Quote of the Day
“Those are my principles. If you don’t like them,… well, I’ve got others.”
Groucho Marx
Funny that this quote should the one that came to mind when I was thinking about David Cameron.
Facebook and your phone’s address book
Interesting report in The Register:
It has emerged that Facebook’s war on competing services now extends beyond the manipulated Timeline and into punters’ pockets. The social network’s mobile app appears to be altering address book entries to direct messages to Facebook mail accounts. A user composing an email on his or her phone will send the missive to a Facebook inbox the recipient has probably never looked at, and as the original email address is overwritten there’s no alternative.According to reports, address books on iOS and Android devices are being updated by the Facebook app whenever there’s an entry in the address book linked to a Facebook account. In some cases it seems the @facebook.com address is being appended to the contact details, but other users are reporting that it’s being overwritten too.
With most companies one would assume that this is a bug. But with Facebook…..?
The ‘Busy’ Trap
Nice essay by Tim Kreider on the prevailing disease of ambitious people.
The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it. Not long ago I Skyped with a friend who was driven out of the city by high rent and now has an artist’s residency in a small town in the south of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn’t consume her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college — she has a big circle of friends who all go out to the cafe together every night. She has a boyfriend again. (She once ruefully summarized dating in New York: “Everyone’s too busy and everyone thinks they can do better.”) What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality — driven, cranky, anxious and sad — turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment. It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school — it’s something we collectively force one another to do.
Our frantic days are really just a hedge against emptiness.
Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.
I was about to click on my ‘Read Later’ bookmarklet because I was too busy to read it. But I didn’t. Yay!
After the Ball…
A groundsman inspects the aftermath of a large marquee in College grounds.
New-tech moguls: the modern robber barons?
My (long) Observer essay about the new Masters of the Digital Universe.
What’s much more significant about these moguls is that they share a mindset that renders them blind to the untidiness and contradictions of life, not to mention the fears and anxieties of lesser beings. They are technocrats who cleave to a worldview that holds that if something is technically possible then it should be done. How about digitising all the books in the world? No problem: you just throw resources and technology at the task. And if publishers protest about infringement of copyright and authors moan about their moral rights, well, that just shows how antediluvian they are. Or how about photographing every street in Europe, or even the world? Again, no problem: it’s technically feasible, after all. And if Germans object to the resulting intrusion on their privacy, well let them complain and we’ll pixelate the sods. Oh – and when we discover that those same cars have been hoovering up the details of our home Wi-Fi networks, their bosses say “Oops! Sorry: it was a mistake.” Same story with the high-resolution satellite imagery beloved of Google and – now – Apple. Same story with Mark Zuckerberg’s fanatical, almost sociopathic, belief that the default setting for life should be “public” rather than “private”. The prevailing technocratic motto is: if something can be done, then it ought to be done. It’s all about progress, stoopid.
Actually, it’s all about values. And money. The trouble is that technocrats don’t do values. They just do rationality. They love good design, efficiency, elegance – and profits. That’s why one of the poster children of the industry is Apple’s creative genius, Jonathan Ive, who designs beautiful kit in California which is then assembled in Chinese factories. And when the execrable working conditions prevalent in such places are exposed, the company’s senior executives profess themselves surprised and appalled and resolve to do everything they can to ameliorate things. And we believe them – and continue eagerly to purchase the gizmos manufactured in such oppressive plants.
Why are we so credulous, so forgiving? It’s partly because wealth – like political power – is a powerful aphrodisiac. But it’s mainly because we accept these people at their own valuation. We’ve bought into their narrative. They see themselves as progressives, as folks who want to make the world a better, more efficient, more rational place. We’re charmed by their corporate mantras – for example “Don’t be evil” (Google) or “Move fast and break things” (Facebook). In their black turtlenecks and faded jeans they don’t seem to have anything in common with Rupert Murdoch or the grim-faced, silk-hatted capitalist bosses of old. Instead of grinding the faces of the poor, our modern technology magnates move effortlessly from tech forums to TED to All Things D to Davos, reclining on spotlit sofas discussing APIs and cloud computing with respectful or admiring moderators. And in recent times, they are even invited to lunch with President Obama or as guests at political summits where they are fawned upon by presidents and prime ministers who hope that some of the magic dust will rub off on them.
What gets lost in the reality distortion field that surrounds these technology moguls is that, in the end, they are fanatically ambitious, competitive capitalists…
Banksters will keep on escaping justice until the politicians act
Good Observer column by Rawnsley.
We already knew from the financial crisis that the banksters were greedy, reckless and incompetent. We already knew from their reluctance to account for themselves or change their behaviour that they were shameless. The latest mis-selling scandals confirm something else we already knew: that they fleece their customers. What has changed over the past few days is that we now have proof that they are also corrupt and fraudulent. The rigging of Libor, the key interest rate which is used to value contracts worth trillions and affects everything from home loans to credit card charges, has shocked those who thought they were beyond being shocked. Sir Mervyn King has long held a scathing view of modern banking culture, but even the governor of the Bank of England seemed staggered that they had fallen so low. Barclays and the other institutions involved in this particular fraud were not just practising casino capitalism. They were rigging the wheel, loading the dice and marking the cards. The “few bad apples” defence will not wash. Some 20 further banks, including several other big household names, are also under investigation for perpetrating this scam. This could only happen in a City in which cheating and deception have become institutionalised.
A scandal of this magnitude demands a matching political response. That it has yet to receive.
Yep. And I see little evidence that it will.
Rawnsley also puts his finger on one of the most maddening aspects of all this — the fact that there really is one law for the rich and one for the rest of us:
One of the most shocking dimensions of this latest scandal is that no one may face prosecution. After last summer’s urban disorders, the police were imaginative in the use of the law to apprehend those involved. The courts handed down sentences to looters which were designed to be exemplary. A college student, with no previous convictions, was imprisoned for six months for nicking a £3.50 pack of bottled water. Yet there is serious doubt whether it will be possible to prosecute banksters who perpetrated a massive con involving sums which would buy many millions of bottles of water.
How to write about technology
Neal Stephenson has a new book
I’ve been reading a proof copy kindly sent (out of the blue) by his publishers, Atlantic Books. Couldn’t put it down. The thing about Stephenson is he writes about technology like Michael Lewis writes about finance or venture capitalism. He’s amazingly well-informed, detached, learned and, sometimes, wickedly funny — the most literate geek we’ve got.
Here, for example, is an excerpt from his December 1996 Wired essay “Mother Earth Mother Board” about the way the world was — and is — girdled by submarine cables:
The Victorian era was an age of superlatives and larger-than-life characters, and as far as that goes, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse fit right in: what Victoria was to monarchs, Dickens to novelists, Burton to explorers, Robert E. Lee to generals, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse was to assholes. He achieved a level of pure accomplishment in this field that the Alfonse D’Amatos of our time can only dream of. The only 19th-century figure who even comes close to him in this department is Custer. In any case, Dr. Edward Orange Wildman Whitehouse fancied himself something of an expert on electricity. His rival was William Thomson, 10 years younger, a professor of natural philosophy at Glasgow University who was infatuated with Fourier analysis, a new and extremely powerful tool that happened to be perfectly suited to the problem of how to send electrical pulses down long submarine cables.
Wildman Whitehouse predicted that sending bits down long undersea cables was going to be easy (the degradation of the signal would be proportional to the length of the cable) and William Thomson predicted that it was going to be hard (proportional to the length of the cable squared). Naturally, they both ended up working for the same company at the same time.
Whitehouse was a medical doctor, hence working in the wrong field, and probably trailed Thomson by a good 50 or 100 IQ points. But that didn’t stop Whitehouse. In 1856, he published a paper stating that Thomson’s theories concerning the proposed transatlantic cable were balderdash. The two men got into a public argument, which became extremely important in 1858 when the Atlantic Telegraph Company laid such a cable from Ireland to Newfoundland: a copper core sheathed in gutta-percha and wrapped in iron wires.
This cable was, to put it mildly, a bad idea, given the state of cable science and technology at the time. The notion of copper as a conductor for electricity, as opposed to a downspout material, was still extraordinary, and it was impossible to obtain the metal in anything like a pure form. The cable was slapped together so shoddily that in some places the core could be seen poking out through its gutta-percha insulation even before it was loaded onto the cable-laying ship. But venture capitalists back then were a more rugged – not to say crazy – breed, and there can be no better evidence than that they let Wildman Whitehouse stay on as the Atlantic Telegraph Company’s chief electrician long after his deficiencies had become conspicuous.
The physical process of building and laying the cable makes for a wild tale in and of itself. But to do it justice, I would have to double the length of this already herniated article. Let’s just say that after lots of excitement, they put a cable in place between Ireland and Newfoundland. But for all of the reasons mentioned earlier, it hardly worked at all. Queen Victoria managed to send President Buchanan a celebratory message, but it took a whole day to send it. On a good day, the cable could carry something like one word per minute. This fact was generally hushed up, but the important people knew about it – so the pressure was on Wildman Whitehouse, whose theories were blatantly contradicted by the facts.
Whitehouse convinced himself that the solution to their troubles was brute force – send the message at extremely high voltages. To that end, he invented and patented a set of 5-foot-long induction coils capable of ramming 2,000 volts into the cable. When he hooked them up to the Ireland end of the system, he soon managed to blast a hole through the gutta-percha somewhere between there and Newfoundland, turning the entire system into useless junk.
Long before this, William Thomson had figured out, by dint of Fourier analysis, that incoming bits could be detected much faster by a more sensitive instrument. The problem was that instruments in those days had to work by physically moving things around, for example, by closing an electromagnetic relay that would sound a buzzer. Moving things around requires power, and the bits on a working transatlantic cable embodied very little power. It was difficult to make a physical object small enough to be susceptible to such ghostly traces of current.
Thomson’s solution (actually, the first of several solutions) was the mirror galvanometer, which incorporated a tiny fleck of reflective material that would twist back and forth in the magnetic field created by the current in the wire. A beam of light reflecting from the fleck would swing back and forth like a searchlight, making a dim spot on a strip of white paper. An observer with good eyesight sitting in a darkened room could tell which way the current was flowing by watching which way the spot moved. Current flowing in one direction signified a Morse code dot, in the other a dash. In fact, the information that had been transmitted down the cable in the brief few weeks before Wildman Whitehouse burned it to a crisp had been detected using Thomson’s mirror galvanometer – though Whitehouse denied it.
After the literal burnout of the first transatlantic cable, Wildman Whitehouse and Professor Thomson were grilled by a committee of eminent Victorians who were seriously pissed off at Whitehouse and enthralled with Thomson, even before they heard any testimony – and they heard a lot of testimony.
Whitehouse disappeared into ignominy. Thomson ended up being knighted and later elevated to a baron by Queen Victoria. He became Lord Kelvin and eventually got an important unit of measurement, an even more important law of physics, and a refrigerator named after him.
My only complaint is that the collection doesn’t include “In the Beginning Was the Command Line”, his great essay on open source. But perhaps that’s because it’s now available as a book
Patent absurdity exposed at last
This morning’s Observer column about Richard Posner’s landmark ruling.
What brings Posner to mind this Sunday morning, however, is not his views on obesity but on intellectual property. You may have noticed that in the last few years the world’s biggest technology companies have become lavish patrons of the legal profession. Apple, Google, Samsung, HTC, Microsoft, Oracle, HP, Amazon and others have being suing one another in courts around the globe, alleging that they are infringing one another’s patents. The resulting bonanza for lawyers has long passed the point of insanity, but up to now the world’s courts seem powerless to make the litigants see sense. As a result, judges find themselves allocated the role of pawns in what are effectively business negotiations between global companies.
Until now. What happened is that Posner, in an unusual move, got himself assigned to a lower court to hear a case in which Apple was suing Google (which had purchased Motorola in order to get its hands on the phone company’s patent portfolio) over alleged infringement of Apple’s smartphone patents. Posner listened to the lawyers and then threw out the case. But what was really dramatic was the way he eviscerated the legal submissions. At one point, for example, Apple claimed that Google was infringing one of its patents on the process of unlocking a phone by swiping the screen. “Apple’s argument that a tap is a zero-length swipe,” said Posner, “is silly. It’s like saying that a point is a zero-length line.”
Hypocrisy: the last refuge of a banker
Ambrose Bierce once defined hypocrisy as “prejudice with a halo”. (He also defined “corporation” as “an ingenious device for obtaining profit without responsibility”.) He must have been thinking of Barclays bank and its CEO, Bob Diamond, who, in return for remuneration totalling £100m, presided over the fiddling of the LIBOR rate. Last year the BBC (on whose Executive Board Diamond’s boss, Marcus Agius, sits) invited him to give the quaintly-named Today Business Lecture 2011, in which he said, in part:
It’s a very personal thing, but throughout my career – from my time as a teacher, to my time as a banker – I have seen just how important culture is to successful organisations.
Culture is difficult to define, I think it’s even more difficult to mandate – but for me the evidence of culture is how people behave when no-one is watching.
Our culture must be one where the interests of customers and clients are at the very heart of every decision we make; where we all act with trust and integrity.
But it’s not just about how we behave towards our customers and clients. It’s also about how we work together with our colleagues, because if you have to deliver for customers with 150,000 colleagues around the world, as we do, you better be able to work as a team.
As far as I’m concerned, if you can’t work well with your colleagues, with trust and integrity, you can’t be on the team.
Culture truly helps define an organisation.
You know what? He’s dead right. And the culture of the banking industry stinks to high heaven — as the Bank of England Governor, Mervyn King, pointed out with admirable clarity yesterday.
And less you think that it is only a few bad apples like Barclays and RBS that are bringing an otherwise admirable industry into disrepute, spare a thought for the industry’s trade organisation, the British Bankers Association, which on Thursday issued a statement saying that
“The British Bankers’ Association is shocked by yesterday’s report about LIBOR. The banks which contribute to the LIBOR rate must meet the necessary obligations to their regulators. The BBA has proactively co-operated with the authorities at every stage and will continue to work with the regulatory investigations into LIBOR, submitting information and making staff available for interview.
The strange thing about this is that the BBA owns LIBOR and is nominally responsible for it. But the minute the scandal broke, the BBA raced to disown that responsibility. The organisation’s Chief Exec is an ice-queen named Angela Knight. Whenever anything goes wrong, up she pops on the mainstream media explaining in frosty terms that it’s nothing to do with the bankers. But even she is now struggling to escape the implications of what her members have been up to.
Here she is on Channel 4 News, for example, being interviewed by Jon Snow:
We turn now to an admirable analysis of the BBA’s hypocrisy by Cathy Newman of Channel 4 News. She starts by sketching the historical background:
Questions about Libor had actually been raised as far back as November 2007 at a Bank of England meeting with bank chiefs, and it seemed clear to everyone at the time that it was the BBA that was responsible for putting its house in order.
BBA spokesman John Ewan said the trade group was already monitoring the situation in early 2008 and would bring forward an internal review, saying: “We want to ensure that our rates are as accurate as possible, so we are closely watching the rates banks contribute.”
And no wonder. By now independent economists had begun to come up with analysis that showed there was evidence of jiggery-pokery.
What was the BBA doing during this period?
On 17 April 2008 a spokesman said the association was conducting a review of Libor and working closely with the Bank of England on the matter.
He added that the BBA would strictly enforce the rules and remove banks who had submitted inaccurate figures from the panel of 16. But there was no independent oversight: the review would be carried internally by BBA investigators who would remain anonymous.
In May of that year Mr Ewan said he had interviewed banks, hedge funds and academics as part of the review.
The BBA initially said it would not be making any major changes to the Libor system, then suddenly hinted that it would increase the panel of banks reporting their borrowing costs in the biggest shake-up for a decade, saying: “The changes will boost the confidence of its many users.”
But two months later there was another change of heart, with the BBA rejecting several radical proposals designed to ensure accuracy. The panel of 16 would remain unchanged.
But the association did promise to improve its scrutiny of the rates submitted by banks. Banks’ input would be “actively monitored every day” and a BBA committee would meet every month to review questionable quotes.
Despite these assurances, in September 2008 accusations of inaccuracy flared up again after analysts noticed that borrowing rates for a US Federal Reserve auction were much higher than Libor, in defiance of all market logic.
BBA spokeswoman Lesley McLeod insisted: “Libor is accurate. It is constantly monitored and currently reflects the extreme market volatility present in these unprecedented circumstances.”
So what are we to conclude about Ms Knight’s sordid little trade organisation?
When suggestions of rate-rigging first surfaced years ago, along with widespread suspicion among bankers and academics, the BBA made no attempt to shift the blame to others.
The association clearly knew about market misgivings about the veracity of the Libor rates as early as November 2007.
Throughout 2008 the BBA promised investors it was monitoring the information supplied by banks closely. There were no revelations of wrongdoing – and no suggestion that it was anyone else’s responsibility to supervise Libor.
The trade body promised to monitor the situation on a daily basis, but failed to undercover wrongdoing that we now know was rife at Barclays.
Given all that, the BBA’s claim to be “shocked” at the report into wrongdoing at Barclays looks like the kind of thing that gives hypocrisy a bad name.