5 Interesting Tech Stories You Might Have Missed This Week

Image via Complex Original

In 1995, magicians Penn & Teller came up with an idea for a driving video game. It was a time when games were undergoing interrogation from politicians for corrupting children with violence and laziness, and the duo decided to make a game that would be the opposite of all of the worst fears about them. Desert Bus was what they came up with. Simon Parkin retells the game's history for the New Yorker this week, dubbing it the worst game ever made for allowing players to do nothing but drive a bus through a desert for 8 full hours to reach Las Vegas. There was no combat, no level progression, only a long and empty road with no real purpose. Though the game was never released it's a good reminder of how flexible technologies really are, and how the uses we imagine for them are heavily influenced by culture and less by intrinsic qualities of technology itself.

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When Asiana Flight 214 crash landed in San Francisco last week it was a minor miracle that only two people were killed. Writing for The Huffington Post, Alexis Kleinman reports on some of the technological factors that contributed to so many lives being saved, foremost of which is the 16G airplane seat. A requirement for all planes since 2009, the 16G seat is built to withstand a force 16 times stronger than gravity at Earth's surface. Because of this requirement, most seats on the plane remained in tact during the crash and held passengers safely in place. In years past, many of the seats might have been crushed, creating a landscape of dangerous metal protrusions, but with these new standards an even greater loss of life seems to have been avoided.

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Mesh networks have been subject to speculation for years as one of the first possible variations of the Internet that could function completely separately from the Google-driven version we've become so familiar with today. In a story for MIT's Technology Review, Tom Simonite reports on the ways mesh networks have been used during natural disasters like Haiti's 2010 earthquake to connect local authorities and rescue workers in the absence of access to the normal Internet. With a special piece of software, cell phones, wi-fi routers, and laptops can all be connected on one network that's only accessible to those with the right software and permission. Instead of Google and Facebook's massive servers sending out signals to everyone with a Comcast account, mesh networks allow a smaller, private network to be formed, allowing for communication and data storage separate from the traditional reach of the Internet. Mesh networks point to a future where the Internet becomes fractured and people begin to build their own protected networks to serve local groups and communities without fearing interference from the larger forces that have turned to mainstream Internet into a swamp of surveillance and advertising.

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Peter Sunde, one of the founders of Pirate Bay, has seized on the growing discomfort with online surveillance and decided to create a new technology that reinforces personal privacy online. Named after the Swedish word for "secret," Heml.is is a messaging app for iOS and Android built around end-to-end encryption, meaning the only people able to read a message's content are the person who wrote it and the one who receives it. The app will be free of advertisements and won't secretly harvest user data to sell to marketing firms. Instead Sunde is pinning his hopes to a model where a basic version is free and deluxe versions with advanced features can be purchased later on. Initial development is being funded by a Kickstarter campaign asking for $100,000.

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In Northern California last month a group of people attended a $350 nature retreat planned by the group Digital Detox. The camp forbid phones, computers, tablets, watches, mentions of work, talk about age, and real names were not to be used. Writing about the event for The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal compares this fear that technology is a toxin to the Naturalism movements of the 60s and 70s, arguing it "conjures up the same chemophobia that pervades the current whole foods movement. It says: technology is toxic and addictive, unnatural." Like the Naturalists, Digital Detoxers are less interested in changing social conditions but only want to improve their own individual lives, purging the poison through the privilege of disappearing into the woods for a few days while leaving behind the economies that made those toxins profitable in the first place. It's a reminder that under much of the fear-mongering and skepticism over the effects iPhones and Facebook, there is a selfish kind of futility of the super privileged, those most able to withdraw to the woods to find themselves for a few days, while the rest of us squeeze in 20 minutes of downtime scrolling through our phones in between jobs.

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