Nice updating of the classic 1993 New Yorker cartoon to take in the Snowden era.
From a fascinating talk by Ethan Zuckerman.
Web filtering, Cameron style
Nice satirical video by the Open Rights Group.
Just a pin-prick? Or a big deal?
This morning’s Observer column:
If you have ever been a hospital patient, then you will know the drill: before anything else happens, you have to have your “bloods done”. You roll up your sleeve, a phlebotomist searches your lower arm for a suitable vein, inserts a sterilised needle and extracts a blood sample that is then labelled and sent off to a lab for analysis.
Depending on your condition, this can happen a lot. If you are a cancer sufferer on chemotherapy, for example, you may come to think of your arms as pincushions and you sometimes have to watch in dismay as the phlebotomist hunts up and down for a suitable vein. Although the analysis of blood samples is now highly automated and efficient, at the sample-collection end it’s very time consuming and resource intensive.
The mind boggles at the amount the National Health Service must spend on it every year. And yet it is an absolutely central part of modern healthcare: blood tests are on the critical path of a very large number of diagnostic and treatment regimes.
Enter Theranos, a California startup that has (or claims to have) developed novel approaches to laboratory-based diagnostic blood tests using the science of microfluidics, which concerns the manipulation of tiny amounts of fluids (think ink-jet printers, for example)…
So even Apple can’t break into my iPhone?
Hmmm… I wonder. This from SiliconBeat:
Apple says it would be burdensome — and mostly impossible — for it to unlock people’s iPhones upon the request of law enforcement.
In a legal filing this week, the iPhone maker answered a question posed by U.S. Magistrate Judge James Orenstein, who had been urged by federal prosecutors to force Apple to unlock an iPhone. Orenstein said last week that he would defer ruling until Apple let him know whether it’s feasible to bypass an iPhone’s passcode.
Here’s the meat of Apple’s response, which comes amid law enforcement officials’ growing frustration over tech companies’ increased privacy and security efforts:
“In most cases now and in the future, the government’s requested order would be substantially burdensome, as it would be impossible to perform. For devices running iOS 8 or higher, Apple would not have the technical ability to do what the government requests—take possession of a password protected device from the government and extract unencrypted user data from that device for the government. Among the security features in iOS 8 is a feature that prevents anyone without the device’s passcode from accessing the device’s encrypted data. This includes Apple.”
The fallout from the Safe Harbor judgment — contd.
From today’s New York Times:
Companies are scrambling. American and European lawmakers are upset. And no one really knows how to respond.
The cause of the anxiety? The decision two weeks ago by Europe’s highest court to strike down a 15-year-old international agreement, known as safe harbor, that had allowed companies to move digital information like people’s web search histories between the European Union and the United States.
The ruling has left businesses like Facebook and Google, which rely on the easy transfer of online information to make money from digital advertising, on uneasy legal footing.
A new safe harbor agreement between Europe and the United States could help ease some of that uncertainty, but negotiators have been unable to reach a new deal for two years.
And in a sign of increased tension, European privacy regulators say they will start to enforce tougher oversight of data transfers, including issuing fines and banning overseas data transfers, by the end of January if a new agreement is not reached.
Quote of the Day
Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.
Voltaire
Incivility and its implications
Very perceptive essay by Umair Haque about the long-term implications of online incivility. Sample:
We once glorified Twitter as a great global town square, a shining agora where everyone could come together to converse. But I’ve never been to a town square where people can shove, push, taunt, bully, shout, harass, threaten, stalk, creep, and mob you…for eavesdropping on a conversation that they weren’t a part of…to alleviate their own existential rage…at their shattered dreams…and you can’t even call a cop. What does that particular social phenomenon sound like to you? Twitter could have been a town square. But now it’s more like a drunken, heaving mosh pit. And while there are people who love to dive into mosh pits, they’re probably not the audience you want to try to build a billion dollar publicly listed company that changes the world upon.
The social web became a nasty, brutish place. And that’s because the companies that make it up simply do not not just take abuse seriously…they don’t really consider it at all. Can you remember the last time you heard the CEO of a major tech company talking about…abuse…not ads? Why not? Here’s the harsh truth: they see it as peripheral to their “business models”, a minor nuisance, certainly nothing worth investing in, for theirs is the great endeavor of…selling more ads.
They’re wrong. Nothing could be further from the truth. Abuse is killing the social web, and hence it isn’t peripheral to internet business models — it’s central.
It is. Of course the reason why the proprietors of social networking services don’t want to tackle it is that doing so would imply that they were responsible for what gets published on their platforms, and that might imply legal liability for it in the longer run.
Martian takeaways
We went to see The Martian on Saturday. Interesting and enjoyable, but not as good as Apollo 13. We saw it in 2D, but a friend who saw it in 3D described it as “unmissable”. In structure, it’s a bit formulaic — if you’ve ever read one of those ‘how to write a screenplay that sells’ books you’ll be able to predict how it evolves. But the big difference with Apollo 13 is that The Martian is pure fiction, whereas the earlier film told a version of something that actually happened, and so was significantly more gripping.
Still, the takeaways from The Martian are useful. They include:
- Never underestimate the significance of potatoes
- The importance of ‘maker’ and DIY skills — the very skills that are atrophying because of our addiction to black-box technologies with “no user-modifiable parts”.
- The usefulness of engineers and geeks, especially those who are good with mathematics.
The new Holy War — and its collateral damage
This morning’s Observer column:
The novelist Umberto Eco wrote a deliciously insightful essay in 1994, in which he argued that the Apple Mac was a Catholic machine, in contrast to the PC, which, he argued, was clearly a Protestant device. How so? Simply this: the Mac freed its users/believers from the need to make decisions. All they had to do to find salvation was to follow the Apple Way. When the Mac was launched, for example, a vigorous debate broke out among user-interface geeks about whether a computer mouse should have one or two buttons. Some were critical of the fact that the Macintosh mouse had only one button. But when queried about this, Steve Jobs – then, as later, the supreme pontiff of the Church of Apple – was adamant and unrepentant. Two buttons would undermine the rationale of the Mac user interface. He spoke – as his Vatican counterpart still does – ex cathedra, and that was that.
In contrast, Eco pointed out, the poor wretches who used a PC had, like the Calvinists of yore – to make their own salvation. For them, there was no One True Way. Instead they had to choose and install their own expansion cards and anti-virus software, wrestle with incompatible peripherals and so on. They were condemned to an endless round of decisions about matters that were incomprehensible to them but on which their computational happiness depended.
Spool forward 21 years to today and nothing much has changed, other than that the chasm between computational Catholics and Protestants now applies to handheld computers called smartphones, rather than to the desktop machines of yore…
How to find out how long your runway is
The one big thing I’ve learned from being involved in tech start-ups is that the first person you should hire is a financial controller. You don’t have to have him or her as a full-time employee — usually a day a week is enough at the beginning. But what you need is someone who understands money, because most techies don’t understand it. The best financial controller we ever had maintained a constantly-updated spreadsheet which could tell us — to the day — when we would become insolvent if things continued on their present course.
In principle, insolvency is a simple idea: it’s when your liabilities exceed your assets. But what most engineers and company founders forget is that — if you’re behaving ethically — your liabilities include the cost of shutting down the company, ensuring that laid-off staff get whatever redundancy pay that’s due to them, and that your customers are not left in the lurch. In the UK context, that probably means you need at least £50k over and above the cash you’re counting on to give you the runway provided by your investors.
In one of the companies I was involved in, it took us much longer to get sales revenues than we expected — not because people didn’t like our product (they did), but because when you’re a new company sales take much longer to close, and therefore it takes much longer to get the resulting revenues flowing in. And if you’re doing hardware as well as software (and we were) then you have to remember that in order to make the hardware you have to put money up front — often three to six months ahead of delivery.
Which is why some fledgling companies are destroyed by a sudden big order. The large revenues that will in due course arise from those sales arrive long after you’ve had to put up the cash in to make the kit. And in the interval you can become insolvent — and then it becomes illegal to continue to trade unless you have been able to find ways of increasing your assets, either from investors, a bank overdraft or some other wheeze. So little companies sometimes go under because they’ve suffered what my old friend Roger Needham used to call a “success disaster”.
So it’s nice to discover that Trevor Blackwell has created an elegant interactive calculator which will tell you exactly how much runway you’ve got left. All start-up founders should consult it regularly.