Assorted links for Tuesday

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Werner Herzog has made a documentary, Lo and behold, about the internet and its implications which premieres this week. He’s done an interview with TechCrunch about it.

The IBM PC – the machine that made personal computers acceptable to chartered accountants – was launched 35 years ago this month.

27,000 computers in London’s Metropolitan Police are still running Windows XP. Here are some reasons why.

Google plans to obliterate Flash from its Chrome browser from next month.

Joe Nye on the fragmentation of the Internet.

How the tech industry differs from the automobile business

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Reading a fascinating WashPo interview with Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, I was struck by this:

We’re a bit larger today, so we can do a bit more than we could do 10 years ago or even five years ago. But we still have, for our size, an extremely focused product line. You can literally put every product we make on this table. That really is an indication of how focused it is. I think that’s a good thing. Regardless of who you are, there’s only so many things that you can do at a very high-quality and deep, deep level — personally and in business. And so we’re not going to change that. That’s core to our model and way of thinking.

This seems very different to the way most successful modern companies operate. With them, the game appears to be to provide a product to match every discernible market niche.

Take Mercedes, for example. I’m perpetually baffled by the various Mercedes model I see on our roads. So I went to the company’s site to try and get a handle on the range.

Here’s what I found. Mercedes sell 28 different types of consumer vehicle in the UK (I’ve ignored the commercial stuff), to wit:

  • 3 types of hatchback
  • 4 types of saloon
  • 4 types of estate car
  • 6 different coupés
  • 4 different models of cabriolet/roadster
  • 6 SUV models
  • 1 MPV

My guess (I haven’t checked) that the BMW range is just as diverse/confusing. It must be a hell of a challenge to maintain some level of coherence in this profusion. How do Mercedes sales personnel keep up? Maybe they instantly categorise every customer who comes in the door. As in: Here comes an estate-car customer. Oh, bet she’s a coupé type. He’s definitely S-class material. And so on.

Maybe the contrast between Mercedes and Apple is emblematic of the cultural differences between the tech and the auto industries. In that sense, Elon Musk’s approach to the Tesla range seems much closer to Apple’s.

Review of ‘The Cyber Effect’

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My Observer review of Maria Aiken’s new book.

Note the doctorate after the author’s name; and the subtitle: A Pioneering Cyberpsychologist Explains How Human Behaviour Changes Online; and the potted bio, informing us that “Dr Mary Aiken is the world’s foremost forensic cyberpsychologist” – all clues indicating that this is a book targeted at the US market, another addition to that sprawling genre of books by folks with professional qualifications using pop science to frighten the hoi polloi.

This is a pity, because The Cyber Effect is really rather good and doesn’t need its prevailing tone of relentless self-promotion to achieve its desired effect, which is to make one think about what digital technology is doing to us…

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Foreign interference in voting systems is a national security issue

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Good WashPo OpEd piece by Bruce Schneier on the implications of (i) Russian hacking of the DNC computer systems and (ii) the revelations about the insecurity if US voting machines:

Over the years, more and more states have moved to electronic voting machines and have flirted with Internet voting. These systems are insecure and vulnerable to attack.

But while computer security experts like me have sounded the alarm for many years, states have largely ignored the threat, and the machine manufacturers have thrown up enough obfuscating babble that election officials are largely mollified.

We no longer have time for that. We must ignore the machine manufacturers’ spurious claims of security, create tiger teams to test the machines’ and systems’ resistance to attack, drastically increase their cyber-defenses and take them offline if we can’t guarantee their security online.

Longer term, we need to return to election systems that are secure from manipulation. This means voting machines with voter-verified paper audit trails, and no Internet voting. I know it’s slower and less convenient to stick to the old-fashioned way, but the security risks are simply too great.

Assorted links for Monday

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“The bandwidth bottleneck that is throttling the Internet” – Nature article that explains why (among other things) your Skype calls are often so poor.

Brexit – a story in maps – the only thing that’s clear about the Brexit vote was the overall percentages pro and anti. Everything else is as muddy as hell — as this terrific mapping exercise shows.

Ben Evans: Is AI the next Big Thing or merely the enabler of many smaller things? Good question. Link

David Auerbach: Donald Trump: Moosbrugger for President . Terrific essay, searching for a precursor or model for Donald Trump. Finds it in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities

The Carpenter and the Gardener – Alison Gopnik’s book on what academic research tells us about rearing children to adulthood (and beyond). I was alerted it by a fascinating Financial Times review which said that it “should be required reading for anyone who is, or is thinking of becoming, a parent. It might also offer comfort to any adult who feels that their life has been blighted by their own parents. (And at £20, it is cheaper than therapy.)” As a baffled parent, I’ve ordered it.

The mystery of Peter Thiel and Donald Trump

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Larry Lessig was as puzzled as I was by Peter Thiel’s endorsement of Donald Trump. But Larry points out something interesting about Thiel’s speech to the GOP Convention:

What’s striking about this speech — except for its references to Trump — is how obviously true it is. Something has gone wrong in America. Growth is not spread broadly. Technical innovation is not spread broadly. We were a nation that tackled real and important problems. We have become a nation where — at least among politicians — too much time is spent arguing over the petty. “Who cares?” about which bathroom someone uses — which coming from a gay libertarian must mean, “it’s not of your business.” The wars of the last generation were stupid. We need to focus on building a “bright future” that all of America can share in.

What’s puzzling about this speech is how this brilliant innovator could predicate these words of a Donald Trump presidency. Maybe the excuse is that they were written before the true insanity of that man became unavoidably obvious. Who knows.

Yep. Who knows?

Links for 14.08.2016

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“Why I can’t bank on Lloyds any more” – nice elegiac piece by Victoria Coren on closure of a local bank branch.

Nate Silver’s daily updated forecast of how the Trump/Clinton contest is likely to play out.

Trump is seeking volunteer election observers to stop Clinton ‘stealing’ the election.

“Think Amazon’s Drone Delivery Idea is a Gimmick? Think Again” – insightful piece on Amazon’s lack of faith in America’s crumbling transport infrastructure.

Facebook won’t allow desktop users to deploy ad-blockers – they can, you know. But to make a real difference they will have to do the same to mobile users.

Does the BBC really have a licence to snoop?

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This morning’s Observer column:

My eye was caught by an interesting “scoop” in last Saturday’s Daily Telegraph: “BBC to deploy detection vans to snoop on internet users,” screamed the headline. “The BBC is to spy on internet users in their homes,” the report began, “by deploying a new generation of Wi-Fi detection vans to identify those illicitly watching its programmes online. The Telegraph can disclose that from next month, the BBC vans will fan out across the country capturing information from private Wi-Fi networks in homes to ‘sniff out’ those who have not paid the licence fee.”

Scary, eh? Before you reach for your tinfoil hat, though, some background might be helpful…

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