Apple’s new Siri voice assistant is a really useful feature but a few improvements could be made. I have read several forums with users requesting continuous listening and I can hear the privacy critics howling already and it goes something like this:

“Coninuously listen??! But then Siri will know all about my planned defection to the Communists! Unacceptable.”

All jokes aside, one of the biggest hurdles to using the assistant is getting Siri to begin listening. In order to signal to Siri that you want to give it a command you need to hold down the hold button for almost a second before the signature purple microphone appears. The old voice commands feature was activated the same way but it took much longer to activate. To a user like myself who used to ask my iPhone “What time is it” and “Call dad” Siri was a great incremental improvement.

The key word here is incremental, everything about Apple is slow and methodical. If they released all their good ideas at once they wouldn’t be in business for very long. Every competitor would steal the ideas, improve them, patent the improvement and take market share. Apple’s strategy seems to involve keeping their technologies highly patented and interdependent (there is so much about iOS that cannot be copied due to patents it makes me prefer Android less since Google has to engineer the round about way to do everything Apple holds a patent to)

Another long-term strategy Apple uses to steal market share is their product release schedule and secrecy. The next Apple release will probably be this fall and the iPhone 5 will most likely contain improvements to its camera ,the introduction of NFC and changes to the “beta” Siri. One of these features might be continuous listening.

It would be wise for Apple to release this as a hardware upgrade, if it is even technically feasible. Previously with the release of the iPhone 4 many users were upset that Siri would be an iPhone 4-only (and now 4s) feature.

I believe this was due to a higher quality microphone required to capture your voice accurately. Siri is a hardware and software technology, and continuous listening, if it is even technically possible, would require a hardware upgrade.

The phone might get a new low-power chip that is responsible for continuous listening, or perhaps they are looking to make changes in the power management chip used in the iPhone. Either way I’m pretty excited for the new technology, and hardly afraid of continuous monitoring by my phone.

Hello everyone, I’ve started up another year of school and I’ve been falling a bit behind on my Music Mondays posts. -Alex Massaad

Like many other developers I have been running iOS 5 for the better part of their beta program. This has allowed me the chance to preview and test out some of Apple’s next generation software, as long as I didn’t tell anybody about it.

Now iOS is out of beta and yesterday was made available to all users for free and I can report on this revolutionary update.

I spent about 6 hours updating (apparently I had an unresolved network config error, not a problem on Apple’s end) but now that I’ve got their official release I have a problem: My WIFI Hotspot is no longer available!

At first I thought it had been moved around but I realized it wasn’t anywhere to be found. Eventually I discovered this simple solution which was the following:

1. Launch the Settings app.
2. Tap the General tab.
3. Scroll all the way down and tap Reset Network Settings.
4. Restart iPhone
5. Launch the Settings app.
6. Tap General.
7. Tap Network.
8. Scroll down and the Personal Hotspot should show up, and will now be activated on the main Settings app tab

I’ve been listening to this for a long time now, and I really love this song. While this zippyshare download isn’t a release quality link, it does allow me to play this song out to more people who can love it too via iTunes or Ableton!

You can download this song here: The XX vs Alan Fitzpatrick & Reset Robot -Silicone Shelter (King Unique Bootleg) on zippyshare

Here’s proof that our future is not becoming less free.

Film 4002 – “Is our future becoming less free?

By: Alex Massaad

Featured Article until March 2010

Course Description:

The proliferation of high-speed Internet and multimedia-capable computers has opened up an information highway that has changed the way modern audiences interface with audiovisual media. New information sharing technologies such as YouTube and Bit Torrent have enabled the swift dissemination of almost any commercial audio or video recording, while concurrently causing a furor within legal systems internationally.

This course will look at audio and video separately in order to understand how technology is altering culturally coded norms within media. As the course develops we will be looking at various binaries such as: copyright/piracy, free/paid, corporate/independent and original/remix in order to understand how our use of media and technology can alter both the media and the technology.

(more…)

Watch: Sleep Dealer (Rivera, 2009)

Read: Everette, Anna. “digitextuality and click theory: theses on convergence media in the digital age.” New Media: Theories and practices of digitextuality. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print.

While I personally feel that cyberpunk is a very interesting genre because of its depictions of humans interacting with virtual spaces, the only cyberpunk film that I included in my syllabus was the Spanish film Sleep Dealer (2009). This film deals with current issues such as illegal immigration and telecommuting by portraying Mexican workers who plug their consciousness into labour robots abroad, an advanced version of telecommuting. The reading that I paired this film with continues teaching intertextuality and develops a concept Everette refers to as “digitextuality.” This is a development of Julie Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality that basically understands that “every text builds itself as a mosaic of quotations, every text is absorption and transformation of another text.” Digitextuality is an amalgam of this concept, fused with the understanding that digital media is breaking off from traditional media, and new media is being constructed and used in different ways than traditional media was. I felt this related well with the film’s portrayal of telecommuting in the future and how technology might facilitate these disembodied jobs in the future.