Bitcoin’s silver lining?

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This morning’s Observer column:

The downside of the media feeding frenzy around bitcoin is the way it obscures the fact that the technology underpinning it, the blockchain, or the public distributed ledger – a database securely recording financial, physical or electronic assets for sharing across a network through transparent updates of information – is potentially very important. This is because it may have more useful applications than supporting speculative bubbles or money laundering. In 2016, for example, Mark Walport, the government’s chief scientific adviser issued a report, arguing that the technology “could transform the delivery of public services and boost productivity”.

Which indeed it could, but that would be small beer if the messages I’m picking up from across the tech world are accurate. For the real significance of blockchain technology might be its capacity to retool the internet itself to make it secure enough for modern use and return it to its decentralised essence, in the process possibly liberating it from the tech companies that currently have a stranglehold on it…

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Countering the wisdom of hindsight

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We went to see Darkest Hour last night. Spellbinding performance by Gary Oldman as Churchill. The only parallel I can think of is Bruno Ganz’s evocation of Hitler in Downfall. There are a couple of dramatic-licence slips which are understandable in terms of the script dynamics but overall it’s a fascinating and occasionally moving film. Its most redeeming features are (i) countering the complacency of hindsight by conjuring up the desperation of the British plight after the invasion of France (and before US aid kicked in); and (ii) its revisionist interpretation of the peacemongering activities of Lord Halifax and Neville Chamberlain in the early days of the War Cabinet.

Well worth seeing IMHO.

ps: Makes me realise that I need to read Nicholas Shakespeare’s Six Days in May. No rest for the wicked.

Why Facebook has abandoned news for the important business of trivia

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Today’s Observer column:

Connoisseurs of corporate cant have a new collector’s item: Mark Zuckerberg’s latest Epistle to his Disciples. “We built Facebook,” it begins, “to help people stay connected and bring us closer together with the people that matter to us. That’s why we’ve always put friends and family at the core of the experience. Research shows that strengthening our relationships improves our wellbeing and happiness.”

Quite so. But all is not well, it seems. “Recently,” continues Zuck, sorrowfully, “we’ve gotten feedback from our community that public content – posts from businesses, brands and media – is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other.”

Well, well. How did this happen? Simple: it turns out that “video and other public content have exploded on Facebook in the past couple of years. Since there’s more public content than posts from your friends and family, the balance of what’s in news feed has shifted away from the most important thing Facebook can do – help us connect with each other.”

Note the impersonality of all this. Somehow, this pestilential content has “exploded” on Facebook. Which is odd, is it not, given that nothing appears in a user’s news feed that isn’t decided by Facebook?

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Social media are performative spaces – even when you’re torturing your kids

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Social media are performative spaces in which people try — and succeed — to project images of themselves as they want to be seen by others. We also see this in schools and even elite universities — where students are reluctant to meet face-to-face with their tutors. They want to communicate via electronic messaging — email, WhatsApp, FB Messenger, whatever. Why? Because they are scared of F2F encounters which will reveal their doubts, insecurities, failings, ignorance. Instead they want always to project their ‘edited selves’.

None of this is new. What is really extraordinary, though, about the case of the Californian parents who imprisoned their 13 children (and shackled three of them to furniture) is that they managed to project happy-clappy images of their family on social media.

Less haste, more security

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This morning’s observer column:

I ran into my favourite technophobe the other day. “I see,” he chortled, “that your tech industry (he holds me responsible for everything that is wrong with the modern world) is in meltdown!” The annoying thing is that he was partly right. What has happened is that two major security vulnerabilities – one of them has been christened “Meltdown”, the other “Spectre” – have been discovered in the Central Processing Unit (CPU) chips that power most of the computers in the world.

A CPU is a device for performing billions of apparently trivial operations in sequences determined by whatever program is running: it fetches some data from memory, performs some operations on that data and then sends it back to memory; then fetches the next bit of data; and so on. Two decades ago some wizard had an idea for speeding up CPUs…

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Meltdown and Spectre summarised

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Lovely economical summary by the UK ICO’s Head of Technology Policy of the two vulnerabilities currently obsessing the CPU-design industry:

In essence, the vulnerabilities provide ways that an attacker could extract information from privileged memory locations that should be inaccessible and secure. The potential attacks are only limited by what is being stored in the privileged memory locations – depending on the specific circumstances an attacker could gain access to encryption keys, passwords for any service being run on the machine, or session cookies for active sessions within a browser. One variant of the attacks could allow for an administrative user in a guest virtual machine to read the host server’s kernel memory. This could include the memory assigned to other guest virtual machines.