Touch Screen Anything

This is pretty amazing

Developed by Disney, which is regrettable on account of their being the embodiment of corporate evil. Also in international collaboration with various universities… apparently using (as the instructable says) “a really fancy chip”… but you can do the same thing with an arduino, instructable here.

Which is cool.

Or disappointing – because I was getting all ready to work myself up into a rage about “IP”, and how if the monopoly on this idea is owned by Disney, basically no other company/corporation would get to use it… but we would likely see The Kinnect Effect – where it gets reverse-engineered and given life by the hacker community.

Maybe this is still the case – hard to say… these things generally being up to whatever mood the legal department is in that morning… where there’s a hit, there’s a writ etc.

Still… cool little invention, especially if it is DIYable… or even a Vitamin-Part-Black-Box-With-API or a VPBBA, as I liked to call them. VBA. Whatever. VPBBAs are the future.

Go on, say it out loud. It makes your lips do that thing that Brittney did at the start of “Hit Me Baby One More Time”. It’s got hit written all over it.

There are lots of forebodings that 3D Printing will have copy-monopoly issues… in fact at the Fablab 2012 Conference earlier this year, virtually every speaker touched on the sclerosis of “IP” – apart from the post-911 Guard-Economy Guy, who clearly wanted (but would not actually admit to wanting) to put DRM into stepper-motors so anything printed by them contained a traceable finger-print. He had jack-boots (with his trousers tucked into them) and a mustache. He talked about “evil” a lot. My only conference tweet was:

“In the 20th C, govts rounded up and killed 120 million of their own people. On balance, evil is not a bottom up phenomena”

But not to this guy – he listed lots of evils… and they were all bottom up. They were all bottom-up, and all largely imaginary. Things we needed to be “protected from”. Just in case. This guy was all about strenuously controlling the API of VPBBAs. Like Apple does with its “devices”… but at a component level. Did I hear recently that Apple are dropping Intel chips in favour of making their own? Maybe not.

So… The Printable Gun guy has just had his printer confiscated by the manufacturer… who to be fair, was only leasing it to him. The seized it from his home.

Now I don’t have particularly strong feelings about DIY weapons. DIY weapons are pretty easy to make without 3D printers. I used to be in favour of “gun control”, but that was before our govts started attacking the internet. Our govts are increasingly moving towards being a bigger threat to us than the people they’re ostensibly protecting us against… and there’s this eternal metaphorical question… “At what point do you start shooting back?”

And what do you even shoot at? New Zealand has the highest housing-costs in the OECD. All of our big banks are foreign owned. Our govt is negotiating secret trade-deals which are nothing to do with free-trade, and all to do with allowing corporations to impose rents on us for “ideas”. We have (for a Western country) chronic child-poverty, which due to the advertising-driven media, poor parents are blamed for. The NZ version of the CIA has just been caught illegally spying on us, at the behest of the police, at the behest of The FBI, at the behest of the entertainment industry. It was announced today that the people investigating this crime are going to be the same people who were involved in committing it.

We are being occupied. Colonised. If this was being done at the point of a gun, we’d be shooting back by now. The line would have been crossed.

So I’m in two minds about 3D Printable weapons. To be honest, I don’t really care – because this is an information war… and it isn’t being fought with anything as primitive as guns.

I’ve just been asked to do some sort of talk… a speed-date type thing, with 20 slides, 15 seconds each… 5 minutes. I’m not sure if the broadband in NZ is good enough to do what’s required… the broadband at my house certainly isn’t… but what I think I’ll do… whether I do the talk or not, is do something that explains the Information War that we’re currently in, to people who don’t understand the internet. Hopefully by way of a series of stories that they can re-tell.

Guns? pah. Guns are for cowboys.