Category Archives: Observer

Thirty Years On…

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This morning’s Observer column.

Thirty years ago (on 24 January 1984, to be precise), a quirky little computer company launched a new product and in the process changed lives and maybe the world. The company was called Apple and the product was named after a particular type of Californian apple – the Macintosh.

With astonishing chutzpah, the company announced the product to the world via a single advertisement screened during the Super Bowl on 22 January. The film was directed by Ridley Scott and showed a dimly lit auditorium in which ranks of drably clad zombies are being harangued by a despotic figure shown on a huge screen. Into this auditorium comes a beautiful female athlete who runs towards the screen carrying a large hammer, pursued by goons attired in riot police gear. Just as the despot’s rant reaches a climax, the athlete stops, whirls the hammer four times and then launches it at the screen. When it strikes, the screen explodes and the camera pans to the zombies, whose mouths gape in bewilderment. “On January 24th,” intones a voice over the closing scene, “Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

Most people who saw the ad were probably baffled by it. But for some of us, the symbology was clear…

Why your health secrets may no longer be safe with your GP

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Last Sunday’s Observer column about the NHS plan to create a national database of health records.

Those planning this healthcare data-grab are clearly hoping that citizen inertia will enable them to achieve their aim, which is to make our most intimate personal details available for data-mining by “approved researchers”. If they succeed, then, starting in March, the medical data of everyone who has not opted out will be uploaded to the repository controlled by the NHS information centre. And for the first time the medical history of the entire nation will have been stored in one place.

What’s wrong with this?

How long have you got?

Talking cats and corporate social responsibility

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This morning’s Observer column.

It’s 4.30 on a gloomy winter’s afternoon. I’m sitting with my grandson having one of those conversations in which grandsons explain complicated stuff to their grandads. He is four years old, omniscient in the way that four-year-olds are, and tolerant of my ignorance of important matters.

The conversation turns to computing and he inquires whether I have Talking Tom Cat on my iPad. “No,” I say. “What is it?” He explains that it’s a cool game that his grandma has on her iPad. There is a cat called Tom who listens to what you say to him and then repeats it in a funny voice. Also there’s a dog who does funny things.

So I dig out my iPad and we head over to the app store where, sure enough, Talking Tom Cat 2 is available as a free download. A few minutes later it’s running on my iPad…

Read on to find out what happens next.

The antisocial side of geek elitism

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This morning’s Observer column.

Just under a year ago, Rebecca Solnit, a writer living in San Francisco, wrote a sobering piece in the London Review of Books about the Google Bus, which she viewed as a proxy for the technology industry just down the peninsula in Palo Alto, Mountain View and Cupertino.

“The buses roll up to San Francisco’s bus stops in the morning and evening,” she wrote, “but they are unmarked, or nearly so, and not for the public. They have no signs or have discreet acronyms on the front windshield, and because they also have no rear doors they ingest and disgorge their passengers slowly, while the brightly lit funky orange public buses wait behind them. The luxury coach passengers ride for free and many take out their laptops and begin their work day on board; there is of course Wi-Fi. Most of them are gleaming white, with dark-tinted windows, like limousines, and some days I think of them as the spaceships on which our alien overlords have landed to rule over us.”

Beyond gadgetry lies the real technology

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This morning’s Observer column.

Cloud computing is a good illustration of why much media commentary about – and public perceptions of – information technology tends to miss the point. By focusing on tangible things – smartphones, tablets, Google Glass, embedded sensors, wearable devices, social networking services, and so on – it portrays technology as gadgetry, much as earlier generations misrepresented (and misunderstood) the significance of solid state electronics by calling portable radios “transistors”.

What matters, in other words, is not the gadget but the underlying technology that makes it possible. Cloud computing is what turns the tablet and the smartphone into viable devices.

Google’s robotics drive

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This morning’s Observer column.

You may not have noticed it, but over the past year Google has bought eight robotics companies. Its most recent acquisition is an outfit called Boston Dynamics, which makes the nearest thing to a mechanical mule that you are ever likely to see. It’s called Big Dog and it walks, runs, climbs and carries heavy loads. It’s the size of a large dog or small mule – about 3ft long, 2ft 6in tall, weighs 240lbs, has four legs that are articulated like an animal’s, runs at 4mph, climbs slopes up to 35 degrees, walks across rubble, climbs muddy hiking trails, walks in snow and water, carries a 340lb load, can toss breeze blocks and can recover its balance when walking on ice after absorbing a hefty sideways kick.

You don’t believe me? Well, just head over to YouTube and search for “Boston Dynamics”. There, you will find not only a fascinating video of Big Dog in action, but also confirmation that its maker has a menagerie of mechanical beasts, some of them humanoid in form, others resembling predatory animals. And you will not be surprised to learn that most have been developed on military contracts, including some issued by Darpa, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, the outfit that originally funded the development of the internet.

Should we be concerned about this? Yes, but not in the way you might first think…

Read on…

The importance of being Edward

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Opener of my long piece in today’s Observer on the implications of the Snowden revelations.

Whatever else 2013 will be remembered for, it will be known as the year in which a courageous whistleblower brought home to us the extent to which the most liberating communications technology since printing has been captured.

Although Edward Snowden’s revelations initially seemed only to document the extent to which the state had exploited internet technology to create a surveillance system of unimaginable comprehensiveness, as the leaks flowed it gradually dawned on us that our naive lust for “free” stuff online had also enabled commercial interests effectively to capture the internet for their own purposes.

And, as if that realisation wasn’t traumatic enough, Snowden’s revelations demonstrated the extent to which the corporate sector – the Googles, Facebooks, Yahoos and Microsofts of this world – have been, knowingly or unknowingly, complicit in spying on us.

What it boils down to is this: we now know for sure that nothing that you do online is immune to surveillance, and the only people who retain any hope of secure communications are geeks who understand cryptography and use open-source software.

This is a big deal by any standards and we are all in Snowden’s debt, for he has sacrificed his prospects of freedom and a normal life so that the rest of us would know what has happened to the technologies on we now depend. We can no longer plead ignorance as an excuse for alarm or inaction.

Read on…

Even our grunts could be monetised by Facebook

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This morning’s Observer column.

As Mark Twain observed: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” And that was a long time before the web. Which brings us to a meme that was propagating last week though social media. Its essence was an assertion that Facebook monitored – and stored – not only the stuff that its subscribers post on their Facebook pages, but even stuff that they started to type and then deleted! Shock, horror!

Read on…

Why do governments screw up IT projects?

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This morning’s Observer column:

This is a tale of two cities – Washington and London – and of the governments that rule from them. What links the pair is the puzzling failure of said governments to manage two vital IT projects. In both cases, the projects are critically important for the political credibility of their respective administrations. And yet they are both in trouble for reasons that most engineering and computer science undergraduates could have spotted.

So here’s the puzzle: how is it that governments stuffed with able and conscientious civil servants screw up so spectacularly whenever IT is involved?

Let us start with Obamacare, the US president’s landmark reform of his country’s dysfunctional healthcare system…

Read on…

Beyond the bubble

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Yesterday’s Observer column.

The bad news, therefore, is that we’re in a new technology bubble. If you are impolite enough to mention this in Silicon Valley at the moment, however, then people will cut you dead. That’s par for the bubble course. The folks who are caught up in one do not appreciate well-meaning attempts to rain on their parade. When the Celtic tiger was roaring in my beloved homeland, for example, a lone economist named Morgan Kelly dared to say that the tiger had no fur – and was roundly abused for his pains.

The good news is that when the current technology bubble pops there will be less collateral damage than last time. This is largely because it costs so much less to start a technology company nowadays and the funding models (and therefore the investment risks) are different…