Original story

WallStJournal 6.12.2010

Finally! Nokia’s “monster” memoryphone meets Data Commission criteria - shares up 12%

Nokia’s memoryphone is finally available in the stores. The long lines outside telecoms retailers lifted the Finnish company’s shares, which have been in the doldrums lately, and trading was brisk in New York. *

The special feature of the 7220 Memoryphone - dubbed in the media as “Talking Kong”, “The Elephone”, and even “The Monsterphone” - is that it hears and records everything that is spoken in the immediate vicinity. Earlier, industry confidence in the memoryphone had already begun to fade as the prototypes repeatedly failed to meet the requirements of the EU and USA Data Security Commission. According to DSC regulations, all devices linked to the UN-administered Internet must be subject to control by the authorities. Nokia has lobbied desperately for months to get exemption, claiming it was acting on behalf of the privacy of its customers, but the company has been obliged to surrender and install a port to allow surveillance by DSC agencies.

The Nokia 7220 uses 1Gb memory chips and is capable of storing in memory several days of conversations. While charging, the physical phone receiver empties its memory into that of the home station, from where the user can collect all conversations recorded by the phone either directly or via a conventional mobile connection. The Personal AltaVista 4 search engine application that was developed jointly by Nokia, Geoworks and Digital can be employed both in the home station or on the memoryphone itself.

Researchers estimate that home computers will soon have become so fast that within only a couple of years the standard PC will be capable of absorbing and digesting everything that the memoryphone owner and his discussion partners ever say around the phone.

DPA and DSC regulations prohibit centralized audio registers

AltaVista has acquired the commercial rights to monitor all major NetRadio stations and analyse sound & voice samples and links to all Internet pages. International data protection laws nevertheless limit the use of the material gathered. AltaVista has the capacity for instance to form a register of human voice samples, from which memoryphone users could request the phone to record the names of those taking part in the conversations and also links to their other network conversations. The DPA has come down firmly against this, however. As a result, AltaVista is distributing for the personal use of 7220 users the software required for analysing individual speakers’ names from the sound samples.

The keenest advocates of the new memoryphone are people who have hitherto had to wrestle with such things as the minutes of meetings or seminar transcripts. The device is also invaluable in those awkward shopping situations where you forget what it is you were told to buy on the way home: the user only has to listen through the relevant conversations, first inserting a filter to screen out items that are obviously not shopping-related. The only difficulty might be if the user cannot remember keywords or key phrases from the conversations required.

Forgetting - a civil right?

The 7220 has not been welcomed unreservedly in all quarters. One of the first opponents was the influential British author and social scientist Lawrie Fitzpatrick, who was the first to coin the term “monsterphone”. Fitzpatrick has urged the relevant EU authorities to press for the compulsory installation in each phone of an electronic indicator, so that the targets of recording by memoryphone could be aware of the presence of the device. Fitzpatrick has argued forcefully on the issue of “the basic civil right of having an imperfect memory”, and he feels that it is not necessary that all speech be recorded for posterity or for officials to pore over at their leisure, as in some “Big Brother is Listening to You” scenario.

In spite of the concerns voiced by Fitzpatrick, the new phone has prompted excitement in the telephone market. There were long lines outside several New York stores as the first 7220s went on sale, and it was the same story in London, Paris, and Tokyo.

Many other members of the scientific community have expressed fears over the likely impact on society of the new memoryphone. Researchers into artificial intelligence and cultural analysts have been carefully optimistic, however, along with many historians. They look forward to being able to examine significant conversations in their natural form and not as regurgitated by political columnists, Hollywood, or MSNBC.

Douglas B. Lenat, developer of the world’s leading autodidactic computer CYC, has stated that the acquisition of real-time conversations by CyCorp will greatly expand CYC’s areas of understanding. CYC is learning all the time, and will on this basis be able in due course to discuss matters under almost any circumstances whatsoever and answer questions on a practically unlimited range of topics.

“We will be happy to pay the datacomms charges of a memoryphone owner for each and every interesting subject conversation, if we can acquire the rights to all conversations for CYC to listen in to them.” Lenat believes that capacity will not present a problem, since the CYC system is capable already of eavesdropping several thousand conversations simultaneously.

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