technology embedding ethics

Having tried to confront ethics in internet experiments at a conference a couple of weeks ago, I'm trying to think about the way technologies like the internet embed ethics and how this challenges us both in every day life and as researchers into communications, but also for developers creating new technologies.

One obvious place where this shows up repeatedly is in the tension between free speech and hate crimes, as well as between privacy and accountability. but it also shows up in the power imbalance between large organisations and the individual. Taking these in the reverse order, then:

1/ The cloud is run by a small number of very big trans-national companies, for profit - original technical reasons for centralising resources (compared with the world wide web of the 1990s, or even early 2000s) was economic - scale gets price/performance advantages for servers, as management and control are run in one place for a lot of people. prevention of various attacks (e.g. denial of service on small sites) goes away as a problem, since few bad guys have the resource to launch a big attack on today's giant data centres (outside a couple of government agencies:)

However, once all that information is concentrated in one place, it affords opportunities which didn't make sense when it was decentralised. A for profit company has no choice: It has to maximise the shareholder value. This isn't mission creep, its just capitalism.

Of course, putting all your eggs in one basket does have a downside when there is a successful hack (viz the ever increasing list of Cablegates, Sony's, Ashley Maddison's)

2/ Privacy is not assured in a network. when you communicate, at least one other party now knows what you said. In a computer network, your privacy is now in their hands, since everything you "send" to them is a copy. They now have a copy. It can be copied again. While the parties to your original communication may be accounted for (you think/hope), further copies are not accounted for. This is a consequence also of the near-zero cost of copying. In days of illuminated manuscripts, only people with a monastery full of monks could copy stuff again. Nowadays, as downloaders know, anyone can re-upload. As YouTube demonstrated, you can even legitimise file sharing if you have enough power (see 1/:)

However, privacy is not dead. There are social norms which prevent us repeating all secrets to all and sundry. There are also legal situations where confidentiality is required (patient/doctor or client/lawyer, or just gf/bf but only if at least one of them is a celeb:)

What isn't clear because of the way technology has made copying easy, is when you are trespassing on those social norms - the technology could be less neutral - it is fairly easy now to provide tools that look (locally, on your device) at the information you have and make suggestions about reasonable use of it (delete now for ever, do not copy, etc) - in organisations that care about security (defense agencies) classification provides rules about where data can go - we could help every day people by building better support for remembering what you should and should not do.

3/ Many systems provide platforms for public utterances - blogs, have-your-say, comment-is-free, etc etc - but also just being able to get a throw away e-mail account at the drop of a hat.

Many are geared to ease of use, so don't need accountable sign-on, and don't check what is said or who it is said to.

Such systems allow trolling and other offence.

The problem is that the policing of what people can say, to whom, and where is generally regarded as a form of censorship, and in some countries, strongly opposed.
This conflates two things
a) anonymity (which has its place for whistleblowers, or people in countries where free speech is anathema anyhow)
with
b) free speech.

In general, if you think you have a right to say something, you should be able to stand by what you say, hence being anonymous is not only not a requirement, it is actually a really weird thing to require. Experiments on requiring true names, or at least accountable identities, on some sites have resulted in visible reduction in abuse.

So what I'm trying to say here is that we have built an internet, web, cloud, which to a large degree is not fit for human purpose.

• It is good for corporations to make money at your expense
• It is excellent for us to live in a panopticon
• It is a fine public space for people to shout abuse at others while wearing a mask.

Time to fix this.

lost and not not forgotten

social scientists studying the right to be forgotten have forgotten why

sharing and hiding - e-books and crypto comms

two ideas for the day:
1/ when you're reading an ebook, people around you don't have the pleasure of seeing what you're reading as they do by seeing the cover of a paper book....

so e-books have wireless for download - why not (up to you to turn on/off) use a whispernet style ad hoc meassage to broadcast to people nearby what you currenty are lookin at....?

2/ when you type an email that has a word like "attachment" in it, the mailer notices if there isn't an attachment often, & asks you if you meant to have one
how about the mail app (or browser) could also look at the email and make a guess "this looks private, don't you want to use the recipient's public key"?

j

democracy and debate - what's wrong with vanguards etc

just listening to lots of talks by social scientists - when people talk about politics, they've spent a lot of time reading, digesting, thinking, synthesising and so on. so then they report their results back. what's the problem?

well, basically, TL;DR

the process has to be a process for al potential involved parties - this is why syndicalist anarchism is the way forward - direct democracy has to engage, so the naive extension of representative democracy into direct democracy just burdens people with too many irrelevant discussions, so is alienating in a worse way.

towards an antisocial contract

Towards an Anti-Social Contract


I've read the David Kaye's report, which I very much like (clarity and precision, but also happen to agree). 


What is missing? A clear way to measure proportionality, and a social/legal framework to implement judgement of what is a (currently on hold) proposals to replace the European Human Rights proportional way to suspend crypto rights. So for example, the UK's where decisions are made, and replace them with politicians - with a UK Bill of Rights threatened to remove judges as the place Anderson's report makes it plain this is unacceptable (not just and proportional scheme to carryout lawful intercept, the advent of ethically, given conflict of interest, but constitutionally).

However, there's a very real threat that without a transparent, fair, intercept. Government agencies need to be persuaded to reduce their really good perfect forward secrecy mechanisms, and better key  management in general, will basically mean there will be no feasible (child porn , terrorism organisation, money laundering etc) would mission creep (similar to commercial agencies abuse of personal data) as that would mean legitimate policing of really bad uses of the net simply go completely unchecked. 

There's a secondary threat, which is that wholesale monitoring by too: If citizens feel confident that monitoring is only done for good reason, and without weakening out crypto-systems, they may not feel the need to adopt unbreakable systems. Many agencies will result in a massive breach of privacy when should never have had access to 2 Million documents - modern cloud (inevitably) one of those agencies accidentally leaks a collection of monitoring data. This is the other lesson from Snowden (the NSA's internal security procedures were incompetent, in that one person providers do not let their system administrators have such privilege.




This is the balancing act that needs to be created, in my view. and nor should a security agency, and what better way to enforce this, than only to collect necessary and sufficient data in the first place - the needle, not the whole haystack.

A sort of Anti-Social Contract c.f. always on

So maybe we need a new arbiter organisation - a distributed citizenship v. government tie-breaker - not the police, business or the press or current national judiciary  - a sort of 7th estate. It should, like the Internet itself, admit of no kings, just working codes of practice. It could manage rights to be forgotten too. It might need to employ some very smart social machines to cope with ddos, edit war, troll, bot farms etc etc

science and policy #101

Three recent pieces of work in Cambridge came to light

1. scientists have been working on the basis for randomized trials, and realized that, of course, we must have some non-randomized trials, to check if the very basis for randomization as part of scientific empirical method is sound.
In a bold inter-disciplinary move, the scientists collaborated with the department of history and analyzed a number of UK and other policies for economics and military action, to see if one could find random (e.g. the 100 years) and non-random (e.g. the 1st world) wars, as well as economics (e.g. monetarism, and austerity). The results will be published very soon, but are currently under embargo, in case they disturb a current experiment with Greece.

2. Engineers in Cambridge have long wanted to build a railway to replace the ageing bus and taxi system. Working from earlier chinese experiments with mono-rails, and the guided by the guided bus success, the proposal is not to take the modern electric line from Royston to King's Lynn, where customers are already used to the trains splitting at Cambridge, with one half going forward, for example, to Ely, and the other half, soon, to the Science Park. From next year, they hope to split the train laterally, with the left half going around the pieces (Christs, Parkers) and Commons (Midsummer etc), and the right half going in a long overhead loop, to Ely, allowing the Eels much easier migration along their breeding paths in the fens. If the duo-mono-rail is a success, the engineers propose to extend the routes to Paris and Brussels, where onward mono-mono routes could serve ski-resorts and some of the Belgian mountain regions where the finer beers are produced.

3. For some time now, a very ambitious project in CRASSH has been working on Consipiracy Theory. This work has involved linguists, computer scientists, taxi drivers and publicans, and has recently yielded a breakthrough. A new tool has been built that can detect consipiracy theories with a false positive rate of 2% and a false negative rate of 3%. The method is based on a mix of Bayes and various NLP clustering algorithms. Currently the tool is part of a possible startup and venture capitalists are clamouring to fund the work. The business case is unclear as yet, and there have been some suggestions that at least one major journalism organisation may have prior art, although scientists suggest that their conspiracy generator is based on different technology (followers of Chomsky will understand that recognition and generation are quite different linguistic machines). At least one government agency claims that they had build a system exactly like this in 1961, and that it correctly identified Cuba and Suez, but they could not reveal the technology for fear of showing potential national enemies how much more advanced the UK was than them. Security analysts have asked them to "put up or shut up" as this is not the first time that they have claimed to have approaches to their work that would save time and money, but have not deployed because they would have, err, saved time and money and lives and red faces.

Meanwhile, CRASSH were not available for comment.

intent with meaning - future network control

there's a lot of chat about intent-oriented networking e.g. Nemo, - latest fad - seems to be a little bit like predicate routing - or declarative networking - where you way, in a very high-level way (e.g. legalease, c.f. recent microsoft paper on compliance) what you want to happen. Hopefully, this is 11 layers higher than open flow, and employs P4 at a minimum, as most of the intents that aren't just 5-tuple flowspec based, must necessarily employ DPI and application based content patterns.

however, where are the semantics? this seems to me to be a massive missing mole of an elephant in the room

Who (subject/object) wants What (packet, router, link, user) to be Where (in a jurisdiction, or not) When (before T, after T etc), and Why (profit, loss, legal link, fun) - the WWWWW (High 5 ?) of networking - it shouldn't be too hard to do a bit of deontic logic and denotational sugar to get this right...a suitable job for computer science, and possibly, the NaaS project, but possibly not...

Not Worn Down. or Out.

Some company has bet its farm on some new fangled wearable device called the Watch. A bunch of other wearable computing/communication devices have done ok (highly portable mp3 music players to alleviate the burden of having to talk to people while exercising, wrist bands to measure speed and vital signs to olympic precision, to save the burden of having to look at a map and step on a scales. etc etc

None of this stuff is for me - maybe I am an outlier, outlandish, outspoken (sure), and out there, but I can't stand this stuff but not for a luddite reason -

ALthough I've always been slow to take up a tech (didn't have broadband at home or computers in the house til the kids needed it for school, didn't have a mobile phone til someone gave me one at work, didn't have a car for decades before needing to transport elderly people and do shopping etc - all driven by cost benefit analysis basically), this is not why I'm eschewing the old wearable stuff...

I've not ever been able to wear a watch, and find it hard to wear gloves - no idea why, but when uncles gave me watches as presents when I was a kid, I would run into doors, walls, catch them on aunties pointy noses, smash the glass, rip the strap in shreds, or drop them in a cup of really hot tea, to see if Douglas Adams would be right - who knows why? I just find this stuff intensely irritating.

If someone built something so tough it wouldn't break, I'd end up like Isidora Duncan, killed by being dragged behind a drone that accidentally got entangled with the fitbit it just delivered to my left paw.

One of our cool students built the nearest thing to an ideal wearable for me, a high-visibility cycling jacket that is decently made, well waterproof, light enough to wear on anything except a really hot day, and has a set of lights and sensors built in. Good on you, Andy Li, for visijax - I am betting he actually could have saved lives, but I still managed to break it (note to andy - the jacket is still fine, so it still gets used, just needs re-wiring - my fault entirely)....

I am not especially known as clumsy  - I can do fiddly things like thread a needle or hand solder electrical stuff without having to use a vice...I am obviously not averse to having tablets, smart phones, internet tv, blogs, twitter etc etc - I am not eve averse to doing some exercise (12 miles per day cycling, occasional long (100 mile) rides) and having some idea how to plan pace and fuel over a day etc

but I for one, am not going to be sporting one those new, extremely expensive, hopelessly hipster wannabe things on my wrist any day soon, no not even if Apple gave me one:)

EU versus US cloud economy

was at interesting meeting yesterday where it was shown that the EU lags the US in business adoption of  cloud technology, and that this is harming growth/productivity of companies (I think I can believe this) - positive role model companies do exist, so it isn't just head-in-the-sand

A lot of the talk was about the fact that the network deployment in EU is NOT a barrier  (capacity/latency/price are all fine), but at the same time, some of the net is actually under-utilisaed.

That's a useful point, and indeed, one could claim that the fact that the entire warfare about Net Neutrality has been largely US based is evidence that the stakes for content and service providers versus network providers are much higher in north american than in Europe.

for my part, I reckon a large part of the problem is that most european countries rely on overseas companies to provide cloud technology (Amazon, Microsoft, etc) and it is really hard to do a large scale business transformation that cloud can achieve with a remote company (or a company you don't trust, own, or have the same language/culture as). So the answer seems pretty obvious - the fact that the UK has less of a problem in this space is consistent with this, in that we have more local cloud expertise in the UK (having provided some of the core tech here anyhow:)

some people there disputed this viewpoint, and claimed there was no problem having BT or Microsoft cloud-ify their EU-based business - that assertion was made with no concrete examples.

the me-oh-my tube revolution is coming and it will not be televised

decentralized cloud - you know it makes sense. So youtube/google make a lot out of the amount of material that is uploaded every day. However, note that the usual zipf law of popularity (the very very very very very very long tail, where the vast vast vast majority of cats-falling-off-bicycle-videos are only ever viewed by .5 people) means that this stuff stays on 1 server, and never gets replicated (pushed) to caches.

So why upload it? Its personal - only you and your mum ever look at it.
Perhaps you are an aspiring pop star and its your video - so still, why upload it ? you only need to be _indexed_. Its far more efficient if you serve it yourself and you get to count how many people look at it directly, and from where, and get 100% of any advertising revenue (If you chose to host adverts too).

its obvious.

dis-intermediate google now!

Privacy in the Past

Have been reading about the past some, recently. For example, the rather fine England Arise! by Juliet Barker, about the revolt by Peasants in late 14th century England, triggered by the last straw, yet antherpoll tax (lets not pause to reflect how the rediculous sanctions threatened against Greece if they renege on their debt, and revoke their austerity measures under their own democatically elected governement might by related in some way:)

What I am more interested in here is the notion, reported in some places, that the idea of personal privacy is somehow only a recent invention.

Its actually quite hard to find good evidence on this,  of course, but it is clear that in every day life, most people lived hand-in-glove with each other to the extent that routinely private activities (the privy and procreation) were likely not terribly private, from your kith and kin.

Note well, though, this is the nub -- "private" is a triadic adjective. WHat is private about you, with respect to whom. I doubt very much if medieval peasants would have appreciated strangers turning up to queue at the window of their toilet or marital bed to watch. There was a social context.

What is interesting in the account in the book is that a highly distributed, lightly (hardly) coordinated activity arose which could not have used letters to coordinate since many were barely literate, but also due to cost, let alone the Victorian Internet (telegraph) or the telephone or e-mail or Online Social Networks. So people rode around on horseback, or walked about a lot to tell others what was happening.

And yet the powers that be were practically caught napping.

i.e. no surveillance state.

I assume the folks running this uprising were not idiots (they nearly succeeded, after all) and realized that a moducum of secrecy was needed in planning resistince and events. So they had a pretty good clue, obviously that their discussions and communications were indeed private, at least against being overheard by adversaries.

As with all revisionism, apologists angling to support the encroachment of the surveillance state on civil society, use the claim that privacy was a brief-lived, recent invention associated with wealth and individualism, and they use this to justify, in the face of relatively small injury to open societies, massive revokation of the right to privacy of every day folk (of course, secrecy in government (and banking and so on) is retained - why? do they have anything more to hide, I wonder:)).

Fact is, privacy is as old as whispering.innocently

Addendum  - just dealing with yet another teenager - do you remember hiding stuff from your parents when you were a kid? Its normal. Its part of asserting your individual nature and becoming self sufficient. Growing up. SPying on your kids is bad for them and you. Spying on your citizens is same, oh governments...

anonymous, boring, repetitive and dull

I've just read two very good (but quite similar books on Anonymous, one is We Are Anonymous by Parmy Olson, and the other is Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy by Gabriella Coleman.

While I like a shot of lulz as much as the next guy, and the righteous support of Wikieleaks, and even more, support of Arab Spring uprisings (esp. Tunisia) was a Good Thing, a huge amount of what these folks did is really rather dull and tedious. Indeed, reading the Enki of Loki (apologies to Neal Stephenson ) or any random religious tract of biblical proportions is really quite similar (and topiary slew glenbarry who slew kayla who was the daugther of Satan who was the son of SkuleMystress who lay with socketscientist and beget IIS and Apache vulernabilities daily etc etc)

Sheesh, if i wanted this sort of stuff I could just turn to the Gideon's Bible (cue Bungalow Bill)

Open Sauce

Recent moves in US and EU have meant that Science (especially publications) that is largely funded from the public purse, is being made openly available by requiring Scientists (now, no longer in an adventure with Pirates) to publish in Open Access journals and conferences - this is a jolly good thing, in my view. Indeed, the science (drugs, software, machines) itself should also be so available.

But what about other walks of life  like Comedy, or even Politics, Economics and Philosophy?
Surely most of this is developed at Universities, and so should be made freely available to the public in the same way? Indeed, I think it would be a tragedy if we don't have Open Access to Comedy and Rock and Roll as soon as possible.

Just finishing the excellent Hacker/Anonymous book by Gabriella Coleman. Its really a work of an anthropologist, studinying the weird new tribes in the cyber-jungle and their odd, odd ways....fun, but it does make one wonder (especially bits about Arab Spring) how nuch of a "performance installation/artwork" this all is, how much truth, rather than a Margaret Mead type debacle...we shall see....(or probably not, given the nature of Anonymous....

collaborated to death

I'm working on quite a few projects, and we use what used to be quaintly known as "productivity tools" - basically, we use (for example - non exhaustive list):

twitter/facebook/google groups & email lists and sms to coordinate stuff

shared calender tools

Git, Svn, Basecamp and a zillion other version controlling repositories

wikis, wordpress, for shared live journaling/awareness/coordination where > 140 char and less ephemeral, but not as versions as code, reports/papers

hotcrp, easychair, edas for conference management

webex, skype, younameit for video/voice realtime meetings

sharedlatex, office360, google docs for shared edits

This is a triumph of toolsets over sanity! I spend the first 7 minutes of any meeting trying to remember the use-context of the tools....arghhh!!!

death by computer supported collaborative computing!

Big Brother2.0 debate/conversazione, Lady Mitchell Hall, Nov 1, 11-12.30

I'm going to discuss things from a technical (computing) perspective, but with a modicum of social science

1. The canard: "If you've got nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" needs debunking

(cue visual duck being thrown out of a hammock:)

This oft-repeated statement misses various important features of the way the world and people work:

Firstly, we all hide things all the time - the reasons are many:

some things are not finished, and need further work before they are presentable - 

sometimes, that is our own selves -our half baked opinions.

some things are hurtful to some people, but not to others

we present ourselves differently to different people - our kin, our close friends, our colleagues, our acquaintances and people that we encounter - all are given different levels of trust, because there are different levels of shared experience (and many other reasons). Context matters

Surveillance is toxic. It reduces everyone's choice of behaviour to that which is acceptable to everyone else. For all time. 

2. Because of the change of context over time (we grow older, our social network varies, the world changes, new stuff gets discovered, people forget stuff), we need to control aspects of information about ourselves as seen by others - indeed, we need to have obsolete data removed from their view

The statement that this is "censorship" is false. It is about a generalization of the "public right to know"

In general, the "public" is a set of people who we can send information to - e.g. my family, my friends, google, facebook, Sky TV, Isil, or GCHQ or the NSA or the Polis. Most of these, most the time, do not have a "right" to know. this is obviously false. I have a right to tell or not. I can judge my context.

e.g. Wes Hardaker, en route from san Francisco to Vancouver in SFO airport tweets to his partner at 5am "this airport is so dead" - the NSA might think he's a terrorist. he isn't - he means that the airport is really quiet (its 5am, after all).

e.g. Euan Blair on his 18th birthday gets drunk and is found /photographed in a gutter. before he was 18 it was no-one's business (he's a minor)- after he's 18, he's an adult -t he fact that his father is prime minister isn't relevant. the fact that many of the journalists covering the story are functional alcoholics and hipocrites is of no more interest, either, even if it is deliciously ironic.

e.g. mark thatcher gets lost in a rally drive across the sahara isn't specially interesting - see above. His mother isn't responsible for her 25yr old son's poor navigation skills doesn't reflect on her free market dogma or handbagging skills

3.with a suitable combination of technology (tracking content using DRM just as music and movie companies do, but on behalf of the citizen) we can tell if people send our data further than we wish, and law (data protection law, esp. in Germany - mainly because over time, the experience of the Stasi surveillance state rammed home why you really should care about this) we can 

catch bad people, fine them, put them in jail and (hopefully) make people think about whether they should inappropriately gossip - we can also age and remove from sight data that is no longer relevant (criminal records for crimes that the perp has rehabilitated, health records of no public interest, financial info that is out of date). THis is no less true of trivia (my birthdate is not necessary for buying a drink, just the fact that I am over age X...)

4. Enforcement ideally should be social, but should include suitable independent organisations - perhaps a new Estate (the first virtual estate)

5. GCHQ (and the NSA etc) are in no special privileged relation to most people in regards the above.

We need to incent them to do their job right. expensive surveillance is not a substitute for good old fashioned Humint....

6. Google (facebook, NHS care data/Price Waterhouse) aren't exempt either

7. we need law with sharper teeth, because of the heavily asymmetric power held by agencies named above compared with the individual

8. data,just because it can be copied without error, is not necessarily true in the first place. and it can become false (law change, for example). recall by humans is revisionist, because context changes. Data without context is inherently false

9. Every decoding is an encoding (Maurice Zapp, Small World, by david lodge).

10. If you don't by this, give me all your keys and all your passwords.

There's a lot of background work to this, but I'm assuming the audience probably won't want bell, book, candle and footnotes:-)

My 10 cents

http://www.festivalofideas.cam.ac.uk/events/big-brother-20-our-future-age-surveillance

refs
stephen farrell quite (59 mins in):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oV71hhEpQ20

terrorism, evidence etc report card:
http://www.lawandsecurity.org/portals/0/documents/02_TTRCFinalJan142.pdf

CATO report on costs of counter terrorism compared to what:
http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa755.pdf

John Naughton's notes are now available too

Not wrong to be forgotten

A few more points after the illuminating debate at the Cambridge Union Society last night (23.10.14).

i) so people are still hung up on the notion that,
because the internet/web/cloud can copy/store things so cheaply,
then deletion is impossible -

first off, that isn't necessarily so,
but even assuming it is,
its tantamount to arguing that
because we can now 3D print guns, we don't have to bother with gun control law...

- in fact, if there is a reason to remove data from publication
(its required by law - because its  defamatory or wrong,
or its required by ethics because the use is no longer relevant,
or its required by emotions - it would hurt someone's feelings again and again)
then the imperative is to embed the right in a law so that we incent people to withold their copies
(which is not the same as _erasure_ but is quite possible, and easily enforced

keeping a copy of my ex-partners photos private is fine (i do) -
re-broadcasting them 35 years later is not.

ii)  preventing search producing a hit on content from i) isn't pointless -
its just a weaker version of stopping people re-publishing stuff
the european court finding was blurry on this
because of the definitions of stakeholders in current law. poor.

iii) the argument that there are many search engines and meta-search,
and that the internet "routes around damage"
so people will setup sites like "blockedbygoogle"
minutes after something is not returned by search, is irrelevant -

if we get the law right, and the right put into action, then technology can work -

scale out of distributing rules for filtering spam (e.g. see how ApamAssinsin shares filter rules, see how ingress filtering and BGP policy checks work, see how legal censorship works etc etc and see how collaborative filtering and recommendation engines work), and
other tricks works vert well (no, not 100% -but we aren't arguing 100% -
we're arguing shifting the balance so
a) people think a bit about this,
plus
b) law that gives victims teeth, so deliberate flouting
earns the perpetrator fines/criminal records, public opprobrium etc

personal clouds, with personal control of flow of data through cloud, and
making the relationships between people and between people and organsations
(whether government or corporate)
more symmetric in terms of control of flow and lifetime of data)
is essential

people get confused about "google do x" or "person re-tweets y" -
the size of the agencies shouldn't
matter - anyone can leverage the internet to scale out cheap copying of data to many,
but should they?, is the question to ask?,
to whom? who is the entitled audience, now? or later? -
see next points:


iv) people are confused that this is censorship -
certainly currently the legal framework, and its "enforcement" by Google is a form of censorship,
because the "right to know" (i.e. public interest)
isn't being tested by an organisation that _represents_ public interest,
in any accountable way - sure, that's a bug, but we can fix that too - that doesn't mean
the right to be forgotten is wrong either

popular journalism (especially in recent years) has not helped :-)

Right to be forgotten & trolls & hobbits & elves

A two-part blog today

1. Right to be forgotten.
This is a very bad phrase. The right should be to not be reminded (as much).
The false dichotomy is just that - the binary decision between "remember and not remember".
Neither humans nor technology remember things accurately.

a) Every encoding is a decoding (Maurice Zapp, of Euphoric State University, in David Lodge's fictional Small World) - recall is revisionist for humans. It is also revisionist in technology - you may decide to do an audit (who read the file, when ? these are often recorded or appended to meta data) - where were the people looking at the data? why. Should we sort the results of a search to show more recently accessed data higher? this will affect others. Just as it does with your own grey matter!
b) We need to forget things - its part of coping with trauma, even just at the level of embarassment
c) We evolve (and we all evolve) so stuff we did that they agreed with then, we and they may not agree with anymore. Why should we be faulted now for what was ok back then?

Ref:
Delete, by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger

Better solutions - social nets should use interaction/activity based weights to decide what is recalled easily - stuff should fade - this copes with public figures naturally (as they interact with world but about their public duties, not their private lives) as well as the private individual online - if I havn't seen you for 25 years, I won't naturally recal lstuff about you - if you show up asking mefor a reference, maybe some stuff will come "flooding back" - this maps also to natural cognitive resource limits that are known about in humans, and implements a nice form of relevance filtering easily. THis also implements "unfriending without tears" on online social media - you just ddidn't interact with someone (like or mention or comment on their timeline) so they slowly fade from memory - many systems already are implementing things a bit like this, but for somewhat misguided reasons - lets fix it - its easy!

2. Trolls
There's a saying from 30 years or more of newsgroups (Usenet, if you go back that far):
"Don't feed the trolls"

So trolling is getting worse - this is not surprising - there's more people in the hills (which have eyes) than ever. These people don't know from Adam (and they are probably eating the apple). Why do they troll - to share in your glory? who knows....but they can because of what I might call Internet Induced Empathic Disorder - they are alienated, and they don't know you are a person - many of them do stuff they wouldn't dream of doing in the same room as you - this is well known. Its worse where there are too many terrible cultural examples (see the Russian Social Media abuse below, but nearer to home, see BBC's :Have your say" comments  or Youtube's hilarious children from hell type comments on videos there (remindes me of the evil devils on rollerblades in the hilarious film, Dogma!)

How to fix? Engage or Ignore? I don't believe the troll's target is the right person - we need to have a social response - peer pressure - show the troll where they sit, surrounded by hobbits and wizards (and elves) - that'll wake them up, or else turn them to stone, come sunrise.


Ref:
Protest 2.0 - networked negoative consolidation

The Lottery of Babel and the Library of Babylon

On every floor of the tower, it is sometimes said, a different language is spoken. once a month, the floor manager buys a ticket for the lottery. if the ticket wins, the language stays the same. otherwise, a new language is chosen, and everyone on that floor must learn it. the chances are rare that the language stays the same for 2 months in a row, let alone a lifetime. however, it is rumoured that sometimes this has happened. Indeed, it is said that there are dizzy heights and possibly sepulchrous depths in the tower where denizens of neighbouring floors have found they spoke the same language as each other for a time. the lottery is administered, of course, by a priesthood, who either understand all the languages, or else have their own universal tongue and each learn the language of a handful of floors. nobody knows which.

few people on each floor are capable of learning a new language every month, and so most people cannot truly understand one another. sometimes, a group get together and try to keep the old tongue alive. these cathars claim too that there are no priests and there is no lottery. they are quickly suppressed.


In the library of babylon, the most sacred works of all religions are kept. the more common books, such as the bible, the torah, the koran, the vedas and so on occur in many versions. the rarer religions, or ones for whom there are few remaining living followers, often have a single copy, or even only a partial segment of the Ur text. the organisation of the library is chaotic. the librarians wanted to organise the text in order of date, but could not agree on whose calendar to employ. then a small group  proposed alphabetizing the entire collection, but were resisted by those who pointed out that there were more ways of writing than there were religions.

the theological experts suggested that there was a tree of religions, not to imply "older" or more "fundamental", but that one could see many similarities in the gods - the indo-european polytheists at least, and the abrahamic religions.

the chief librarian suggested that this was merely the result of errors that crept in during the copying of texts due to the biases of the monks at the time.

as a result, no-one can vouch for the correctness of any of the religious tracts. reform and born-again are thrown together in confusion. there is a ground swell of opinion that the library must be burned, as it represents the ultimate sacrilege. the librarians have all deserted the buildings, which stretch far across the sands to the sea, where the boats full of foreigners are arriving. it will not be long now.

I Need a Vacation

I went away (as we do) for 2 weeks to Paleochora, Crete and then 1 week in La Villa, Fosciadora, Garfagnana so I should be feeling great, n'est ce pas? well up til the last minute in each place, all was v. good, but then, in each case, there's a long drive to an airport, waiting around for a plane, and a long drive home from the airport in England. Then there's no food in the house and everything smells of damp and cat. Then there's a pile of obscure letters on the doormat. Then there's kids' results to open and ponder.

Then there are rental car add-on bills in the e-mail which appear to be made up out of thin air (thank you Maggiore, yes that's you - bogus bill about twice the amount of the quote on the booking).

Then there's email - two weeks away and 1300 mesages to deal with, at least 100 of which actually require thought - 1 week away, and another 450 messages - this is in august, for godsakes, when most people should be on a beach or by the pool, but no, they are writing research proposals, drafting theses, preparing responses to research funding agency calls, discussing research code releases, posting papers from conferences (yes that's you SIGCOMM, right in the middle of august and in Chicago, where no sane person would go except to see Buddy Guy, and then not in mid-summer). And my vacation away mail told people (and I told all my colleagues I'd be offline too).

I think that German Company that started to delete all e-mail for people on vacation has the right idea - work/life balance tricks like that are essential for some sort of sanity. I actually had a vacation message that said that once, but still people resent stuff after I know they got my auto-response.

Modern Technology is not progress - repeat after me:)

NPfIT - NP Hard and Not Fit for Purpose

In an interesting report from the Cambridge MPhil for Public Policy student group, on the largest IT project failure ever, so far, a lot of historical detail is dredged up, and a number of useful conclusions drawn under headings like Haste, Design, Culture & Skills, which are pretty hard to disagree with.

Some stuff goes unsaid, but reading between the lines, one might ask

1. were no "references taken up" for the people who were shortlisted for the contract? I mean I know BT pretty well, and I'd never hire them for a systems integration job like this - sure, for the spine/N2 (which worked fine, and afaik, were loosely modelled on SuperJANET), but not to bring together an unknown outfit with a dodgy sounding name (iSoft - wannabe Microsoft:) and Fujitsu (ok, make decent clone PCs once then, but large databases etc? Not really).

2. So I realize it was a while ago, but even then, we had rapid growth internet outfits with many services (like google and apple and onlone gaming) who had built customer relation databases (with ok security) for 100s Millions of users, which managed a lot of stuff that scaled out, and could address the srts of needs the NHS requirements said (oh, ok - the requirement capture was one of the biggest failings in the whole thing, of course) - one thing that open source, internet/cloud companies do is to stay agile, so they can interface to legacy systems (as they get big enough to acquire them - e.g. google buying youtube or the maps system, or microsoft buying skype) - in the same way, rather tan imposing a central design on an heterogeneous set of health services, interfacing between them woould have been just fine...

3. How bad was Lorenzo? Didn't anyone do a code inspection ever? It sounds a bit like the Obamacare sign-on system fiasco - but why? I mean lashing up a bunch of patient recor databases into mongodb, mysql or whatever (let alone Oracle or Ingres or some big iron dbase) is not rocket science. Its done by Internet startups 100s of times a year and is hardly ever the reason they fail.

Of course, the other component that work (Picture Archiving / Comms) worked because there is much less heterogeneity in those systems - image standards exist and you just need web/email access to glue systems together....so lucky no-one managed to balls up that part, eh!

Anyhow, nice report, but would be nice to hear more about the contract failures (lack of penalty clauses with enough teeth)....

forget me, forget me not - how to implement?

some haev argued that
copyright takedown == right to be forgotten
(ie. not quite the same as censorship - just enforcement of access control
by the data owner (in case of PII, person is owner of rights to access some
facts about themselves, unless there's a compelling argument for public knowledge) -
there are other arguments for and against, but this analogy (whatever its flaws) might be useful for estimating the cost of the right to be forgotten (as per EU court ruling)

whatever the many of pros and cons on the topic, but how to implement?
well, if you upload film, music (or stills) to youtube, and are worried about copyright, don't:
google have made it their business to acquire legal copies of Just About Everything digital, and will eventually match whatever you've uploaded to a copy they have in house - they will then discover if there is a rights holder (that isn't you) and, if they havn't already done so, will contact said owner, and ask/ngotiate
 a) do they want content taken down b) do they want analytics c) do they want advertising revenue -
in fact, google can and do optimise this by region by doing blanket agreements with large publishers of digital content.


so to do the same for stories in webpages (and search results) concerning individuals could be done exact same way (probably is) - the technical cost might be a bit higher because you need to
keep a per page (per region) filter entry. The bigger cost (by far) is establishing genuine rights holder (data subject) and whether there's a public interest angle or not - this requires judgement (rather than just money:) so I think its interesting that Google is doing this now...

but the negotiation is where this differs and that's a really tricky business...

Mutually Assured Distraction

A lot of commentary on the current fad for extra-territorial mass surveillance misses the point - the reason countries are doing this isn't just because they can, its because they can't currently be held to account.

In the old days, spies would be caught from time to time, and executed (or exchanged). Now, the spies aren't in the other territory, and plausible deniability means you can't even use extradition agreements between allegedly friendly countries (e.g UK &US) to get them bought to book/justice. This shows up in other domains than mere military intelligence:

1. Drones
2. Finance
3. Energy

Sadly for all these, the level of technological development of a country really doesn't have to be that great to gear up to use a bunch of 100$ radio control quadcopters, or a cunning HFT instrument, or even just the ability to turn off the gas pipeline to a neighbour - of course, there are expensive versions of these weaponised tools (e.g. BAe Systems drones that US uses in Pakistan are quite pricey - surprisingly so given cost of crop spraying, or outside sports broadcast drones, really - but then the MoD/DoD were always targets for ripoff pricing) - also the US threatens banks who don't reveal US taxpaying customers accounts/transactions details with massive fines if the bank has a stateside operation (of course, swiss and german banks just close down US tax payer accounts rather than face this), and Putin wields the russian gas wealth like the playground chess playing bully he is:)

But the low cost versions are just as bad.

Hence, talking about this needs to move up a level, methinks, as the realpolitik of using this stuff is not going to go the way of nukes, quite the reverse, since the Use of Weapons of this type doesn't lead to Mass Destruction, just death by a thousand strikes......

Horizon Digital Economy annual shindig - some ideas...

so we had the Horizon annual conference last 2 days in Nottingham, and jolly good it was too - esp. two v. good "industry" talks, one on New Media from local 21st century 'cinema' people in notts, the other from the link guy for NHS data projects which was v. v cool

couple of ideas sproinged up during discussions

1. the loneliness of the long distance spectator - instead of filing a long strung out event (marathon run, tour de france etc) from central, string together a set of friends and family of a given participant into a narrative...lovely idea  - whole new experience for all concerned - main problem is legal consent (if spe, participants have prior agreement, e.g. with news media channels) - should be fairly easy tho to think through

2. informedConsent.com - a startup idea - we are suffering from ethics questionnaire fatigue - we need a pool of people who agree to be study groups for repeated things (a la Nielsson ratings biz model) and just deal with their informed consent once (or occasionally) for all those twitter/facebook/email/emotionsense/mypersonality etc etc

3. Embrace Messy

Lots of studies of systems (esp. internet of things or other tech embedded in everyday life) involve lots of noise - e.g. multiple occupancy houses etc etc - why bother trying to be a control freak nailing down who is who (e.g. with fascistic rfid tagging of everyone or even worse, invasive use of cameras or mikes and face speaker/gait/gesture recognition etc) - embrace the mess - for example, lots of people in my house use computers at random, so we all get each others' profiles/recommendations - this is amusing and, indeed, gives us a community feel about who likes/watches/listens to what!! this is good not bad:)

the fact that it also acts as cover traffic is also good for fuzzing (plausible deniability:)

35 years of irresponsible research

Yesterday, I went to the very cool science museum london future room to attend the very cool Responsible Innovation project's flagship event showing off their rather good ideas on how we in the tech sector (the hated ICT term unfortunately due to funding agency's presence) should include some sort of notions of responsibility (e.g. to people, e.g. ethics and society) into our work in innovating (i.e. don't just do it because you can, but choose what to do because you should and what not to do because you should not:)

being a grumpy old git yesterday, I had to intervene in various curmudgeonly ways, but on the whole, I thought the proceedings were constructive, optimistic and helpful, and surprisingly, a lot of people in the audience seemed positive too:)


So here's some comments on the event

Marina Jirotka (University of Oxford) introduced the project - a few things I didn't like

1/ they were filming and we were told if we didn't want to be filmed, not to ask questions - that's a bit of a technology fail up front:)

2/ the noise level fro mkids running around in the science museum would have made life difficult for anyone with significant hearing loss (e.g. me, which is why i was sitting in the front row being annoying)

Marina showed a REALLY cool video showing affective robots as a use case example of hat can be good, but then bad - i didn't say it at the time, but Robots have been done to death in the Sci Fi (our ethical storifiers) community - not just going back to the Golem of Prague, but Asimov's Zeroth law, and then things like Aliens Synths (good and bad in Alien 1 and 2) and BLade Runner's Replicants (and Philip K Dick's dissection of what makes us human and them not (empathy!). and even humans falling in love with robots (see one of the original I Robot stories - or for a more oblique version, see John Wyndham's story abotu smart monkeys painting and revealing adultery in a family) see also Sladek's Roderick & Roderick at Random for a lot of discussions of robots in society

Indeed, one distinguishing feature of the Geek/Tech (ICT) sector is the addiction of many practitioners to the morality tales that we get from 100 years of Sci Fi (HG Wells, Jules Vern to Star Trek and Dr Who - many featuring techno ideas 50 years before they are realized, with a full exploratory discussion of their pros and cons - for more recent stuff, look at Pat Cadigan's  work, e.g. Synners or Charlie Stross's Accelerando....for other areas of concern including mixed reality and new economic forms...or even Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind

 Sir Nigel Shadbolt (University of Southampton)

Sir Nige is ever the optimist - I asked him about being forgotten - why do we need to save everything personal - he bought up the difference between Commons and Public goods and private goods (see question later about 17th century models:) which was a good answer - I asked why we just talk about data and not just processing - for example, why can't I direct th digital camera stream to my phone (which knows where I am in the room and has enough processing to remove the pixels with video of me and send back to the net without me, for example - many other examples, given the copious amount of CPU cycles out there where we could personalize and filter the interweb in ways that reflect our preferences for what is seen by who about stuff that concerns US! we could even build Social Machines (e.g. for democratic or dictatorial households or meetings) to determine what rules for processing and storage apply:)
Note, Technicolor routinely customies digital movies for over 30 different locales in europe (e.g. substitute for a coke can, Orangina in France, or IrnBru in Scotland) - so substituting for my image in known location in a (fixed) camera view is really quite trivial:)

 Artist display - Barbara Gorayska - quite a cool performance/installation in the break

PANEL: How do we innovate responsibly in a digital world?

Chair: 
Lizzie Coles Kemp (Royal Holloway, University of London) - great synthesizing chair person!
Panel:

• Daniel Stauffacher  (ICT4Peace) - very cool stuff - like the IRTF's GAIA group (see research group which will meet soon )
• Derek MacAulay  (Horizon Institute, University of Nottingham) -- Gave a nice chat about Horizon model of personal cloud etc 

• John Hand  (EPSRC) - the funders viewpoint - I mentioned the NSF as an Ethics for STEM programme that's more general that EPSRC should look at...
• Anthony House  (Google) quoted Tim O'reilly "Create more value than you capture" and also got asked a great question about breaking concrete that cements us to 17th century values:)
• Judy Wajcman (London School of Economics) - a GREAT talk about women and about time (why should everything that's faster be better:)

Q&A:  Questions to the panel

I asked "since many areas like banks/finance, government/war, pharma/medical, energy/global warming, as well as cloud/privacy, don't take ONE BLIND BIT OF NOTICE of what would be socially responsible, why should we in the tech (ICT) community bother?

Several questions followed, which were a bit less blunt....

The gist of the answers was that we could lead/set an example, but also that businesses if large need to keep their brand clean so theres is mileage (economic) in being ethical, plus small outfits would like help ("tell us what to do")

of course, not just being motivated by profit (Pikketty got namechecked) was good - i'd have love to have heard Precariat views too:)

 WRAP UP: Tristram Riley-Smith (University of Cambridge) wrapped up with the Science/Evidence-> Policy story which was good stuff

I'd have like to have heard about making the law responsibile too (GCHQ said "we don't break the law" - not on paper, bt in a moral sense they do:)
[shout out here to PIs Campaign to test this in European Court

Duty Cycles Finished

We depend more and more on Solid State Storage, and more and more devices use rechargeable batteries.

What if one day, everything went wrong at the same time?

Why this is not unlikely?

Simple - the devices are made and sold in batches. They have a duty cycle limit (there are a maximum number of write cycles you can apply to Flash memory and there are maximum number of discharge/recharge cycles you can run a battery through). The chances are likely because of the law of large numbers - most people buy things at xmas or other holidays, so manufacturing and usage are synchronised.

Devices (like cars) are built so that components fail on the guarantee lifetime boundary (or just after).

The law of large numbers (central limit theorem) says that this is something that will apply to lots of stuff....

So picture this (cue Blondie music) a day in december, 2024, all the electric cars and phones and networks and power systems and internet of things die. And cannot be rebooted. Ever. Again.

Solution to the Google Glass Privacy Problem

It's obvious that Google Glass is the only way we will solve the dementia problem of the future, but the current worry on many peoples' mind is the ominpresent privacy risk - as written about so cogently in Dave Eggars' book, The Circle, this is not acceptable.

I propose a solution, not very different than several technologies I invented many years ago such as the Hairt and the Gurl (a clear pre-cursor to the Glass, and obviously prior art sufficient to bust any patent on it:)

The solutions is that every Glasshole shall be given a regulat supply of enough kits for everyone in every social encouter that might cause embarassment for innocent bystanders (colleagues, sexual partners, family etc) - a suitable kit is already available for around 5 bucks - see google tache proposal, for one fine product.

This would also make many pub situations infinitely more entertaining.

the net is a very gendered engenderment

so thinking back, its hard to remember any women associated with the creation of the internet - lots of "fathers of x" and so forth

yet in the 70s and early 80s, computer science was nearly 50/50 gender balance (in jobs I had an university courses and departments)

so why did this happen?

and how would the net be different if it had been designed/discovered/invented by women?

answers on a woven tapestry embroidered with holerith string band music

Towards an Aesthetic for Conspiracy Theories

So we need to lay down some terms for these conspiracy theories, that enable people to get them right (lets say we want to start a few bogus ones and see how they run, for example:-)

Rule 1. Lack of evidence proves that there is a cover up.
This is an essential rule of the conspiracy theorist - its part and parcel of the next rule:

Rule 2. A conspiracy theorist should strive to make their story unfalsifiable.
Falsifiable theories are for Popperians seeking objective knowledge, not for the hunter for objectionable ideas.

Rule 3. Ideally, a conspiracy theory should have great (in the sense of broad) explanatory power or applicability - it ought, at one fell swoop, to encompass several problematical domains (missing aircraft, beleaguered news readers, confused celebs). Conspiracy theories make the inexplicably complicated, suddenly comprehensible to a complete dolt.

Rule 4. Any decent conspiracy theory resonates with some fundamental cultural meme, especially one that engenders fear, uncertainty and doublets. Hence myths from eldritch times, alien technology, hidden rules of numbers and the odd way some people look at you when you talk about this in the context of UKIP's chances at ruling Scotland, are essential.

Rule 5. There is a cover up, which means that there are coverer uppers. There is some group (Illuminati, Opus Dei, the French, the Arms/Drugs/Car manufacturers, UKIP) who know something, and are not telling us.

Rule 6. A good conspiracy theory exploits the principle of maximum astonishment (see also Rule 3). On the other hand, a conspiracy theory might sound occasionally plausible for a moment - for example, the fact that mice, cats, dogs and horses are just different stages in the growth of the same creature, or that the names of passengers on flight MH370 were the same as the travellers on the Marie Celeste, or that 3D printers contain secret scanners to make sure you don't ever copy people, especially not members of UKIP.

Search Me

In the UK, we had/have a deplorable police practice called "stop and search"

now this was ostenisbly so people suspected of carrying {drugs, knives, guns, islamic-extremism, irishness} cold be caught - unlike the US, this was targetted - of course, the net effect was to alienate various groups (especially the last 2) even more.

ironically, one of the things about the british police people like is that you could ask them staff - "ask a bobby" was a common piece of advice - the {time, location, help, etc}...and generally, they would be helpful (still are sometimes) - also, them not carrying guns makes them a bit more accessible:)

So now, if you search the internet via some engine {Google, Bing, Yahoo! etc}, what you look for will no doubt be part of the encroaching polis-state's total information awareness - as someone said at the IETF, when flying to Vancouver recently, he'd set off from another airport very early, and was about to send his partner an {e=mail, SMS, checkin} saying "this airport is SO dead", and then thought "do i really really want the NSA to put their interpretation on that".....

how weird to live in this world.

so the {NSA, GCHQ, Disney, etc} collect all our utterances.....but you can't go ask them for anything.

note that despite this, 9/11, 7/7, and poor Rigby's murder occurred. all that money spent by the surveilance state, but they can't reveal what they know in case the bad guys know that they know who the bad guys are and where they live.

come on, its our money, and we know you know where everyone lives, so how about you use it t round up the usual suspects for once before they commit some outrage, eh? just once. to prove you didn't spend it all on drink and drugs

Dave Eggars puts it in to context with a nice article discussing the swings of history and the story of Bernstein and the Front....for me, what we need is an extremist liberal take over of government which locks up and persecutes all the surveillance people for a couple of years, to give them a taste of what they are going to enable, but to point out that if it was an extremist right wing takeover, it would never end.

terms and conditions, part II

1. We were wondering why there's no service that explains all online services' Terms&Conditions in Plain English once and for all (using a common set of terms:)

e.g. you own everything you put here on google's blogger service; or you own nothing you put here on google's blogger service. When you die, it is all deleted; or when you die, it is all in the public domain; etc etc

2. We were also wondering why there is no service that explains to you your privacy settings in one simple infographic, once and for all

e.g. using a simple visualisation of which people  who you don't know from Adam can see something you post or tag or blog, when a friend of a friend responds, reposts/ tags etc  - i.e. a simple venn diagrammy type thing with your ego net extending at least to friend of friend, then with pictures of people further away in the you-centric infosphere, and so on.

Of course, one answer to these two questions is that there isn't really an honest way to make money from such a service - or at least, not in a way that would a) induce trust and b) not cause all the existing service providers to set their best lawyers on you...

So I'm thinking this is an excellent project for cloud legal people at QMUL - we can get law students each year to do a project translating T&C for for the lay person, and explaining about property and privacy for the great public users of the unwashed Interweb....

3. Single sign on - hmmmm - how do we do this with really fast revocation? I quite like the two-gadget approach (you need a fitbit like device that talks to your smart phone - without both, AND you, then all bets are off....

The Role of Religion in Revolutionary Network Architectures

I'm looking forward to the forthcoming IAB workshop on Internet Technology Adoption and Transition for lots of reasons (catch up with many people, navel gaze about important topic, maybe even find out what works and what doesn't)!)

However, I'm looking through all the papers that will be presented and am worried that we are missing a very big factor in technology's success or failure, and that is faith.

The papers to be presented break into 4 rough groups
1. Economics -
     e.g. how do markets and commons interact.?...
     how do various tricks bundling, regulation play out?

2. Process -
     what do patents do to things?
     how does the ietf capitalize (or not) on research?

3. Ecology
     does the hourglass emerge always?
     how is diversity helpful (or  hindering)?

4. Technology
   what makes a protocol tick well?
   what pieces of the current experimental world (ICN, bitcoin) will make it to      prime time?

All good, but all roads that have been trod several times before in the communities - in general, economics has not had a great track record in prediction, and bio-inspired stuff is fun, but again doesn't match the details.
It is always worth studying the process and use cases are well worth documenting of course, but what bugs me is that there are so many potential failures we havn't looked at, and what do they have in common?

For me, it is the lack of a fervour, and what is more, persistence in the face of strong adversarial reaction - when we started deploying IP (I am not talking about the mega-ARPA projects, I am talking about the "going into schools at weekends" and "laying out community nets in small towns" movements in the mid 1980s), we were conducting a missionary movement - I recall also giving courses on TCP/IP to hoards of commercial folks despite their seniors in their companies still buying all sorts of CCITT (now ITU) and ISO (now nowhere to be seen) products being pushed by big companies and government agencies (GOSIP - Government OSI Procurement, was the official religion).

We persisted on this for 20 years - we still do....but we are now the official religion.

so now what happens if you want to introduce new tech, you need to make it the underdog - IPv6, no good at all - DNSSec secure BGP? hopeless basket cases. You need something that
a) is really barking mad, but might just work
and
b) has the feel of overthrowing an older dogma
and
c) inspires faith, even when the evidence is thin....

but you also need to think long term - 20 years is too short - its generational.
And most of us in the game are from the previous generation, and we need to get out the way.....but of what?

future of the net & its impact on birth and death of industries

Yesterday, I attended an interesting meeting between policy maker/implementors, and techie/geeky people to discuss this fine topic (again - previous meeting was blogged earlier here under the topic of collective intelligence

this time, we split into two groups first, and laid out our wares to each other as techies all in one room, and policies all in the other, and then came together.

1. Techie discussion was perhaps more far reaching - long term problems like the use of the Internet as a metaphor for organising other sectors (decentralisation, symmetry between clients and servers/peer progressive) for energy, government, education, crowd sourcing/funding, journalism etc etc...

Some v. interesting stuff on power-law distributions in networks, and how these impact the way power itself plays out across a web of organisations, and if we do adopt the internet metaphor for these other secotrs, what that would do to wealth (in all senses of the word).

2. Then the policy people summaries their topics, which were much more about immediate problems the net brtings in their space under the general headings of

Personal - Does the net impact our cognition?; why do some things succeed and some fail? does the net replace people & jobs?

Business -does the net replace businesses or just optimise them?

Government - who is going to lead on regulation and governance?; is the net just too big to control;?
specifics (who is going to pay for rural broadband? how should public broadcast be funded?)

There was sme discussion about transport area stuff (esp. under optimnisaing both the operations and the large decision making - e.g. HS2). There was some discussion about censorship and darknets.

The main conclusions the tech people draw on these discussions (and tried to lead the policy people towards) were largely optimisitic

Again, background reading
1. Jaron Lanier's "Who Owns the Future"monetizing your personal data instead of being owned by the net
2. Cory Doctorow the war on general purpose computing and appliances
3. The Interconnectedness of Everything

Crucial background was on defending systems against bad guys. I'm not so optimistic about this aspect of the net