A Space For New Art
Visiting the Bienale in Venice made me feel very happy (I love Venice) and very sad (seeing only ‘old’ art from the big names). Walking around in the Punta della Dogana museum, re-architected by Tadao Ando in such an obviously unobvious (over designed) way that the whole building got on my nerves in fact, it felt like walking around in a temple, or rather a prison, meant to keep the people out, meant to take away the art from the people.
And then it occurred to me that, given the mainstream stuff that was shown in there (Koons, Richter, etc), this was not such a bad idea really. What about setting up a foundation, aimed at collecting all major artworks in the world. It would announce the opening of a new museum, meant to make Guggenheim, MOMA and all that look like pilferers (it would be located in Dubai, of course). Grand opening: April 1, 2014. RSVP. Everybody shows up. And then: a black box (or maybe golden..). No doors. No windows. All art inside. Safe. Forever.
The museum would be called “A Space For New Art”. Because that is what it would provide: space for new art. Because it would take all the old art from the face of the earth, creating a void that can be filled with new ideas by new artists. At last.
Global GSM eavesdropping network.
GSM has been broken up to the point that a phone call or an SMS can be intercepted using an ordinary phone and a PC. The impact of this attack is still somewhat limited, because to eavesdrop, you need to be close to the target mobile phone. However, with a bit of ‘crowdsourcing’ we can overcome this ‘limitation’.
Push-to-talk button for RFID
Basic RFID tags, like EPC Global tags, store a unique number that is broadcast whenever they come within reading range of an arbitrary reader. This poses some privacy threats because if you carry a tag with you all the time, the same serial number will show up at all the readers you pass. Today at the RFIDSec 2010 workshop I learnt that secret handshakes (See Czeskis et. al.) are an active area of research in RFID security. The aim is to provide some context to an RFID tag that will allow the tag to decide whether to talk or not.
Using a mobile phone number as an authentic identifier
This idea came up when I saw a guy in the train today, carrying a cardboard box with a number written on it.
I stared at the box, and it took a short while before I realised the number was a phone number. I wondered why that was, and then it occurred to me that maybe the guy carrying the box was the recipient of the box. Maybe the phone number on the box was used to call him up to say his parcel was waiting for him…
1d (One Id)
It actually surprised me that it took so long for a service like Google Voice to come along. No more arbitrary distinction between email, voicemail, sms and conversations: all use the same contact address (a ‘universal’ phone number). Sender and receiver decide independently how to send/receive the message.
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