The new sun in the tech universe

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column:

The Christmas holidays are the time of year when different generations of the family gather around the dinner table. So it’s a perfect opportunity for a spot of tech anthropology. Here’s how to do it.

At some point, insert into the conversation a contemporary topic about which most people have strong opinions but know relatively little. Jeremy Clarkson, say. There will come a moment when someone decides that the only thing to be done to resolve the ensuing factual disputes is to “Google it”. Watch what happens next…

Read on

Dave Winer would like to apologise, on behalf of the United States…

Posted on by

To the rest of the world…

I would like to apologize for Donald Trump and the selfish, childish, uninformed Americans who support him.

Many Americans are from immigrant families who came here as a sanctuary. In some cases, America saved our lives. Many of us are not Christian, though we tolerate them, even though, as in this case they often act like immature entitled condescending superior brats.

I am sorry you all have to see this. But no one has voted yet. Let’s see how it turns out before we panic.

Scripting.com

Thanks, Dave. But we never held you responsible for him!

Surveillance, long-term effects of

Posted on by

Interesting post by a former Federal agent:

We all have a “private self” and a “public self.” It’s no secret that we all act and communicate differently when we are alone or in a setting with people with trust. In a free country, the decision to transition from that private self to the public self is largely within the control of the individual. When a free man or woman is home spending time with family he or she inhabits the private self. Typically one transitions to a public self when they grab the car keys and open the front door to head to work. There are things you may do or say while you were acting as that private self that you will no longer do or say at work, in your car, in an email, or on a business conference call.

Now, imagine living in a place where there is no distinction between the private self and the public self. Imagine a place where only the government has the key that unlocks the door between the private self and the public self…

The (non)sharing economy

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column:

A euphemism is a polite way of obscuring an uncomfortable or unpleasant truth. So pornography becomes adult entertainment, genocide becomes ethnic cleansing, sacking someone becomes letting him (or her) go. People pass away rather than die; toilets become rest rooms; CCTV cameras monitor public and private spaces for our comfort and safety; and shell shock evolved into battle fatigue before finally winding up as post-traumatic stress disorder – which is really a way of disguising the awkward fact that killing people in cold blood can do very bad things to your psyche.

The tech industry is also addicted to euphemism. Thus the ubiquitous, unfair, grotesquely unbalanced contract which gives an internet corporation all the rights and the user almost none is called an end-user licence agreement. Computers that have been illegally hacked are “pwned”. The wholesale hoovering-up of personal data by internet companies (and the state) is never called by its real name, which is surveillance. And so on.

But the word that is most subverted by the tech industry is share…

Read on

History’s contradictions

Posted on by

Lovely Observer piece by Will Hutton:

Sometimes dealing with the past is easy. A few months ago, the college where I am principal (Hertford, Oxford) handed back a precious 16th-century atlas to its rightful owners – the Humboldt University library in Berlin. A British soldier had been offered it in exchange for a packet of cigarettes in the devastated streets of Berlin in May 1945. His father was an Oxford professor and for most of the last 70 years the Ortelius atlas had been first buried in his room and then locked in the college safe.

The 70th anniversary of the end of the war seemed as good a moment as any to return it. But what struck everyone at the small ceremony was how affected the German delegation, including representatives from the embassy and Humboldt University, were by what we were doing. It was a symbol of Germany’s relationship with Britain within a peaceful EU, an act of friendship all the more valuable because it had been freely offered and a recognition that history had moved on.

But more often than not history’s legacies are more unforgiving – a minefield in which yesterday’s and today’s realities seem irreconcilable…

Hunting the Qubit

Posted on by

Today’s Observer column:

We live in a universe that virtually none of us will ever understand. Physicists, however, refuse to be daunted by this and have been casting about for ways of putting these quantum properties to practical use. In the process, their gaze alighted on that fundamental building block of digital technology, the humble binary digit (or “bit”) in which all digital information is encoded. In the Newtonian (ie non-quantum) world, a bit can take only one of two values – one or zero. But at the quantum level, superposition means that a quantum bit – a qubit – could have multiple values (one, zero and a superposition of one and zero) at the same time. Which means that a computer based on quantum principles would be much, much faster than a conventional, silicon-based one. Various outfits have been trying to build one.

The results are controversial but intriguing…

Read on

Academic bitchiness

Posted on by

Isaiah Berlin was a past-master of the genre. Here he is writing1 to Marion and Felix Frankfurter in December 1934 about Richard Crossman, who was then a Fellow of New College, Oxford (where Berlin had been briefly a Fellow), and whom I think Berlin detested.

“Crossman is trying to sell his soul again & finding no buyers even among those who think he had one.”

I worked for Crossman briefly, when he was Editor of the New Statesman. He was an interesting man, but not a nice one.

  1. from Flourishing: Letters 1928-1946, edited by Henry Hardy, Chatto & Windus, 2004. ↩