Category: Technology

Home Affairs Ministry to push Internet users to use their real names in an effort against the “hotbed of evil”

I recently discovered Technorati Japan‘s beta site, which is exactly the same as Technorati in English except it’s in Japanese and geared toward Japanese Internet users. The coolest thing about it for me so far is the fact that you can look at what books, CDs, and (most importantly for this site) news stories that Japanese bloggers are discussing at the moment. With that I bring you this latest story, ripped from Technorati Japan:

The Ministry of Internal Affairs (Somusho) has toughened its stance on eliminating anonymity on the Internet, thereby pushing people to use their real names so they can safely use the net, which has been cited as a “hotbed of harmful information.” They will decide on specific plans with the Education Ministry to encourage the use of technologies with a low level of anonymity such as blogs (diary-like sites) and SNS (Social Networking Sites) at elementary schools.

This suggestion will be included in the final report of the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ “Information Frontier Research Council” to be issued next week.

As the number of people using the internet domestically increases, developments such as the growth of suicide sites and bomb-making guides making their way onto the Net show that the Internet is flooded with harmful information that can lead to crime. The Ministry of Internal Affairs has reached the conclusion that in order to eliminate those negative aspects and make the Internet contribute to the development of the economic system, it is imperative to urge the use of people’s real names and improve the Internet’s trustworthiness.

Comment: Make no mistake: The Somusho is taking dead aim at 2-channel, Winny, and all the other anonymous web sites that have been the backbone of Internet activity in Japan since it got popular. They have heard every horror story about the suicide sites and piracy and are falling all over themselves trying to keep it from being a long-term trend. I’m not sure what to make of it — there are a lot of unhealthy things going on over at 2-chan, that’s for sure (Stay tuned and you’ll see an extended post on 2ch in due time). But then again, brainwashing the children of Japan to put their real names on the Net doesn’t seem like it’ll do much good. Here’s what some blogs are saying about this (thanks again, Technorati!):

From Garter House Annex:

This just makes me sigh.. My strength is leaving me. OK, here’s what I think:

Clearly anonymity does play a part in the dissemination of bad information. I don’t deny that. Nevertheless, I think the negative long-term impacts of repressing anonymous expression will far outdo any positives. Well, you could leave it at “There go the politicians again, going ahead without thinking about such things.”

I’m sure some official would excuse this activity by saying that simply urging isn’t a regulation, but in fact it has the same effect to the person who would be regulated. This is just official-speak and doesn’t fly with the general public.

Since I’m just judging from a news story I might be totally off, but let me give 2 slightly more specific opinions:
1. If they are really putting a priority on “contributing to the economic system”
then they are an era too late! Instead of worrying about the “economic system” they should worry about the development of “society.” If they do that then I think the pros and cons are more obvious.
2. I don’t know whether Yahoo added this or if it was said by Somusho, but I’d like go beyond my difference in position with the government to advise them that they should stop calling the Internet a “hotbed of evil”. Did they rip off “axis of evil” or simply appropriate it ignorantly? If it’s the former they just don’t understand what’s going on, and if it’s the latter then they are just too ignorant for words (Though I couldn’t imagine they would be). It’s ridiculous whichever way you slice it.

NEWS FLASH OMFG: FAMILY MART TO OPEN IN AMERICA!!!!!


AP brings good tidings:

Japan’s ‘Family Mart’ to Open in U.S.
06.21.2005, 09:14 AM

AWESOME Japanese convenience store operator FamilyMart Co. said Tuesday it plans to open 200 stores in the U.S. over the next four years, the first in California.

The inaugural U.S. store will open July 20 in West Hollywood, California, under the name “Famima,” the nickname widely used by Japanese.

It will offer traditional Japanese convenience store staples like “omusubi” rice balls, “bento” box lunches and sushi, as well as U.S. fare like takeaway sandwiches, the company said in a statement. < -- I've died and gone to heaven! "We would like our American customers to experience a new shopping style," it said. FUCK YEAH, I have been waiting for this for EIGHT YEARS!!! The store will also feature wireless Internet access, an ATM, a copy machine and an eat-in area, it said. COOL! The company said it plans to have three U.S. locations by the end of the year and about 200 by February 2009. OPEN ONE IN DC. I BEG YOU. FamilyMart already has about 11,500 stores, including franchises, in Japan and other Asian locations including South Korea, Thailand, China and Taiwan.

Guess what? When “Famima” opens in DC, I never have to go to Japan again! I’ll just eat lunch there every day! Haha! I never thought Forbes Magazine would make me feel like dancing on air, but then I never expected this either! Joy!

Xbox schooling Japan

Gamespot reports:

TOKYO–Classrooms in Japan wil be getting some Xboxes…but not for the typical purpose of playing games. Microsoft announced today that it will be donating Xbox consoles enabled with video chat capabilities to all elementary and junior high schools in Tokyo’s Suginami ward for educational purposes, starting in late June.

A total of 80 Xbox units will be given out to 44 grade schools, 23 junior high schools, and eight other public facilities in Suginami. Microsoft hopes its donations will help educate the children to become more IT literate. The consoles will let Microsoft teach the students how to use videoconferencing to take online classes, as well as communicate with other Xbox Live-enabled schools.

“Microsoft has been supporting teachers and students to become IT literate in the current education system that is advancing towards the use of IT. Our donation of the Xbox is one of our activities to strengthen the IT environment to schools,” said Microsoft in its press release. “We hope this will become a good model case where TV videoconferencing is used effectively in the education system.”

The original X-box was basically a commercial failure in Japan, and Microsoft is desperate for the 360 to do better than its predecessor. Anyone who attended public school in the US will probably remember Apple’s long-term strategy of selling heavily discounted Macs to the education market so that children would grow up using their product and in maturity favor them over Windows. Can a strategy that failed to work against Microsoft in the past now be employed sucessfully by them?

The Robots of the Aichi World Expo I

Over the weekend I was browsing at a bookstore in the world’s tallest building and picked up a fantastic Japanese magazine called Robocon, devoted entirely to fans of robots. Mixing news about cutting edge robotics research with coverage of amateur robotic fighting competition and actual technical articles for DIY robot builders this magazine is an absolute must-have for any Japanese reading robot fan (such as yours truly).

The feature article in this issue is naturally a guide to the robots of the 2005 World Expo currently in progress in Aichi prefecture, Japan. The article consists of a map to all the robot attractions at the expo, as well as several great articles introducing the various robots being presented there. I’m going to try and translate some of the more interesting parts over the next few days, but in the meantime here’s a brief look at one of the cutting-edge anthropomorphic droids.

android girl!

National Geographic has this brief article.

Repliee Q1 (at left in both pictures) appeared yesterday at the 2005 World Expo in Japan, where she gestured, blinked, spoke, and even appeared to breathe. Shown with co-creator Hiroshi Ishiguru of Osaka University, the android is partially covered in skinlike silicone. Q1 is powered by a nearby air compressor, and has 31 points of articulation in its upper body.

Internal sensors allow the android to react “naturally.” It can block an attempted slap, for example. But it’s the little, “unconscious” movements that give the robot its eerie verisimilitude: the slight flutter of the eyelids, the subtle rising and falling of the chest, the constant, nearly imperceptible shifting so familiar to humans.

Surrounded by machines that draw portraits, swat fast-moving balls, and snake through debris, Q1 is only one of the showstoppers at the expo’s Prototype Robot Exposition, which aims to showcase Japan’s growing role in the robotics industry.

But given Q1’s reported glitch-related “spasms” at the expo, it may be a while before androids are escorting tour groups or looking after children—which may be just as well. “When a robot looks too much like the real thing, it’s creepy,” Hiroshi told the Associated Press.

For more information, photos, and best of all video, see the official project website at Osaka University’s Intelligent Robotics Laboratory.

The Japanese language website of NEDO (New Energy and industrial technology Development Organization) has some additional information worth mentioning.

The name “Repliee” is supposed to suggest the French word replique (replica).

The Repliee Q1’s skin is made of silicon and colored in imitation of human skin. The android uses air servo actuators to subtly inflate and deflate the chest in imitation of real human breathing. The Repliee has been designed to respond to its environment in the unconscious ways that a human does. For that purpose it has extremely sensitive touch sensors throughout its body, and different kinds of touched trigger different responses. It also has microphones to pick up and respond to human voice.

Size: 680mm wide, 1,500mm tall, 1,100mm deep
Weight: 40kg
Power: air servos (external air compressor)
Movement: Upper body moves via actuators with 42 degrees of freedom
Operation: controlled via serial link to external computer
Usage environment: indoors
Controller size: 1000mm wide x 680mm tall x 850mm deep
Compressor size: 900mm wide x 1360mm tall x 900mm deep

Update- My friend Matt has posted a very, very recompressed version of a video of the robot responding to touch on his website. On an unrelated note, his newest comic/rant about booth babes at E3 is a good complement to my photo report from Computex. The big difference is that Computex booth babes were made to memorize scripts and give presentations about the products. At least that’s what I think they were doing, since it was all in Chinese.

More wacked out Japanese Spam

This starts out sounding like a disgruntled employee trying to get back at his boss, but ends up being just another ploy. Enjoy:

Subject: Destroy this site please.

Target URL: http://knowledge.yahoo.co.jp/ (tr: address changed to protect the innocent)

Hello, everyone, I started working part time at this online dating site 6 months ago, and at first I pretended to be a woman (nekama) and was pretty good at it, getting several responses from customers. But a difference of opinion with the boss got me sent to the spam department where I send tens of thousands of spam messages a day. I guess this e-mail would also be considered spam, huh? Yes, of course it would.

OK, enough about me, here’s the reason for this e-mail. I want you all to to help destroy the most profitable section of this company to get them back for moving me to the spam department. This would be beneficial to you all, and the company won’t even know why it’s happening, leaving them with nothing to do but cry about it. Here’s the strategy:

1. Enter your gender, location, nickname, e-mail address and password and send it in.
2. An e-mail will come back to you with a login link. Use that link to login with the user name and password you created.
3. This will take you to the profile entry area, so quickly make a profile and proceed to the member’s menu.
4. Enter the verification code to use the free 500 points, a 5,000 yen value.
5. This will be a good value for you. Now preparations are complete for my strategy to make the company cry.
6. Now the important part: After seeing your profile men pretending to be women (nekama) are certain to come at you. Those with no dot before their nicknames are all nekama, and those with a dot are all “free” (tr: ie: real), so only respond to those with a dot before their names. Check this in the profile lists. There should definitely be some members with and without dots before their names. DEFINITELY do not respond to the ones without dots. That’s because if you use all your free points on nekama the strategy is a failure! After that you can all enjoy talking to the “free” women. I mean, there are only about 12-15 of them each day! Since they are definitely not nekama the probability of meeting them should definitely be much higher, so keeping in touch with them won’t be a waste of time. I can imagine the worried faces of my bosses when they see that registrations are up but they aren’t responding to the nekama. HAHAHA!
Remember, the target site is http://news.goo.ne.jp/

That is all, you may begin your mission. Thank you very much.

Post Computex Photo gallery. Part 2 – Girls (and gawkers)

Continuing from part 1 (gear) of my Computex photo gallery/a>, here are a few sample thumbnails. Or just browse the album directly.

Anyone who has ever been to, or read about, any kind of large trade show related in any way to the computer technology field will be familiar with the show models or ‘booth babes’ hired by major presenters to lure attendees to their booth, where they can have their arms filled up with brochures and worthless branded knick-knacks. While for most attendees, the booth-babes may only be a pleasant distraction from the more serious business of checking out the new hardware, there is a serious contingent of people who are there just to check out, and photograph the dancing, scantily clad, attractive girls.

As good looking as most of the girls are, most of them are surrounded by so many excessively eager, desperate, camera-bearing men that you can’t just stand there and enjoy the show, except in some of the smaller out of the way booths. Larger, more popular booths such as Shuttle or Nvidia were just so hideously jam-packed that seeing the models up close would require about as much effort as pushing your way through a moshpit to the front row of an overcrowded rock show.

After seeing the ridiculous effort that these photographers exert to attend each little dance number and photograph the models at each company’s stall, I realized that the photographers themselves were just as amusing as the models, and decided to present a photogallery interleaving portraits of the photographers with the photographed. For the ideal presentation, start with this first model photo and view the rest sequentially within the gallery.


Click here for an obsessively complete photo gallery of models from this year’s Computex, as well as past computer trade shows..

Post Computex Photo gallery. Part 1 – Gear

There are a lot of candidates for the center of the world’s IT industry: Cupertino, Redmond, Palo Alto, Tokyo, Seoul, – but these days it seems to be Taipei.

The definitive expression here is DIY, widely known in English speaking countries as an acronym for Do It Yourself, but here in Taiwan adopted as a uniquely specific lexical item referring just to the homebrew computer industry. If you walk into any of the many, many, many expansive computer stores in Taipei you will be overwhelmed by a selection of parts unavaliable at all but the rarest of US computer stores, and more interesting struck by the odd lack of brand name desktop systems.

“Here in Taiwan, if you can’t make your own PC you’re not a man,” I was told earlier today by a Taiwanese guy named Kevin. This is a sentiment that I can imagine evoking a kind of cultural jealousy in hardware geeks throughout the entire planet.

This little number from Foxconn has the distinction of being one of the coolest and best looking PC case designs I have seen. They also have the fine distinction of having provided one of the exhibitor ID tags that was used to sneak me into the show.

On Sunday I had the pleasure of attending Computex, Taiwan’s trademark computer and technology expo, the largest in Asia and the second largest of its type in the world after Hannover, Germany.

Of course I took a number of photos, and here is a sample of them. I have divided photos into two parts: Gear and Girls, since as everyone knows the motivation for attendance at these tech industry shows is based almost equally on both of those things.


Some of the literally hundreds of case designs on display.


This is exactly what we’ve all wanted for all these years! Screw laptops, next time I buy a portable I want something that looks like Q cobbled it together.


This isn’t an ipod shuffle, but an unreleased prototype product of the socalled iVogue mp3 player line from Jetway. They estimated a July release date, but the website doesn’t even have a listing for these products yet, much less pricing information.


Easily the most impressive piece of actual new technology I saw at the show. This is an experimental prototype CPU cooling system, from Korean manufacturer KM Korea. The demo had a chip of some kind running at about 50 celsius, quite hot to the touch. You press the button and it activates their cooling device, and the heat instantly drains away from the chip surface, cooling it to about 15 celsius in only a couple of seconds. I have no idea how it works, and where the heat is being dissipated to. Perhaps the table concealed some kind of wormhole, through which the heat is sent into whatever dark dimension in which Cthulhu waits.

Broadband in Japan

Thomas Friedman’s latest column is about how broadband and cell phone based internet access is superior to that of Japan. OK, no arguments there. But what about the Thomas Bleha report in Foreign Affairs that he cites?

In the administration’s first three years, President Bush barely uttered the word “broadband,” Mr. Bleha notes, but when America “dropped the Internet leadership baton, Japan picked it up. In 2001, Japan was well behind the United States in the broadband race. But thanks to top-level political leadership and ambitious goals, it soon began to move ahead.

It is now clear that Japan and its neighbors will lead the charge in high-speed broadband over the next several years.”

South Korea, which has the world’s greatest percentage of broadband users, and urban China, which last year surpassed the U.S. in the number of broadband users, are keeping pace with Japan – not us.

Does the Japanese government actually have any policy to support broadband? I had always gotten the impression that the broadband growth in Japan was entirely due to strenuous efforts by KDDI and Softbank/Yahoo BB, efforts that were originally opposed by the state sponsored Japan Telecom until they realized that they too must sell broadband to survive. Until a couple of years ago Japan had a reputation for being far, far behind Korea in terrestrial internet connections, with many people apparently content to just access their email and tiny web sites from their mobile phones. So the question is, does anybody reading this know whether this alleged pro-broadband government policy in Japan even exists?

The future is coming

I’m feeling pretty sick this weekend so I”m not going to even try and write anything intelligent.

After years of watching anime and reading manga, there’s an entire image of the future out there that Japan has promised to bring the world. I always thought that Japan would be the first country to use robots on the battlefield, but Korea seems to be beating them.
DMZ robot

Japan in space

At least they are on track to become a real space-faring nation, and after that it’s only a matter of time before the Gundam show up.

[Update!]I take that back, it looks like the Gundam prototype is already in existence. They actually have a video of it firing a gun!

Proof that if the protestors in Beijing are right and Japan really is going to remilitiarize and return to Imperialism, China will have no hope against the robot armies of the 21st century.