Yahoo! retro-style advertisement on Sunset Blvd.

A couple of blocks away from Booksoup we found this nice retro-style advertisement. Maybe for Californian people the high visibility of Yahoo! and other large internet brand names is normal, but in germany it is still not.This is actually what I like most when traveling to California and especially the San Francisco Bay Area: It feels like the internet world is seamlessly integrated with the real world. The first time I traveled to the U.S. was in 1996 or 1997 to visit the first JavaOne conference. I was amazed, that almost all advertisements displayed internet addresses. Now people can't even remember the time, when there was no internet.

Nice Bookstore: Booksoup, L.A.

After visiting Singularity Summit 2007, I spend some days off with my wife in Santa Monica, L.A. We went to BookSoup, a nice Bookstore on Sunset Strip. I spent a lot of time in my life in bookstores and libraries and I really don't like the big "fast-food chain" bookstores. When you enter a bookstore, you can feel if the owner really likes books. I think this is one of the places.

Inside the shop, there were several post-its sticked on the bookshelves. These were ratings/recommendations of books from the staff and from customers. Especially this one is interesting. It shows two opposite opinions on the work of Noam Chomsky:

Singularity Summit 2007: When will the machines exceed human intelligence?

This year I went again to the USA to visit the Singularity Summit. (I wrote a Special Report of the first Singularity Summit last year).

We arrived late on the first day, so I couldn't seen all the talks. Later I downloaded the Podcast of Rodney Brooks Keynote "The Singularity: A Period Not An Event." Very entertaining. At the end of the Q&A session he is also talking about changes to be made to the geneva convention, when armed robots are deployed in war zones, as "some countries are respecting the geneva convention". This led to the question, if he should really build robots for the US government... You can find it here.

The second day started with a keynote from Peter Norvig which was quite entertaining, too. Below you can see the essence of his talk and what he thinks what are the prerequisites of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). In short: Probabilistic First-Order Logic over lots of data. First it sounds like that maybe only Google has access to "this lots of data", but now they share it with us. You can get approx. one trillion word-tokens (n-grams, from unigrams to 5-grams) of text from publicly available web-pages in 24GB gzip'ed text files over the Linguistic Data Consortium.

In the Q&A session someone asked Peter if he has maybe observed "emergent intelligent behavior" in the large server networks of Google. I am not sure, if this guy was just joking...

The other interesting part was again the american pragmatism: American Venture Capitalists are already interested in the possible business created by the Singularity. In germany, this is unthinkable. I guess most german VCs don't even know what the Singularity is. And if they knew, they would think about it as science fiction... or scientists gone mad.

So I agree with Rodney Brooks: The Singularity will not be a moment in time. It is a period. And it is not only about intelligent machines, but also about human transformation. Maybe the last people who will be transformed are the german VCs or our government (we shortened the distance to russia and singapore).

Relaunching Hackers-with-Attitude.com

In 2006 we launched H.W.A. as a communication platform for news about the freenigma service, our pet project effort to bring e-mail encryption to the masses - together with GnuPGs Werner Koch.

The freenigma service is quite successful - even though it is not the perfect solution for encrypting e-mail, because it manages both the public and the private key in one place. It is for normal people who have not the technical background to install and run things like GnuPG or PGP and who use Web-Mail. These people have no encryption at all or they can use the freenigma service.

Before freenigma service, we developed another pet project, the freenigma appliance. This is a free-software alternative to the proprietary systems from PGP Corp. and Utimaco. We transfered the project and its code to Inmedias, a company well-known in the free software community in germany. Inmedias will market the freenigma appliance in the future.

Now we have room for "new adventures" on H.W.A and we celebrated this with a new layout for this blog which is more close to our corporate design.