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On the first floor of an unassuming terrace above a row of shops in Hawthorn, eight men and women are gathered. They have been recruited at random by an agency and are being paid about $65 each for the evening to wear plastic headsets that look a little like shower caps, and virtual reality-style visors over their eyes.

There are felt-tip sensors inside the bathing caps to measure the electrical activity in each person's brain. The lights go down, a screen comes up, and a show comes on. But the real show is inside these people's minds: advertisers and television networks want to know what makes this audience pay attention, what engages them and how much their memory will encode for the longer term.

Perhaps even more importantly, they also want to know the audience's emotional response: activity in a complex network of cortical and sub-cortical regions - particularly in the right side of the brain, often ascribed as the creative and emotional side compared to the rational, systemising left side - indicate both emotional intensity (how emotionally energised someone becomes) and emotional valence (the motivational state created by the emotion).

Welcome to the age of neuromarketing.

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On the third floor of the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum, there is what probably is the world’s largest scale model of a city. The room-sized model of central Shanghai in 2020, as envisioned by the urban planners, fills an area larger than 100 square meters

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Does the idea of the military and private corporations having secured shared networks off the Internet grid sound disturbingly familiar? Anyone who's read William Gibson's novels would think so, right down to his description of "black ice" for the security surrounding the walled-off corporate areas online. Do we want corporations banding together to form alliances that can't be seen by any customers, competitors, or government regulators? Should we be concerned about the potential for the very criminals everyone is determined to avoid using the same technology themselves, moving on to set up another dark cloud without ever being detected?

Cohen's dark clouds could be used for everything from a seemingly innocuous defense from online attacks to more insidious uses that could violate laws, including customer privacy. He poses the question anyone should ask when confronted with the idea of such a weapon: "What are the legal ramifications, and do they out weight the need to protect ourselves from criminals who can and will use these tactics against us?" Gibson's novels may be more on target for a vision of our future than we ever imagined.

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Originally posted by Mr.Push:
sure, if data security was being used by bad people it would let them do bad things. but isn't that already happening?

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Originally posted by Mean Old Man:
A post by the mortally quotable Domitella, over at the Gaiman Board, caught my eye. (I believe she's on staff at a museum in the England.)
We have a great exhibition where they had obviously put a lot of thought into the content of some audio pieces listenend to through telephones. Only they are rotary dial telephones and none of the children know how to use them