The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the most active and powerful organization aiming to protect civil liberties in the digital world, has just announced that it has cracked the secret codes printed by the Xerox DocuColor color laser printer, as a first step to bring color printer secret codes into the open. The U.S. Secret Service has made agreements with Xerox, Canon, Brother, Dell, Epson, HP and other printer manufacturers so that their color laser printers print almost-invisible codes on every page they produce, marking the date, time, and serial number of the printer. This is ostensibly to track down printers used to produce counterfeit money, however the information could be used by government in any way. Now the code has been cracked, it is a far broader privacy issue, as now anyone can discover by which printer a document was produced. However this had to be understood as a possibility when the initiative was created. What can be created and used (or abused) by government can equally be abused by others, and the only resort is to make it completely open. As the EFF note, if we find the US government is making behind-the-scenes deals with private corporations to compromise our privacy through our printers, who’s to know what other of our personal technology is being compromised in this way? The potential for abuse comes not just from government, but from anyone else that has access to or uncovers this information. That’s one of the reasons why I have problems with the “people who have nothing to hide shouldn’t be worried” argument about privacy loss.

I just caught up with Tom Gruber, who I met when he was Chief Technology Officer at Intraspect, an innovative company providing collaboration spaces based on email, which was acquired last year by document management vendor Vignette. Tom’s new initiative is realtravel.com, a site that allows individuals to create personal word and photo journals of their travels, and to share them with their friends or the world. The intent is to build this into a community where travellers can get great recommendations and insights from other experienced travellers. Excellent features include creating maps showing travellers’ itineraries around the world. The business model is built on advertising and referrals. Back in the dot-com heyday, start-ups focused on getting “eyeballs” – that is people’s attention – and then “monetizing” the eyeballs. The problem was, there wasn’t much money in people’s online attention. Today, however, online advertising amounts to $10 billion, and referral payments for sending people to sites selling books, gadgets, travel and more add up to a similar amount. Travel is in fact one of the real commercial successes of the Internet, with a substantial proportion of travel bookings now made online. As such, if you can create a compelling place for travellers to visit and spend time, as Tom and his colleagues have done, there can be a very viable business.

The amazing eMachineShop represents a turning point in personal manufacturing. The company enables anyone to create machine-shopped pieces using a vast arrray of techniques including milling, extruding, thermoforming, water jet cutting and far more, on any choice of materials, to create whatever they want. The company provides free, extremely easy-to-use 3D CAD (computer aided design) software which automatically inputs into their systems, so you can, within an hour of having logged onto their site, sent off a design to be created. The applications are vast – in essence you can make for yourself anything you want, at a low cost. No more unavailable car parts or overpriced spare parts for machinery, and sculptors can simply imagine their sculptures rather than work for years to acquire mechanical skills. The next phase from here is the rise of “fab labs“, where the creation of the piece is done in your own office or home rather than having to be sent away. This truly is about power to the people. What will be unleashed by the power of these tools, available to anyone?

In a startling development, the Australian Army is considering sending broadcast SMS for recruitment purposes. Presumably they would meet Australia’s strict Privacy Act, however this is not fully clear from the news release. Particularly as SMS marketing is a relatively new medium, people tend to respond negatively unless they have actively opted-in to receiving messages, rather than having forgotten to tick a box somewhere to avoid getting on a generic list that will be sold to all-comers, the Australian Army included. The Australian government has implemented strong ant-spam legislation, so it is rather disappointing that one of its arms is undermining those messages. Legitimate SMS marketing definitely has a role, but if the medium is abused, there will be a backlash.

Fuji Xerox has just announced a new ultra-thin electronic paper that doesn’t need electricity to maintain its display. Meanwhile, Sony recently announced flexible electronic paper that can be rolled up like a normal piece of paper. The leader in the electronic paper industry, E Ink, has already announced products that embody aspects of both of these innovations. The vision of e-paper technology is to create a low-cost, thin, flexible screen that has very high resolution and relies on ambient light (i.e. has the same readability as normal print on paper), feels good to the touch and does not require a current to maintain its display. In other words, just like paper, except you can change what’s printed on the paper at will. As a brief overview of the field indicates, this is still a technology of the future. Sony has launched its Librie ebook (which is only available in Japan) using current generation epaper, and has received great reviews for the epaper screen. As we all know, ebooks have not so far replaced the traditional paper variety we still find in bookstores. Yet at a certain point of technological development, epaper will become transformative. The reality is that real books and newspapers are currently far superior to the current digital versions. However when the paper feels, looks, and acts sufficiently like the tree-based material, everything changes. We can then tuck a newspaper under our arm, open it out to peruse in the subway, and when we get bored of the New York Times, turn it into the South China Morning Post. Similarly, we can carry around a book that is nothing like a laptop, but rather – if we choose – is indistinguishable from a contemporary hardcover, including the ability to scribble in the margins. The primary difference being that you can turn it into any book you happen to feel like reading. Another transformative application of e-paper is in large displays. As soon as it is cheap enough, there is no reason every square inch of visible space – table-tops, elevator walls, pavements and more – will not become a screen for news, advertising, and other distractions. No, the technology is not here now. However 10 years is a reasonable estimate these technologies to be commercially viable. At that point, they will completely transform media, publishing, and public-space advertising. More to the point, they will change how all of us interact with information and media.