1950: The Turing Test Alan Turing, an English mathematician and logician, advocated the theory that eventually computers could be created that would be capable of human thought. To cut through the long philosophical debate about exactly how to define thinking he proposed the "imitation game" (1950), now known as Turing test. His test consisted of a person asking questions via keyboard to both a person and an intelligent machine within a fixed time frame. After a series of tests the computers success at "thinking" could be measured by its probability of being misidentified as the human subject. Still today Turing's papers on the subject are widely acknowledged as the foundation of research in artificial intelligence.

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Face recognition In order to be able to recognize a person, one commonly looks at this persons face, for it is there where the visual features which distinguish one person from another are concentrated. Eyes in particular seem to tell a story not only about who somebody is, but also about how that persons feel, where his / her attention is directed, etc. People who do not want to show who they are or what is going on inside of them must mask themselves. Consequently, face recognition is a kind of electronic unmasking. "Real" face-to-face communication is a two-way process. Looking at somebody's face means exposing ones own face and allowing the other to look at oneself. It is a mutual process which is only suspended in extraordinary and voyeuristic situations. Looking at somebody without being looked at places the person who is visually exposed in a vulnerable position vis-à-vis the watcher. In face recognition this extraordinary situation is normal. Looking at the machine, you only see yourself looking at the machine. Face biometrics are extracted anonymously and painlessly by a mask without a face. Therefore the resistance against the mass appropriation of biometrical data through surveillance cameras is confronted with particular difficulties. The surveillance structure is largely invisible, it is not evident what the function of a particular camera is, nor whether it is connected to a face recognition system. In a protest action against the face recognition specialist Visionics, the Surveillance Camera Players therefor adopted the strategy of re-masking: in front of the cameras, they perfomed the play "The Masque of the Red Death" an adaption of Edgar Allen Poe's classic short story by Art Toad. According to Visionics, whose slogan is "enabling technology with a mass appeal", there are alrady 1.1 bn digitised face images stored on identification data banks world wide. When combined with wide area surveillance camera networks, face recognition is capable of creating a transparent social space that can be controlled by a depersonalised, undetected and unaccountable centre. It is a technology, of which the surveillance engeneers of sunken totalitarian regimes may have dreamt, and one that today is being adopted by democratic governments.

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The Big Five of Commercial Media After a number of mergers and acquisitions five powerful media conglomerates lead the world's content production and distribution. They operate on an international basis with subsidiaries all around the globe and engage in every imaginable kind of media industry. Table: The World's Leading Media Companies Media Company 1998 Revenues (in US$) Property/Corporate Information AOL Time Warner (US) 26,838.000.000* http://www.timewarner.com/corp/about/timewarnerinc/corporate/index.html Disney (US) 22,976.000.000 http://www.disney.com Bertelsmann (GER) 16,389.000.000 http://www.bertelsmann.com/facts/report/report.cfm News Corporation (AUS) 12,841.000.000 http://www.newscorp.com/public/cor/cor_m.htm Viacom (US) 12,100.000.000 http://www.viacom.com/global.tin (* Revenues of Time Warner only (merger with AOL took place in January 2000)

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Extranet An Extranet is an Intranet with limited and controlled access by authenticated outside users, a business-to-business Intranet, e.g.

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Artificial intelligence approaches Looking for ways to create intelligent machines, the field of artificial intelligence (AI) has split into several different approaches based on the opinions about the most promising methods and theories. The two basic AI approaches are: bottom-up and top-down. The bottom-up theory suggests that the best way to achieve artificial intelligence is to build electronic replicas of the human brain's complex network of neurons (through neural networks and parallel computing) while the top-down approach attempts to mimic the brain's behavior with computer programs (for example expert systems).

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Friedrich Kittler, The History of Communication Media In this essay, Friedrich Kittler, one of the world's leading media theorists and media historicist, offers a concise and fascinating history of communication technologies in general terms from its beginnings up to now, provoking new insights by showing interesting interdependencies. http://www.ctheory.com/ga1.14.html

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