Daily Archives: February 24, 2009

Mind reading with MRI

Posted on February 24, 2009 by Robin

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By hooking up an MRI and looking at the visual cortex whilst the subject looks at an object creates a pattern. When the subject recalls that object in short term memory, you can recognise that pattern and tell what object the subject is thinking of.

This has 2 implications:
1) We can read a specific person’s mind; if we build up a library of their memory patterns
2) The part of the brain used to recall memories is the same as the part used when we are looking at something directly. This is important: it means that we really are living in a world created by our imaginations 🙂

OneSwarm: Privacy preserving P2P

Posted on February 24, 2009 by Robin

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Although widely used, currently popular peer-to-peer (P2P) applications are limited by a lack of user privacy. By design, services like BitTorrent and Gnutella share data with anyone that asks for it, allowing a third-party to systematically monitor8 user behavior. As a result, P2P networks can only be safely used by those comfortable with wholly public knowledge of their activity.

OneSwarm is a new P2P data sharing application we’re building to provide users with explicit control over their privacy by enabling fine-grained control over how data is shared. Instead of sharing data indiscriminately, data shared with OneSwarm can be made public, it can be shared with friends, shared with some friends but not others, and so forth. We call this friend-to-friend (F2F) data sharing.