Wired News summarizes a damning report from four University of Washington researchers that reveals how security flaws in the new RFID-powered Nike + iPod Sport Kit make it easy for tech-savvy stalkers, spouses, thieves, corporations, or governments (oh my!) to track your movements via those nifty shoes. From the report’s overview:

Key industry players are incorporating wireless radio communications capabilities into many new personal consumer products. For example, the new Nike+iPod Sport Kit from Apple consists of two components — a sensor and a receiver — that communicate using a wireless radio protocol. Unfortunately, there can be negative side-effects associated with equipping these gadgets with wireless communications capabilities.

In the case of the Nike+iPod Sport Kit, our research shows that the wireless capabilities in this new gadget can negatively impact a consumer’s personal privacy and safety. As part of our research, we built a number of surveillance tools that malicious individuals could use to track Nike+iPod Sport Kit owners. Our tools can track Nike+iPod Sport Kit owners while they our working out, as well as when they are just casually walking around town, a parking lot, or a college campus. The tracked individuals don’t even need to have their iPods with them.

Our research also shows that there exist simple cryptographic techniques that the Nike+iPod Sport Kit designers could have used to improve the privacy-preserving properties of the Nike+iPod kit.

Our work underscores the need for a broad public discussion about and further research on the privacy-preserving properties of new wireless personal gadgets.

Employing some “simple cryptographic techniques” is all Nike & Apple would need to have done to alleviate these privacy and surveillance concerns. Why didn’t they? The researches speculate that “associated tradeoffs, like sensor battery life, manufacturing costs, and use experience” might have prevented the designers from implementing these privacy-protecting measures.

When should an extra 15% in battery life trump protecting a user’s privacy? Should companies (and consumers?) accept extra costs for privacy protections as a cost-of-business? How can we train technical designers to make ethically-based decisions when creating these kind of products? All vital questions, and significant challenges that must be addressed to successfully engage in value-conscious design in real-world contexts.

(Noëmi Manders-Huits and I have been working on a paper, “Values and pragmatic action: The challenges of engagement with technical design communities,” that confronts these very issues. I’ll post a draft when ready for comments.)

An article in the Globe and Mail discusses the growing anti-iPod movement:

If we can draw a lesson from Yegor Sak’s adventure, it’s never to underestimate the public’s desire to watch an iPod be destroyed.

We know this, because Sak, a 19-year-old Toronto concierge who goes by “Yegor Simpson” on-line, is the force behind SmashMyiPod.com, a website that’s gained global attention for its violent premise. Sak made web surfers an offer: If they could raise $400 toward the purchase of a new iPod, he would videotape it being smashed to pieces right in the showroom.

After an overwhelming response, that’s exactly what happened.

Sak says he hatched the idea partly as revenge for being sold a defective iPod two years ago, but mostly as “a shout-out against consumerism.”

…The huge interest in Smash My iPod is about more than the gadget’s popularity; it reflects a growing frustration that the iPod cult has become slavish and ubiquitous.

A scattering of protest sites have popped up, including the vehement anti-ipod.co.uk, a site by a British teen, and I Hate Your iPod (ihateyouripod.com), a weblog that rails against the sycophancy of pod culture — the Halloween revellers dressed as iPods, the custom lanyards that will turn the tiny white iPod Shuffle into a crucifix pendant.

Their anger is only fuelled by evangelical users — and a fawning media — who seem convinced that iPod ownership is a fact of life.

…Earlier this year, a New Yorker named Andy Rementer put up posters in Manhattan, showing a crudely-drawn iPod, with the words “You don’t need me” written on its screen. Photos of the posters became popular on-line; like Sak’s video, they quickly stirred up a debate.

“I was frustrated by the way iPods were forced upon us,” says Rementer, adding that protest is tough in an iPod world. “Most people were complaining about the fact that I drew the wrong number of buttons on the iPod.”

But for all the rumblings of discontent, the scattered anti-iPod movement hasn’t rallied around a champion, until now — which brings us back to Sak’s video. When Apple first launched the Macintosh — its original cult product — it produced a famous 1984 SuperBowl commercial that depicted a young woman throwing a sledgehammer through a giant screen, on which a Big Brother-like face is speaking; the screen explodes, the Orwellian drones are liberated, and Apple’s message to the IBM monoculture of the day came through loud and clear.

We’re a long way from 1984. But Yegor Sak’s rubber mallet, watched by the world, should be familiar enough to make Apple squirm, just a little.

I’ve maintained my resistance, but it is waning fast…
[via Question Technology]

Perhaps this will ease my concerns about transitioning from reading books on the subway to becoming one in the army of iPod clones. Unmediated reports that a public library is beginning to loan audio books pre-loaded on iPod Shuffles.

Andrew Sullivan writes a commentary (very much aligned with Christine Rosen’s thoughtful essay) about the “iPod people” of New York:

There were little white wires hanging down from their ears, or tucked into pockets, purses or jackets. The eyes were a little vacant. Each was in his or her own musical world, walking to their soundtrack, stars in their own music video, almost oblivious to the world around them. These are the iPod people.

Even without the white wires you can tell who they are. They walk down the street in their own MP3 cocoon, bumping into others, deaf to small social cues, shutting out anyone not in their bubble

I see iPod people every day.

Sullivan again mirror’s Rosen’s thesis with his concern that we’ve created a “society without the social”:

It wouldn’t be so worrying if it weren’t part of something even bigger. Americans are beginning to narrow their lives.

You get your news from your favourite blogs, the ones that won’t challenge your view of the world. You tune into a satellite radio service that also aims directly at a small market — for new age fanatics, liberal talk or Christian rock. Television is all cable. Culture is all subculture. Your cell phones can receive e-mail feeds of your favourite blogger’s latest thoughts — seconds after he has posted them — get sports scores for your team or stock quotes of your portfolio.

Technology has given us a universe entirely for ourselves — where the serendipity of meeting a new stranger, hearing a piece of music we would never choose for ourselves or an opinion that might force us to change our mind about something are all effectively banished.

Atomisation by little white boxes and cell phones. Society without the social. Others who are chosen — not met at random. Human beings have never lived like this before. Yes, we have always had homes, retreats or places where we went to relax, unwind or shut out the world.

But we didn’t walk around the world like hermit crabs with our isolation surgically attached.

Finally, Sullivan correctly points out what we are missing in our iWorld:

But what are we missing? That hilarious shard of an overheard conversation that stays with you all day; the child whose chatter on the pavement takes you back to your early memories; birdsong; weather; accents; the laughter of others. And those thoughts that come not by filling your head with selected diversion, but by allowing your mind to wander aimlessly through the regular background noise of human and mechanical life.

External stimulation can crowd out the interior mind. Even the boredom that we flee has its uses. We are forced to find our own means to overcome it.

And so we enrich our life from within, rather than from white wires.

So far I’ve resisted the urge to get an iPod, telling my fiancee I’d much rather be reading a book on the subway than slipping into semi-consciousness while listening to my favorite music, preferring to “enrich myself from within” rather than escaping into my own iWorld. It remains to be seen how much longer I can resist.

Wired News writes about Prof. Markus Giesler’s ethnographic study of iPod users called “iPod Therefore iAm.” Giesler uncovers the formation of a new “cyborg consumer”:

According to Giesler’s preliminary research, the iPod isn’t simply an updated Walkman. It’s an entirely new beast: a revolutionary device that transforms listeners into “cyborgs” through a process he calls “technotranscendence.”

Unlike the Walkman, the iPod taps into a “hybrid entertainment matrix,” in which functions like random shuffle are a key construct, not just a cute marketing device.

“IPod and user form a cybernetic unit,” said Giesler. “We’re always talking about cyborgs in the context of cultural theory and sci-fi literature, but this is an excellent example that they’re out there in the marketplace…. I have seen the future, and it is called the cyborg consumer.”

Christine Rosen’s article “The Age of Egocasting” in the latest The New Atlantis provides needed insight on the impact of new technology (such as TiVo & iPod) on our desire to feel “in control” of the media that we experience. I agree with her summation:

From the remote control to TiVo and iPod, we have crafted technologies that are superbly capable of giving us what we want. Our pleasure at exercising control over what we hear, what we see, and what we read is not intrinsically dangerous. But an unwillingness to recognize the potential excesses of this power—egocasting, fetishization, a vast cultural impatience, and the triumph of individual choice over all critical standards—is perilous indeed.