Category Archives: Observer

Privacy: the perfect storm of surveillance

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From an Editorial in today’s Observer.

A pattern is emerging. A researcher discovers that a product or service offered by a large (generally US-based) company contains a security flaw or a feature that compromises the privacy of internet users. The revelations are confirmed by other experts across the internet. The company responsible then goes through a predictable series of steps: first, “no comment”, followed by indignant denial, then a PR-spun “explanation” and, eventually, an apology of sorts plus a declaration that the bug will be fixed or the intrusive practice terminated.

A recent example was Apple’s extraordinary contortions over the discovery that its iPhone was covertly collecting location data and storing it in unencrypted form. But last week also saw the revelation that devices made by TomTom, the leading manufacturer of GPS navigation systems, had effectively been spying on Dutch users and that the aggregated data had been sold to the police in order to guide the location of speed traps…

Journal of the cyber-plague years

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My piece in today’s Observer.

In 1971, Bob Thomas, an engineer working for Bolt, Beranek and Newman, the Boston company that had the contract to build the Arpanet, the precursor of the internet, released a virus called the "creeper" on to the network. It was an experimental, self-replicating program that infected DEC PDP-10 minicomputers. It did no actual harm and merely displayed a cheeky message: "I'm the creeper, catch me if you can!" Someone else wrote a program to detect and delete it, called – inevitably – the "reaper".

Although nobody could have known it 40 years ago, it was the start of something big, something that would one day threaten to undermine, if not overwhelm, the networked world…

Privacy in the networked universe

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From a comment piece by me in today’s Observer.

Recent events in the high court suggest that we now have two parallel media universes.

In one – Universe A – we find tightly knit groups of newspaper editors and expensive lawyers trying to persuade a judge that details of the sexual relations between sundry celebrities and a cast of characters once memorably characterised by a Glasgow lawyer as “hoors, pimps and comic singers” should (or should not) be published in the public prints.

If the judge sides with the celebs, then he or she can grant an injunction forbidding publication. But because news of an injunction invariably piques public interest (no smoke without fire and all that), an extra legal facility has become popular — the super-injunction, which prevents publication of news that an injunction has been granted, thereby ensuring not only that Joe Public knows nothing of the aforementioned cavortings, but also that he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know.

In the old days, this system worked a treat for the simple reason that Universe A was hermetically sealed. If a judge granted the requisite injunctions, then nobody outside the magic circle knew anything.

But those days are gone. Universe A is no longer hermetically sealed.

It now leaks into Universe B, which is the networked ecosystem powered by the internet. And once news of an injunction gets on to the net, then effectively the whole expensive charade of Universe A counts for nought. A few minutes’ googling or twittering is usually enough to find out what’s going on.

This raises interesting moral dilemmas for Joe Public…

News-U-Like

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This morning’s Observer column.

Way back in 1996, the distinguished American journalist James Fallows published Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy, a remarkable study of the pernicious effects of broadcast television on democracy.

Among the phenomena he examined were the relentless trivialisation implicit in soundbite politics, the obsessive insistence that every political issue – no matter how complex – has only two sides and the tendency to treat every political controversy as if it were a football game and every election a horse race. But, en passant, Fallows also highlighted an equally disturbing trend – towards market-driven news: that is, news agendas that are driven not by some professional assessment of what's important and relevant, but by research into what viewers like and respond to. Put crudely, such an approach leads to news programming that plays down politics and economics in favour of coverage of crime, celebrity and sport. News-U-Like, as it were.

Earlier this month, Fallows decided to revisit this territory by embarking on a study of contemporary online news media…

James Gleick and the mystery of information

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In today’s Observer there’s a conversation between me and James Gleick, whose book, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood has just been published in the UK.

Here’s a paradox: we live in an “information age” and yet information is a maddeningly elusive concept. We habitually confuse it with data, on the one hand, and with knowledge on the other. And yet it’s neither. There’s an arcane mathematical discipline called “information theory” that underpins all digital communications nowadays and yet resolutely disdains to make any connection between information and meaning. It would take a brave author to pursue such an elusive quarry. Or a foolhardy one.

James Gleick is an accomplished stalker of mysterious ideas. His first book, Chaos (1987), provided a compelling introduction to a new science of disorder, unpredictability and complex systems. His new book, The Information, is in the same tradition. It’s a learned, discursive, sometimes wayward exploration of a very complicated subject…

I had a nice email this morning from Chris Stewart, a reader in Australia, who had just seen the piece. It reminded him, he said of a limerick that did the rounds in late 1960s Information Science circles. “I have”, he writes, “no idea who wrote it and after quoting it for more than 40 years no one has claimed it …”.

“Shannon and Weaver and I
Have found it instructive to try
To measure sagacity
And channel capacity
With sigma p i log p i”

Which is a nice way of summarising Shannon’s formula for information as the measure of ‘unexpectedness’ of a message — H, as here:

“Weaver” refers to Warren Weaver who wrote a piece for Scientific American (“The Mathematics of Communication”, July 1949, p 11-15) explaining the significance of Shannon’s original paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” which had been published in two issues of the Bell Systems Technical Journal in 1948. The book, The Mathematical Theory of Communication by Shannon and Weaver, was published in 1949. It consisted of Shannon’s journal articles plus Weaver’s more accessible explanation.

Maddeningly, I can’t find a copy of Weaver’s SciAm article online, though I’m sure it’s around somewhere. And the SciAm search engine denies all knowledge of Warren Weaver.

Still, apropos the ditty forwarded by Chris Stewart, it’s good to know that Limerick, Ireland’s fourth city, is located on the Shannon, which is Ireland’s largest river.

Amazon’s new Cloud Drive rains on everyone’s parade

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This morning’s Observer column.

“Impetuosity and audacity,” wrote Machiavelli, “often achieve what ordinary means fail to achieve.” If you doubt that, may I propose a visit to the upper echelons of Apple, Google and Sony, where steam might be observed venting from every orifice of senior executives? If you do undertake such a visit, do not under any circumstances mention the word “Amazon”.

The proximate cause of all this corporate spleen is the launch last week of Amazon’s Cloud Drive service. At first sight, it seems straightforward: it looks like a digital locker in which one may for a fee securely store one’s digital assets in the internet ‘cloud’. “Anything digital, securely stored,” runs the blurb, “available anywhere.” The first 5GB of storage is free, with more available at an annual cost of a dollar per gigabyte. Upload files to your "cloud drive", where they are stored online and from where they can be accessed by any device that you own.

So far, so innocuous. It’s not the online storage business that has Apple, Google & Co spitting feathers, but the Amazon CloudPlayer which goes along with the digital locker…

Google booked by judge

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This morning’s Observer column.

Last week, a US judge in Manhattan made a landmark decision. As to what it means, opinions vary. Some see it as arresting the cultural progress that began with the Enlightenment; others are celebrating Judge Denny Chin’s ruling as the blocking of a predatory move by a giant corporation to control access to the world’s cultural heritage. The truth, as always, lies somewhere in between…

LATER: Interesting comment by Tim O’Reilly:

I think that when we look back at the history of the e-book market one of the classic business school cases is going to be how stupid it was for publishers to sue Google. Here you have a powerful, monopolistic company, and then you have another company that comes in really as a white knight, and the publishers sued the white knight. And the thing that was wrong about this was that the publishers’ settlement basically made Google into an ineffective competitor to Amazon. It took away all of Google’s strength. It made their model like Amazon’s, in which it had no advantages.

There were some really interesting things that Google could have done like algorithmic pricing. They were talking about taking a much smaller cut of the transaction, building the marketplace in a very different way. They were talking about open standards. Google ideally should have been building a book search engine that searched all e-books where they were and not just on Google’s site. They made mistakes. If the settlement had pushed them in that way it would have been really, really interesting. But it made Google a book retailer, which they aren’t, and now we have one dominant player, and the publishers are going to really come to regret that. Apple may end up being a big player, but it’s hard to tell.

Thanks to Lorcan Dempsey for the link.

Net Neutrality and Mr Vaizey

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This morning’s Observer column.

Here’s a tale of two societies. The South Korean communications commission is planning to boost broadband speeds in that country tenfold by the end of 2012. That means Koreans will get one gigabit per second (Gbps) connections by next year, which is 200 times as fast as the 5Mbps ADSL connection which is common in the UK. Meanwhile, back in the middle ages (aka Whitehall next Wednesday), a ministerial summit on “net neutrality” convened by the culture secretary Ed Vaizey will hear how Britain’s internet service providers (ISPs) plan to throttle still further the measly internet access they provide to the citizens of the UK in order to boost their bottom lines and reduce competition.

Now it has to be said that the principle of net neutrality is not exactly a staple of saloon-bar conversation, so most citizens will assume that next Wednesday’s discussions have nothing to do with them. In this, they are sadly mistaken – as they will discover if Ed Vaizey does indeed agree to let the ISPs violate or erode the principle…

Obsessiveness rules OK

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This morning’s Observer column.

While all this was going on, Apple and Microsoft were squabbling about capital letters. A while back, Apple attempted to trademark the phrase “App Store” – the name of its online store of downloadable programs. Microsoft objected, arguing that the term was too “generic”. (This from the company whose main products are Windows, Word, Office and Excel.) On Monday last, Apple struck back. “Having itself faced a decades-long genericness [sic] challenge to its claimed Windows mark,” it sniffed in a court filing, “Microsoft should be well aware that the focus in evaluating genericness is on the mark as a whole and requires a fact-intensive assessment of the primary significance of the term to a substantial majority of the relevant public.

“Yet, Microsoft, missing the forest for the trees, does not base its motion on a comprehensive evaluation of how the relevant public understands the term App Store as a whole. What it offers instead are out-of-context and misleading snippets of material printed by its outside counsel from the internet and allegations regarding how the public allegedly interprets the constituent parts of the term App Store, ie, ‘app’ and ‘store’.”

The Church of Latter-Day Apple

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Once upon a time, when Apple was mainly a computer manufacturer, people used to liken it to BMW. That was because it made expensive, nicely designed products for a niche market made up of affluent, design-conscious customers who also served as enthusiastic – nay fanatical – evangelists for the brand. It was seen as innovative and quirky but not part of the industry's mainstream, which was dominated by Microsoft and the companies making the PCs that ran Windows software. This view of Apple was summed up by Jack Tramiel, the boss of Commodore, when Steve Jobs first showed him the Macintosh computer. “Very nice, Steve,” growled Tramiel. “I guess you’ll sell it in boutiques.”

That was a long time ago…

Thus begins my Observer ‘Comment is Free’ piece on Apple’s transformation into the behemoth it has become. Towards the end of the piece, I mentioned Umberto Eco’s famous essay arguing that the Apple Mac was a Catholic device, while the IBM PC was a Protestant one. His reasoning was that, like the Roman church, Apple offered a guaranteed route to salvation – the Apple Way – provided one stuck to it. PC users, on the other hand, had to take personal responsibility for working out their own routes to heaven.

I’ve always thought that Eco’s essay was just a lovely literary conceit. But now, courtesy of Evegny Morozov, I find that there is even a scholarly literature on the subject. Or, at any rate, one learned article. It appeared in 2001 in the Oxford University Press journal Sociology of Religion: a quarterly review under the title “May the Force of the Operating System be with You: Macintosh Devotion as Implicit Religion” and the Abstract reads:

The purpose of this study is to consider the devotion of Macintosh computer enthusiasts as a case of implicit religion. Data was collected from two primary sources: twelve in-depth face-to-face interviews, and letters to the editor from MacAddict magazine. In addition, supplementary information was obtained from pro-Macintosh Web sites and magazines. Following Nesti (1997), Macintosh devotion was analyzed along four lines: (1) the search for meaning, (2) social forms, (3) the hidden message of the metaphor, and (4) the case of the voyage. I found that Mac devotees used the Macintosh as a “reflective medium” to discover meanings in the midst of changing computer technology. As an implicit religion, Macintosh devotion is based on the sacralization of the bond between people and computers. Its followers envision an utopian future in which humans and technology work together in harmony. Furthermore, the Mac enthusiasts adopted from both Eastern and Western religions a social form that emphasized personal spirituality as well as communal experience. The faith of Mac devotees is reflected and strengthened by their efforts in promoting their computer of choice.