Category Archives: Observer

Old Europe takes on Google

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The news that the EU has decided to investigate whether Google is abusing its dominance of the market for internet searches naturally led your columnist to type "Google abuses market dominance" into, well, Google. In 0.19 seconds it reported 4.4 million results.

The same query typed into Bing, Microsoft's search engine, produced only 362,000 hits. On the other hand, typing "Microsoft abuses market dominance" into Bing produced only 218,000 results, whereas the same query produced 665,000 results in Google. From which we can draw two conclusions. The first is that the algorithmic machinations of search engines, like the Peace of God, passeth all understanding. The second is that the EU is about to spend a few years, and several million euros, coming to the same conclusion…

This morning’s Observer column.

Why the Establishment hates the Net

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This morning’s Observer column.

Two disconnected events last week showed how far we still have to go in understanding our new communications environment. In one, an Anglican bishop was suspended for some remarks he made on his Facebook page about the forthcoming wedding of two graduates of St Andrews University. In the other, a 27-year-old accountant had his appeal against a conviction for posting a joke message on Twitter dismissed.

First, the bishop…

Facebook, Google and the battle for the inbox

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This morning’s Observer column.

The trouble with email, as the parent of every teenager knows, is that it’s so, well … yesterday. I mean to say, you have to think of a “subject” and whether you’re going to start the message with “Dear” or “Hi!” or “Yo!”. And then there’s the problem of what you put at the end: “See you!” or “xxx” or “Gotta go…” And don’t even mention the issue of the ‘signature’ at the end of the message – you know, “Sent from my iPhone” and all that. And on top of that, there’s the fact that email isn’t synchronous. You could send a message and the other person might not see it for, well, at least five minutes.

Hopeless.

This is the context in which Facebook’s latest ‘messages’ initiative needs to be seen…

Richard Harper — whose new book I am enjoying — also has a nice piece about communications overload in the paper this morning. His conclusion:

Zuckerberg’s announcement has hit a nerve – but not because of the number of messages we now receive. It’s because his announcement is asking us to think about who we want to be and how we convey that through our communications. These are human questions, not technical ones, and all the more important because of it.

What’s the point of The Social Network?

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This morning’s Observer column.

Lessig’s point is that it’s the open internet that should be the real hero of the story. “What’s important here,” he writes, “is that Zuckerberg’s genius could be embraced by half-a-billion people within six years of its first being launched, without – and here is the critical bit – asking the permission of anyone.” That’s true, but I think Lessig is too harsh. The message he wants the film to communicate is there in the screenplay if you look hard enough. It lies in the film’s portrayal of the contrast between what happens to unauthorised innovation on a closed, tightly controlled system and what’s possible with the open, uncontrolled architecture of the internet.

The Mac Apps store: a harbinger of … what?

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This morning’s Observer column.

A couple of weeks ago, Apple announced some new products, including a fancy new lightweight laptop and the latest version of the OS X operating system. In the midst of all the techno-porn, however, Steve Jobs dropped a little bombshell: Apple is opening an online store to sell Mac apps, ie small programs akin to those sold for the iPhone and iPad.

So what? you say. And you may be right. But since Apple is now one of the biggest companies in the world (by market value), nothing that it announces will go unexamined. In the blogosphere, there has been much speculation about what the Mac app store portends.

Opinions vary from the bored to the apocalyptic…

The £500m question

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This morning’s Observer column.

The news that, according to the national security review at least, cyber attack comes second only to terrorism as the gravest security threat facing the nation will have come as a great surprise to most citizens. We are conscious of the annoyances of malware, viruses, worms, spam and phishing, but for most these are just minor irritations, not threats to the nation's survival.

Yet the other day we had the foreign secretary gravely intoning why, in the midst of the most savage spending cuts in living memory, it is suddenly necessary to give an extra £500m to GCHQ to protect us against nemesis in cyberspace. At the same time, in America, we see the Pentagon setting up a whole new cyber command, USCybercom, with all the usual paraphernalia and awash with funding.

What, you might ask, is going on?

There seem to be two broad answers to the question…

Reading the pulse

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This morning’s Observer column.

One of the few comical aspects of the spending review is the frantic attempts by all concerned to predict how the victims of Osborne's axe will respond. The major newspaper groups and the Tory party will of course be deploying the usual – expensive – steam-age tools: opinion polls and focus groups. The cash-strapped Labour and Liberal Democrat parties may have to resort to cheaper techniques – inspecting the entrails of slaughtered goats, perhaps. In the interests of levelling the playing field, therefore, this column offers them a better idea: intelligent data-mining on Twitter.

It’s taken a while for the penny to drop, but finally the world is waking up to the fact that the phenomenon of social networking might actually tell us useful things about what's happening out there in the world beyond the Washington Beltway and the Westminster village. Not only that, but the resulting data might even be useful for predicting what’s likely to happen…

The worm that’s turning

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This morning’s Observer column

In the normal course of events, a Siemens Simatic Programmable Logic Controller PLC would not be of interest to anyone other than a hardcore industrial process engineer. It’s a small, dedicated computer used to control the operations of specialised machinery in a wide range of manufacturing industries. Since June, however, the Siemens controllers have become a topic of intense interest to people like journalists and policymakers who, in normal circumstances, have difficulty controlling a microwave oven.

How come? The reason is the Stuxnet worm, a piece of computer malware as malicious software is called, that has caused a huge stir in the mainstream media…

Why e-books are a weight off my mind (and on my conscience)

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Last Sunday’s Observer column.

When the history of e-reading technology comes to be written, an Irishman named Michael O'Leary will be assigned a small but significant role in the story. This is not because the chief executive of Ryanair has a secret life as a geek, but simply because he has perfected a system for squeezing his customers until their pips squeak. And therein lies the tale…

A Flickr of interest

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This morning’s Observer column.

At a Royal Society symposium on web science this week, Tim Berners-Lee let slip an interesting observation. Many people, said the web's inventor, no longer make a distinction between Facebook and the web. My guess is that these people are mainly teenagers – those whose experience of cyberspace is coloured by the fact that the first thing they encountered online was social networking. They started with Bebo and MySpace and then graduated to Facebook. And there they have stayed.

So, for them, Facebook is where it's at. That explains why they no longer use email, for example, except – grudgingly – to collect official communications from school or college. Most of their electronic communications are routed either via text messaging or Facebook updates. Almost all teenage party invitations now come via Facebook, which has also become the logbook of their lives. When it was announced a couple of weeks ago that Flickr, the photo-hosting site, had hosted its five billionth picture, someone pointed out smugly that Facebook already has over three times that number…