Entries by Alan Patrick

Google to stop making Glass "In present form"

Google is to stop producing its wearable technology Google Glass in its present form, but is still committed to the idea of smart glasses, the company has said.
The technology, which delivers news, messages and calls directly to a user’s field of view, has been on sale in the UK since June, and in the US since 2013.

In a statement posted to its Google+ account, the company said the Glass team would move out of the “Google X” incubator labs and become a separate division. What the "New New" form will be is anybody's guess, but I'd suspect it will be less obvious to other people more than anything else, to stop both the "Glasshole" problem and to not alert other people so visibly that its filming and recoding them. Somehow I don't think they will relinquish the "hoovering up all that data" play.

In other news today, UK hypermarket chain Tesco has just launched an app for Google Glass...talk about timing. While the aim is largely laudable, it seems like yet another unfortunately timed play from this beleagured retailer.

Update - Had a Twitter discussion with Steve Bowbrick, his point being that the Google Glass busiiness model (very expensive device that records other people as UGC) has been rejected (by the public). I am less sure that Google will let go of it, as with Facebook I suspect it will be a 1 step back, 2 steps forward when you're not looking sort ofplay - I think it will be interesting to see what 2.0 does.

The next edition of Charlie Hebdo went on sale on Wednesday, and the production run was up from 60,000 to c 5 million - and rather than c 25% of 60,000 copies being remaindered, this time 5 million was probably not enough. (The money will be going to support the families of those killed, though there is a bit of a sour note starting with people trying to sell copies on eBay)

If the aim of the shootings was to cow Hebdo and its satire it has been a complete failure so far, and also far any attempt to further inflame France (if anything the UK media seems more cowed than the French).

But (and this is why the subject surfaces on this digital tech blog) modern online technology probably has quite a lot to do with this beng different to what it may have been even a few years ago. In short, my thesis is that the huge amount of user generated content has both increased ordinary citizen participtaion globally, and lessened the ability of the various vested interest armed camps to twist this to various agendas. My thesis is that, (so far anyway):

Firstly, using violence or banning to suppress unwelcome media is hardly a new trick, and it usually works if there is no way to route around it - but if it can be routed around it often produces the opposite effect, i.e. drives a far larger distribution and hence support base for the victims. (This is why banning stuff always backfires if the material can find a route out, as it incites more, not less people to take an interest). Digital media, including video and image based media, was a major part of that alternative channel here.

Secondly, the #JeSuisCharlie campaign was hugely accelerated and amplified by the online media, it was the fastest and largest twitter trend yet seen - it had enormous reach, fast.

Thirdly, social media was heavily used to organise and co-ordinate gatherings of support all over the world.

Fourthly - the outpourings of user generated media from smartphones have made it something that huge numbers of people have engaged with at a visual level as well as textual - I don't know if this makes a difference but I suspect the higher information content and authenticity of UGC picture and video images makes it easier to see what is "real" and - it seems to me anyway (be interesting to see if any research confirms or denies this) harder to inflame by deliberate mis-representations.

In addition, the shootings have generated furious discussion about a multiplicity of conflicting issues to a new level of distribution and intensity. There are many interlocked issues - Freedom of speech vs Causing needless Offence; What observances can a religion rightfully demand of non-believers; Is this religious fundamentalism or a cynical use of religion for political ends, What is the role of Satire - to only speak truth unto power, or to poke at any sacred cows, etc etc etc.

It has engaged millions of people all across the world like nothing I've looked at online before, and (I can't prove this on my very limited analysis to date, however I think this is true based on what I've looked at so far) I think we're not merely seeing the all too usual polarisation and a spit-at-your-camp approach that contentious issues usually take, there is actually some hope that we are still in an Age of Reason.

At this "interesting" time in history this is something that can only do good in this writer's opinion....

I heard our Prime Minister was proposing to ban encrypyed messaging services in the UK (from the NYT Bits section - I prefer US papers' take on UK tech politics, they are usually more informed and detached than UK pundits):

“Are we going to allow a means of communications which it simply isn’t possible to read?” Mr. Cameron said at an event on Monday, in reference to services like WhatsApp, Snapchat and other encrypted online applications. “My answer to that question is: ‘No, we must not.’ ”

Mr. Cameron said his first duty was to protect the country against terrorist attacks

“The attacks in Paris demonstrated the scale of the threat that we face and the need to have robust powers through our intelligence and security agencies in order to keep our people safe,” he added.

Of course the comment was sparked by the Charlie Hebdo shootings, and the need to dress ones weak tells up as strongly as possible, and also that we have a general election in a few months so the Tories (the party of lawnorder) are all competing with each other to seem more draconian than thou while shuffling for post election pole positions. And of course it is only due to be execuited when everyone has forgtten about it, long after the election, if he wins.

Any restriction on these online services, however, would not take effect until 2016, at the earliest, and it remained unclear how the British government could stop people from using these apps, which are used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

Except that it's unworkable (but you all knew that already).

The reason is that it can't work - or rather, it can to an extent, insofar as the average Brit will be unable to prevent being spied on for life (assuming all the commercial providers acquiesce - I'm less sceptical of this happening than some pundits on this) - is that the real bad guys will know exactly how to get around this all, so will do so. Of course so will all the UK tech experts, but they will immediately be suspected of nefarious designs - way to go to shut down a potentially lucrative UK stake in an emerging high value industry.

Also, by all accounts the impact of digital surveillance has been far less effective in staving off all these impending Bad Things than good old fashioned spying has. Most recent terror events (including Paris) have happened because authorities dropped their physical surveillance of known bad people, or forgot to tell each other who they knew was up to something. Thus, building a MegaData store of bigger haystacks to find needles in is probably not going to help enormously.

This way, all you will probably wind up with is permanent mass surveillance of civil society and little impact on the criminals you are after.

Mind you, from a State point of view that may be a totally desirable outcome, as all States like to control communications as naturally as they like to tax, and as a bonus it stifles all those irritating critics to boot. Every one of these events first brings cries of "we must not allow this to damage our free way of life" followed shortly by proposals to do just that.

There is a terrible irony that to so many of our glorious leaders, the best way they can think of to protect our freedom is to stifle it.

A better approach by far would be to carry on doing what has been shown to work already, and probably also be prepared to have a mature discussion with the Geat British Public about something that we alreeady know - you can't do anything that is 100% effective here.

It is of course a given that every right thinking media organ in the Free World believes in Free Speech, and all would of course passionately and vehemently subscribe to Voltaire's maxim* that:

"I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it"

Until the Charlie Hebdo shootings.

Then it immediately became very clear that defending Charlie Hebdo's right to say what they said may actually mean defending it to (your) death. And at this point we started to see a certain amount of wilting of resolve. The main resort of the brave free world mediarati was to backward shuffle to clicktivism, to wit "Je Suis Charlie" - easy to tweet, blog, say etc - but what precisely does it mean?. Will those proclaiming it from their barricades actually defend free speech to their deaths?

One can actually measure just how much any media outlet is "je suis" Charlie. There is an arcane part of game theory that looks at the actions people take to prove how strongly they support a proposition, idea or movement. The wording changes for these actions, they were called "tells" in my day (before poker grabbed the term) so I will use "tells". In general a strong "tell" is when someone gives something significant of themself (time, money, effort), or puts something of theirs at risk to back a position. A weak tell is when they will put very little of their assets or themselves at any risk.

Thus "clicktivism" - activists clicking buttons on social media - is a very weak tell. It's part of a general trend towards weak tell approaches that the digital world has facilitated, aka "slacktivism" - it's an easy and convenient out. Je Suis Charlie is, on its own, is merely one of these - you risk nothing, commit nothing, it just takes a click of a button to show how deeply you care. So of course most of the chatterati became Charlie for the day.

But what shouid be the response of those brave "free world" agencies with real voices, i.e our free press, be? Many ordinary people actually came out onto the streets that night, which is in itself a stronger tell than any form of slacktivism, and from a game theory "tells" point of view made it clear that our brave mediarati were leading from the rear. So what was the press going to do with their organs of mass distribution the next day?

Should they exhibit "strong tells" - prove their refusal to bow down, publish the same cartoons that got Charlie Hebdo staff killed and be damned?. Or publically proclaim they will subscribe to Charlie Hebdo (as Arnold Schwarzeneger has), or will they financially support Charlie Hebdo (as Google et al have). Or maybe even make it clear you will retaliate (As Anonymous has).

Or should one exhibit very "weak tells" - fulminate on one's op-ed pages about the right to free speech, draw a few "safe for work" cartoons, clicktivise "Je Suis Charlie Hebdo" prominently - but don't publish anything directly risky, and then argue for a host of reasons one couldn't possibly take the risk of upsetting people who may want to hurt you.

There is of course the tried and trusted victim blaming gambit - blaming the Charlie Hebdo people for bringing it all on themselves, as the FT (among others) tried - the game theory of the anti-tell I suppose.

In effect, quite a few continental European media outlets, Huffpo and many independent bloggers & cartoonists chose the strong tell, publishing Hebdo or other strongly satirical cartoons and being potentially damned, whereas most of the Anglo American free press and chatterati pundits - those proud upholders of free speech in their own lunchtimes - basically bottled it and then resorted to various Chamberlainesque arguments to excuse themselves. Je sort of suis Charlie for today isn't very convincing.

By their tells shall ye know them.....

By the way - Voltaire also said:

To hold a pen is to be at war.

You heard it in 1766 first, so it should hardly be a surprise now....

*Actually, it wasn't Voltaire who said that about defending free speech, strictly speaking, it was one of his biographers - but it is the sort of thing he would say. And arguably if anyone needed defending from the religious and other fundamentalists of the day it was Voltaire, who was one of the founders of the hard edged satirical tradition that people like Charlie Hebdo continue, and he did it at a time when many people did kill you for your opinions. If Voltaire was alive today, and lampooned todays' sacred cows as vociferously as he did those of the 1700's in his books like Candide, he would be strung from the gibbet of every religious and special interest extremist group on the planet today, and the Anglo-American chatterati would be baying for his blood along with them)

There is a crisis in the British Accident & Emergency (A&E) system at the moment, the causes are are a "perfect storm" of previous decisions, mainly around reduction in funding in the end to end care system overall, and the usual crop of winter bugs, especially ones that over-impact the ever-increasing numbers of elderly. But this week I discovered a possible self-inflicted cause - their own expert self-diagnosis system on the NHS website will erroneously send people who can safely medicate at home to A&E.

(As I understand it is the same system that the medically unqualified telephone helpers on the 111 system use for diagnosis, with similar results, it would seem).

TL;DR- I would suggest the NHS expert system is too poor a model of symptoms and then defaults to the lowest risk position - i.e. to send anybody with the slightest probabiliy of something serious to A&E, causing an unwarranted increase in demand for the most expensive part of the formal medical sytem. And that this lesson applies to similar expert systems being touted everywhere by the Technorati as the Next Big Thing.

The idea is laudable - you go online or ring up the 111 helpers and "self provision" your diagnosis, and potentially self treat, thus saving the expensive professional medical system a lot of time, capacity & money. An excellent idea, especially as the "family doctor" system in the UK only really operates for about 10 out of 24 hours at best, and even to access that in a hurry is damn difficult if you are working. So you go to the online help out of hours, or even in hours if you can't get an appointment that day.The flaw is that both the web system and the tele-helper are relying on an Expert Algorithm, that unfortunately isn't.

This is how it (doesn't) work. A member of my family started getting pretty ill with aching limbs, nausea and vomiting, and a blinding headache. If you go on the symptom website with any permutation of these symptoms, the system soon decides that you may have meningitis, a very nasty condition, and tells you to get to A&E post haste, if not sooner.

However, these symptoms are also the near-identical symptoms for Norivirus, or Winter-Flu, a nasty bug but one that can be safely self treated at home in the vast majority of cases.

Needless to say, the probability of my family member having Norivirus with those symptoms, in winter, while the bug is occurring at its max, is infinitely more likely than having meninigitis. The expert system does not seem to have this "probabiity" function however, and appears to default straight to a lowest risk stance "this could be meningitis - go to A&E now!"

Even so, this Expert System is probably OK for the single case - but now scale it to a country of 50 million or so people, make it the easiest method of getting advice, scale down on the more skilled alternative (aka "doctors") as a second opinion and and multiply me by all the other people getting hit by the current Norivrus bug going round, and you have very likely generated a large number of unnecessary visits to A&E by the "Worried-not-quite-well" who have had the bejeezus frightened out of them by having an automated system that can't discriminate properly between a dangerous condition and a nasty winter bug, and drops to the lowest risk position of "get thee to A&E".

Also, you'd expect the system to try and do a few clarifying questions, given the huge difference in potential outcomes in a diagnosis of norivirus vs meningitis. There are a few to be fair - far fewer than I'd have expected though - but even then they are odd. For example, one question is "have you flown in from abroad in the last 3 weeks". Well yes, we have, as a matter of fact. But I was then expecting the system to ask where from - we flew in from alpine Europe, not exactly a dangerous disease hothouse. Now I don't know if the lack of the "where did you fly from" question in this "Expert" system was to make it easier to use, or to not offend anyone, but to my mind it was a pretty useless way of separating norivirus from meningitis.

The main issue with the question chain though, was you sat there looking at the screen thinking that none of these options properly described the issue - where was the "other/tell us what really happened/that isn't right" button?

Anyway, our diagnosis was sorted by talking to a real expert system - our doctor - over the telephone the next morning. "Oh yes, there is a lot of it going round right now, here's a prescription coming via email, go to XXX pharmacy and pick up the medicine". Five minutes on the 'phone with a real expert system = no panicked visit to A&E, no blocking resources for those who need it more, etc etc. But to use this option you (i) have to take the risk that it isn't meningitis on yourself over an anxious night, and (ii) have the self confidence that is probably the right call despite the prevalence of lurid medical "advice" Google gives at the touch of a button. Not a good failsafe resort for a nationally deployed medical expert system.

I would therefore bet a lot of money that a lot of people, especially out of hours, used that website or 111 and, when told to get to A&E PDQ, went there in a panic and helped no little bit in creating the huge crunch in A&E over the last few days. It may have only been a small % uplift, but the way capacity constrained complex systems work is they don't degrade linearly, they degrade in a non linear (aka accelleratingly worse) mode until they collapse.

Now it is something of a belief in the Technorati that these expert systems are inevitable and will be the saviour of many services/automate many people out of jobs/be the great leap forward for mankind etc etc (choose your Future of Technology belief set) but this experience maps onto something far more prosaic that I have seen repeatedly in the 30 or so years I've been building system models and simulations, to wit that:

- no simulation ever captures the overall complexity of reality
- any error, no matter how small, is magnified massively when a high volume of "events" (the simulation term for, in this case, a user going through the diagnosis) are thrown at it
- those errors then cause huge downstream problems long before they are detected
- fixes are put in, usually with intervention by much higher cost informal side-systems
- all too often, a more compex edifice is created than the one it replaced
- the system winds up costing far more from its errors than any putative savings

In other words, be very careful of how these early-day expert systems are deployed, as their errors could cost a hell of a lot more than the theoretical savings they may generate (unless, as in the case of the banks in 2007/8, you can make the public pay of course).

Interesting article on the Daily Dot, in essence it argues that:

..social media disastrously amplified every new load of garbage thrown on the trash fire that was 2014. There were a few spots of solidarity and community that couldn't have happened without the Internet, including #YesAllWomen and #BlackLivesMatter. But the fact that these movements happened openly on social media also made them instantly vulnerable to responses that were at best oppositional, at worst nakedly hostile. Even the remedies, when digital, invited further illness.

That's why the best innovations in tech this year were all about shutting people up. Between Twitter's new mute function and third-party auto-block services like Block Together, 2014 was the year we finally realized that to save social media, we need to make it less social.

I've been increasingly thinking the same over the last year, as increasingly I am seeing Social Media operating not as a vehicle for bringing the wisdom of the crowd to bear on a topic, but instead bringing the madness of the crowd out, along with pitchforks and torches. A petition and a social media whip-up of the faithful has the impact of allowing often quite small special interest groups to hijack all sorts of topics and push all sorts of agendas, even using public pressure to end-run existing social and legal frameworks. It was ever thus (the silent majority always loses out to the well organised pressure group) but social media magnifies the impact of small and focussed noisemaker groups (and even individuals, reinforced by a few sock puppets) considerably more than any previous comms technology. And then of course there is the increasing usage of the medium to sell the advertising message, so lord help us if McLuhan was right.

And while in the short term it looks like a boon for every clicktivist, special agenda or Ad campaigner going, in the longer term it will kill the medium as a useful tool as people will increasingly tune out or turn off. Some years ago we reckoned that Filtering would be a key need in social media, but we thought it would be mainly needed to sort the really useful information from the noise - the chaff and the untrue - now I am increasingly thinking it will be required to screen out the plain noisy and vexatious as well.

Daily Dot lists what Twitter has been doing this year:

Muting, which debuted on Twitter in May, and blocking, which improved this year through the establishment of user-created apps, allow you to keep hostile voices out of your Twitter feed. The shiny new mute button lets you prevent a user's tweets from showing up in your stream—without alerting this person that they're dead to you.

The block function was already available to keep unwelcome elements from following or viewing your tweets, but third-party apps (my favorite is Block Together) now allow users to share and subscribe to each other's lists, so a block for one can be a block for all. Block Together can also automatically block new and low-follower-count tweeters, kneecapping trolls who create endless burner accounts to get around blocks.

Also it's probably worth Twitter having better Follower management functions, I am sure they will come as concern about social network privacy also hots up. - the two issues are interlinked in my view.

But it won't just be Twitter, there is a systemic problem with a medium that seems to over-promote the interests of the noisy few over the (more) silent majority.

(Postscript - was reading some stuf I wrote on all this a few years back - in theory the "silent majority" should be able, relatively easily, to register their views online, but it seems that they won't, especially when faced by very aggressive online activists. So you wind up with - as Daily Dot notes - the online battles being largely fought by opposing groups of activists)

(Post-Postscript - and then there is taking shutting people up a bit too far - when the state is over-policing online speech it is also a worrying trend)

Interesting paper by Pew Internet Research, they have conducted a Delphi-technique piece of research on where Privacy will end up by 2025 , essentially they posit 2 possible emergent scenarios:

Bad News Scenario

1) Living a public life is the new default. It is not possible to live modern life without revealing personal information to governments and corporations. Few individuals will have the energy or resources to protect themselves from ‘dataveillance’; privacy will become a ‘luxury.’

2) There is no way the world’s varied cultures, with their different views about privacy, will be able to come to an agreement on how to address civil liberties issues on the global Internet.

3) The situation will worsen as the Internet of Things arises and people’s homes, workplaces, and the objects around them will ‘tattle’ on them. The incentives for businesses to monetize people’s data and governments to monitor behavior are extremely potent.

4) Some communities might plan and gain some acceptance for privacy structures, but the constellation of economic and security complexities is getting bigger and harder to manage.

Good News Scenario

1) Citizens and consumers will have more control thanks to new tools that give them the power to negotiate with corporations and work around governments. Individuals will be able to choose to share personal information in a tiered approach that offers varied levels of protection and access by others.

2) The backlash against the most egregious privacy invasions will bring a new equilibrium between consumers, governments, and businesses — and more savvy citizens will get better at hiding things they do not want others to see.

3) Living a public life is the new default. People will get used to this, adjust their norms, and accept more sharing and collection of data as a part of life — especially Millennials and the young people who follow them. Problems will persist and some will complain but most will not object or muster the energy to push back against this new reality in their lives.

(Incidentally, the report has this annoying random word-break that seems increasingly prevalent in .PDF documents these days, means a cut n' paste is a tougher job as you have to then rejoin it all. You'd think they don't want people to copy their work and re-broadcast it to many other readers...)

Anyway, it's an interesting piece - readers of this blog will know we incline to the pessimistic on this as:

(i) There was little sign pre-Snowden that the Crowd, in it's immense Wisdom, cared a fig for their own privacy - and there has only been a muted understanding afterwards, outside of Technorati circles, that interested parties are working hard to mute further.

(ii) The economics of intrusiveness (and Big Data Capture) are too compelling for any commercial or governmental enterprise to ignore

(iii) The "Internet of Things" is adding a whole new, multi billion device (and dollar) layer of snoopery to the 'Net

If the past is any guide to the future there will probably be a "Wild West" era when institutions and "entrepreneurs" ride roughshod over privacy concerns, with all sorts of appalling breaches ( Bad (2) ), followed by the much slower moving social and regulatory forces that will peg the worst excesses back ( Good (2) ), but the power of vested interest lobbies will ensure it is still a rich seam to mine (Bad (3) ). So, to mix n' match these 2 scenaros, I'd suspect an endgame where something like this occurs:

1) Living a public life is the new default. It is not possible to live modern life without revealing personal information to governments and corporations. Few individuals will have the energy or resources to protect themselves from ‘dataveillance’; privacy will become a ‘luxury.’

3) Living a public life is the new default. People will get used to this, adjust their norms, and accept more sharing and collection of data as a part of life — especially Millennials and the young people who follow them. Problems will persist and some will complain but most will not object or muster the energy to push back against this new reality in their lives.

2) There is no way the world’s varied cultures, with their different views about privacy, will be able to come to an agreement on how to address civil liberties issues on the global Internet.

4) Some communities might plan and gain some acceptance for privacy structures, but the constellation of economic and security complexities is getting bigger and harder to manage, and...

2) The backlash against the most egregious privacy invasions will bring a new equilibrium between consumers, governments, and businesses — and more savvy citizens will get better at hiding things they do not want others to see.

In other words, a two-tier privacy system, patchily implemented globally, with some groups powerful enough to "go dark" - but "Privacy as the Default Setting" will be gone. And shame on all of us if this is the outcome we let happen.

Like many others I was constantly checking the BBC livefeed and ESA reports yesterday as Philae landed. My interest is twofold (well threefold, but we will get to that):

- Firstly, exploration of space is always fascinating and who knows what we will learn from this (It's quite scary the number of people arguing this is a a waste of money!)
- Secondly, it's another episode in the application of the advances in modern Robotics - and for a good, not a dystopian, outcome. The potential of robotics is well showcased here - the downside (surveillance by Philae's brethren) is more worrying, but can be put aside for now.

This second point has me musing a bit more. It has been clear to us for some time that space exploraton will, in the main, be done by our robots for a long time to come. I'm sure I'm not the only one who is half hoping that Philae spots the carcass of another civilisation's robot sent to look at the comet.

Which brings me to my threefold muse - to wit, its highly likely that other civilisations will also use robots for their space exploration, so the most likely human-alien first contact will probably be between two robots. Not so much a "take me to your leader" moment, but a struggle to find a compatible protocol to communicate with each other (and maybe a race to recharge the batteries in the only available plug socket).

Lest we forget. Especially now, when the world seems to be turning ominously into a replay of 1913.

(*Lost 2 Great Uncles at Delviile Wood)

Two things on the Broadstuff Towers spike, both to so with putting a sock over your smartphone:

Firstly, Yondr, for the text-addicted:

Two weeks ago, I heard about a new company called Yondr that was making lightweight smartphone socks-with-locks that prevent the smartphone's user from accessing the device during a concert, movie, or party.

......

Preventing fans from accessing their phones during a show might seem like an extraordinary step, especially in tech-centric San Francisco. But even the most compulsive texters among us can say that they've seen That Person: the guy in front of you at the concert who holds up his iPhone to record eight minutes of video, forcing you to watch your favourite band through his tiny screen, or the girl whose phone lights up with texts while you're in the theatre trying to watch an important scene.

When self control is no longer good enough, the answer is Yondr- a time-lock sock.

More serious I think is the story of a kickstarter for clothing to enhance privacy "inspired by Orwell and Snowden". Behind the hipster fashion is the "UnPocket", essentially a Faraday cage that means your smartphone is shielded from sending and receiving messages:

UnPocket™ is a secure pouch made from layers of stealth fabric that allows you to drop off the surveillance grid at will. UnPocket™ puts you back in control and makes you both untrackable and unhackable.

Oddly enough I couldn't see a garment there with a hoodie....

Interesting twist - when "wearable computing" kicked off, it was all about communication, but now its about going incommunicado.....this Dystopia is the intersection of 3 Bruces - Privacy expert Schneier, Cyber-Futurist Stirling, and coutourier Oldfield.