How Microsoft spent a decade asleep at the wheel

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This morning’s Observer column.

Coincidentally, in that same year, Gates stepped down from his position as CEO and began the slow process of disengaging from the company. What he failed to notice was that the folks he left in charge, chief among them one Steve Ballmer, were prone to sleeping at the wheel.

How else can one explain the way they failed to notice the importance of (successively) internet search, online advertising, smartphones and tablets until the threat was upon them? Or were they just lulled into somnolence by the sound of the till ringing up continuing sales from the old staples of Windows and Office?

But suddenly, that soothing tinkle has become less comforting. PC sales are starting to decline sharply , which means that Microsoft’s comfort zone is likewise set to shrink. Last week, we had the first indication that Ballmer & Co have woken up. In a 2,700-word internal memo rich in management-speak drivel , Ballmer announced a “far-reaching realignment of the company that will enable us to innovate with greater speed, efficiency and capability in a fast-changing world”.

Before visiting the UK, reset your phone to factory settings

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Visitors may not know this, but maybe they should.

Officers use counter-terrorism laws to remove a mobile phone from any passenger they wish coming through UK air, sea and international rail ports and then scour their data.

The blanket power is so broad they do not even have to show reasonable suspicion for seizing the device and can retain the information for “as long as is necessary”.

Data can include call history, contact books, photos and who the person is texting or emailing, although not the contents of messages.
David Anderson QC, the independent reviewer of terrorism laws, is expected to raise concerns over the power in his annual report this week.

He will call for proper checks and balances to ensure it is not being abused.

PayPal giveth, taketh away $92 quadrillion from customer

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From SiliconBeat.

“I’m a very responsible guy. I would pay the national debt down first. Then I would buy the Phillies, if I could get a great price.”

— Chris Reynolds, of Media, Pa., on seeing in an email statement that his PayPal balance was $92,233,720,368,547,800 . He was not a quadrillionaire — nor the richest man in the world — for long, however. When he logged on to his PayPal account, his balance read $0. Was someone at PayPal a bit spacey? Perhaps PayPal just has astronomical on the mind: As the Merc’s Heather Somerville wrote last month, the company is working on a payments system for use in outer space. But  back to the big oops. ”This is obviously an error and we appreciate that Mr. Reynolds understood this was the case,” the San Jose company said in a statement, according to CNN. The company, owned by eBay (market capitalization: about $73.8 billion), said it offered to donate money to a cause chosen by Reynolds.

Senior moments

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Story from a friend whose daughter recently graduated from a major UK university.

The Vice-Chancellor (or perhaps it was the Chancellor – the distinction between the two is often lost on parents) was making a stirring speech about the importance of knowledge, etc. An example of this was the importance of the great overarching scientific theories. So the great man said, “And Darwin’s theory of…”. At which point he had a Senior Moment. There was a brief pause while he rummaged around for the word. And then out it came: “relativity”.

Could happen to any of us. Well any of us d’une certain age, anyway. I remember overhearing a woman in the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin once explaining to her friend why her husband’s Volvo was superior to her companion’s husband’s Mercedes. “It’s got a cataclysmic convertor”, she said.

Some unintended consequences of NSA snooping

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One of the least-discussed aspects of the Snowden revelations is the catastrophic damage they are doing to US foreign policy in one important area, namely Internet governance.

This is one of the big unsolved problems in the international arena because of the disproportionate power that the US wields in the governance of the Net. The reasons for this are largely historical: the Net was an American creation, and it emerged from a Pentagon project, the Arpanet. In the beginning it was largely an American — and, to some extent, European — project, and so it made sense for the informal governance arrangements (under which, for example, domain names were managed) set up in the early days to continue.

But as the Internet became a truly global system, the old arrangements began to look increasingly odd. They also began to irritate some of the bigger powers like China and Russia, who couldn’t see why a global system should continue to be run by a single, ageing superpower. Why shouldn’t the Internet be governed by an international body — like the United Nations, through one of its agencies, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU)? These stirrings reached a peak at the World Conference on International Telecommunications held last December in Dubai, where there were attempts to loosen the grip of the US on Internet governance. These attempts were robustly rebuffed by the US and its allies, but it was clear that this is an issue that won’t go away.

The problem is that while the current governance system is absurd in a global context, nobody has yet come up with a convincing alternative. Or, to put it another way, it ain’t broke but it still needs fixing. The ‘obvious’ solution — to hand the responsibility over to the UN — would be nuts, because it would mean handing over the Net to a sclerotic, incoherent institution in which Robert Mugabe’s government and a host of other unsavoury regimes have a vote that counts as much as a vote from a democracy. It would be like giving a delicate clock to a monkey.

But, in the end, we will have to have new governance arrangements that meet two criteria: reflecting the truly global nature of the system; and protecting its essential features from the tampering of unsavoury regimes.

Which is where the NSA revelations come in. They demonstrate to the world that the US is an unsavoury regime too. And that it isn’t a power that can be trusted not to abuse its privileged position. They also undermine heady US rhetoric about the importance of a free and open Internet. Nobody will ever again take seriously US Presidential or State Department posturing on Internet freedom. So, in the end, the NSA has made it more difficult to resist the clamour for different – and possibly even more sinister – arrangements for governing the Net.

[HT to Robin Stenham for his comment.]

Time to dump the “Great Firewall” metaphor

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This morning’s Observer column — about a new way of looking at the way the Chinese government deals with the Net.

We need different imagery to communicate the essence of this more sophisticated approach. Rebecca MacKinnon, one of the world’s leading experts on “networked authoritarianism”, suggests that a Chinese scholar, Li Yonggang of the University of Hong Kong, has come up with a better metaphor: the internet as waterworks. He thinks that the regime’s efforts to deal with the internet can be best described as a hydraulic project. Water, in this view, is both vital and dangerous: it has to be managed.

In a blogpost about this approach, MacKinnon wrote: “If you approach internet management in this way, the system has two main roles: managing water flows and distribution so that everybody who needs some gets some, and managing droughts and floods – which if not managed well will endanger the government’s power. It’s a huge complex system with many moving parts … there’s no way a government can have total control over water levels. Depending on the season, you allow water levels in your reservoir to be higher or lower … but you try to prevent levels from getting above a certain point or below a certain point, and if they do you have to take drastic measures to prevent complete chaos.”

Given that almost all of the ruling Chinese elite are engineers, you can see why this approach would make sense to them. It’s both rational and feasible. And it provides such an instructive comparison with GCHQ, whose pet project for hoovering the network is codenamed – wait for it! – “Mastering the internet”. Interesting metaphor that, eh?

The hut where the Internet began

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Interesting, slightly elegaic piece by Alexis Madrigal in The Atlantic, reflecting on the life and career of Doug Engelbart and the networked world that we have inherited.

networked computing technology has had a similar privileged spot in American life for at least 30 years. Networked computers democratized! Anyone could have a voice! They delivered information, increased the variety of human experience, allowed new capabilities, and helped the world become more open and connected. Computers and the Internet were forces for good in the world, which is why technology was so readily attached to complex, revolutionary processes like the Arab Spring, for example.

But a broad skepticism about technology has crept into (at least) American life. We find ourselves a part of a “war on terror” that is being perpetually, secretly fought across the very network that Engelbart sought to build. Every interaction we have with an Internet service generates a “business record” that can be seized by the NSA through a secretive process that does not require a warrant or an adversarial legal proceeding. 

The disclosure of the NSA’s surveillance program is not Hiroshima, but it does reveal the latent dark power of the Internet to record communication data at an unprecedented scale, data that can be used by a single nation to detriment of the rest. The narrative of the networked age will never be as simple as it once was. 

If you’re inclined to see the trails of information Bush imagined future scholars blazing as (meta)data to be hoovered up, if you’re inclined to see PRISM as a societal Memex concentrated in the hands of the surveillance state, then perhaps, we’re seeing the end of the era Bush’s article heralded.

At the very least, those with the lofty goal of improving humanity are going to have to explain  why they’ve chosen networked computing as their augmentation platform of choice, given the costs that we now know explicitly exist. The con side of the ledger can no longer be ignored.

He’s right about one thing: the narrative of the networked age will never be as simple as it once was.

Technology vs. Democracy

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I participated in an interesting discussion last night at the Frontline Club on the topic of “privacy vs. security: have we got the balance right?” It was chaired by the BBC’s urbane Mark Urban. The other panellists were Professor Helen Margetts of the Oxford Research Institute, John Kampfner, former Editor of the New Statesman and now a consultant to Google, and Sir Malcolm Rifkind, a former Foreign Secretary and now Chairman of the Commons Intelligence Committee which is currently looking into the Snowden revelations and their implications (if any) for the UK.

It was an enjoyable discussion with a packed and attentive audience. Malcolm Rifkind did a predictably good job of defending the proposition that the UK is doing a reasonable job of ensuring that its spooks obey the laws that apply to them (specifically the Intelligence Services Act, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and the Human Rights Act — though he said relatively little about the HRA). What he didn’t address — because it’s not in his Committee’s remit, was my question about whether GCHQ is a competent outfit which gives value for the oceans of public money that it consumes. And nobody really addressed my biggest concern, which is whether the level of comprehensive surveillance that we now have is, in the end, compatible with a democratic, open society.

Just before embarking on this post, a link popped up in my Twitterstream. It led to an astonishing post on the Economist blog. It’s entitled “America versus Democracy” and starts from the observation that FISC, the secret court that supposedly authorises NSA surveillance, has effectively become a parallel Supreme Court, because it is making law relating to the Fourth Amendment (which is the one that supposedly regulates the state’s ability to intrude on citizens’ privacy). And it’s doing this lawmaking entirely in secret.

But then the post begins to explore the implications of this.

That all the people of the Earth, by dint of common humanity, are entitled to the protections of democracy is an inspiring principle. However, its foreign-policy implications are not really so clear. To those of us who are sceptical that America has the authority to intervene whenever and wherever there are thwarted democratic rights, the advocates of democracy-promotion offer a more businesslike proposition. It is said that authoritarianism, especially theocratic Islamic authoritarianism, breeds anti-American terrorism, and that swamp-draining democracy-promotion abroad is therefore a priority of American national security. If you don’t wish to asphyxiate on poison gas in a subway, or lose your legs to detonating pressure-cookers at a road-race, it is in your interest to support American interventions on behalf of democracy across the globe. So the story goes.

However, the unstated story goes, it is equally important that American democracy not get out of hand. If you don’t want your flight to La Guardia to end in a ball of fire, or your local federal building to be razed by a cataclysm of exploding fertiliser, you will need to countenance secret courts applying in secret its own secret interpretation of hastily drawn, barely debated emergency security measures, and to persecute with the full force of the world’s dominant violent power any who dare afford a glimpse behind the veil.

You see, democracy here at home must be balanced against the requirements of security, and it is simply too dangerous to leave the question of this balance to the democratic public. Open deliberation over the appropriate balance would require saying something concrete about threats to public safety, and also about the means by which those threats might be checked. But revealing such information would only empower America’s enemies and endanger American lives. Therefore, this is a discussion Americans can’t afford to have. Therefore, the power to determine that this is a discussion the public cannot afford to have cannot reside in the democratic public. That power must reside elsewhere, with the best and brightest, with those who have surveyed the perils of the world and know what it takes to meet them. Those deep within the security apparatus, within the charmed circle, must therefore make the decision, on America’s behalf, about how much democracy—about how much discussion about the limits of democracy, even—it is safe for Americans to have.

That’s the argument I was trying to make last night, but much more eloquently stated. It’s why this stuff really matters.

On the way home on the train, I was reading the New Yorker, still one of the great treasures of journalism, when I came on a cartoon. It shows two NSA operatives sitting before a wall of computer monitors. “After we read every e-mail that’s ever been written”, one is saying to the other, “I’m gonna start on that new Dan Brown novel”.