Google, Buzz and Gilbert Ryle

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This morning’s Observer column.

IF, LIKE MILLIONS of others, you use Gmail, Google’s webmail service, you will have been startled last week by the sudden appearance of a cuckoo in your email nest. When you log in to collect your mail, an invitation to “try Buzz in Gmail?” – “no setup needed” – pops up. There’s no indication of what this “Buzz” is, but if you click “try” a window opens saying you’re now “following” a number of people and that a number of people are “following” you. Below this comes a stream of Twitter-like postings from your followees.

This will come as a surprise, because you have no recollection of making any decision to follow anyone, or of soliciting followers yourself. And this is in fact the case: Google has simply gone through your email inbox and designated some of those with whom you correspond frequently as followees. And you were at no stage consulted about any of this…

The more I think about Buzz the more it reminds me of Gilbert Ryle’s concept of a ‘category mistake’, i.e. a situation where we think of something in terms appropriate only to something of a radically different kind. For me, email is an entirely private tool — for confidential communications with carefully selected individuals. The designers of Buzz, however, seem to have assumed that email is inherently social — i.e. involving communication in public. For me — and I suspect for millions of others — this is emphatically not the case. I’m happy to use social networking tools like this blog and Twitter for public stuff. But email is for private stuff — even when I’m sending a message to multiple recipients.

Another thought: this time about the abrupt way in which Buzz was introduced. As I said in the column, it smacks of Microsoft-type arrogance. I don’t really think the Google guys are evil — though of course to regard a public corporation as a ‘moral’ entity is to make another category mistake. Corporations don’t have morals; the best one can hope for is that they obey the law. But, as Ken Auletta’s book about the company makes clear, Google blunders sometimes because Brin and Page tend to approach things with the simplistic directness of engineers. (I’m an engineer, so I can say this.)

Take the Google Books project, the reasoning behind which goes something like this:

1. Millions of books are out of print and therefore inaccessible to most of mankind. This is a Bad Thing.
2. Up to now nobody has had the nerve to digitise out-of-print books that are still in copyright but whose copyright owners are untraceable because infringement carries strict (i.e. unlimited) liability.
3. Google has the resources, capability and chutzpah to digitise these books and make them accessible to everyone — which would be a Good Thing.
4. So Google will digitise the books. QED.

The fact that this might upset many publishers, some authors and sundry public authorities (like the Federal government) doesn’t really appear on the Google radar at first. And when it does, the Google boys are hurt and surprised. So they then try a piece of legal engineering — by proposing a deal with publishers et al in which Google will pay a one-off fee and set up an agency for collecting access fees/royalties and dispensing them to the appropriate recipients. In return Google will receive indemnity from copyright suits in respect of ‘orphan’ works — thereby giving it a unique advantage over other would-be digitisers.

But then it turns out that the US and other governments are not overjoyed by this — much to the dismayed bafflement of the Google boys.

Buzz looks like the product of a similar simplistic, can-do mindset. The best articulation of it I’ve seen comes from Tim O’Reilly (who seems to think that Buzz is wonderful). “Google Buzz”, he writes, “re-invents Gmail”.

There are many of us for whom email is still our core information console, and our most powerful and reliable vehicle for sharing ideas, links, pictures, and conversations with the people who constitute our real social network. But up till now, we could only share with explicitly specified individuals or groups. Now, we can post messages to be read by anyone. Sergey Brin said that Buzz gives the ability “to post a message without a ‘to’ line.” That’s exactly right – something that in retrospect is so brilliantly obvious that it will soon no doubt be emulated by every other cloud-based email system.

Buzz items can be shared directly in Gmail, but are also pulled in from other social sharing sites, including Twitter, Picasa, YouTube, and Flickr.

What’s particularly cool is that the people you “follow” are auto-generated for you out of your email-based social network. If you communicate with them, they are the seed for your buzz cloud. Over time, as you like or dislike buzz entries from that network, the buzz cloud adapts.

The fact that this might constitute a category mistake obviously never occurred to the Google team, or indeed to the sainted Mr O’Reilly, who is normally a very astute observer ot the technological scene.

LATER: Thanks to Neil Davidson for spotting the missing link to my column.

Davos: the upside

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Since I was rude about Davos (see The Davos Smugfest) a few days ago (much to the frustration of Adrian Monck, the former journalism professor who has forsaken academia to become its lead PR guy), I should perhaps balance that post by drawing attention to this more emollient piece by Google CEO, Eric Schmidt.

It’s easy to sneer at Davos as a place where the rich, powerful and famous come to talk to each other and arrogantly put the world to rights. But there has been little sign of arrogance at recent gatherings. Nor any settled view of how to overcome the challenges our world faces. If there is a global conspiracy underway at Davos, no one has yet let me in on the secret.

Instead Davos mirrors the uncertainty in the world in general. The real story this year was not arrogance but anxiety over how we could channel turbulent global forces in a more positive direction so that everyone gains. It's a rare chance for people — whether political or business leaders — to check their more narrow interests at the door and discuss these challenges from a broader perspective.

So we heard real and widespread concerns about the direction of the American economy and, for the first time, the danger of stalemate in our political system. There was intense discussion, too, about the eurozone and levels of debt. Here, too, there were concerns about politics, the lack of clear direction and lowest common denominator decisions…

Chip and PIN is “broken”

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Looks like Ross Anderson and his colleagues have done it again. This report of their new research paper says that Chip-and-PIN readers can be tricked into accepting transactions without a valid personal identification number, opening the door to fraud.

Researchers at Cambridge University have found a fundamental flaw in the EMV — Europay, MasterCard, Visa — protocol that underlies chip-and-PIN validation for debit and credit cards.

As a consequence, a device can be created to modify and intercept communications between a card and a point-of-sale terminal, and fool the terminal into accepting that a PIN verification has succeeded.

“Chip and PIN is fundamentally broken,” Professor Ross Anderson of Cambridge University told ZDNet UK. “Banks and merchants rely on the words ‘Verified by PIN’ on receipts, but they don’t mean anything.”

The researchers conducted an attack that succeeded in tricking a card reader into authenticating a transaction, even though no valid PIN was entered. In a later test, they managed to authenticate transactions, without the correct PIN, with valid cards from six different card issuers. Those issuers were Barclaycard, Co-operative Bank, Halifax, Bank of Scotland, HSBC and John Lewis.

The central problem with the EMV protocol is that it allows the card and the terminal to generate ambiguous data about the verification process, which the bank will accept as valid.

In particular, the terminal can record that a PIN verification has taken place, while the card itself receives a verification message that does not specify that a PIN has been used. The resultant authorisation by the terminal is accepted by the bank, and the transaction goes ahead.

This means that while a PIN must be entered, any PIN code would be accepted by the terminal.

Sigh. Back to barter again. Or perhaps that fancy new-fangled thing called cash?

Braking news: the Toyota feeding frenzy

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I’ve had two Toyota Prius cars so far and they’re easily the best cars I’ve ever owned (and I’ve had a lot of reputable automobiles in my time, including a Jaguar MK II, several Volkswagens and about five of those oh-so-sensible Swedish makes), so I’m a bit puzzled by the media firestorm about the recalls. Of course it’s a PR disaster for the company — and I’m sure they’ve handled it badly. (They could learn a thing or two from the way Amazon handled the Orwell-deletions on the Kindle, for example.)

As far as the sticky-accelerator problem is concerned, I can’t see why it should be much of a threat to any competent driver. As an 18-year-old learner-driver said to me the other day, “why don’t people just put the car into neutral, switch off the engine and coast to a halt?” So is this firestorm a symptom of headless-chicken hysteria, or am I missing something?

The Guardian has made a valiant attempt to explain the Prius braking ‘problem’ in today’s issue. Having run the animation it occurs to me that some of the scandalised Prius owners who’ve been talking to the media may not have used an ABS system before. At any rate, the ABS on my Prius behaves exactly as the ABS on the Saabs I owned before switching to Toyota — and I remember being disconcerted when I first braked in an ABS-enabled car.

Thanks to Kevin Cryan for the Guardian link.

Back to the future: the US Sejm

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Nice Krugman column.

We’ve always known that America’s reign as the world’s greatest nation would eventually end. But most of us imagined that our downfall, when it came, would be something grand and tragic.

What we’re getting instead is less a tragedy than a deadly farce. Instead of fraying under the strain of imperial overstretch, we’re paralyzed by procedure. Instead of re-enacting the decline and fall of Rome, we’re re-enacting the dissolution of 18th-century Poland.

A brief history lesson: In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Polish legislature, the Sejm, operated on the unanimity principle: any member could nullify legislation by shouting “I do not allow!” This made the nation largely ungovernable, and neighboring regimes began hacking off pieces of its territory. By 1795 Poland had disappeared, not to re-emerge for more than a century.

Today, the U.S. Senate seems determined to make the Sejm look good by comparison.

Last week, after nine months, the Senate finally approved Martha Johnson to head the General Services Administration, which runs government buildings and purchases supplies. It’s an essentially nonpolitical position, and nobody questioned Ms. Johnson’s qualifications: she was approved by a vote of 94 to 2. But Senator Christopher Bond, Republican of Missouri, had put a “hold” on her appointment to pressure the government into approving a building project in Kansas City.

This dubious achievement may have inspired Senator Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama. In any case, Mr. Shelby has now placed a hold on all outstanding Obama administration nominations — about 70 high-level government positions — until his state gets a tanker contract and a counterterrorism center.

What gives individual senators this kind of power? Much of the Senate’s business relies on unanimous consent: it’s difficult to get anything done unless everyone agrees on procedure. And a tradition has grown up under which senators, in return for not gumming up everything, get the right to block nominees they don’t like.

In the past, holds were used sparingly. That’s because, as a Congressional Research Service report on the practice says, the Senate used to be ruled by “traditions of comity, courtesy, reciprocity, and accommodation.” But that was then. Rules that used to be workable have become crippling now that one of the nation’s major political parties has descended into nihilism, seeing no harm — in fact, political dividends — in making the nation ungovernable.

How bad is it? It’s so bad that I miss Newt Gingrich.