Sunday, March 12, 2006

Swarms of microrobots with big goals by ZDNet's Roland Piquepaille -- Following a previous EU-funded project which allowed to build several kinds of microrobots in the last three years, another project has already started to deploy "real" swarms of up to 1,000 robot clients. Such robot swarms are expected to perform micro assembly, biological, medical or cleaning tasks.



This is both intriguing and worrisome. On the one hand it means cures for various types of cancer and possibly AIDS, reverse engineering the human body. Real A.I., maybe the secret to eternal youth? On the other hand dangerous biochemical weapons, injected into the biosphere...silent killers that you can't even see. Creepy neh?

Sunday, March 05, 2006

Let's begin with the internet's so called security. What security you ask? The internet's a free medium, no restrictions political or otherwise except your own good sense (though good sense in the nnonymity of cyberspace is rather debatable).

Exactly my point. Don't get me wrong I love this sort of freedom. But sometimes it leads to certain complications. Like a few months ago. I recieved an e-mail telling me that somoene requested to be added as a friend to my friendster account. That's fine, the only problem being that I didn't have one. An account that is. But someone somehwere had somehow setup a friendster account with my e-mail address, when I requested for a password to get with the forgotten password link it was sent straight to my e-mail. Strike one.

I decided to follow it up to clear up any misunderstandings, meaning I logged in coantacted the administrator and informed him/her that there had been a mistake. I told him/her that my name isn't 'jerome', and did not live in the phillipines. Thereby hoping to have things cleared up I thought nothing of it for a few months. Until last week.

Another mail with another 'friending' request showed up. Strike two. This time I contacted the admin again and any of 'jerome's friends, hoping to contact jerome himself. No luck again. Jerome's account is practically empty. Only a few message replies from friends to sent posts that aren't even there. Strike three.

Is this some kind of prank? Is 'jerome' from philippines even real? Or just a figment of the net's random imagination?