Amazon’s Cloud Nine

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This morning’s Observer column:

In 1999, Andy Grove, then the CEO of Intel, was widely ridiculed for declaring that “in five years’ time there won’t be any internet companies. All companies will be internet companies or they will be dead.” What he meant was that anybody who aspired to be in business in 2004 would have to deal with the internet in one way or another, just as they relied on electricity. And he was right; that’s what a GPT is like: it’s pervasive.

But digital technology differs in four significant ways from earlier GPTs. First of all, it is characterised by zero – or near-zero – marginal costs: once you’ve made the investment needed to create a digital good, it costs next to nothing to roll out and distribute a million (or indeed a billion) copies. Second, digital technology can exploit network effects at much greater speeds than the GPTs of the past. Third, almost everything that goes on in digital networks is governed by so-called power law distributions, in which a small number of actors (sites, companies, publishers…) get most of the action, while everyone else languishes in a “long tail”. Finally, digital technology sometimes gives rise to technological “lock-in”, where the proprietary standards of one company become the de facto standards for an entire industry. Thus, Microsoft once had that kind of lock-in on the desktop computer market: if you wanted to be in business you could have any kind of computer you wanted – so long as it ran Windows…

Read on

LATER Just came on this — which makes the same point about Amazon’s AWS, only more forcefully.

Two cheers for the Librarian of Congress

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Sometimes the Librarian of Congress does the right thing:

Every three years, the Librarian of Congress issues new rules on Digital Millennium Copyright Act exemptions. Acting Librarian David Mao, in an order (PDF) released Tuesday, authorized the public to tinker with software in vehicles for “good faith security research” and for “lawful modification.”

The decision comes in the wake of the Volkswagen scandal, in which the German automaker baked bogus code into its software that enabled the automaker’s diesel vehicles to reduce pollutants below acceptable levels during emissions tests.

“I am glad they granted these exemptions,” said Sherwin Siy, vice president for legal affairs for Public Knowledge in Washington, DC. “I am not glad it was necessary for them to do so in the first place.”

The auto industry, and even the Environmental Protection Agency, opposed the vehicle-tinkering rules that were proposed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others. About every 36 months, the Librarian of Congress and the Copyright Office entertain proposals for exemptions to the DMCA, which was passed in 1998. The DMCA prohibits circumventing encryption or access controls to copy or modify copyrighted works. The ultimate decision rests with the Librarian of Congress.

Just a pin-prick? Or a big deal?

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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)…

Read on.

So even Apple can’t break into my iPhone?

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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.

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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.

Incivility and its implications

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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

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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.