I_Am_Coder

I was about to set up shop on the Silk Road and got to see it just before it went offline. My product is legal and all... I was just trying to be cool, so I have nothing to worry about. I first went in after someone linked to my site from the electronics section and I kept getting hits from an onion URL that I couldn't access from Chrome.

What are your thoughts on 2.0? Where should I set up shop now?

I backed your KickStarter campaign right away. Thanks for thanking me so fast! It would be elite if you could pop by /r/silkroad before things get too heated here.

And to hit on the deep web film's main theme: "when a community of individually invested people work together on something, particularly on the Internet, it can quickly become an unwieldy force"... check out my comment on the AMA with the brain researcher who specializes in social interactions. Or, for the lazy, read this article: http://pandodaily.com/2013/11/20/crowdfunders-beware-your-crowd-can-become-an-angry-mob/ about my stint as a hacktivist earlier this month.

I work in info sec during the day and am attracted to the deep web because of the elegant use of encryption and public keys.

Salut Jean-Francois,

I recently plotted the attitude of a crowd on a KickStarter campaign that went south. The campaign was for an electroencephalograph that would detect REM sleep and play a voice recording to trigger lucidity. I could tell that the prototype wasn't legit as I had worked on something very similar for the OpenEEG project.

I reported it to KickStarter right away, but they didn't do as much as reply to my report. So I had to back the campaign on the last weekend in order to post a comment and point out the irregularities to the investors.

I then witnessed what appeared to be an event-related potential in the attitude of the backers as they realized that it was a scam. On a much slower timescale than the P300, of course, but similar to what happens in the brain when it recognizes something.

I marked each backer's comment as either positive (excitatory) or negative (inhibitor). If we pretend that each backer is a brain cell and each comment is a neurotransmitter, then we can plot an EEG of the crowd. I was expecting it to look a lot more like the P300, but think you'll still be entertained: http://lsdbase.org/2013/11/21/2013-11-21-measuring-the-brainwaves-of-a-crowd/.

The best way to see what happened is to read the comments for yourself. I flipped them for you so they appear in order and so that I could measure and weigh them for the graph: http://lucid-code.com/P300/LUCI/Sorted.htm#Wake_Up_Call. ┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ)

Read from there up until I get out the popcorn. You shall be entertained and it shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes. But for the lazy, I knew that it was a scam because:

• their EEG didn't complete a circuit (they only had one electrode, which didn't make skin contact)
• their lucid dream induction percentage (80%) was unheard of
• their amp was orders of magnitude out of the range of brainwaves
• and – what ultimately exposed it as a scam to the masses: the images of their prototype were created in Photoshop.

They did not collaborate with any institutions - where did you get that data?

I am interested in using your sleep induction algorithms for my research. Where can I download some samples?

I have been experimenting with different audio tracks played during REM sleep. I wear headbands with sensors (accelerometer (for eye movements), EKG and now finally EEG) that record my sleep and play audio tracks when rapid eye movements are detected.

I created an open research database - the Lucid Scribe Database project, where I upload the raw logs along with a printout of the most interesting minute every other night... I almost have a hundred sessions online so far that can be freely downloaded, reviewed minute by minute or replayed.

I make the software available as freeware and have been polishing and releasing the code as open source. Over a dozen different sensors work with it and it is has a plugin interface that makes it real easy for me to add new hardware.

It would be awesome if you could take a look - I could really do with some pointers from someone with your experience!

Elite. For those who don't have an account yet: what sort of experiments are you running and what do you have in the pipeline over at Dreamlabs?