Facebook's AI Points Internet Drones to Where the People Are
wired.com
wired.com
I think it is pretty cool that a college social network has morphed into a horrifyingly privacy invading intelligience company just as much ad the next guy, but seriously WTF?
I assume there is a good reason they are using drones? The deep learning of satellite data was interesting, but why is it neccessary?
Assuming you just use planet labs or something similar to get data and you process it, you find the people. Makes sense. Except in the case that these people regularly migrate as nomadic beduins i guess you could serve your popup drone fleet at them as bushpeople don't have adblock.
But if they are just poor people who are trying to get by and live, to the extent possible, like many other people, I don't get it. Surely you have a chicken and an egg problem here, right?
They either have running water and some semblance of infrastructure like roads and power, or they don't. Unless Matk is going to airdrop a fission reactor wouldnt have been easier to ask thr power company or trace the lines?
Second thing. Why not towers, or just paying for LEO sattelite nets?
Don't get it, but I guesz it one ups self calibrating loon baloons...
That really doesn't apply to subsistence farming communities, for example in sub-Saharan Africa. Population will be much more dispersed than in more urbanised developed countries. You can have tiny farmsteads with a dozen people every 100 yards covering thousands of miles of apparently rural land. Connecting mains water or electricity is impossibly expensive, but cell phones can still be widely used though communal charging.
If the main benefit of Facebook is advertising, why bother extending functionality to people who are too poor to buy anything?
But I don't know what the end goal is. Both the target market and the target publishers are a mystery so far as I can tell.
Perhaps government or regieme campaigns will be the main buyer of advertisements to such detatched communities. I wonder what the cost per conversion is for rural votes?
It was my understanding that the village my friend worked at had a rationed power supply for the wotkers and medical clinic that was run by a generator.
Do this is my point. Literally providing access to water with a hole and pneumatics was such an improvement in quality of life I am not sure what the usecase for this is.
* complicated totally foreign technology
* lack of charging ability
* likelyhood of downloading the cracked screen app is pretty high.
* using low cost satelites and repeaters has to make more sense.
So I am not sure what communal charging is, but if it is a crank box or generator, In the hypothetical we have just invented it would almost certainly be cheaper (but way less sexier) to just build low cost suburban housing like the hexayurt and provide education and technology from existing infrastructure.
How Silicon Valley is a distributed drone based LAN that provides a hookup app to people starving in the bush, or in the sluns of India.
The tech is intellectually stimulating, it is one if the main usecases for Planet Labs Api, but maybe im missing something, but how does this make sense.
Also, how does this operate in production, these things fly around and then link to eacjother and towers recharging several times a day?
Those are real questions. What is the application and ehat does the implementation look like?
There are a number of startups providing these services (some of them have gone through YC I think?). It's now so common that you just have to assume that if your phone is broadcasting anything at all, including looking for a WiFi network to join, that your location is being tracked and sold for competitive analysis by corporations.
Apparently it's about as effective as search ads: http://venturebeat.com/2014/12/16/90-of-marketers-say-retarg...
The other possibility here is tracking via geolocation or iBeacon, which require an app with location services/bluetooth enabled. And in those cases the tracking is most likely based on Apple IDFA/Google Advertising Id, so you at least have the option to opt out: https://dev.twitter.com/mopub/ui/opting-out-interest-based-a... (assuming the app properly respects the setting).
Better yet don't go to stores that employ this sort of thing.
There's a strong network of trackers both in the digital space and now the meat space, so the cards are pretty much stacked against you.
I realised the other day that I use it for the internet about once a week since I'm either at home, work or out doing something where a phone isn't an option (cycling, swimming etc).
The same could be criticism for most social contracts, and there are groups like the Mennonites who live happy lives with levels of technology they deem fit.
Edit: Why did you edit your comment?
Self driving cars? Bad enough.
Self targeting drone swarms...?
'Prepping' just seems one tiny notch more rational.
One of these could be powered for a month off a shoebox sized battery:
https://wiki.hackerspace.pl/projects:zsun-wifi-card-reader
Now mesh network them every few hundred feet.
Not sure how Wired's ad-blocker-detector works. I am on the campus of a large company that uses a shared proxy for outbound internet. If that's triggering the screen, that seems bad for Wired.