machine Learning.

Quine Relay

A quine is a program that prints its own source. Quine Relay is a new project which has been trending in the last month, an ouroboros or cyclical program in Ruby that generates a Scala program that generates a Scheme program and so forth through 50 languages until you end up back in Ruby. An exercise in cleverness rather than a useful piece of code, Quine Relay have nevertheless garnered 2,644 stars from GitHubbers in less than a month. Coders do like a bravura bit of meta-programming.

Sliding Menu

Sliding Menu is an Android library, written in Java, that allows developers to easily create applications with, yes you have guessed it, sliding menus popularized by YouTube and Facebook apps. It’s already being used in the Android applications of Foursquare, LinkedIn, and The Verge and is one of the most forked GitHub projects written in Java. There’s also a demo app available on Google Play demonstrating the capabilities of the library.

Storm

Storm is framework which aims to do for distributed real-time processing what Hadoop did for offline batch processing by allowing you to process massive and unbounded streams of data. Use cases include real-time analytics, machine learning, continuous computation, and distributed RPC. Storm’s creator Nathan Marz currently works for Twitter, where Storm is used to allow continuous analysis of the Twitter firehose. Storm is mainly written in Clojure but supports any language (Java is supported by default) and is one of the most starred Java projects on GitHub.

Tree.io

Tree.io is a business management platform written in Python containing modules like Project Management, Help Desk, and CRM (Customer Relationship Management). It’s been one of GitHub’s most forked and starred Python projects in the past month. Tree.io is aimed at small- to medium-sized businesses who need a single system to track everything happening in their business and isn’t going to cost a fortune. It also runs on a company’s own servers instead of in the cloud like Basecamp, Zen Desk, Salesforce, and other solutions which provide part of the same functionality.

Upton

Upton is a web-scraping framework, developed by non-profit newsroom ProPublica and packaged as a Ruby Gem, which has been doing well on pulls, commits, and stars. It lets you can scrape complex sites to a CSV in a single line of code and minimizes the number of requests you make to the site you are scraping. Its makers describe Upton as “sugar around RestClient (a debugger for RESTful web clients) and Nokogiri (a HTML parser).” Upton is named after labor journalist Upton Sinclair, who Time magazine memorably described as "a man with every gift except humor and silence."

[Image: Flickr user John Fowler]

Not content with sold-out symphony halls and packed panels at gaming conventions, video game music is getting a convention of its own. It’s called Game Music Connect and it’s hitting London on September 9, loaded with all the star-stocked panels, demos, and previews your MIDI-cued mind can handle.

After years of working together, BAFTA-award winning film and TV composer James Hannigan and audio director John Broomhall (X-COM, Heavenly Sword) gathered their coterie of famous industry buddies under one roof to detail every inch of the video game music world. Game Music Connect’s mission statement is a simple invitation behind the scenes of the audio worlds that accompany gamers on digital adventures.

Forgive us for asking why anyone would go to such a thing. In an expansive interview with Time+Space, Hannigan stressed the convention’s appeal for any gaming fan:

We subsequently decided that we wanted to deliver one offering an insight into how games are scored and to look at both the aesthetic and technical side of making music for the medium, getting away a little from industry jargon and the feel of an industry-only event in general... Anyone with an interest in music for games wanting to hear some of the industry’s top composers, audio directors and music managers in conversation, talking about how they work on major franchises and approach their day to day work could benefit from attending.

To that end, the day opens with a blockbuster panel of high-profile game composers telling their personal journeys and inspirations, including Martin O’Donnell (Bungie’s Destiny, Halo), Jesper Kyd (Assassin’s Creed, Borderlands, Hitman), Richard Jaqcues (Mass Effect, Little Big Planet 2, James Bond 007: Blood Stone), and others.

But the subsequent panels dig deeper into the science and business of audio composing and design, with audio directors such as Adele Cutting (Harry Potter series) and Alastair Lindsay (Sony Computer Entertainment Europe) outlining the process behind the who, what, where, and why of everything piped into gamers’ ears. How do they decide which audio pieces are spliced in at different points in the environment? What if the player stops moving--will they get stuck with the same looped background music?

There’s science and art in the sounds that blur right by our ears, but these pros are here to explain just what kind of emotion they’re subconsciously triggering. If you want to hear how their minds work but you can’t make it to London, maintain hope: In the Time+Space interview, Hannigan mentioned his desire to continue Game Music Connect beyond the September 9 engagement, though the dates and venues have yet to be finalized.

[Image: Flickr user United States Mission Geneva]

My mom is pretty jazzed about the Chromecast. When I showed my favorite 71-year-old how to beam Netflix to her TV using Google's new mobile-to-TV streaming dongle, she was delighted--even as someone who is averse to email. It would seem that the gut reaction of countless eager consumers flooding the Chromecast pre-order forms is founded: This thing is awesome because it’s simple. But its small size and slick marketing belie its incompleteness.

Unlike other home theater technology companies, Apple and Google have yet to make an effort to move beyond their proprietary systems. Jumping between AirPlay and Chromecast, I can't help but think that both of these devices are awesome--except that they’re missing an open standard.

After beaming a few YouTube videos to the TV from the new Nexus 7, my mother instinctively asked "Okay, now can we get the grandkids on here? Let's FaceTime the kids." I had to explain to her that we couldn't do that. If I had brought my Apple TV over to her place, we could do it from her iPad, but since this new Chromecast thing was made by Google and right now only works with Android devices like the Nexus 7, it’s a no-go. In all likelihood, an app like Skype for Android will soon support Chromecast-enabled video chat, but it'll take time for developers to adopt support, and this thing hasn't even shipped yet.

For somebody like my mother, the idea of beaming a video from a phone (or in her case, iPad) to the TV without fidgeting with wires is pretty astonishing stuff. She's seen it at my house with my Apple TV, but this time I was letting her tap the little Chromecast icon on the Nexus 7 and watch it take over her own TV screen, which is normally filled with whatever inane garbage happens to be on cable TV. The metaphor should be simple: The TV is a big monitor for your phone. Except there are so many caveats that the metaphor totally breaks down, making these devices exceptionally hard to grasp, even for hardware nerds.

"If I had one of these I'd use it all the time," she told me. "I'm sick of all these vampire shows and now this Under the Dome thing is on. I mean, come on."

I mentioned that my mother isn't the most tech-savvy person on the planet. That's mostly true. Sure, she doesn't know how to attach a file to an email, but in the last 7 months, she's developed a full-blown addiction to her new iPad. And now, when she sees video being pushed effortlessly from an iPad-looking device to her television set, she instinctively wants it. But alas, when the Chromecast ships next week, she wouldn't be able to use it for much.

There are a few reasons for this. First of all, Chromecast is so new that developers haven’t had time to build support for Chromecast into their apps. Much to Google's credit, they've launched an API to facilitate exactly that. It also plays nice with the browser, so in theory a web-based video will be supported. This is huge.

But even when there are a million Chromecast-ready mobile apps and support for Chromecast comes built right into Chrome on all platforms, we'll still be left with two separate, non-compatible standards for doing the same exact thing: Beaming videos from small devices to big screens. Sure, there'll be a lot of crossover among third-party apps. But will Apple rush to add Chromecast support to FaceTime and its other apps? When will Chromecast for Chrome start supporting QuickTime? Maybe these will both be non-issues in six months.

But as I use technologies like AirPlay and Chromecast--as wonderful as they both are--it’s painfully obvious that I, the consumer, am getting shortchanged in large part because these giant tech companies compete in other businesses. It's the same reason iPhone users were stuck with a substandard mapping application for several months last year. Just give us something that works according to a metaphor we can understand. Is the TV a giant monitor for our phones, or not?

Mobile-to-TV Video-Beaming Should Be Universal & Simple

It almost feels too improbable to even bother proposing, but why not have a cross-platform standard for this? Such an idea may seem anachronistic in this era of walled gardens and ever-battling tech titans, but why succumb to the status quo just because? After all, the web we all know and love was built out of a lot of open technologies and standards, without which today's more closed systems wouldn't even be possible (or much fun, at least).

Imagine the following scenario: It's Thanksgiving. The whole family is in the same house for once. Maybe you all want to watch a movie on Netflix. Or perhaps there's an adorable, iPhone-shot video of your baby cousin on somebody's phone. Or just a funny YouTube clip. A half dozen of you are all in the living room, sitting in front of the same giant HDTV. Wouldn't it be cool if any of you could take out your phone and, in less than 30 seconds, let everyone watch the video on the same big screen?

It would be cool, and if the platforms happen to match up and the app supports the TV-beaming standard, it's totally possible. But in such an unplanned, multi-person media-sharing scenario, complications seem unavoidable. You want to share that video? Sure, I just got a Chromecast. Oh, wait. That's an iPhone. Can you open the video in Chrome? Actually, screw it, let me hook up my old Apple TV and we'll AirPlay it.

If after that, somebody wanted to share a video from their Samsung Galaxy S4, they could, but only after switching inputs. Windows Phone? Ugh, forget it.

With separate, platform-tethered solutions for this simple, universally useful kind of feature, hopping around between streaming devices, mobile platforms, and apps is going to be a necessity. User experience bottlenecks will prevail. This isn't the end of the world, in and of itself, but it's not consistent with user expectations.

Of course, the big tech companies aren't solely to blame for this woefully inconsistent state of Internet TV. Content providers and online video services still need to adopt the standards and design a TV-friendly experience. As widely adopted as AirPlay is, I still can't get Amazon's Instant Video app to push videos from my iPad to my TV. And not because of technical limitations.

Chromecast has a long way to go, as do developers in their efforts to support what is still a brand-spankin'-new technology. For now, Apple TV's AirPlay is far more content-capable, but as the far-cheaper Chromecast evolves, Apple may soon find itself with some serious catching up to do.

[Image: Flickr user Rafael Acorsi]

Unlock your plugged-in iPhone for just a moment and your charger has full access to pretty much anything--which might be a problem if you run across a Malware-infecting charger like one built by the Georgia Institute of Tech.

For most people, a full iPhone charge won’t last the day. Our houses, cars, local bars and offices are littered with chargers--and thinking they’re just dumb cords, we trust them implicitly. The malicious charger, however, can bypass Apple’s normal application restrictions by pinging Apple with the plugged-in phone’s UDID for a provisional profile to install provisional applications, just as developers do to test unfinished apps.

At the Las Vegas Black Hat conference last week, Georgia Tech research scientist Billy Lau and graduate students Yeongjin Jang and Chengyu Song used the malicious charger, codenamed ‘Mactans’ (Latin for “black widow”), to install trojaned versions of Facebook’s app that took screenshots of password screens and dialed numbers without user input.

The Mactans cable required the invaded phone to be both a) unlocked while plugged in, and b) have a valid developer account already installed on the phone able to request provisional profiles from Apple, but the implications for trap chargers in the future are worrying.

Lau, Jang, and Song built the charger, which took a week and $45 in materials, to illustrate the dangers involved in the popular assumption that chargers are simple power outlet transformers. The current generation of Apple products (iPhone 5, iPod Touch 5, iPod Nano 7, iPad 4, iPad Mini) already have an authentication chip that allows both data transfer and charging (cables without the chip can only charge), which was seen as stopgap protection--until Chinese tech company iPhone5Mod allegedly created an imposter chip that allows data transfer. But Lau’s team’s Mactans takes the place of the wall charger-half of Apple’s charging combo: the obvious argument is that the wall plug portion of the official Apple charger is jam-packed with tiny components, but that doesn’t stop third-party wall plugs from being comparatively large--big enough for the Linux-based Beagleboard that Lau’s team used to launch their invasive malware.

In response, Apple released a statement yesterday assuring users that iOS7 will alert users when they plug into a USB charger for the first time, asking if the iPhone should “trust the currently connected computer”--a tipoff that the innocuous charger they’re plugging into is something more. But when the chips are down and your phone is dying, how vigilant will you be that the charger behind the bar is using a first-party Apple plug? You know you’re living in the future when even the wires can’t be trusted.

Remember Rhapsody, that service that pioneered streaming music back when you still had to explain what “streaming music” was to your Luddite friends? Sure, Rhapsody still gets mentioned in music app write-ups and reviews for the sake of naming names, but anyone who is truly considering a new music service probably doesn't give Rhapsody a serious thought.

Why? Because developers don’t care about the platform. And these days, what devs think of your music service matters more than perhaps any other category of user.

Sure, most people download apps and sign up for web services without consulting a bona fide engineer. But music services are a little different--once you sign up and start building a collection, you’re basically married to the thing. No one takes their choice of cloud music service lightly because the pain of switching is so great. Even non-technical users understand this intuitively--everyone has felt the pain of having to transfer a music collection from an old computer to a new one, or rebuilding it from scratch after a hard drive fail.

So when it comes to selecting among Spotify, Rdio, Spotify and the like, many people do ask their technical friends for advice. Which of these platforms is going to be around the longest? Which one is going to sell my personal data? Which one integrates with the social network I use?

When it’s time to answer those questions, the sentiment from music enthusiasts and developers is that Rhapsody doesn't innovate anymore, they haven't kept up with mobile or realized the importance of accessible APIs. It's not hard to find all sorts of social apps using both Spotify and Rdio's API to power new, innovative, ideas for listening to or exploring music. But it’s hard to find anything that connects with Rhapsody.

It’s not that Rhapsody doesn’t technically have an API--after all, the company’s own apps have to contact its servers somehow. The issue is that the API isn’t open to anyone--you have to apply for approval first. And what about documentation and the community? Just check out Rhapsody’s crappy developer portal to see why it’s so inadequate (or if you’re jonesing for a trip back to 1999.)

Left confused after seeking out Rhapsody's developer relations, I turned to Rdio, which has it's own easy to use portal--the company even has a Twitter account for the Rdio API and email address in the bio. I sent an email and bluntly asked a few questions including, "Why is having mobile APIs and web based ones important to your business?" The response I got back from API engineer R. Kevin Nelson explained the goals of uniform mobile APIs across different platforms and a simplified web one, but he also added

I think perhaps the question you're really asking here is "Why is having an API important to your business?" And I think the answer to that is a lot more interesting, but it's also less specific to being a music company than it is to being a tech company.

For starters, our public-facing API is a subset of our internal API, which powers all of our applications. This has a handful of organizational benefits that aren't necessarily visible on the outside, but are familiar to folks in the industry: separation of concerns, team and codebase modularity, dogfooding, that sort of thing.

From a business development and marketing standpoint, having a feature-rich API infrastructure is really important for strategic partnerships. For example, we recently sponsored the Pitchfork Music Festival, and the mobile apps for the festival used Rdio for music playback.

Having a public API also keeps us active in the digital music community, which is an important part of the larger picture. We sponsor and attend hack-athons (most prominently, Music Hack Day) and take the opportunity to meet with developers and discuss new ideas. A lot of the time, these hack-athons are where the "next big thing" gets conceived and built.

As a music enthusiast myself continually looking for new ways to discover music and easier ways to listen, I've encountered these apps Nelson alludes to, ones that use an API to build their music idea around music services. One of these is SetList, an app that combines your Rdio music collection and your location and alerts you when one of those artists is playing a show near you. A brilliant idea, but one that Mediumrare (company behind SetList) couldn't support without an easily accessible API.

Bop.fm co-founder, Shehzad Daredia, echoes Bryan Maniotakis from Mediumrare and says a public API is "Definitely critical, why reinvent the wheel or go through the prolonged / painful process of licensing music?"

While streaming services like Rdio and Spotify are interesting in their own right, it's the small upstarts that can come to market with the killer feature before anyone else that's the most interesting in the music space.

As I’m re-reading this, it sounds like a rant--but it should be taken as a wake up call. Dear Microsoft (with your Xbox Music service) and Napster/Rhapsody: Wake up before all your users leave. We need lots of choices in the music platform industry. Consumers don’t want you to die off. Counting on people signing up for a trial only to forget to cancel it is no way to run a business. In the same way Blockbuster gets a backhand everytime someone mentions Netflix, I think Rhapsody should feel the sting when Spotify and Rdio get talked about. But without a robust platform, the sting is only getting worse.

Lisa Bettany

Male or female, some developers are just more visible and well known than others and Lisa Bettany is definitely one of the more well-known ones. Her name has become closely tied to her iOS photo app, Camera+, which is put out under TapTapTap studio. Camera+ was not only one of the first most notable third-party camera apps for iPhone, it also rose to that status by implementing unauthorized, sought-after, features like using the volume buttons as the shutter button. A feature Apple has since copied and implemented into the default iPhone camera.

Bettany has created all the scene modes and effects in Camera+ and also keeps up with the app's main components. Beyond the iOS app and being a professional photographer, Bettany is currently working on a new book which details her trip around the world taking photos exclusively with her iPhone.

Amanda Wixted

There's a really good chance you've played one of Amanda Wixted's iOS games, considering most have reached the top 10 list on Apple's App Store. As former tech lead on Zynga's iPhone team and first mobile engineer, she helped develop FarmVille, Live Poker, Mafia Wars, and more. Users not tied into Zynga's suite of mobile games might have bumped into Wixted under her other mobile apps, Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man.

Wixted left Zynga and started her own company, Hyperspace, in 2011 which created the location-based mobile game, Turf Geography Club. The app has since been discontinued and Wixted left to start Meteor Grove Software in 2012, which is an independent iOS development and consulting shop based in Brooklyn.

Carla White

Following a movie-like storyline, Carla White switched careers and ended up developing her own suite of apps after the app she was seeking didn't exist in the fashion she thought it should. Her first app was Gratitude Journal, an app that was designed to capture a user’s thoughts, specifically what one is grateful for. White came up with the idea while journaling what she was grateful for after the passing of a relative. The app has seen the top spot on the lifestyle chart in the App Store as well as being featured by Oprah.

White not only now has three apps under her development company, Happy Tapper, including Little Buddha and Vision Board, but she has also written a book called Idea To iPhone. In the book White says a person does not need to be tech-minded to get into making apps and teaches someone to take a concept to an app.

Claire Boonstra

Layar, the augmented reality app which arguably sparked the consumer awareness of AR as a new and useable technology, was cofounded and developed by Claire Boonstra. Layer has been downloaded more than 26 million times in 209 countries since its inception in 2009.

Layer might be one of Boonstra's biggest accomplishments and given her a prominent position, but one of her most memorable public acts came with her TEDxAmsterdamED talk about education. Boonstra has since left Layer to pursue her passion of education, as she puts it, "It was suddenly there and I couldn’t stop it."

Jean MacDonald

Jean MacDonald is pretty well known in the Mac community, working for Smile Software and contributing to TextExpander developing new snippet groups. She’s not an iOS developer per se--she builds Mac apps--but we’re including her here because Objective-C is Objective-C. At Smile, MacDonald also took charge of PR and marketing duties as well as product documentation. MacDonald became a partner at Smile Software in 2009.

MacDonald's most recent contribution to app development isn't with specific code or a neat new app, but rather facilitating a camp for young girls to get into app development themselves. App Camp For Girls was a crowdfunded initiative which garnered more than double its goal of $50,000 and has been widely praised in the media.

Cathy Edwards

What happens when you create the best app search engine? Apple scoops you (and your company) up and incorporates it into their offering. Cathy Edwards was responsible for the engineering (including the search algorithm), product management, and design of the app Chomp. Since Apple's acquisition of the company, Chomp has of course been shut down.

Edwards has been an advocate for women in tech, also constantly repeating that developers should ship within the first 90 days. Considering Chomp was built and shipped in just over 90 days and bought by Apple in just over 2 years, she may have a point.

Prerna Gupta

Prerna Gupta cofounded Khush, a company that developed intelligent music apps. In 2011, Smule acquired Khush and Gupta moved over and became chief product cfficer at Smule. One of Smule’s breakout hit apps was Ocarina, with the ability to blow into the iPhone's microphone and play a wind instrument, similar to how someone would play it with a physical instrument. Apps from Smule have been downloaded over 90 million times to date.

Gupta made Fast Company’s list of Most Influential Women in Technology 201l for work with her genre-breaking app, LaDiDa. She is also a angel investor and resident mentor at 500 Startups.

Sophia Teutschler

Sophia Teutschler along with John Casasanta were the two founding members of TapTapTap, the app development shop that has been behind many successful apps and much forward thinking about a new generation of mobile development. Teutschler and Casasanta ended up splitting over business decisions which turned out to be irreconcilable in the end and Teutschler left TapTapTap to start Sophiestication. Like any partnership or business, often differences in direction for a product can create an unhealthy working situation. The two ended up dividing up assets including apps, with Teutschler taking Tipulator and the recently finished Groceries. Developing both Mac and iPhone apps, Teutschler and Sophiestication practice a simpler, less high profile art of app development than TapTapTap.

The Morris Virus (1988)

Robert Morris's worm infected 10% of computers online at the time--around 6,000 machines. Morris built the virus to test the size of the Internet, when he was a grad student at Cornell. The bug slowed infected computers to a halt, prompting the government to sue. Under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Law, in December 1990, Morris became the first virus-maker convicted in U.S. court. This first criminal hacker's legal troubles were ironic: His dad, a coauthor of UNIX, was the former chief scientist of the National Computer Security Center for the NSA.

The harm was done by mistake: Morris designed his bug to replicate in 14% of cases, even if it detected a copy of itself, as a safeguard against security programs trying to outsmart it. This extra load of viral copies drew administrators' notice, and inadvertently clogged infected computers.

Due to "potential loss in productivity," the Morris worm cost between $200 and $53,000 per infected system, authorities estimated. Morris was sentenced to three years of probation, 400 hours of community service, a fine of $10,050, and the costs of his supervision.

Morris bounced back in later years. In 1995, he cofounded Viaweb, a startup that made software for building online stores. Viaweb sold for $48 million in 1998, to Yahoo. The next year, he got his PhD from Harvard.

In 2006, the once-infamous hacker cofounded Y Combinator, the seed-stage startup funding firm. The next year, he got tenure as a computer science prof at the hacker school where his rep might be best appreciated: MIT.

Chernobyl Virus/CIH or "Spacefiller" (1998)

Chernobyl gets its name from its trigger date: April 26, the anniversary of the 1988 nuclear disaster. Created far from the former USSR, in Taiwan, the virus is only associated with the incident by coincidence--a red herring to investigators.

Chernobyl, also known as CIH, effectively paralyzes a computer by overwriting a chip inside PCs. The author, Chen Ing-hau, then a college student at Tatung University, was caught by Taiwanese police. His virus infected 60 million computers and caused U.S. $1.6 billion in damages. Since the Taiwanese government was unable to prosecute Chen--no victims came forward to sue--the virus led to new anti-malware legislation in Taiwan.

Chernobyl is sometimes called "spacefiller" because it works differently than other computer worms, in a way that brings to mind DNA insertion by biological viruses. While most viruses add their code to the end of an infected file, this one looks for gaps in code to add its own. Since the "insertion" doesn't change the infected file's size, it makes the virus harder to detect. Chernobyl is an example of how computer viruses, much like the organic ones that give them their name, evolve to exploit weaknesses in their hosts.

The Melissa Virus (1999)

If you want a virus with personality, look no further than Melissa: Named for a Miami stripper, she was made by a porn-fiend fan of The Simpsons, who ended up behind bars when his email-Frankenstein invaded Microsoft and Intel. By the time the 30-year-old was arrested, Melissa was the worst computer virus outbreak to date.

The first ever email-aware virus hid inside an attachment called "List.DOC," which contained a list of 80 passwords to porn sites. Spreading through Microsoft Outlook emails, it hijacked infected address books, sending itself to the first 50 contacts. In a subset of cases--whenever the day of the month and minute coincided--Melissa printed a line of text at the current cursor position in a Microsoft Word doc:

"Twenty-two points, plus triple-word score, plus fifty points for using all my letters. Game's over. I'm outta here": a quote from Bart Simpson about Scrabble.

Unleashed by New Jersey hacker David L. Smith on the alt.sex newsgroup, the quirky virus wasn't meant to do harm, just mischief. But Melissa got out of hand: On March 26, she clogged Microsoft's and Intel's email servers. The tech juggernauts sought vengeance, after an estimated $80 million worth of damages: The FBI, New Jersey state police, AOL, and a Swedish computer scientist collaborated to hunt down the horny hacker, who was arrested on April 1.

Melissa cost her maker a 10-year prison sentence (he served 20 months), plus a $5.000 fine. She showed hackers the potential real-world consequences of cyber play.

The I LOVE YOU Virus (2000)

Imagine a computer virus that operates like a lover-boy con artist: It exploits lonely people, stealing by seducing. This bug isn't a cyber spy, terrorist, or identity thief, but in a way, it's more malicious: It gets in your head. And takes your stuff when it leaves.

The Trojan Horse that arrived in millions of email boxes on the morning of May 5, 2000 carried an email attachment labeled "I Love You." Recipients expecting a secret admirer's confession got a rude surprise: When the doc was opened, all image files on the computer were overwritten. Photos of family, friends, lovers and pets--all deleted in a flash by the would-be Internet Romeo. The psychological weapon then launched anew, sending itself to the first 50 contacts in the user's Windows address book.

I LOVE YOU spread like a sexually transmitted disease out of southeast Asia. It was unleashed on May 5, 2000 near Manila, in the Philippines, and chased daybreak across the world: first to Hong Kong, then Europe, and finally the U.S., when people began work that Friday morning. It was later estimated to have caused U.S. $5.5-8.7 billion in damages internationally and cost around $15 billion to remove.

To protect themselves, the CIA, Pentagon, and many major corporations chose to shut down their email systems. The worm ended up affecting 45 million computers, making I LOVE YOU one of history's most dangerous computer disasters.

The Filipino authorities arrested two college students alleged to have released I LOVE YOU, but the hackers couldn't be charged since the state had no law against malware. In July 2000, two months after the outbreak, the Philippine Congress passed its E-Commerce Law to protect against future worms.

You might call it the Miss Lonelyhearts virus, after the novel by Nathaniel West: a bug that preys on the human desire for love. The intensity of that longing drove the book's protagonist, a romance advice columnist, out of his mind. So might I LOVE YOU.

Code Red Virus (2001)

Code Red forced the White House's website to shut down temporarily on June 19, 2001, along with several other government agencies. Red exploited a flaw in the Microsoft Internet Information server, which allowed it to vandalize websites with its graffiti:

"HELLO! Welcome to (URL redacted)! Hacked By Chinese!"

Since the virus targeted U.S. government websites, it was seen as a potential cyber-attack by terrorists or a foreign government (like... China?), but the hacker is unknown.

This cyber villain got its name, as usual for computer viruses, from a coincidence. The security investigators at eEye Digital Security who first chased the bug were drinking Code Red Mountain Dew at the time.

Red infected 359,000 computers at its peak, on June 19. "Hacked By Chinese!" became an Internet meme representing online defeat. Its claim to fame is that it was the first virus to push around the White House-- though its sophomoric vandalism would be upstaged by its more sinister successor, agent.btz. Check out Virus #9 for more information.

The Anna Kournikova Worm (2001)

The Anna Kournikova Worm posed as a photograph of the sexy tennis player, but was actually a virus made by Dutch fanboy Jan de Wit, on February 11, 2001.

"Here you have, ;0)" was the subject, "Hi: Check This!" the body of the message that carried de Wit's worm. The bait was a file labeled "AnnaKournikova.jpg.vbs." Kournikova was a tempting lure, no doubt, for male recipients: at the time, she was the face of the sports-bra maker Berlei, in its "Only the ball should bounce" billboard campaign. People voted her one of the 50 Most Beautiful People in 1998 and ESPN.com voted her "hottest female athlete."

Kournikova was the most searched athlete on the Internet through 2008, the eighth most searched woman in 2001, and even one of the most searched terms on the Internet for a while. Net surfers searched her not so much for her tennis prowess, which was good but not great (ESPN voted her the #1 "most overrated athlete" and #18 in the "25 Biggest Sports Flops of the Past 25 Years"), but for her image. The 2004 Swimsuit Issue featured photos of her which are still famous today, along with photos in Maxim and FSM. The year after the worm, she would place first in FHM's 100 Sexiest Women in The World.

So, the timing could not have been riper for an Anna Kournikova worm than when it hit.

De Wit was 20 when he made the virus, using a bug-making toolkit he got online from an Argentinian coder. Anna was similar to I LOVE YOU, but it didn't corrupt or delete any files on infected computers. Anna spread fast enough, though, that she got the FBI’s attention. They used David L. Smith-- author of the Melissa virus, now finished his 20-month prison sentence and still collaborating with anti-virus investigators--to find the real name, home address, and email of the coder called “OnTheFly.”

De Wit turned himself in on February 14, after conferring with his parents. He was prosecuted in Dutch court, and given a community service sentence--despite the FBI arguing that US$166,000 of damages were caused by Anna. The mayor of de Wit's town, Sneek, calling the virus "a joke," said his town should be proud to have produced such a talented kid, and that the tech crew at his office should interview him for a job when he finished school.

The Slammer (2003)

Bank of America ATMs, a 9-1-1 Emergency Response system in Washington state, and an Ohio nuclear plant were all victims of this "denial of service" attack--a flood of robo-zombie information packets that overwhelms an automated system with noise.

Slammer wrought havoc fast: The virus slammed 75,000 machines within 10 minutes of being released. Like the ingenious mind-child of a deranged James Bond villain, the bug burrowed into America's electronic systems of cash-flow, public safety, and energy, and tried to break them down. If it had succeeded--particularly in the case of the nuclear facility--the costs in money, injury, and even human life could have been catastrophic.

The source of the bug is unknown. Ten years later, Slammer holds the record for the fastest spreading virus to date.

Netsky & Sasser Virus (2004)

German teenager Sven Jaschen was arrested on May 7, 2004 for spreading 70% of all malware on the Internet at the time.

The coder admitted he'd written the viruses, known as Netsky and Sasser, but insisted he never intended harm: He saw himself as an avenger, a virus hunter. His fast-moving bugs were designed to infect computers in order to delete other viruses.

The high school student learned about viruses in a computer class he was taking. At the time, the virus MyDoom had just exploded onto the Internet, eclipsing I LOVE YOU as the fastest spreading bug. MyDoom's creator, believed to be a programmer in Russia, is unknown, but its effect was to spam millions of email boxes with the message "andy; I'm just doing my job, nothing personal, sorry." It seemed like a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, aimed at companies, programmed to flood their systems with noise mail.

When MyDoom was launched on January 26, 2004, Jaschen was a 17-year-old novice programmer, and he took the virus as a call to arms. What if he could write a bug that would outpace MyDoom and delete it? He'd become a hacker hero.

The Terminator inspired Jaschen's first virus. Netsky gets its name from Skynet, the computer network that Arnold Schwarzenegger's android character fights in the Terminator movies. It was written in 2000 lines of code, which took the novice programmer weeks of after-school sessions to write. Netsky's mission was woven into the lines of code: "we are the skynet- you can't hide! - we kill malware writers (they have no chance!) - [LaMeRz-->] - MyDoom is a thief of our idea! --<-<- ->->"

Jaschen built Netsky in his parents' basement, where he chugged seltzer and listened to MTV. Netsky had some success at deleting MyDoom, until the virus writers caught on, and redoubled with new code. Jaschen countered with Sasser, which he released on his 18th birthday, April 29, and then went to sleep.

The next morning is when the anti-virus virus got out of control. Since it was crudely written by a newbie coder, it accidentally caused infected machines to reboot constantly. Jaschen tried to fix the bugs in his bug by releasing frantic follow-ups, but to no avail. Within 48 hours, Sasser infected 1.3 million PCs--especially groups of PCs linked together in Windows-based local area networks common in business offices.

Sasser halted rail service in Australia, paralyzed one third of Taiwan's post office, forced Finland's Sampo Bank to shut down 130 branches, and prompted Delta Airlines to cancel several transatlantic flights. Its effects were so intense, so fast, that many businesses opted to install a new Microsoft security patch immediately.

Police arrested Jaschen at his home on May 7. A year later he was sentenced to 21 months of probation, plus 30 hours of community service at a retirement home. Microsoft paid two of his high school classmates $250,000 for information leading to his arrest.

On September 1, 2004, just four months after his arrest for virus-making, 18 year old Jaschen was hired as an "ethical hacker" by Securepoint, a German security company.

Poison Ivy (2005)

Think of this virus next time you change clothes or share a bed in front of your laptop, edit private documents, or surf embarrassing websites: Poison Ivy may be watching. This "remote access Trojan" (R.A.T.) gives the hacker full control of the hijacked computer, to record or edit content--documents, pictures, passwords, online purchases--or even use the speaker and webcam to record audio and video.

Ivy can bring "eyes and ears" into your home, the way FBI surveillance characters do on the TV shows The Wire and Homeland--only this bug is wireless. It spreads by email, quietly infecting unsuspecting computers. You may be bugged without knowing it, as you read these words. Watch out.

Ivy has been used to infiltrate U.S. defense and chemical industries, according to the security firm Symantec. Nobody knows who created it, but it has been traced back to China--perhaps designed by Chinese hackers to spy on foreign governments.

Ivy is very much a DIY virus, popular with amateur hackers. YouTube tutorials show cyber voyeurs how to install and use Poison Ivy from home, after disclaimers like “don’t be dumb!” The PoisonIvy-RAT.com website provides support for users, led by a mysterious character called Codius, whose email address is support@poisonivy-rat.com. So it’s not just China: Anybody with computer skills who wants eyes inside your computer has a tool to try.

The Agent.btz Virus (2008)

Agent.btz sparked a security scare which forced the Pentagon to issue a temporary ban on thumb drives. The U.S. Cyber Command unit, a new military group to fight online spying, was created soon after, motivated by this worst-ever cyber breach. The outbreak started with a thumb drive left in the parking lot of a U.S. base in the Middle East.

Agent.btz spreads through infected thumb drives, installing software that steals data. It works by copying existing files and replacing them with viral software, while storing the original in the background. Foreign spies presumably designed the virus, as former Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn III claimed in Foreign Affairs in October 2010, when the issue was declassified. The bug invaded when it was inserted into laptop at the base, which was connected to and uploaded itself onto a network run by U.S. Central Command.

America’s traditional Middle Eastern enemies, like Al Quaeda, Iran, or Afghanistan, are obvious suspects. But the government either never learned the source of the thumb drive attack, or they never told us.

Stuxnet (2009-2010)

This little beauty was built by engineers working for the governments of the United States and Israel to fight the “bad guys.” Iran, to be specific.

Stuxnet was the first computer virus to cause damage not online or in computers, but in the outside world--by obstructing Iranian nukes from getting made. Stuxnet traveled by thumb drive, like agent.btz--only this time the victim wasn't U.S. Central Command, but Iran's nuclear program. The virus worked as military sabotage in ways that previously could only be done by physical bombing, rockets, or a human spy planting explosives or snipping wires.

Stuxnet targeted software controlling industrial systems in a uranium enrichment facility in Natanz, Iran. By mucking up machines, it made their centrifuges spin out of control and self-destruct, according to data from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The New York Times described the virus's development through anonymous interviews with current or previous workers on the classified project. At Stuxnet's peak, soon after the virus spread beyond Iran and was discovered, it shut down around 1,000 of the 5,000 centrifuges at Natanz. U.S. officials argued that Stuxnet set the Iranian nuclear program back between 18 months and two years. Others consider this an overstatement, and caution that U.S. involvement in cyber-warfare may give our enemies justification for their own. The case has even been made that this cyber-weapon was a net benefit to Tehran.

Good or evil aside, Stuxnet set a new standard for cyber sabotage. In the evolution of computer viruses, Stuxnet is the bleeding edge. Begging the question: What's next?

[Image: Flickr user Mr.Roach]

Over the years Apple has bought a number of smaller companies whose expertise covers different areas in semiconductor manufacturing, including spending about $280 million on PA Semi--a fabless company which knew all about low power-consumption chip design. Now it's bought another company with similar knowledge, the very small Passif Semi. Why?

Not very much is known about Passif Semiconductor Corp. It's employees on LinkedIn label it as having "1-10" staff, and we know that in June 2008 it received $1.6 million in venture funding from Khosla Ventures...a VC firm which we know likes placing cash in early-stage companies that work in computing, silicon, mobile, and other similar sectors. We also know that Passif's work is about "switch based receivers with a low power consumption and a small footprint," which means that the company's staff know all about making wireless chips and the kind of silicon that's friendly to mobile devices because it doesn't consume much power.

A quick search for the patents owned by the company, by which we may guess at the kind of IP Apple has bought, reveals not many results, but there are two that are particularly interesting.

First check out U.S. patent number 20110260839. It's for an "autonomous battery-free microwave frequency communications system." In its plainest form this patent describes a system that captures energy from a microwave signal by an antenna, stores it in a capacitor, and uses that stored energy to operate a built-in transceiver which autonomously sends out pre-determined data. The patent even notes that the incoming energy can come from "various communication forms, such as wireless network protocols or cellular communications."

You may have recognized the gadget described in this patent: It's very similar to an RFID tag service, where the radio frequency signals are both the carrier of digital chatter between a tag and the interrogating computer (such as a subway turnstile) and the source of energy that powers the transmitter (in a device like a smart subway ticket). Essentially Passif is talking about a contactless short-range communications system that can work even without a powered device like an iPhone in the loop. Interestingly, Apple has in the RFID space, including for ticketing purposes.

The second interesting patent is U.S. number 2013032578, an application for an "Un-tethered wireless stereo speaker system." This novel radio setup imagines an autonomous speaker system that establishes a temporary bi-directional wireless link with an audio source device. The first speaker chats to the source by radio, and extracts the first audio channel from the stream. The second speaker slaves to the first one and extracts its own secondary channel from the audio signal stream. Essentially it's like a simple ad-hoc Bluetooth stereo system without too much fiddling with Bluetooth settings--although Bluetooth is indeed mentioned in the patent as an option. Passif's proposal is better than standard Bluetooth, according to the patent, because of confusion over the automated sharing of channels between left and right speakers.

Immediately one can imagine Apple taking Passif's idea and building in a new AirPlay protocol to its future devices and promising a simpler and more hassle-free Bluetooth speaker accessory list from its third-party accessory suppliers. Indeed there's already a hint in current developer Apple TV code that one tap configuration for remote control units is going into iOS7.

But of course it's not just audio data that could be sent this way. The patent simply describes signals that obey established protocols, and this could be plausibly stretched to include video formats or perhaps simple data sharing.

And that's where the first patent comes in. It sounds exactly like the sort of low-power-signals technology that Apple would love to harness for mobile payment solutions. The payment tech may be an expansion of Apple's existing, and expanding, in-store smartphone payments service EasyPay--with NFC tags simplifying the process of purchasing devices. It may also be connected to Apple's Passbook scheme that would give iPhones the power to act as secure RFID ticketing systems. And, ultimately, it could help Apple turn its iPhone into a sophisticated digital credit card replacement device...something that's long been mooted.

Alternatively Apple could integrate Passif's knowledge of low-power wireless and comms and short-range audio into a design for an accessory like a smartwatch. Optimized low-power chip and comms designs could help solve one of the big problems with current-gen smartwatches, which is short battery life. It's even possible the RFID tech in Passif's patent could help turn any iWatch into a convenient wireless payment dongle--one that's far less risky to use than bumping an expensive iPhone against a store's reader pad.

Ultimately, of course, we don't know exactly what Apple has plans for. But its acquisition of PA Semi all those years ago definitely bore fruit in the successful homespun AX series of chips in the iPhone and iPad, so let's hope something equally innovative comes from the fresh purchase.

[Image: Flickr user JamesIrwin]

When startup prince Marco Arment tweeted out a clarion call for writers to break their blog free of oppressive content hosting sites, he was keying into the eternal blogger quest to maximize freedom without having to wrestle with clunky open source plug-ins (or, you know, actually having to learn to code).

In response, news sites starting offering alternatives to Medium. Here are some suggestions from Timo Reitnauer at IWantMyName, running the gamut from the uber-simplified Tumblr to posting via Dropbox.

Low-Intensity and Designed Blogging

Here are some tools to get you up and running fairly quickly with a serviceable website and a blog where you can post your strokes of genius.

Squarespace

With clean editing navigation and drag-and-drop UI, Squarespace lives up to its name with modular “blocks” chosen from an extensive list of content types (simple text, video, even radio), making this super simple for multimedia types. But it’s the expand-and-pinch front-end blog design tweaking that sets Squarespace apart from its competitors, allowing the code-illiterate to yank around their page appearance (complete with listed pixel dimensions) instead of guesstimating length-by-width dimensions as they go back and forth from front end to back end.

It’s slightly annoying to get prompted to save every time you want to change a field in the editor, but it beats accidentally navigating away and losing that cat-pic slideshow you labored over for half an hour. It also comes with prominent access to analytics and walks you through creating an inline shop with considerations for taxes, coupons, shipping--all those things you’ll care about once xtremepups.squarespace.com takes off.

Plus, the boys and girls in its customer support are known for their 24/7 service. Sadly, these services cost: There’s no free version, though there is a 14-day free trial, and tiered services start at $10/month-to-month (though real functionality starts at $20/month-to-month).

Virb

Less elegant but still functional, Virb retains a topbar navigation and smattering of themes with clear labeling (Business, Music, Portfolio, Restaurant, etc). After the free trial, Virb comes in at a nominal price of $10 flat fee/month for all its WordPress and Blogspot-esque bells and whistles.

Weebly

With much more emphasis on mobile, Facebook integration, and posting-on-the-go through their app, Weebly is intent on getting your content shared. The editor is particularly useful, not only for its easy top bar navigation and mobile view editor but for the “free content search” included in multimedia embedding: In a visually dominated content world, the search for appropriate and usable photos tacks on posting time. Themes tend to be a little more varied, though many are clearly catered to the personal. After the free trial, plans start at $4.83/month for Standard, $9.83/month for Pro (which includes site search, HD media, larger file upload, etc).

Tumblr

Oh, Tumblr: Nest of fandoms and endless content recycling. Unlike the other offerings, Tumblr doesn’t cost a cent--but its premium themes do, which you’ll probably want to pick up ($19-$49) after you realize how often you see the same half-dozen professional-looking free themes going around. Add to that a curiously limited customization palate depending on theme and Tumblr looks weak in the personalization department. But with Tumblr, you’re not investing in your site’s individuality--you’re investing in the built-in Tumblr community, which sends 87 million posts into the world per day. Yes, those same rabid fan-people can spread your content like wildfire at the push of a “reblog,” doing most of your marketing for you. They won’t see your pretty designs if they “follow” you, but it’s a free subscription piped right to their dashboards. Here, more than anywhere, visual content (especially GIFs) are king.

Blogs That Scale Bigger With Stability

WordPress

The core WordPress CMS is used by a surprising amount of professional services (amateur to pro journalism outlets, startups), so it’s no surprise that they’ve got a tried-and-true content-posting UI. WordPress is customizable, but doesn’t have the flashy UI and handholding of SquareSpace or Weebly.

Professional WordPress servers like Page.ly have arisen out of this stability, taking care of bandwidth and security for subscription fees. If you’ve grown your site beyond the capabilities of the amateur circuit of content hosting listed above, Page.ly offers $24/month for personal use with nominal features (more for the $64/mo Business and $149/mo Premium levels), but the prime advantage for such professional hosting is pageload speed and dependable security.

Who Wants A WYSIWYG Blog Anyway?

DropPages, Scriptogr.am

Tired of blogsites holding your hand through the editorial process? Try DropPages--a site that links a folder in your Dropbox to a domain. Once registered, you’re off to the races. As in, download a theme from the available (a paltry three at the time...but hey, they’re young), put it in your chosen Dropbox folder, and proceed to edit everything via HTML in good ‘ol Notepad. The advantage? You can edit it anywhere you can access a Dropbox folder: mobile, tablets, other computers. It’s all in the cloud, baby.

Postach.io

Love the clean interface and organization of Evernote? Cool--Postach.io lets you blog with it. Similar to DropPages, Postach.io links to your Evernote account and lets you post/blog on the go, but it also has more themes (and lets you sort and choose on its site) than the nascent DropPages. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.

So which platform is the best? None, of course--they all serve different needs with different pricing options. But for general-purpose blogging with more options and less hassle, we have one we prefer.

A Blogging Workflow Add-On We Love: Draft

This web-based solution implements MarkDown and includes a well-implemented, hassle-free version-control system for collaborative writing and publishing. Register to Try Draft and your writing space is defined. Simply begin a new document and start typing. The interface is completely uncluttered, with a few formatting choices in dropdowns. Draft keeps every keystroke, so you needn’t save until you have a complete version draft of your document.

Choose “Mark Draft” to create a saved version, and draft keeps every version so you can travel back through if you’ve misplaced, lost, or inadvertently destroyed some gem of personal prose. Want more backup security? Export as Text/Markdown or HTML. Draft implements the Ink File Picker, so you can export directly to your computer, and since Draft is intended to be a blogging platform, you can create settings to publish directly WordPress, Tumblr, Twitter, Blogger, LinkedIn, Mailchimp, Buffer, or a WebHook URL. Like Google Apps, Draft supports simultaneous editing by collaborators.

The Publishing Platform We’d Pick: Squarespace

There’s a reason we went over this platform in-depth. The drag-and-drop, pinch-and-expand UI is clean and natural, facilitating experimentation without requiring page reloads to tinker with different parts of your blog. This is a site for armchair designers endeavoring to tweak their site into something unique, unlike the carbon-copy blogs that erupt out of Tumblr or Blogspot’s limited themes.

Its crown jewel is the blog platform’s shop assistance: If you intend to sell merchandise or personal products, there’s plenty of options front-and-center for organizing purchasing straight from your blog. Ten dollars a month is reasonably cheap for a site; it’s $8 a month if you commit for a year. The “professional” level is only $16/month for a similar commitment.

Wondering whether you should build a blog from scratch? Read why you should be your own platform.

[Image: Flickr user Matteo Paciotti]

Is WordPress your own platform? What about when you host it on your own hardware? When you used a shared server or a virtual private host? When you use Wordpress.com? Is Tumblr? Is SquareSpace?

I have some thoughts.

I agree with the exhortation to "be your own platform," but the way I'd define that is more technical, legal, and political in nature. People posting extensively on Facebook, Twitter, or Medium are relying on the future goodwill and unknown business models of those sites that their words and images will persist in some form and in a form that the creator wants. That's impossible to know. I've written a few things on Medium (not paid) because I liked the experience of their writing tools, their statistics, and their reach. I think two of the three items I wrote became featured and had several thousand reads. It's a wonderful way to write and a wonderful place to post.

But it's not mine. It's theirs.

I can't export. I can't embed. I have no idea about what their ultimate plans are. They could delete all non-owned/paid content in the future with no notice. They could rework the design and it would be ugly. My words' persistence, both in appearance and permanent location, are dependent on factors beyond my control.

I always argue that people should register a domain name and only work with services (and pay for the level of service needed) so that they can front their own domain in place of any platform domain. That ensures some persistence. I've migrated my personal blog out of a hosted blogging platform into my own across multiple revisions and then into Squarespace. I've managed through scripting and redirects to mostly keep URLs dating back to its earliest days from breaking. (There's a few-month period in 2001 that seems in bad shape that I may have to recover from the Internet Archive, though.)

So Tumblr, Squarespace, Wordpress.com, and the rest seem like reasonable choices to me if you BYOD. Otherwise, you're once again relying that a company will continue to exist in a form of your choosing, rather than its own. This is coupled with the ability to export one's posts. This will sound hilarious, but I migrated to Squarespace (version 6 platform) a few months ago from Movable Type 5. I had to export from Movable Type, import via Wordpress.com, and then export from Wordpress.com to a format that Squarespace 6 could read. It worked surprisingly well. Very surprisingly well. But it shows the danger of platform lock-in.

Squarespace 5 offered export and a third-party posting API that would allow local storage and composition and then posting. Version 6 did away with that, although I believe from working with Squarespace (which has sponsored my podcast), this wasn't intended as lock-in. Rather, the platform was a huge overhaul, and they're still working on it. It doesn't benefit them to lose customers who don't want to migrate from version 5 to 6, or who won't sign up because content is locked away. (Of course it can be scraped and re-created if need be, but that's a pile of work.)

I own a platform, The Magazine; it is purpose built because Marco didn't find one that suited. He didn't want to make it a platform-for-lease to others because it would have made him beholden to others' needs, rather than his own. I feel the same way. I enjoy producing the publication, but it's exceedingly difficult to create a generic method of serving all the forms, audiences, and app stores with a similar experience. Many are trying. I hope some succeed!

Convinced you need to be your own platform? Check out our in-depth guide to blog tools here.

[Image: Flickr user Kelly Sikkema]

As interesting as the iWatch rumors is the hope that with it will come a re-invention of the wireless headphone. A wireless display on your wrist would almost certainly beg an Apple-made new wireless headset, as we can’t imagine Jony Ive passing for an up-the-arm-routed headphone cable.

Apple ventured into the Bluetooth headset world with the original iPhone, presumably only to complement their revolutionary device with an Apple take on the familiar ear dongle. Removing the standard ear clip and relying on the earbud to keep the unit secure, lots of people liked the design, but function suffered for those without the perfect ear size.

After six years and a rethink of standard earbuds design, I think it's time for Apple to try a redesigned wireless approach.

The first place you can look for a vision of next-generation headphones might be a Kickstarter campaign from Sound Band. Connecting wirelessly via Bluetooth, Sound Band attaches behind your ears, almost invisible from the front with nothing sticking in or on top of the ear. There are actually no speakers and the headset uses what the company call surface sound, basically bone conduction like that employed in Google Glass. Sound Band has passed their goal of $175,000, which is a good indicator that demand is in place for a new type of headset.

When indie developers are successful venturing into new waters, it leads speculation to bigger companies being willing to test their own hand at a product category. Many have pointed at Kickstarter's most successfully funded project to-date, the Pebble smartwatch, as precursor to Apple's own offering. Earning more than $10 million, Pebble has proven that a notification-based phone companion is not only possible, but in demand.

Another current Kickstarter campaign looking to change the way people listen to music on the go is Syphon Soundwrap. The Soundwrap is different from the Sound Band and uses electrostatic speaker technology, which is basically very thin speakers placed right next to your head rather than in or on your ears. Meant to be attached to the inside of a helmet, beanie, hat, or other headgear, Soundwrap is aimed at sports enthusiasts but could work in many different situations.

Of course, a pair of Apple Bluetooth headphones wouldn’t be trying anything that other electronics company hadn’t. Wireless headphones exist on the market today, but the hideous designs and deal-breaker battery life have kept them a niche product. Even as desirable as Sound Band might be, the product still lacks an appealing design; it’s clear that Google Glass, Pebble, and the new class of wearable devices are only going to raise expectations further.

[Image: Flickr user Gabriel Rocha]

E-commerce companies are on a constant quest to reduce the friction between shopping and buying online. And you don’t need analytics to tell you that entering credit card information is the part that sucks.

A new open source payments framework called Skeuocard thinks that displaying the fields in a different way visually could help ease the anxiety people feel when presented with a form full of blank text fields. "Basically, Skeuocard is an attempt to better match the user's mental model and cognitive biases," says developer Ken Keiter.

Skeuocard payments require the user to enter numbers so that the image of their credit card on the screen matches the actual card.

"My hypothesis is simple,” says Keiter. “People are relatively good at determining consistency, visually. Skeuocard's use of dynamic constraints depending upon the card product reduces its flexibility vs. usability trade-off, and the mimicry of the card's layout--especially the loss of field labels--reduces the amount of context-switch overhead that's produced by having to associate names of fields with the corresponding information on the card."

As you can see from Skeuocard's online demo, and indicated by the name itself, this project is an attempt to skeuomorphize your online payment process in hopes of cutting down on mistakes from users, frustration, and thus abandoned shopping carts. The project is available to fork or contribute to on GitHub so any business with merchant needs should be able to take advantage of Skeuocard.

On Keiter's blog introducing the project he lists real-world things he's heard people say in regards to inputting their credit card online, “Am I supposed to enter my card number with the spaces?” “Okay, the month on the card is 7… So that’s January, February, March, April, May, June, July…,” and “What’s a CCID? Is that the same as a CCV?” among other things.

If there's any question of "why" still left in your mind, consider what Keiter described to me in an email: "Skeuocard isn't meant to be a grand gesture, nor a redesign simply for the sake of change. My highest hope was that this would get people to ask themselves two simple questions (perhaps in this order): Does the card on my screen look like the card in my hand? And why has this been done any other way in the past?"

[Image: Flickr user Jorge Franganillo]

Rice University scientists, working with Microsoft Research, have created something rather surprising--a long-term-mood detecting device that can ascertain a user's emotions with up to 93% accuracy. What's more, there's no EEG device in use here, no blood pressure sensors. It's all down to simple smartphone data analysis.

The MoodScope system is a two-parter, with a smartphone acting as a data-collection device and a cloud-based model. Since we take our smartphones everywhere and increasingly use them to surf the web, engage in social media, use apps and so on, they are a fabulous tool for this purpose. MoodScope takes note of how users contact their friends, where they are habitually located, which apps they use, and what sites they visit. It turns out that phone calls are most strongly correlated with mood (often positive moods) and apps are the second strongest.

The app runs only intermittently so it doesn't eat up too much power, and builds a 1MB-sized log file that gets uploaded every night.

The cloud aspect of the app builds up a mood model of the user's habits, adjusting them based on incoming data and actual user-generated reports on their mood state. The locally installed app can make these assessments too, but these wouldn't necessarily be calculated using the most updated algorithm. Early on the estimate of the user's mood hits about a 66% accuracy, and this rises as the algorithm is refined--accurately tapping whether the user is in one of several states like "relaxed," "bored," or "excited."

The team behind the app notes that it's not perfect, and everyday life is jammed with almost unmeasurable and unpredictable events that can influence mood beyond the detection limits of the app. But it's confident that in time it will be able to improve the accuracy of the mood-sensing algorithm, particularly if it includes extra measurements like monitoring audio events for stress or other fingerprints. This probably would be battery intensive, but there's already a number of devices that will listen to your every word in order to watch for a command phrase.

But what exactly is this data for? At heart it's simply an extension of the quantified self, expanding measurements from strictly physical properties like exercise or location, which are pretty simple to collect, to more esoteric properties.

The Kickstarter project Melon is one great example of a less tangible data collection system--it's designed to measure "focus" of its wearer by correlating a user's attention and the activity they're taking part in via a simple EEG sensor. The idea is that by keeping track of their "focus" as assessed by the sensor and its associated app, the user will become aware of how their activity is helping them pay attention. It's easy to imagine a system like MoodScope being used for similar self-awareness assessments of all sorts of different potential types, bearing in mind that during an unexpected event a user is less likely to be good at assessing their mood compared to an automated system that's learned their habits.

There's also the intriguing idea that automated mood tags could become an interesting new shared label on social media services like Twitter or Facebook. Considering how we all use amusing hashtags on Twitter already, and even Instagram our dinner or important life events and share them with the world, this isn't too difficult or outlandish a scenario to imagine. This is another novel use of smartphone-based mood-sensing devices, although it's hard to imagine that it would be easy to monetize.

More monetizable is the idea of mood-adapting services or third-party apps. Existing apps like Spotify already try to offer mood-appropriate playlists based on the whim of the user, and this sort of service could be better based on a real-time adaptive response. Gaming is another obvious area where automated mood sensing could be very powerful, where games introduce different elements based on what the user is feeling (and this is something that Microsoft is looking at for its next-gen Kinect).

The practical upshot: Over the next year or so be prepared to think about how users are feeling when they use your app, and working out how you can use this data to your advantage. Right now this is a research topic, but all it would take would be a player like Apple or Samsung (which loves bolting in extra features to its devices) to really push mood sensing by smartphones into the limelight.

[Image: Flickr user Tauno Tõhk]

Today’s News Scrum Discussion: The Idea Maze by Chris Dixon

“Competition from other startups is usually just a distraction. In all likelihood, they won’t take the same path, and the presence of others in your maze means you might be onto something. Your real competition – and what you should worry about – is the years you could waste going down the wrong path.”

This observation gets at something which isn’t often discussed in technology--fear of duplication. In the outset of the article, Dixon says it’s hackneyed to claim that “ideas don’t matter” because ideas dictate what you execute on over the roadmap of your company. But one reason that “ideas don’t matter” has become axiomatic is that it’s nearly impossible for two developers (or two designers) put side-by-side with limited visibiltiy into each others’ projects to come out with the same exact thing--even if they are given the same resources and the same problem to solve. That’s because, as he says further on, “theories” are a big part of what drive software development:

Theories. There are now decades of historical data on tech startups, and smart observers have sifted through to develop theories that generalize that data. Some of these theories come from academia (e.g. Clay Christensen) but increasingly they come from investors and entrepreneurs on blogs.

The apps and services that succeed in getting long-term traction are the ones based on debatable hypotheses, which Dixon refers to here loosely as “theories” about how people will use and react to your feature set. The “debatable” theories work because they inspire products that polarize people, and polarization is core to being recognized and remembered by people who see zillions of apps and services every week. The theory needs to be controversial enough that it’s non-obvious, but provable and tied to metrics. Once a small set of early adopters prove the theory can work, other people become believers.

An example that comes to mind is Airbnb; before that business started, few people would believe that homeowners renting spare rooms could ever aggregate to compete with the hotel industry. And yet that was Airbnb’s hypothesis, and it turned out to be supported by user behavior. (Chris Dannen)

Chris is right that testable theories ought to drive startups. But I’ll take it a step further. Taken together, what Dixon is really saying is that successful entrepreneurs have a worldview that informs their decisions and allows them to generate new hypotheses. This viewpoint allows good entrepreneurs to make the choice between success and death that Dixon outlines for a number of successful companies:

Imagine, for example, that you were thinking of starting Netflix back when it was founded in 1997. How would content providers, distribution channels, and competitors respond? How soon would technology develop to open a hidden door and let you distribute online instead of by mail? Or consider Dropbox in 2007. Dozens of cloud storage companies had been started before. What mistakes had they made? How would incumbents like Amazon and Google respond? How would new platforms like mobile affect you?

All of these companies have an overarching worldview. Netflix believes that personalized distribution leads to the best results for media consumers and producers. This worldview led to them embracing online distribution before anyone else, but it also led them to the disastrous attempt to spin off their DVD-only service into Qwikster--some hypotheses are proven false.

Their worldview also drives their fantastically successful data-driven foray into original content production. Dropbox is based on the idea that no one should be left out of the networked, collaborative information age. Their original product is about extending the benefits of GitHub and cloud storage to everyday consumers, which is why they focused on making their service as easy to use as possible, rather than trying to beat the industry leaders on features. The decision to acquire Mailbox was about making mail filters--typically for power users only--mainstream.

The combination of theory, history, analogy, and experience in Dixon’s article all add up to one key point: Have a view of the world that you can apply to solving the problems you face. Know yourself and what you value. Found your company on some underlying general principle that you passionately believe in. This worldview will allow you to make the right choices and stay focused, even as your product changes. (Gabe Stein)

Looking at other startups as distractions, it’s hard for me not to think of idea of music artists and bands “competing” with each other. Digital media editor at NPR Flora Lichtman talks about music sampling in this 2011 on-air interview, implying that copying and sampling just leads to new innovations: “...then that becomes the basis of a new piece of--a new song. And so, we have a musician, Sublime, which has sampled the ‘Funky Drummer’ beat and then created their own new piece.” Startups are aware of the competition in their space and will all borrow ideas from each other.

In all likelihood, they won’t take the same path, and the presence of others in your maze means you might be onto something. Your real competition – and what you should worry about – is the years you could waste going down the wrong path.

Only your team with your experiences can create the product you’re producing. Time worrying is the only thing other startups can steal from each other. (Tyler Hayes)

Sure, time spent worrying is a crucial facet of entrepreneurial culture that is rarely discussed in mainstream depictions of startups--but it applies to both timing and time elapsed. It’s pretty clear that good ideas may not be recognized if they come before technology can really execute them or before the market is ready for them, as with AskJeeves or LoudCloud. But the amount of time a team spends working on a strategy, developing a product or service, and testing can have a major impact on their ultimate longevity and ability to adapt. I started thinking about this last year when I read a post by Jason Freedman about wasting time. From Freedman’s post:

Your startup, in the pre-product phase, is basically a ticking time bomb. The only thing that can prevent it from exploding is user delight. User delight attracts funding, enhances morale, builds determination, earns revenue. Until you get to user delight, you're always at risk of running out of money or, much more likely, losing a key engineer to something more interesting. Time is your most precious resource.

Similarly, at the end of his post Dixon says, “Your real competition--and what you should worry about--is the years you could waste going down the wrong path.” But there are plenty of other ways to waste or lose time too, especially if people on a team are working on the project alongside day jobs or other startups. The “direct experience” Dixon talks about is immensely valuable, but if everyone has too much on their plates, a team can stagnate in even the most solid idea maze. (Lily Hay Newman)

I like Gabe’s comment that all great companies have a worldview, a set of values, that inform their actions but this is also where I take issue with Dixon’s views in this piece.

"Good startup ideas are well developed, multi-year plans that contemplate many possible paths according to how the world changes. Balaji Srinivasanc calls this the idea maze: A good founder is capable of anticipating which turns lead to treasure and which lead to certain death."

This is a very engineering-oriented way of looking at the world, as if the founder was Deep Blue mapping out all the possible chess moves of its opponent dozens of moves ahead. Startup founders, even those who succeed, are usually no better oracles than the rest of us. You can't analyze your way to predicting the future. The world is just too complicated for that. This also vastly underestimates the effect that luck and timing can have on a startup's fortunes, a fact which is rarely acknowledged by founders and is a classic example of survivor bias in action.

To use Dixon’s phrase, “a sense for the history of the industry, the players in the maze, the casualties of the past, and the technologies that are likely to move walls and change assumptions" are all just starting points, like minimum requirements to creating a good business. In a way it’s about knowing the current rules of the game in order to decide which ones are worth breaking. The most important ventures will deliberately deviate from the received wisdom--the history, the analogies, and the theory of Dixon’s piece--at least in certain areas. The actions of truly groundbreaking companies are not always successful except as an expression of their values and worldview. (Ciara Byrne)

[Image: Flickr user Till Westermayer]

With a little bit of clever coding, every physical key you own can actually be copied without your knowledge. In fact, one of the world’s most secure keys became little more than a speed bump to a duo of hackers who are barely out of their teens.

At the Def Con hackers conference this past weekend, students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology previewed code they wrote–-and which they plan to release–-that allows anyone to scan and 3-D print high-security lock keys.

To be sure, this isn’t the first time someone has been able to 3-D print working keys. We previously told you about Outbox’s software that lets the company scan a picture of your mailbox key and reproduce it for their “reverse mailmen” to be able to access your mailbox. But those are just mailbox keys--they’re about as secure as a 13-year-old with braces.

But the MIT kids--David Lawrence, 20, and Eric Van Albert, 21--have successfully duplicated high-tech keys to a Schlage Primus lock, arguably the most secure lock people have invented. As Andy Greenberg writes for Forbes:

Schlage’s Primus models are advertised for use in high-security applications: The company’s marketing materials include references to the locks’ use in government facilities, healthcare settings, and detention centers. That security stems in part from Primus’s unique model, which includes two tracks of teeth–one on the top of the key and another on the side, each of which correspond to a separate set of pins in the lock. Even Marc Weber Tobias, one of the world’s most well-known lockpicking experts, has written that he uses Primus locks in his home and for secure evidence storage in his legal practice.

Think about that for a second. Thanks to simple software and 3-D printing, the most secure physical key in the world can soon be copied without problem by anyone with access to that key. And if the most secure key in the world can be copied by simple code, how easy will it be to copy the keys to your house, office, car, or safe? Very.

But you may say, “Well, I’m not going to be dumb enough to give someone my key to scan,” to which I would say: It doesn’t matter. With this software you don’t need the physical key to scan. A picture will do. As one of the hackers, David Lawrence, told Forbes:

All you need is a friend that works there, or to take a picture of their key, or even a picture of the key hanging off their belt. Pirating keys is becoming like pirating movies. Someone still has to get the information in the first place, but then everyone can get a copy...Our message is that you can do this for any high-security key. It didn’t take that much work. In the future there will be models available online for almost any kind of key you’re looking for.

Now, before the world freaks out and we go back to securing our homes with moats and drawbridges, I’d like to point out that the wonderful thing about software is that, though it can cause problems (which, in this case, it very definitely is a problem), it is also often the solution to those problems as well.

We all know software has enabled us to make our once tangible things intangible (DVDs became streaming video, CDs became MP3s, physical books became e-books). And though most of the things I’ve just listed are recreational objects, that doesn’t mean software is limited to just creating digital things of stuff that keeps us entertained.

The time and technology is now ripe for software to make the physical key–and keyhole–obsolete.

“But how would I get in my house without a key?” my friend asked me when I told him I was writing this story.

“Your phone, of course.”

Using your phone as the key to your home or office isn’t some fanciful far-in-the-future tech. Two companies–-Lockitron and Kwikset–-offer brilliant solutions to turn your old-fashioned locks from a device that requires physical key access to a device that requires only software key access. These solutions work via near-field communications, such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, that are built into your phone and use bank-level security encryption to make door locks levels of magnitude more secure. Throw an added layer of biometrics support–-as the next iPhone is rumored to contain–-into the mix and a software key could offer more security redundancies than even the most advanced physical key, which, as the hackers from MIT have proven, don’t hold up so well in the digital age.

Software and 3-D printing created this problem and only software will solve it. After all, if your door doesn’t have a keyhole, it doesn’t matter how many 3-D-printed keys a thief has-–it’s not opening.

[Image: Flickr user Lindsey Turner]

Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata will ascend to the International Space Station in November and find a friendly face from his home country waiting. Kirobo, the first talking robot in space, will recognize Wakata’s face and greet him by name.

If a companion robot that knows and speaks to you is unsettling, at least this particular bot was built to be small, cute, and harmless with Japanese design’s signature large eyes. It’s a unique cultural phenomenon to categorize a nation’s technology by design (think Honda’s ASIMO), and Japan is arguably the only country to have pursued robotics enough to have developed a unified style. (American robotics, if anything, is globally identified with the infamous Predator and Reaper drones, but drones aren’t true robots, requiring a three-man crew to operate.)

Appropriately, the robot awaiting astronaut Wakata is named Kirobo, combining the Japanese word kibou, for “hope,” and robot. Kirobo is the latest in three decades of human-facing bots, in which Japan has trial-and-errored itself through mad experiments in the Uncanny Valley to home in on what comforts us. But beyond simple technical achievement, the Japanese have yearned to do what other national cultures have blanched at: Supplementing, and in some cases replacing, human-to-human interaction with robots.

The Robot Culture Game

Consider the robots that Japan plans to use as caregivers for the elderly. They were conceived as a solution for the country’s ever-declining birth rate, a trend which has left fewer Japanese to take care of the retiring Baby Boomer generation. Other nations see the end of life as the period most in need of human interaction, but the Japanese distinction between souls in people and things is blurred. From Shinto belief in the kami (roughly, “spiritual essence”) inhabiting rocks, trees, and streams, to the nature spirits inhabiting Miyazaki films, Japanese culture is embedded with belief in spiritual animation of the seemingly mundane. So it is not an unnatural concept that one can find spiritual meaning in robot companionship.

Kirobo is not alone either: A paired robot, Mirata ("mirai" is Japanese for “future”), waits on Earth, relaying all of her partner’s conversations. While Kirobo can be controlled remotely, the robots’ conversational skill developers at Toyota, headed by project manager Fuminori Kataoka, wanted the bots to have voices of their own.

"I wanted to introduce Kirobo and Mirata the sense of 'Wa' (or Japanese spirit) in the process of communication. This sense of 'Wa' is to have compassion when communicating with one another, and to value the sensibility to listen to the other person," Kataoka said.

Such formalism is another key part of Japanese culture’s embrace of robotics: the strict etiquette of conversation and, more broadly, public interaction itself. The conflict between honne (inner desires) and tatemae (public facade) is a perpetual strain between inward thinking and outward behavior--an ever-present distance between people that evinces a privacy and acceptance that one person can never truly know another. And while Western cultures explore such uncertainty in art and philosophy (to solipsistic extremes), Japanese culture calcifies the distance in the ritualized addressing of superiors and inferiors, the etiquette around entering and exiting rooms, in beginning and ending dinner--established protocols which robots can be built to emulate.

Where Is The Soul Of A Robot?

Legendary Japanese roboticist and Osaka University Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro unveiled the latest version of his uncannily lifelike robot body double at the Global Futures 2045 conference in New York last June. Like Kirobo, Ishiguro’s robot “Gemenoid” HI-4 can respond to questions: A female Gemenoid modeled clothes in a Takashimaya Osaka department store and answered customers’ questions, which proved so popular that the clothes the Gemenoid modeled sold out immediately, Ishiguro told the conference.

“It’s a question of where the soul is,” Ishiguro states in reference to his latest self-bot that could take his place at conferences or in classrooms. Ishiguro is excited to deploy his robodoppelgänger to outright replace him in conferences and classrooms--a full-fledged endorsement in his belief that a robot needs to have a human presence (sonzaikan in Japanese). In a Japan Society Lecture last February, however, Ishiguro discussed a significant practical application of robots: Preserving the skills and personality of important people.

Lo, it has happened: Seiichiro Katsura of Keio University has created a robot imbued with the skills of 90-year-old master calligrapher Juho Sado, and the robot’s express purpose is to teach children the master’s art. Notably absent, however, is any sort of Ishigiro’s human presence: The robot is a series of clamps, poles, and a drawing arm with paintbrush. This isn’t the first endeavor to preserve Japanese culture using robots: In 2007, scientists at Tokyo University taught a ‘bot they’d named HRP-2 to perform the Aizu Bandaisan, a Japanese folk routine. Though HRP-2 is at least humanoid, its blocky form is far from the human presence Ishigiro espouses.

Ishigiro insists that the more work he does on robots, the more he learns about humanity--not just about ourselves, but how we relate to the intersection between the human and the robots we treat as partners. Two-hundred miles above Earth, little Kirobo waits and will, his designers hope, bring a little conversational warmth to an astronaut far from home.

Via Slashdot

Taylor Beck contributed reporting to this article.

[Image: Flickr user Eric Kilby]

Last week we asked readers to be our Labs Rats and subject themselves to a reader survey. Knowing that surveys don’t exactly nourish the human soul, we also put out the call for free-form qualitative feedback via email. Here were three thoughtful responses with good ideas for the site--and a few, ahem, critiques. We’ll reproduce them here, edited for length as some readers got quite impassioned. My responses are below.

Letter 1: Why Don’t You Host A MOOC?

Hi everyone at Co.Labs!

Just wanted to throw a quick "Merci" in your direction and let you know how much I appreciate all that you do.

I am an expat American artist-entrepreneur living in the Black Forest of Germany and I read Co.Labs every morning with my coffee and I check for new stuff before bed.

This has been my ritual since you started Co.Labs. While it is very beautiful here, (30 mins from France, got a *huge* studio and work spaces) this is not exactly a hotbed of intellectual, forward-thinking interaction.
And that's putting it mildly.

I love the variety of your content and I feel you have enabled me to stay on top of what is trending, who to watch and what's developing in the tech/social/design/science industries.

You are one of my main life-lines to what I feel is a daily, immediate global pulse of what's interesting in the combined fields of tech/design/social/education.

I am always trying to find better ways of engaging and helping small business owners(mainly those on the creative/artistic side) to branch out into international waters using technology.

This can be daunting at times because the Germans and the French are not super big about change and early adoption like Americans.

I read Co.Labs for many reasons and so often you give me a much-needed boost when I feel like a 3-headed entrepreneur-alien in the land of yes-but people.

There is always something on your site that feeds my need for tech/design/global input. So I know I am not crazy, just ahead of the curve so I must push on!

As to how CL can be better?? hmm.. Maybe give a MOOC now and then? I would take a CL MOOC for sure! Interactive interviews/chats (live) with interesting people?

A MOOC (or massively open online course) is a great idea and it’s one I’ve been practicing for. I’ve been teaching video courses at General Assembly here in New York, and while I don’t enjoy them as much as the real-life classes, they’re obviously much faster, and the reach can be enormous. We’re all about learning and building here at Co.Labs, so a course would be a natural fit.

To me, the value of something like this would be in a format that is daily, quick, and digestible--if followed every week it would eventually accrete into a larger understanding of a programming or design concept. We aren’t presently set up to produce that much video in our current workflow, so there would be a little bit of a learning curve. But video more generally is something I’m already trying to figure out, and the suggestion to host courses is a great way to do that. Look for more experiments in this area to come.--Chris Dannen, Editor

Letter 2: You Should Put Startups Into A Web Confessional

Firstly, love FastCompany.com! I had read a lot of snippets over the years and I finally subscribed to your digital edition :)

My dream is to be a digital marketing consultant one day! I'd like to guide small to medium sized businesses in Marketing, SEO and Analytics. Having completed your survey I wanted to pass on an idea, maybe its been done a million times but its an area of interest for me. What does an innovative timeline really look like? How does one get from an innovative idea to a well-oiled machine? We all hear common words thrown around like, luck and hard work but where are the emotions? The in-betweens we never focus on.

Maybe a competition to select the next innovative business idea, take a vote from your subscribers/followers to see who they want to follow and read about throughout the year. (maybe this happens every 6 months, let your subscribers/followers choose) Make your subscribers/followers part of the yearly company journey. Write about their successes, pitfalls, tips, tricks, and what strategies they used to overcome road blocks. Include a column or blog for the innovator, like a web confession cam. I'd love to hear/read about ones personal experiences, emotional struggles so I can truly grasp and appreciate how hard it is to turn an innovative idea into reality.

What budding innovator wouldn't want exposure from a credible, famous source like FastCompany.com?

We’re already at work on this concept with stories from entrepreneurs like Nate Kontny, the DataFox founders, and myself (with my project, Writebot). As we recruit more guest startups the volume of these sorts of posts will increase, and their observations and anecdotes will get more detailed. But hey--great idea to do things like web confession cams. I hadn’t thought of that. Video diaries are easier for the entrepreneurs to create and often more interesting to consume. And we know readers want to see firsthand the daily grind of startup life and how to best navigate it. I love this concept.--Chris Dannen, Editor

Letter 3: This Is Bullshit, Not “Reader Engagement”

Dear Chris,

About a week or so I engaged Gabe about the CoLabs audio experiments, offered a similar suggestion to this Labs Rats program, and am interested to see how it works out for you. I have some thoughts for your consideration.

Engagement with people on a qualitative level is somewhat lacking on Fast Company. This was one of the reasons I was impressed with both Gabe’s direct response to me, and the opportunity to influence Fast Company on a more substantive level. The Labs Rats program almost validates the public conversation I had with Gabe, and showing responsiveness to feedback is potentially an exciting differentiator for Fast Company- depending on the direction you take it. At the moment, certain aspects stand out to me that I think may leave your program falling short of its promise.

...

Surveys are actually a tool I find people can resent specifically for the reasons I mentioned above. I don’t like being corralled into providing “user-data” like income, but prefer to be related to on the merits of what I say and do. There’s a lot more to it, but I can imagine the survey would be greeted with a less than enthusiastic response. Naturally, incentivizing the survey could make a difference with that. I would love a Nike FuelBand BTW, but overall the fact that is a dangling carrot designed to get more participants in the survey, and consequently diminishes my chances of winning might be considered an insult to my intelligence. Again, this sort of thing comes back to what my intrinsic motivations for participating on Fast Company are. A survey with nominal incentive not only misses the mark, but hits the wrong one IMHO.

Now, you almost seem to pick up on the key despite that. I thought it was even kind of funny how you almost point the blame up the chain to management. However, I think you do better to lay out what the management objectives are, and then follow with the survey as an option provided for its “convenience” for those busy participants that do not have a lot of time to spare. The highlight for me was how you do offer the direct accessibility via e-mail. Other than public conversation, I would not have offered my feedback.

...

Anyone that uses FC social media for whatever purpose is going to have a localized perspective on what you are asking, but the feedback might not be very forthcoming unless you really frame the program around them and invite their participation on their own terms.

...

Fast Company still operates mainly as a magazine and not so much as a social community. Writers publish, but often leave conversations unattended. For instance, with the “one and done” tone set by writers, you get the corresponding effect by readers. I assume there are reasons on the table why hosting conversations might not be feasible, but for feedback’s sake it’s worth checking those assumptions at the door. There is a skillset involved with being an “online social media personality” that actively engages a community, and it goes beyond the base skillset of writing articles. However, when done correctly, the corresponding effect is both qualitative and quantitative.

People check back when addressed directly. They are more likely to comment if reciprocation is apparent. They are also more likely to engage each other in an environment of reciprocation. Pick your metric. “One and done” is a contemporary understanding of social media, but if you actually engage people then many more will spend much more time on site, bounce less, and will consequently be more responsive to any initiatives requiring action. Fast Company already has a solid base with social enabled high quality content, but it is underutilizing its capabilities to simulate activity simply by being more “social”. If you put more attention to that, I am pretty sure you will find FC becomes an even more popular online destination of choice, and thus a superior value to your advertising partners.

It appears you must not be following us on Twitter. If you were, you’d see that we interact with very nearly every single person who tweets or retweets about our stories. If you look at my personal Twitter feed, you’ll find I talk to a lot of our readers every single day.

If you’re looking for this kind of action in our article comments, you won’t find it. The majority of people prefer to discuss our articles in social networks. Comments are evolving to be of a different purpose, one I can’t generalize yet.

I don’t like the idea of a survey either--surveys are mundane and impersonal by nature. But this is something that’s necessary for us in order to run our business, which is supported by display advertising. Our site is only 5 months old this week, so we don’t yet have a formalized infrastructure for taking more qualitative, conversational feedback--except our email inboxes and Twitter handles. For now, that’s where this conversation will stay. But rest assured we’re listening.--Chris Dannen, Editor

[Image: Flickr user Patrick Hoesly]

If you thought the whole 3-D-printed gun thing got contentious earlier this year, just wait. The next generation of 3-D-printed guns will be easier to produce, sturdier, and unlike the firearms that come out of printers today, these homemade guns will be made of metal.

Printing metal with additive technologies is a very new process. This is believed to be the world's first commercially available 3-D-printed gun component:
The Auxetik, a muzzle brake for pistols and rifles that was made available by Michigan-based Sintercore LLC last week. A muzzle brake is a device that reduces the recoil of a weapon when it's fired.

What's different about Auxetik, compared to previously printed gun parts, is that instead of using one of the standard plastic-producing 3-D printers we're all used to seeing, it's built using a technology called direct metal laser sintering (DMLS), a technique already being used by some hobbyists to make homemade rockets.

The DMLS process turns metal powder into solid metal by melting it with a fiber optic laser. Like plastic printers, it takes blueprints from CAD files and turns them into physical objects, tiny layer by tiny layer. The chief difference, of course, is that the output is made of metal.

Why does this matter? It's the first step toward a reality in which real, metal guns can be easily manufactured by anybody with access to the right kind of 3-D printer and the proper design blueprints. The plastic guns and gun components printed by projects like Defense Distributed work, but they're cheap-looking and not particularly durable. In fact, police in Australia (where all guns are banned) have warned that 3-D-printed plastic guns can be dangerous to use, given their fragile construction.

Sintercore isn't providing access to the CAD blueprints for the Auxetik, but rather selling the component itself. Still, what Sintercore is doing gives us a glimpse at what's possible when high-powered lasers meet metal powder to form an object that was designed explicitly for destruction. No matter how you feel about the existence of 3-D-printed guns or the regulation thereof, it's hard to argue that the innovation isn't a big deal. As the music industry knows all too well, the sudden widespread availability of a certain filetype over this globe-spanning network we call the Internet can have a very dramatic impact.

The whole thing also stands as a reminder of how primitive 3-D printing is. Sure, those complex, colorful plastic widgets getting spit out of MakerBots and bigger 3-D printers are really cool, but it's only the beginning of this impending revolution in the way things are made. Plastic prototypes will be joined by hard metal and even a brand new type of flexible, self-healing metal. Houses. Food. Human tissue. The list of what will soon be printable seems to grow by the week.

To many, the advent of 3-D-printed guns represents a scary new frontier in which regulating who has access to deadly weapons becomes virtually impossible. To others, it's all about empowering citizens with expansion of constitutionally promised rights. Whichever it is, it's hard to argue things will ever be the same.

Tracking: Inside 3-D Printing's Weird, Illicit, Dangerous Fringe

Our ability to print things in three dimensions is, they say, the future. It's been around for several years, but this transformative technology is now getting cheap and fast enough for everyday consumers to utilize. The potential is undeniably enormous.

Yet for all the magical potential of 3-D printing, it also raises strange, illicit, and potentially troubling issues. The most obvious example is the 3-D-printed-gun controversy, which we'll follow closely as it heats up. There are also concerns over copyright infringement, a contentious issue that's only beginning to rear its head in the world of rapid 3-D prototyping. What happens when millions of people are slowly granted the ability to produce 3-D objects at will? It's not unlike the Internet: Lots of awesome, radically transformative things will happen. Along with it, we'll get plenty of weirdness.

In this story tracker, we'll touch on everything from 3-D-printed food to sex toys and look at the social, legal, and ethical issues raised by this rapidly blossoming technology.

Previous Updates

June 18, 2013

Cue The Battle To (Somehow) Regulate 3-D-Printed Guns

Well, this should make for a debate that’s as contentious as possible. Nearly a year after Defense Distributed first grabbed headlines with its plans to build a 3-D-printed gun, lawmakers are starting to freak out. Last week, a New York City council member introduced a law that aims to outlaw the printing of any gun component unless one is a registered gunsmith. Under the law, any guns that are printed would need to be registered with authorities within 72 hours. The proposal comes a few weeks after a similar one was introduced in the New York state assembly. This is undoubtedly just the beginning.

The impossible-sounding nature of these laws highlights precisely why this issue is at once so terrifying and exciting to different camps of people. The same networks that empower everyday people to become publishers and share music freely now permit people to exchange blueprints for deadly weapons. To some, it’s an expansion of liberty. To others, it sends us down a dark and dangerous path. Like the sharing of MP3s, restricting this kind of activity will prove difficult, if not downright impossible. The quest to do so only grows more urgent as 3-D printing becomes more ubiquitous.

For those who haven’t followed the story, it broke into the mainstream last summer when Forbescovered Defense Distributed, an organization dedicated to creating a 3-D-printable gun and making its CAD design blueprints freely available online. To do so, the organization launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise the money needed to buy a 3-D printer. They succeeded, but Stratasys, the 3-D printer manufacturer, quickly repossessed the device, citing concerns over the legality of its intended use.

Cody Wilson, the 25-year-old founder of Defense Distributed, proceeded to develop the world’s first fully 3-D-printable gun anyway. A video of Wilson successfully firing his printable pistol, dubbed “The Liberator” were posted online in May, as were the CAD files needed for others to print the gun. The State Department demanded that Wilson remove the files, which he did, but not before 100,000 people had downloaded them. From here on out, limiting the spread of these files online will be about as easy as scrubbing the leak of Kanye West’s new album from the Internet. Indeed, as an intelligence memo from the Department of Homeland Security said of 3-D-gun blueprints, “limiting access may be impossible.”

[Image: Flickr user Electric-Eye]