Category Archives: Observer

The new Holy War — and its collateral damage

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This morning’s Observer column:

The novelist Umberto Eco wrote a deliciously insightful essay in 1994, in which he argued that the Apple Mac was a Catholic machine, in contrast to the PC, which, he argued, was clearly a Protestant device. How so? Simply this: the Mac freed its users/believers from the need to make decisions. All they had to do to find salvation was to follow the Apple Way. When the Mac was launched, for example, a vigorous debate broke out among user-interface geeks about whether a computer mouse should have one or two buttons. Some were critical of the fact that the Macintosh mouse had only one button. But when queried about this, Steve Jobs – then, as later, the supreme pontiff of the Church of Apple – was adamant and unrepentant. Two buttons would undermine the rationale of the Mac user interface. He spoke – as his Vatican counterpart still does – ex cathedra, and that was that.

In contrast, Eco pointed out, the poor wretches who used a PC had, like the Calvinists of yore – to make their own salvation. For them, there was no One True Way. Instead they had to choose and install their own expansion cards and anti-virus software, wrestle with incompatible peripherals and so on. They were condemned to an endless round of decisions about matters that were incomprehensible to them but on which their computational happiness depended.

Spool forward 21 years to today and nothing much has changed, other than that the chasm between computational Catholics and Protestants now applies to handheld computers called smartphones, rather than to the desktop machines of yore…

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The European Court of Justice’s bombshell

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This morning’s Observer column:

On Tuesday, the European court of justice, Europe’s supreme court, lobbed a grenade into the cosy, quasi-monopolistic world of the giant American internet companies.

It did so by declaring invalid a decision made by the European commission in 2000 that US companies complying with its “safe harbour privacy principles” would be allowed to transfer personal data from the EU to the US.

This judgment may not strike you as a big deal. You may also think that it has nothing to do with you.

Wrong on both counts, but to see why, some background might be useful….

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LATER This is a truly extraordinary moment. Lots of interesting and informative stuff about it on the Web, including this piece by Julia Powles and this NYT piece by Robert Levine.

And this from Edward Snowden:

Snowden_tweet

So what happens next? My colleague Nóra ní Loideain has passed me this reassuring note:

Christopher Graham, UK Information Commissioner, said on 8 October at a meeting at Dentons [a law firm]: “Don’t panic. Safe Harbor is not the only route for international transfers. We are coordinating our thinking with other DPAs across the European Union.” The 28 DPAs which form the EU Art. 29 Data Protection Working Party met in their International Transfers sub-group on 8 October, and this group’s plenary will discuss the issue on Thursday this week, on 15 October.

Which means … what, exactly??

Why some software can’t be a black box

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This morning’s Observer column:

For anyone interested in what is laughingly known as “corporate responsibility”, the Volkswagen emissions-fraud scandal is a gift that keeps on giving. Apart from the company’s Nazi past, its high status in German life, its hitherto exalted reputation for technical excellence and quality control, and its peculiarly dysfunctional governance, there is also the shock to consumers of discovering that while its vehicles are made from steel and composite materials, they are actually controlled by software. We are already close to the point where that software may be more valuable than all the physical materials that make up the vehicle, and, if Apple and Google have their way, that imbalance is set to grow.

Volkswagen’s chicanery was discovered by good, old-fashioned analogue detective work…

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Ad-blocking and the future of the Web

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This morning’s Observer column:

There is, alas, no such thing as a free lunch. What’s even more depressing is that there is no such thing as a free internet service. Most people nowadays probably understand that in relation to, say, social networking services, if the service is “free” then the users (or, more precisely, their personal data) are the product. But this also applies to stuff that you haven’t signed up for – websites that you browse, for example. The site may be free to view, but there’s often a hidden cost.

One part of that cost comes from surreptitious tracking of your browsing habits by outfits that sell that information to advertisers. (If this is news to you just install the Ghostery browser extension to see who’s monitoring your browsing.) The other cost comes from ads that are placed on a webpage either directly by the site owner or as the outcome of a real-time auction that goes on in the depths of the internet.

And as the web has evolved, and more of our lives conducted online, internet advertising has steadily increased. It’s now at the stage where it’s really annoying…

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Algorithmic-driven markets and the future

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This morning’s Observer column:

‘When a true genius appears,” wrote Jonathan Swift, “you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.” We need to update this for our age: whenever a really new technology arrives, you can tell it by the fact that most right-thinking people think it’s a scam.

Thus, to the average person the idea of a “cryptocurrency” like Bitcoin seems daft. I mean to say: a “currency” that was invented by a geek; is not backed by any bank or government; has no central authority; and operates on the basis of a public ledger that is secured by arcane cryptography. It has to be a scam, doesn’t it? Well, actually it doesn’t – but it would take more space than is available here to explain why. The point is that most people can’t see the point of cryptocurrencies, which, paradoxically, is why they are interesting.

On the other hand, most people – non-geeks as well as geeks – can see the point of Uber, the cab-hailing service that is causing such turmoil on the other side of the Channel (and occasionally over here too). You download an app to your smartphone. When you need a cab you launch the app and it shows you on a map where the nearest available cars are, and you hail the nearest one. Within three to five minutes it shows up. And when you arrive at your destination, you don’t pay the driver: the fare is charged to your credit card. QED.

Compared with currencies, therefore, Uber seems pretty comprehensible…

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The significance of eBay

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This morning’s Observer column:

Twenty years ago this month, a French-born Iranian-American computer programmer named Pierre Omidyar added an experimental online auction section to his personal website, which at that time focused mainly on the Ebola virus. He called it AuctionWeb because it enabled people to bid to purchase items that other people were advertising for sale. One of the earliest, and most puzzling, sales on the site was of a broken laser pointer, which went for $14.83. The story goes that Omidyar wrote to the buyer asking if he understood that the laser pointer was broken. The guy replied that he was a collector of broken laser pointers. At this point, Omidyar realised he might be on to something.

He was: he called it eBay…

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Two cheers for Google?

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This morning’s Observer column:

You know the problem: you’re on a train and suddenly realise you need some information that is available on the net. So you pull out your smartphone and type a web address into the search box. The server responds, the page you want begins to load and then suddenly there’s a big box obscuring the content. The box tells you that you’d be much better off downloading the company’s app. Inducements include the possibility that you might get a better rate by booking via the app than via the boring old website. Sometimes the “close” button that will enable you to get rid of this intrusion is obvious, but sometimes it’s hard to find on a small screen. In the meantime, the train has just gone into a tunnel and you’ve lost your internet connection.

Welcome to the world of “app-install interstitials”. They are, IMHO, a pain in the butt. On the scale of web annoyances, they rate just below pop-up ads and those display ads placed by companies that covertly monitor your browsing. But now it transpires that Google doesn’t like these interstitials either and has announced that henceforth it will be downgrading in its search results any mobile-oriented web pages that produce interstitials…

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Potholes on the road to the self-driving future

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This morning’s Observer column:

Somehow I think it’s going to take quite a while to get to self-driving nirvana. For one thing, autonomous vehicles require digital mapping that is an order of magnitude more detailed than anything in Google Streetview. Secondly, those maps need to be continually updated, because even an unexpected new mini-roundabout might confuse the vehicle and cause an accident.

But the biggest obstacle might come from what supposedly kept Harold Macmillan awake at nights – “events, dear boy, events”. Driving in Devon last weekend, I came on a number of temporary traffic lights at roadworks, and wondered how an autonomous vehicle would cope with them. After all, they would not appear on its digital map; and although it would be programmed to look for a red light in a standard position at a junction, it might not “see” a temporary one.

Devon is a ravishing county, but it has one quirk from the motorist’s point of view: it has lots of extremely narrow lanes, most of which have high hedges growing on either side. There are occasional passing places which allow two vehicles to edge past one another. This is fine until a procession of three or four vehicles meets another procession of several cars stuck behind a truck, at which point the only way to reach a solution involves a good deal of human-to-human negotiation. This is something that even the dumbest human is good at, but which will lie beyond the capability of even the smartest machine for some time to come…

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The ad-blocking paradox

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This morning’s Observer column:

Mail Online is one of the world’s most popular news websites and it’s free: no paywall. But my browser has a plug-in program called Ghostery, which will scan any web page you visit and tell you how many “third-party trackers” it has found on it. These are small pieces of code that advertisers and ad-brokers place on pages or in cookies in order to monitor what you’re doing on the web and where you’ve been before hitting the current page.

When I looked at the Mail Online report, Ghostery found 31 such trackers. Some of them came from familiar names (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Pinterest, Doubleclick). But others were placed by outfits I have never heard of, for example, Bidswitch, Brightcove, Crimtan, Sonobi, Taboola. These are companies that act as high-speed intermediaries between your browser and firms wanting to place ads on the web page you’re viewing. And theirs is the industry that pays the bills (and sometimes makes a profit) for the publisher whose “free” content you are perusing.

But we humans are cussed creatures. It turns out that we loathe and detest online ads and will do almost anything to avoid them…

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Microsoft: obituaries are premature

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This morning’s Observer column:

One of my favourite cartoons shows a team of scientists in a Nasa control room clustered around a big screen. Their spacecraft has just landed on a very distant planet and has begun transmitting data back to base. A guy in overalls is saying to his assembled colleagues: “Now all we have to do is figure out how to install Windows 95.”

Ah yes, Windows 95… I remember it well. It signified the moment when Microsoft finally managed to implement the user interface invented by Xerox in the early 70s. It was launched with the biggest hype-storm that the computer industry – or indeed any other industry – had ever seen. Microsoft paid the Rolling Stones an unconscionable amount of money (we never found out how much) to use Start Me Up as the musical backdrop for the launch. The first internet boom, triggered by the web and the Netscape browser, was just beginning to roll and Windows 95 was the first Microsoft operating system to have a TCP/IP stack (needed to connect to the internet) baked in.

Back then, the PC was the sun in the computing universe around which everything else revolved. And Microsoft controlled well over 90% of the PC software market. So Windows 95 really was a big deal.

Last week, 20 years on, Microsoft launched Windows 10 with the kind of faded hoopla that accompanies 60s discos…

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And then, of course, there is the fact that Microsoft is one of the very few large corporations that is still doing serious, high-quality, long-term research.