The significance of the new Apple watch

Posted on by

Jon Gruber nails it with a typically insightful piece:

All three products (counting XS and XS Max as a single product in two sizes, which, as I’ll explain later, is how to think about them) are interesting, but to me, the Series 4 watch was the standout of the show. The XS and XR iPhones are refinements to the landmark X that was announced last year. The Series 4 watch is a landmark redesign.

I would argue that the landmark iPhone models were the original, the iPhone 4, the iPhone 6, and the iPhone X. It’s kind of interesting to me how the Apple Watch’s evolution has paralleled the iPhone’s. A first-generation model like nothing seen before, good enough to change an entire industry but deeply flawed in certain obvious ways. Second and third generation models that simply address those obvious flaws. And then a fourth generation model that takes things to an altogether new level, particularly pertaining to the display and the physical case of the device.

In the presentation, Apple executives made a big deal of the ECG feature of the new watch, especially the fact that it has FDA clearance. It is a big deal — as anyone with heart trouble will confirm. But Apple is being disingenuous in not acknowledging that they are late to this particular party. A company called AliveCor has been marketing an ECG monitor for the iPhone — and (irony of ironies) a special watch-band for the Apple Watch for some years. I know about it because a friend of mine found it to be a life-enhancing piece of kit. In fact, in lectures over the last two years I’ve been citing it as an example of the unquestionable upsides of mobile technology.

I guess those billionaire executives can’t bring themselves to admit that they’re behind some curves. That’s not to say that their implementation of the ECG tech isn’t neat. It is. But it’s not the first.

Controlling digital giants: new ideas wanted

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column:

The five biggest companies in the world are now all digital giants, each wielding monopolistic power in their markets. We are increasingly aware that some of their activities are socially damaging: they are deepening inequality, avoiding taxation, undermining democratic processes, creating addictive products, eroding privacy and so on. And yet, with the odd exception (mostly represented by the European commission), our societies seem transfixed by them, like rabbits paralysed in the tractor’s headlights. Politicians bleat about the need to do something about the digital giants, but so far it’s been all talk and no action.

This is strange because democracies have extensive legal toolkits for dealing with overweening corporate power. We have antitrust and competition laws, monopolies and merger commissions and federal trade commissions coming out of our ears. And yet – again with the single exception of the European commission – they seem unable to deal with the digital giants. Why?

The answer is partly historical and partly ideological…

Read on

Why Google wants to get back into China

Posted on by

From Kara Swisher:

Rather than obsessions about whether Google is ‘censoring’ right-wing politicians, Washington lawmakers

should take all their sanctimony and direct it at the China issue, which actually deserves some scrutiny. Perhaps that is the real reason Google avoided sending its current chief executive, Sundar Pichai, to the recent Senate hearings, so he could avoid explaining what it was thinking when it came China 2.0: Now With 100 Percent More Hypocrisy.

Google seems to have no problem climbing down off its high horse to grab the thing it needs in China.

Which is, simply put, more data.

In his new book, “AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order,” Dr. Lee [Dr Jai-Fu Lee, head of Google China] argues that advances in artificial intelligence — the future of computing — will be enjoyed only by those with the ability to essentially shove increasing amounts of data into the maw of the machine.

Right now, he notes, with China’s aggressive use of sensors and you-say-facial-recognition-I-say-surveillance, a population hooked on mobile in a much more significant way than here and consumers more willing to trade away their privacy for digital convenience, China’s internet companies have access to 10 to 15 times more data than American ones. Dr. Lee and others have called it a “data gap” that Google has to bridge, and soon, if it wants to remain competitive.

As James Carville might have said: it’s the data, stoopid.

Quote of the Day

Posted on by

“Saint Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabobov, Isaiah Berlin, and Ayn Rand. The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher. The third was neither but thought she was both.”

Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind.

Negative equilibrium

Posted on by

From The Economist:

The two major parties are incompetent as well as divided. Their leaders, a charisma-free robot and a superannuated Marxist, are two of the most unimpressive in recent history. The cabinet and shadow cabinet are stuffed with hangers-on. Chris Grayling made a thorough hash of things as justice secretary, only to be put in charge of transport, where he has made an even bigger mess. Leslie Rowse, a historian of Elizabethan England, argued that the basic rule of academic life was that second-raters would always appoint third-raters over first-raters. Rowse’s rule now applies to politics on both sides of the parliamentary aisle.

The result is a negative equilibrium. The government can get away with being useless because it faces a useless opposition, and vice versa. The political system is designed to hold regular tests of strength, as government ministers explain their policies to Parliament. But these tests of strength have turned into tests of weakness, as incompetent opposition spokesmen fail to hold incompetent ministers to account. It is notable that the only serious blow against a minister in recent months was struck by a backbencher, Yvette Cooper, who dispatched Amber Rudd, then home secretary, during a committee meeting.

If…

Posted on by

Michael Tomasky, writing in the New York Review of Books:

Arguably every single tweet the president writes about the investigation, attacking Mueller’s “13 Angry Democrats” and denouncing it as an invariably upper-cased Witch Hunt, is an attempt to obstruct justice; if you don’t think so, get yourself placed under federal investigation and try mimicking Trump’s Twitter habits and see what happens to you.

All of this doesn’t begin to detail what Mueller and his team have learned from interviews about what took place in private. It’s a reasonable bet, then, that Mueller will find that Trump and others around him—former press aide Hope Hicks, possibly his son Donald Jr., maybe Jared Kushner, other campaign associates and hangers-on—have lied or tried to quash or in some way compromise the investigation.

If that happens, what comes next? Three days before Trump’s inauguration, the neoconservative Bush administration official Eliot A. Cohen wrote that “this will be a slogging match until the end.” He felt confident, however, that “the institutions will contain him and the laws will restrain him if enough people care about both, and do not yield to fear of him and whatever leverage he tries to exert from his mighty office.”

Of those forty-five words of Cohen’s, the most important is “if.”

Spot on. And, given the current crop of Republicans in both the House and the Senate, I think we know the answer.

Quitting Twitter

Posted on by

Ian Betteridge has had enough:

Why should I make an investment both in time and emotion in a service that actually cares so little about its users — and, in fact, about the health of the society it now influences? The excuse that Twitter holds up a mirror to wider society is hogwash: it has consistently and with an outstanding level of ill-judgement given a platform to and cultivated people with utterly reprehensible views.

If you’re an out and out vile individual, like Alex Jones, Twitter gives you a free pass. If you’re a conspiracy theorist who wants to get traction for your lies, Twitter is your friend. If you’re a racist, Twitter will defend your “free speech rights”.

But if you’re a woman getting vile, violent and consistent abuse, Twitter will do precisely nothing to stop it.

Without Twitter, the insanity that is QAnon couldn’t have gained the traction it has. Confined to 4chan, it would have been yet another crackpot piece of tomfoolery. Amplified unchallenged by Twitter, it becomes a series of signs held up at Trump’s rallies, and a truck parked across a highway. It won’t be too long before it becomes a death.

Yep. Sometimes, in recent times, I’ve been wondering which of the networks is the most anti-social. Twitter is now probably the worst. The fact that it’s smaller than Facebook provides some consolation, but not much.

Quote of the Day

Posted on by

”With AI devices, consumers exist in a hybrid state where they are someone who buys a product but also a resource… They’re also a worker in that they’re providing unpaid labor by giving feedback to the system.”

Kate Crawford

The political economy of trust

Posted on by

Cambridge University has a new ‘strategic research initiative’ on Trust and Technology, on whose Steering Group I sit.

We’re having a big launch event on September 20, and so I’ve been brooding about the issues surrounding it. Much (most?) of the discussion of trustworthy technology is understandably focussed on the technology itself. But this ignores the fact that the kit doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Digital technology is now part of the everyday lives of [4 billion people] and our dependence on it has raised many questions of trust, reliability, integrity, dependability, equity and control.

Some of these issues undoubtedly stem from technical characteristics of the equipment (think of all the crummy IoT devices coming from China); others stem from the fallibility or ignorance of users (accepting default passwords); but a significant proportion come from the fact that network technology is deployed by global corporations with distinctive business models and strategic interests which are not necessarily aligned with either the public interest or the wellbeing of users.

An interesting current example is provided by VPN (Virtual Private Network) technology. This enables users to create a private network that runs on a public network, thereby enabling them to send and receive data across the public network as if their computing devices were directly connected to the private one. The benefits of VPNs include enhanced functionality, security, and privacy protection and they are a boon for Internet users who need to use ‘free’ public WiFi services in hotels, cafes and public transport. In that sense VPN is a technology that enhances the trustworthiness of open WiFi networks. I use an encrypted VPN all the time on all my devices, and never use an open WiFi network unless I have the VPN switched on.

Earlier this year, Facebook generously offered some of its users Onavo Protect, a VPN developed by an Israeli company that Facebook bought in 2013. A link to the product appeared in the feeds of some US Facebook IOS users under the banner “Protect”. Clicking through on this led to the download link for “Onavo Protect — VPN Security” on the Apple App Store.

The blurb for the App included a promise to “keep you and your data safe when you browse and share information on the web” but omitted to point out that its functionality involved tracking user activity across multiple different applications to learn insights about how Facebook customers use third-party services. Whenever a user of Onavo opened up an app or website, traffic was redirected to Facebook’s servers, which logged the action in a database to allow the company to draw conclusions about internet usage from aggregated data.

Needless to say, close inspection of the Terms and Conditions associated with the app revealed that “Onavo collects your mobile data traffic. This helps us improve and operate the Onavo service by analyzing your use of websites, apps and data”. Whether non-technical users — who presumably imagined that a VPN would provide security and privacy for their browsing (rather than enabling Facebook to track their online activities outside of its ‘walled garden’) understood what this meant is an interesting question. In August 2018, Apple settled the issue — ruling that Onavo Protect violated a part of its developer agreement that prevents apps from using data in ways that go beyond what is directly relevant to the app or to provide advertising, and the app was removed (by Facebook, after discussions with Apple) from the Apple Store. (It is still available for Android users on the Google Play store.)

And the moral? In assessing trustworthiness the technical affordances of the technology are obviously important. But they may be only part of the story. The other part — the political economy of the technology — may actually turn out to be the more important one.