Future Tense

Last week, before committing one of the worst mass shootings in modern American history, Adam Lanza tried to destroy the hard drive on his computer. But whatever he was trying to hide might still be recoverable—and other options are available when it comes to uncovering his digital trail.

According to report published Wednesday by the Washington Post, the authorities are moving swiftly to try to salvage the damaged computer. Investigators reportedly believe before massacring 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., Lanza took a screwdriver or hammer to the hard drive. This creates a hurdle for the cops trying to gain an insight into what was going on inside Lanza’s head in the lead up to his terrible shooting frenzy. But depending on the scale of the damage, it is likely that forensic experts will be able to recover at least some of Lanza’s data. It is a complex, timely, and costly process that can involve piecing together crucial broken parts of the drive like a jigsaw. However, as the Post notes:

Extraordinary recoveries have occurred. When the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated on reentry, investigators were able to recover hard drives that had fallen to Earth. “The data was almost 100 percent recoverable,” [Rob] Lee, the lead for digital forensic and incident response at the Sans Institute, a leading cybersecurity and training organization.

The authorities will also be able to glean information about Lanza from other electronic sources. Given that the 20-year-old killer was reportedly a member of a technology club and likely spent a great deal of time at his computer, he surely had at least one email account. Assuming they can identify that account, investigating officers will be able to obtain a warrant to retrieve a record of Lanza’s email activity, which may offer a useful glimpse into his life and mindset. And if Lanza tried to cover that base by deleting his Gmail or Hotmail account, he probably didn’t realize that deleted emails usually remain backed up on centralized servers, at least for a few weeks.

The officers will probably also try to make contact with Lanza’s Internet provider to attempt to get access to any data showing Lanza’s online behavior. Although ISPs in the United States do not retain data as part of a mandatory retention regime as is the case in Europe, many of the major providers do retain some data about their customers’ usage (often for billing purposes). This doesn’t necessarily mean the cops will be able to obtain a list of websites he was visiting, but they should be able to get hold of his IP address, which could in turn be used to link him to posts or comments made on forums or websites—so long as he didn’t use an anonymizing service like Tor.

If Lanza had a cell phone, some useful data might come from records stored by his telco. Most of the major cell providers retain data showing who you have called and when, and they also retain location data—sometimes for as long as two years—which could be used to try to trace Lanza’s movements in the weeks and months before the shooting. His bank transactions may yield useful intelligence, too.

But Lanza’s hard drive will remain the most crucial piece of the puzzle—which is likely why he tried to destroy it. The hard drive will contain vital information, such as website logs, documents accessed, notes written, images saved. Such data, if it can be salvaged, will help police understand whatever led to the massacre—offering a unique glimpse into Lanza’s troubled psyche by unlocking the secrets he intended to take to his grave.

Every Friday, Future Tense rounds up the best robot videos of the week. Seen a great robot video? Tweet it to @FutureTenseNow, or email us.

This week, an amazing helper robot, a creepy-crawly drone, and a little extra help for Santa.

The Touching Bot
From the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center comes the best robot video of 2012. We’ve featured scores of robots on Future Tense this year—covering everything from bizarre artistic projects to military drones—and if you’ve ever wondered why any of it matters, this is the answer. For the last decade, Jan Scheuermann has been unable to move any part of her body below the neck. The UPMC Rehabilitation Institute worked with Scheuermann to create a robotic arm operated entirely by her brain signals, and the project’s success means she fed herself chocolate for the first time in a decade. It’s a remarkable feat that hangs on the cutting edge of robotics and brain science, and it perfectly captures just how powerfully robots can change lives. “This is the ride of my life,” Scheuermann says. “I keep saying this is the rollercoaster, this is the skydiving. It’s just fabulous and I’m enjoying every second of it.” The video’s a bit long, but hit play and you too will enjoy every second. (Along the same lines, don’t miss the video from May of a paralyzed woman sipping coffee by herself for the first time in 15 years.)

Via IEEE Spectrum.

The Buggy Bot
Here’s the next generation of robot overlords to creep everyone out. From Mad Lab Industries, this device combines a helicopter drone with a six-legged crawler, giving it an impressive range of functions and the appearance of all the worst insects combined. The thing weighs in at nearly 11 pounds, so it probably can’t stay aloft for long, but after just a few seconds in flight, it’s easy to imagine it grabbing someone by the head and flying them off into the distance.

Via DVICE.

The Wrapping Bots
If you’re dreading a weekend full of gift-wrapping, then GM’s latest robotic accomplishment might come across as haughty showboating. A few of the auto company’s factory robots took the day off recently to help Santa box up some model cars. GM has more than 25,000 bots in its factories, and the fact that they can be quickly and cheaply reconfigured to do the things we see here speaks volumes to America’s remaining competitive advantage in manufacturing. Versatile machines like these lower the costs of altering designs, taking custom orders, and creating limited-run products—which is to say they’re perfect for Santa’s workshop up north.

Via PopSci.

Extra Bits

-- We’ve all heard robots are gearing up to steal your job, but a research team funded by the National Science Foundation is looking into how robots can be your coworker, rather than your replacement. Read more from ExtremeTech.

-- Robot cars are on the way, but what do we really want from them? Dan Saffer explores this new relationship between man and machine at Fast Co.Design.

-- Winbot: Like Roomba, but for windows. More from NBCNews.

North Korea has made its first video game! Well, kinda.

The browser-based Pyongyang Racer is too old-school to appeal to gaming aficionados, but it’s not exactly supposed to compete with Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. Made by a North Korea-based IT company and a British-owned travel agency that arranges tours of the country, the game is a marketing stunt, plain and simple.* It hasn’t made me want to visit North Korea any time soon, but the Internet is going gaga for the virtual racer, perhaps because this is the closest most will get to driving through the nearly empty streets of North Korea.

Web-based video games as marketing gimmicks are nothing new. Sometimes they work: Old Spice's “Dikembe Mutombo's 4 1/2 Weeks to Save the World,” a browser-based game in which you save the world from the Mayan apocalypse, is actually fun to play.

In contrast, Pyongyang Racer is just depressing. One of the very few objectives is to collect barrels of petrol—so your car can keep running. Given the poverty rate in North Korea and the horrific prison camps in which as many as 200,000 languish, I experienced some Western tourist guilt while cruising for fuel. Moreover, there are absolutely no people to be seen in the game, neither on the street nor in occasional car you have to swerve around. (The cars are stranded in the middle of the road, perhaps because they ran out of petrol.) Combined with the computerized, propaganda-sounding music, the game is at best eerie.  The occasional sighting of a North Korean traffic lady does brighten the mood a bit, though.  

All weirdness aside, Internet denizens—who are obsessed with North Korea because of its isolation and peculiarities— can't seem to get enough of the game. The site has had trouble staying up, even going down in the middle of my gaming. I have yet to complete a full drive through virtual Pyongyang, and somehow, that seems apt. 

*Clarification, Dec. 20, 9 p.m.: This sentence was updated to make it clear who created the game.

Between that Aaron Sorkin movie, a few ill-advised instant messages, and a never-ending string of Facebook privacy controversies, Mark Zuckerberg doesn't enjoy the most wholesome of reputations these days. But like a ghost of social media past, MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson has emerged from the shadows of obscurity this holiday season to remind us why we all chose Facebook in the first place: because Anderson's site was so tawdry it made Zuckerberg's look squeaky-clean by comparison.

Anderson, better known as MySpace Tom because his face creepily appeared on everyone's account as their first friend when they joined the site, maintains a Twitter account that is often annoying, but usually not to the extent that it makes headlines. That changed on Wednesday, when he smacked down a random critic on the site so viciously that the guy ended up deleting his account. The sequence of events:

That diss so delighted Anderson's followers on the site that they apparently hounded his working-class interlocutor off of Twitter altogether. For an encore, Anderson had this to say to some other random guy who called him "creepy" for still using the same picture of his younger self that graced MySpace a decade ago:

Anderson, as you may or may not remember, has been accused in the media over the years of lying about his age, not to mention a slew of other creepy antics. On the plus side, he takes some snazzy Instagram pictures.

Zuckerberg, as it happens, was in the news this week for donating $500 million in Facebook stock to a local charitable foundation.

One thousand startups will be orphaned; many will die. One billion dollars will have gone for naught. Bright young minds across the country will be out of work. 

This isn't a Mayan prophecy. It's the conclusion of a new report on what's being called the "Series A crunch," an impending Darwinian shakeout that is expected to reshape the technology industry in 2013. The report, from the venture-capital tracking firm CB Insights, corroborates what industry insiders and pundits have been predicting and fearing for months. A recent boom in seed funding for tech startups, particularly those in the Internet and mobile apps sectors, is going to result in disappointment for a lot of would-be world-changers.

The crux of the crunch is that the flood of seed funding—the money that angel investors give to entrepreneurs to help them get an idea off the ground—has not translated to an increase in "Series A" investment rounds from venture-capital firms, which can help turn a promising startup into a real company. Those that get seed funding but do not find Series A money are said to have been orphaned. The hardiest will find a way to survive on their own. The rest will perish, taking a total of more than $1 billion in seed financing down with them, by CB Insights' estimate.

But here's the kicker: That might be a good thing. After all, the people of the world only need so many options for sharing photos, managing their personal budgets, or splitting a check after a dinner out with friends. Of the startups that will fail, many provide services that are nifty but not essential. Some aren't even that nifty. Meanwhile, bona fide, fast-growing tech companies around the country are starving for engineering, coding, and design talent (just look at what Facebook pays its interns). They'll quickly snap up the best founders and employees from the ventures that turn belly-up.

And while no one likes to see $1 billion go poof, that's part of the game. Smart investors will adjust and retarget their money at those sectors that are proving more profitable. CB Insights' report finds that Internet and mobile startups are getting the most seed money, but it's computer hardware and services that are most likely to win follow-on funding. Geographically, New York-based ventures seem to have the hardest time going from seed to Series A, while Boston- and Seattle-area startups are looking more sustainable, on average. Meanwhile, another recent CB Insights report found that startups aimed at businesses are more likely to hit it big these days than those trying to appeal to consumers.

It may sound counterintuitive, but all of this is more evidence that fears of a tech bubble are overblown. As PandoDaily's Sarah Lacey points out, the Series A crunch shows that big investors are proceeding with due caution, rather than hurling millions at anything with a ".com" in its name like they did in the late 1990s. A few big flameouts like Groupon and Zynga aside, Lacey is right that "the bulk of the froth in the Web 2.0 world was mostly just in the private hands of insiders, not the public markets or broader economy." The coming year may be a brutal one for startups, but those left standing will be better off than before.

The AlphaDog is growing up so fast!

OK, the robotic “pack mule” from DARPA and Boston Dynamics is still approximately the same size. But its capabilities have improved markedly since we introduced you to a prototype in October 2011. Then, the machine—intended to carry up to 400 pounds over rough terrain, while also serving as a power source for troops—was stuck on an inside track, connected to heavy cables. In this latest video from DARPA, filmed recently in central Virginia, it marches through the forest, responds to about 10 verbal commands, and follows its leader closely. Rough terrain like ditches isn’t a problem for the hearty man-made beast, and when it rolls down a hill, it recovers smoothly. On flat land, its trot is impressive, too.

It isn’t exactly ready for stealthy missions: The whirrs and whines sound like a blender. But at this rate, AlphaDog—or, as it's also known, the Legged Squad Support System—will be stalking the woods silently before you know it.

Via the Verge.

There is no chance the world will end on Dec. 21. As my Slate colleague Phil Plait has written persuasively on “Bad Astronomy,” notions that the Earth’s poles will reverse, or a heretofore undiscovered planet will collide with ours, or solar flares will wreak havoc are “nonsense, garbage, taurine feces, flim flam, and pifflery.” The Maya never said that there would be an apocalypse on that particular date—and even if they did, there’d be no reason to believe them. We will all live to see another day (except, of course, for those of us who would have died anyway), so don’t put off your Christmas shopping or your credit card payments.

According to a Reuters poll conducted in May, about 10 percent of people worldwide think that Dec. 21 could be doomsday. (To be fair, some apocalypse believers don’t think the world will necessarily end. They argue that we could face some sort of age of enlightenment or other major event—fuzzy predictions to save face when Dec. 22 dawns uneventfully.) If you aren’t part of the 10 percent, the Mayan apocalypse talk is quite entertaining: People are making fun of the Chicken Littles, finding ways to profit, and enjoying apocalypse theme parties—virgin sacrifice optional. 

But though Plait, NASA, other experts, and plain old common sense have me solidly convinced that there is no reason to believe the Dec. 21 hype, there’s a tiny, primitive part of me that has a twinge of fear. It’s illogical. It’s barely present. The skeptical, logical part of me disdains it. But it persists. Why?

According to Shmuel Lissek, an assistant professor of clinical psychology at the University of Minnesota who studies the psychophysiology and neurobiology of fear, evolution is to blame. In humanity’s early days, he says, “fear protected us from survival threats, and in our evolutionary history, the cost of missing a threat is much more expensive than the cost of a false alarm. … Essentially we’ve been naturally selected to be rather safe than sorry.” In cases like this, we’re torn between the primitive parts of our brain, which react quickly to any potential danger we see or hear about, and the evolved, which process the words, sounds, or images from a logical standpoint. If you know intellectually that Planet X isn’t going to slam into Earth on Dec. 21, but your heart rate elevates ever so slightly at the thought, you’re experiencing this conflict. The Mayan apocalypse may not be a stick in the forest that looks like a snake at first glance. In both cases, though, it’s better to be on alert, just in case.

That makes sense. But maybe there’s another explanation. I think it’s a bit like watching a horror movie—you know the action isn’t real, but you still experience some apprehension in a pleasurable, entertaining way. Though it won’t come to fruition, the thought of life ending or changing drastically adds a little suspense and excitement to the everyday. It’s something else to talk about and to distract us from more realistic but less extraordinary fears. You can envision these days as the first act in a post-apocalyptic movie. (Of course, if this were a film, my cavalier attitude would doom me to a gory death within five minutes of the cataclysmic event.)

But there are people for whom Dec. 21 is genuinely scary, not funhouse-scary, and I don’t want to diminish the anguish this has caused them. NASA’s David Morrison, an astrophysicist, has said that he’s received emails from people driven to suicidal thoughts by the prospect of the Mayan apocalypse. For their sake, it’s a relief that the end of fear of the end is nigh.

The furor over Instagram's new terms of service has centered on one awkwardly worded sentence that some media outlets interpreted as giving Instagram the right to sell your photos to advertisers to use as they please. As I and a few others wrote on Monday, that's probably not what the sentence actually meant. Still, the daylong backlash, which saw prominent users delete and suspend their accounts, only began to dissipate when Instagram founder Kevin Systrom came out with a statement promising to remove the sentence and clarify the language around who owns the images that users post to the site. Presumably he'll do that in time to get more user feedback before the new terms go into effect on January 16.

That can only be a good thing. And for professional photographers, and organizations like National Geographic, there's no doubt the content-ownership issue is of critical importance. But here's the downside: All the fuss over advertising has drowned out discussion of some other elements of Instagram's new terms of service that seem genuinely problematic for the average user. Some of the best reporting I've seen on this comes from Reuters' Gerry Shih and Alexei Oreskovic, who—unlike many of the tech blogs that rushed to capitalize on the outrage over the photo-ownership clause—took a broader view of the new policies and how they compare to others in the social media sphere. For anyone concerned with online rights and privacy, their article is an essential read. A few key points:

• While Facebook has been forced by lawsuits to include opt-out settings on key privacy issues, Instagram's new policy is "take it or leave it."
• Instagram's new terms include a clause asserting that users under the age of 18 imply by their agreement that a parent or legal guardian has also read and agreed to the terms. (Yeah, right.)
• The new terms require users with a legal complaint to submit to arbitration rather than sue Instagram in court, and it prohibits them from joining a class-action lawsuit under most circumstances. Reuters quotes a law professor who says that's highly unusual for social-media companies and leaves users relatively powerless to obtain any legal remedies.

Systrom's backtrack on Monday—entitled, "Thank you, and we're listening"—addressed none of these issues, probably because the press's premature, overheated, and under-reported attacks on the new terms largely overlooked them. Let's hope Instagram isn't finished listening just yet.

On Tuesday, the FTC announced its plan to turn the tables on “data brokers”—companies that collect information on consumers (like you!) and then sell it to others. Under the FTC’s orders, nine of these data brokers must provide information about how they work, what kind of information they collect, whether consumers are able to review or access data about themselves, and more.

The problem, says Justin Brookman, the director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Project on Consumer Privacy, is a notable absence of transparency. As of now, consumers have no way of knowing what information has been collected about them or how. There’s also no way for you to verify that the data about you is correct or to request that private details be removed.

As the FTC notes in a press release, data brokers aren’t entirely sinister: “In many ways, these data flows benefit consumers and the economy; for example, having this information about consumers enables companies to prevent fraud. Data brokers also provide data to enable their customers to better market their products and services.” But their wares can be used in other ways. For instance, the Fair Credit Reporting Act lays out ground rules for how employers can use information on things like bankruptcy in evaluating potential employees. But data brokers may attempt to skirt the law by stating in disclaimers that the information they are selling isn’t governed by the FCRA.

This is the latest in a series of actions intended to bring more transparency to data brokers’ practices. In June, data brokerage firm Spokeo was fined $800,000 for improperly marketing consumer information profiles “to companies in the human resources, background screening, and recruiting industries without taking steps to protect consumers required under the Fair Credit Reporting Act.” The next month, Reps. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., and Joe Barton, R-Texas, requested information from nine firms. (The FTC action involves some of the same companies that Markey and Barton addressed, but the lists aren’t identical.) In October, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, D-W.V., announced an investigation into data brokers’ practices, saying of American consumers, “An ever-increasing percentage of their lives will be available for download, and the digital footprint they will inevitably leave behind will become more specific and potentially damaging, if used improperly.”

What, exactly, is in that digital footprint? It’s hard to say precisely, given how many companies there are and the lack of transparency. “I’m supposed to be a privacy expert,” Brookman told me, but even he isn’t sure where all the information is coming from. Publicly available records are one obvious source, so you can safely bet that some data broker out there knows your address, your date of birth, your arrest record. Then it gets a little more complicated. Your social media information could come into play. Thanks to brand loyalty cards, your profile with a data broker—which is often tied to your email address—might track your purchases. That may sound a little creepy but harmless, but as Brookman notes, it gets more uncomfortable when your health-related purchases from a pharmacy are also included in your record. The FTC said Spoke’s profiles, for one, could include “hobbies, ethnicity, religion, participation on social networking sites, and photos.”

Brookman says that realistically, there’s no way to create any sort of “opt out” from data brokers. What we can hope for instead is something the FTC envisions—a centralized database where you can see who knows what about you. Like that you love cat photos, buy hemorrhoid cream regularly, got a drunk and disorderly citation in college, and prefer organic produce.