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LYS ay AV, E\N > THE GRID: THE NEXT INTERNET REVOLUTION ik is called the Grid, and scientists say that before long it will change everything we do, from scientific research to business to tackling fires to booking holidays and even to the way we watch and craft movies. The Internet currently consists of huge servers which contain informa- tion on web pages that is then downloaded onto computers. As a user, you are limited in what you can do with that information by how much memory or processing power your own computer has. Under the Grid, the power of your machine—all the gigabytes, RAM and gigahertz—becomes irrelevant. No matter how primitive and cheap your computer, you will have access to more computing power than cur- rently exists in the Pentagon. A small handheld computer, connected by mobile phone to the Internet, would become a supercomputer. Movies could be edited and watched on it. It could access a word processor that is stored on a computer somewhere in cyberspace. Bob Jones, a Grid project manager who was at CERN when the original web was invented, talks of applications in biology. More and more genomes are being sequenced, producing masses of informa- tion, so the Grid is the perfect means for analysing and sharing that data, he says. "It took eight years for the Internet to catch on," he says. "This time, govern- ments and scientists are already on board, magazine read—into a gigantic database. ao” All of this and more would be combined with information gleaned via a variety of sources — a GPS transmitter to keep tabs on where that person went, audio- visual sensors to capture what he or she saw or said, and biomedical monitors to keep track of the indi- vidual's health. According to a briefing from the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA), LifeLog's sponsor, this vast amalgamation of personal information could then be used to "trace the 'threads' of an individual's life" to see exactly how a relationship or events developed. Someone with access to the database could "retrieve a specific thread of past transactions, or recall an experience from a few seconds ago or from many years earlier...by using a search-engine interface". (Source: Wired, May 20, 2003, http://www.wired.com) so the results will be seen far quicker. It'll be like the web: when you have it, you'll wonder how you ever got by without it." (Source: The Guardian, July 3, 2003) LIFELOG: DARPA'S PROPOSED SURVEILLANCE DATABASE lhe Pentagon is about to embark on a stunningly ambitious research project designed to gather every conceivable bit of information about a person's life, index all the information and make it searchable. The embryonic LifeLog program would dump everything an individual does— every email sent or received, every picture taken, every web page surfed, every phone call made, every TV show watched, every PENTAGON EYES NEW. BIG BROTHER SPYING SYSTEM lhe US Department of Defense is also developing a surveillance system which is designed to track and analyse the movement of every vehicle in a city. Known as "Combat Zones That See", the project is intended to help the US mili- tary protect troops and fight in cities over- seas, but scientists and privacy experts say the unclassified technology could also eas- ily be adapted to keep tabs on civilians at home. The project's centrepiece would be groundbreaking computer software capa- ble of automatically identifying vehicles by size, colour, shape and licence plate, or drivers and passengers by face. The Pentagon's program "aspires to build the world's first multi-camera sur- veillance system that uses automatic... analysis of live video" to study vehicle movement "and significant events across an extremely large area". DARPA, which is overseeing the pro- ject, told more than 100 executives of potential contractors in March that 40 mil- lion cameras already are in use around the world, with 300 million expected by 2005. (Source: Wired, July 2, 2003, http://www.wired.com) “He rcakty (a (ey , [+ swt n “at A | sa pre oe x 1 ve =a IS = a (ez ‘al 6 ¢ NEXUS WWW.NeXU smagazi ne.com AUGUST — SEPTEMBER 2003