Ged Carroll

Search results for: “digital economy bill”

  • The digital economy bill

    I recently wrote a guest blog post with my colleague Nick Osborne for progressive (Nick tells me that means left-of-centre, politically speaking) blog Left Foot Forward: The Digital Economy Bill is legislatively flawed.

    digital economy bill

    Nick was particularly concerned about inconsistencies in the legislation and constitutional issues. I thought about different issues regarding media economics and technological progress, so I thought I would share my thinking with the notes I made before I contributed to the post. Enjoy.

    And here’s the copy that we submitted:

    Left Foot Forward published an article last week, Unravelling the Digital Economy Bill, but the fact is that the legislation is flawed. We say this for a number of reasons but the most concerning is the Secondary Legislation included within the Bill.

    Without getting into the details of Parliamentary legislative rules, this Bill will give the power to Lord Mandelson, or any future Secretary of State whose remit includes this legislation, to introduce new laws, without extensive Parliamentary scrutiny.

    Apparently, Lord Mandelson has also written to the Leader of the House, Harriet Harman MP, to amend the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, also, most likely through secondary legislation. This is all part of the Government’s crack-down on media piracy.

    However, the Guardian has been reporting the potential for this Bill to open the door for the Tories to help Rupert Murdoch and stop news aggregators such as Google publishing any NewsCorp or News International owned news, which would be a dangerous precedent and a concerning outcome for everyone – including bloggers such as ourselves.

    Attempts by Murdoch to pair with Microsoft to block out Google seem to be underway if the Dow Jones Newswire is accurate. This potential lack of consultation, scrutiny and openness is concerning in any Bill, however in a medium and industry that is as fluid as the digital and online sector, there is large potential for this legislation to have some very damaging effects.

    Whilst these controversial legislative methods are apparently designed to future-proof the bill technologically, it also raises a few questions about the government’s vision of the future. Moore’s Law talks about the number of transistors on a given piece of silicon doubling every 18 months; this is the reason why computers and networks have sped up and why storage on mobile phones have increased over the years.

    It is also the reason why the minimum standards for future broadband aim way too low. With Moore’s Law in mind, it is important to look at the actual technological advances being triumphed in this Bill. The UK government had a chance to spur innovation and be visionary like it did with the motorway system in the 1950s, instead we will have set a miserably low benchmark.

    The UK is relatively densely populated, yet Australia under the leadership of Kevin Rudd has set access speeds of 100MBps for 90 per cent of homes. Hong Kong residents already enjoy 100Mbps broadband and similar speeds are available in Japan and South Korea. Simply put, the digital economy won’t be able to grow under these circumstances.

    Furthermore, there is no reference to the digital tax, a necessary evil, to pay for these upgrades. Although it has been stated that it will be in the Finance Bill which will be outlined in the near future, what happens if this Bill doesn’t get through prior to the election and the Finance Bill does? Where is this money supposed to go?

    The next concern is the “three strikes and you’re out” policy, which opens up a whole new area of discussion. Every home will be sent three warning letters every time their ISP finds them downloading illegal content. Users can have their accounts blocked or fined, as can ISPs who do not comply, despite the fact that the ISPA has said most of the Bill will be unworkable and costly.

    Ironically, there is some research to indicate that piracy is closer to trialling, like a test drive at a car dealership and plays an active role in word-of-mouthmarketing boosting media content sales.

    The Bill tries to protect the media industries against digital innovation. Yet this is as misguided as the nationalisation of failing businesses in the UK up to the late 1970s. Much of the media industries’ problems are due to chronic mismanagement.

    Looking at newspapers firstly, they have little to differentiate themselves, like British Leyland of old they produce the type of content no one wants to buy and have historically been making cuts in all the wrong places of their businesses. An analysis found that newspapers were spending 70 per cent of their money in areas that were not value-creating.

    The music industry’s issues extend back way before the internet and have been well documented by the industry insiders like Simon Napier-Bell. In fact it was only the rise of the CD and back catalogue sales of older artists which helped it grow meaningfully throughout the 80s and early 90s.

    Music labels have a fundamental lack of understanding of online economics, in a time when they should be looking how they can rationalise processes and sign increased rosters to take account of the ‘long tail’ of consumer demand they have reduced artist rosters. They cease to add value for established artists who instead have gone for ‘360’ deals with events companies which provide them with more money.

    So basically, there are a lot of holes in this Bill. It could all be moot as it may not even get through prior to the election, but there is no doubt that it needs many more amendments before it creates anything truly useful. Hopefully, the secondary legislation will be used to make these improvements, because if this Bill is sped through without proper consultation, the digital economy may take a long time to recover. More related content here.

  • Matured digital strategy + more

    Mediatel: Newsline: Vodafone’s ‘matured’ digital strategy reappraises adspend – “Many advertisers, including Vodafone, have come to realise that a lot of the social platforms are high frequency but very, very low attention,” she said. “When you are launching a new brand or proposition you can’t communicate it in one and half seconds.” – stating the bleeding obvious dressed up as industry thought leadership. You could have realised that a decade ago. Social is poor for brand building, but what are Vodafone going to do with it?

    Vodafone taxi

    Dubai Ports World and a New Form of Imperialism – report examines Gulf expansionism through a case study of the Emirates-based company Dubai Ports World (DP World). This multinational is one of the world’s leading global port operators and logistics giants—and a source of power for the United Arab Emirates. A close look at its operations in the Horn of Africa reveals the ways that a government can exert control through a modern state-chartered company. A closer look at the operations of DP World also casts light on a key driver of disastrous state fragmentation in the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea. DP World functions like a modern-day version of the British East India Company, serving as both a foreign policy tool and a profit engine – which makes Chinese run ports and Belt and Road projects even scarier

    Project MUSE – China and World Order: Mutual Gain or Exploitation? – signs are that an assertive realpolitik is China’s leitmotif. Frankopan’s New Silk Roads lays out the wide scope of China’s ambitions and hints at some of their genuinely internationalist dimensions, but it also documents the case for viewing China’s role as a wolf in sheep’s clothing—at least as rapacious as European and other imperialists in previous centuries. The latter view is supported by Burnay’s Chinese Perspectives on the International Rule of Law and the anthology Building a Normative Order in the South China Sea. Still other studies show that China’s cyber networks are establishing foundations for Chinese dominion over foreign resources and potential dependencies that, in time, can be pressured to do more than kowtow

    China and Hollywood: Is the romance over? – SupChina – the upcoming sequel to Top Gun, a 1986 American action drama film, made headlines following the release of its first trailer, where two patches that had originally shown the Taiwanese flag appear to have been swapped out. Produced by Paramount Pictures, the movie has Chinese tech giant Tencent as its investor and primary promoter in the Chinese market.

    The “New” Private Security Industry, the Private Policing of Cyberspace and the Regulatory Questions – Mark Button, – the growth of the “new” private security industry and private policing arrangements, policing cyberspace. It argues there has been a significant change in policing which is equivalent to the “quiet revolution” associated with private policing that Shearing and Stenning observed in the 1970s and 1980s, marking the “second quiet revolution.” The article then explores some of the regulatory questions that arise from these changes, which have been largely ignored to date by scholars of policing and policy-makers

    Privacy, People, and Markets | Ethics & International Affairs | Cambridge Core – Most current work on privacy understands it according to an economic model: individuals trade personal information for access to desired services and websites. This sounds good in theory. In practice, it has meant that online access to almost anything requires handing over vast amounts of personal information to the service provider with little control over what happens to it next. The two books considered in this essay both work against that economic model. In Privacy as Trust, Ari Ezra Waldman argues for a new model of privacy that starts not with putatively autonomous individuals but with an awareness that managing information flows is part of how people create and navigate social boundaries with one another. Jennifer Rothman’s Right of Publicity confronts the explosive growth of publicity rights—the rights of individuals to control and profit from commercial use of their name and public image—and, in so doing, she exposes the poverty of treating information disclosure merely as a matter of economic calculation

    ‘Influencing is heading into the void’: Natasha Stagg and Kate Durbin on the future of social media – author Natasha Stagg joins Kate Durbin to discuss the Kardashians’ quest for immortality, ‘it girls’, and maintaining identity in the content economy

    Data and Digital Intelligence Commons – The digital economy can be understood as comprising intelligent systems running whole sectors, employing data based digital intelligence to re-organise and coordinate them. Within such a macro understanding, it is possible to apply the framework of Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) developed by Elinor Ostrom to examine the management of data and digital intelligence resources at the community level in a given sector, like transport, under the dominant model. Such an analysis reveals very suboptimal results on almost all the key IAD evaluation parameters; from efficiency and equity to accountability and sustainability

    Social factory as prosaic state space: Redefining labour in China’s mass innovation/mass entrepreneurship campaign – June Wang, Yujing Tan, – Redefining labour in China’s mass innovation/mass entrepreneurship campaign

    Steering capital: the growing private authority of index providers in the age of passive asset management: Review of International Political Economy: Vol 0, No 0 – with the shift towards passive investing, the three big index providers have become actors that exercise growing private authority in capital markets as they steer investments through the indices they create and maintain. Index providers define the criteria according to which companies or countries are included into an index. Thereby, they influence investment decisions and corporate governance norms as well as strategies of those companies and states (that seek to be) included into their indices. We argue that rather than technical expertise, the main source of authority are their powerful brands that are trusted by the international investment community and which are entrenched via network externalities

    Noncompete agreements | Economic Policy Institute – Our survey results show that somewhere between 27.8% and 46.5% of the private-sector workforce—between 36 million and 60 million workers—are subject to noncompete clauses. High and low level employees are being covered by noncompetes. Given the ubiquity of noncompetes, the real harm they inflict on workers and competition, and the fact they are part of a growing trend of employers requiring their workers to sign a variety of contracts that take away their rights, the authors believe that they should be abolished – having been hobbled by one, I couldn’t agree more

    Telegraphic Revolution: Speed, Space and Time in the Nineteenth Century* | German History | Oxford Academic – the impact of the ‘communications revolution’ upon experiences of time and space during the nineteenth century. Focusing upon the first three decades of telegraphic communication, it unpacks the assumptions underlying linear narratives of ‘acceleration’ and ‘time-space compression’ to understand the roots of Germany’s fraught relationship to modernity. In doing so, it highlights the importance of the changes which took place between the 1848 revolutions and the early years of the Kaiserreich and which laid the foundations for the peculiarities of the Wilhelmine Era. During this period, it argues, the perceived impact of telegraphic communication, the ‘expansion’ or ‘contraction’ of space and time, varied from one person and place to another, reflecting the technology’s progressive and uneven expansion across Germany. Access to new networks of communication was dependent upon, and in turn influenced, the changing status of individuals, towns and the countryside experiencing the forces of industrialization, market capitalism and globalization – more on the central idea behind this

    Jazz Wars in the ’70s | The Village Voice – jazz in the ’70s boiled down to a debate between the non­compromising eclectics and the compromising eclectics, a debate that escalated into a class war. Monied groups with major record label affiliations played concert halls; a middle class of dependable mainstream-modern attractions monopolized the established jazz clubs; the new and avant were accom­modated briefly by the loft scene, and then by a network of new clubs and theatres. Numerous exceptions to this pic­ture don’t alter its veracity. Jazz radio became fusion radio, while the record in­dustry, puffing away at the jazz-is-back myth with one overproduced confection after another – this explains Kenny G

    Beyond scandal? Blockchain technologies and the legitimacy of post-2008 finance | Finance and Society – Harnessing the concepts of ‘moral economy’ and ‘scandal’, we identify both possibilities and limits for blockchain applications to legitimate a range of monetary and investment activities. However, we also find that a persistent individualisation of responsibility for failures and shortcomings with ‘live’ blockchain experimentation has undermined the potentially legitimating aspects of this technology. Combining a reliance on technological fixes with a persistent individualist moral economy, we conclude, works against efforts to confront head-on the tensions underpinning the on-going legitimacy crises facing finance – sociological reasons why much of fintech wouldn’t work even if the tech could

    Swiping right: face perception in the age of Tinder – ScienceDirect – judgments of physical attractiveness are assumed to drive the “swiping” decisions that lead to matches, we propose that there is an additional evaluative dimension driving behind these decisions: judgments of moral character. With the aim of adding empirical support for this proposition, we critically review the most striking findings about first impressions extracted from faces, moral character in person perception, creepiness, and the uncanny valley, as they apply to Tinder behavior

    What’s love got to do with it? Passion and inequality in white‐collar work – Rao – – Sociology Compass – Wiley Online Library – we argue that the passion schema has become a critical marker in the labor market for sorting individuals into occupations, hiring and promotion within organizations, and assigning value to people’s labor. Emergent research suggests that because the expression and perception of passion remain ambiguously defined in the workplace and varies by context, it is pivotal in reproducing social inequalities. In this review, we focus on how privileging passion in the workplace and interpreting it as a measure of aptitude impacts social inequalities by race, gender, and social class

    CMA lifts the lid on digital giants – GOV.UK – interesting points: Each year, about 15% of queries on Google have never been searched for before. Other search engines like Bing will not have the same access to these queries, putting Google in a powerful position of being able to better train its algorithms and provide more accurate search results than its rivals. The CMA has also found that the default settings people are faced with online have a profound effect on choice and the shape of competition. Last year in the UK, Google was willing to pay around £1 billion – 16% of all its search revenues – where it was the default search engine on mobile devices such as Apple phones. – Looking at the the 15% of queries that are new to Google every year, is this cultural evolution, new brands and products or a combination of both?

    Explainer: Behind the climb in Chinese companies’ defaults on bond payments – Reuters – state and private companies have missed payments on more than 100 billion yuan ($14.2 billion) of bonds in the year to end-October, not far off the 111 billion yuan for all of 2018, according to S&P Global. Reuters calculations show six state-owned firms and 42 private companies defaulted on payments this year.

    Marketers warn they could be ‘priced out’ of Facebook advertising | Advertising | Campaign Asia – overheating in developed markets? Really interesting when you read Mediatel: Newsline: Starcom: TV is now twice the price… but not twice as good – “There’s still nothing better than [a 30 second ad],” Dan Plant said on a panel at Future of TV Advertising Global. “Unfortunately it costs twice as much now – and it hasn’t got twice as good at what it was doing. You pay twice as much to achieve the same thing.” – is this really taking into account the long term brand building role of (good) TV advertising? Also the inflation doesn’t seem to be nearly as bad as Facebook for instance

    China’s social credit system: The Chinese citizens perspective | UCL ASSA – The question of who to trust, and social trust more broadly is one that is pertinent to every modern society, not just China. Although the idea of someone being ‘trustworthy’ (chengxin) has long existed in the Chinese traditional moral system, it is widely believed this was fundamentally damaged in the past 50 years, starting with Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966-76), now seen as a period characterised by the ‘breakdown of public morality’.  A turbulent period characterised by families turning on each other and being forced to denounce any friends or family members deemed counter-revolutionary, the Cultural Revolution has also had the effect of eroding the concept of chengxin and therefore also mutual trust over time

    Unilever warns it will miss 2019 sales growth target | Financial Times – economic slowdown in south Asia — one of its biggest markets — and “difficult” trading conditions in west Africa. It also said trading in developed markets remained “challenging” and that while there were signs of improvement in North America, a recovery there would take time.

    Apple faces shareholder vote on human rights policies | Financial Times – shit, meet fan….

    China’s TV, Film Industry Shrinks Amid Ongoing Censorship | RFA – Around 65 percent of 9, 841 actors and celebrities in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan hadn’t been on television lately, while the high-profile roles are generally shared among less than one percent of the profession, the report said.Around 95 percent have had more than a year without being offered work, it said. – It’s RFA so you have to take a certain amount of it with a pinch of salt but the numbers fit with what I’ve heard. The Chinese film industry has put its eggs in fewer and fewer baskets

  • Communications Bill draft

    This is going to be a convoluted long post on the draft Communications Bill, so I just decided to pick a point and start.

    The Draft Communications Bill, what is it?

    The Draft Communications Bill is a piece of legislation that builds upon work done by the European Union and the previous Labour administration. It is designed (as the government sees it) to maintain capability of law enforcement to access communications. It builds on a number of different pieces of legislation.

    Communications Data Bill 2008 – sought to built a database of connections:

    • Websites visited
    • Telephone numbers dialled
    • Email addresses contacted

    This data would be collected by internet service providers. The current government had described these plans at the time as Orwellian.

    Directive 2006/24/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 March 2006 on the retention of data generated or processed in connection with the provision of publicly available electronic communications services or public communications networks and amending Directive 2002/58/EC – requires data retention to identify users and details of phone calls made and emails sent for a period between six months and two years. This information is to be  made available, on request, to law enforcement authorities to investigate and deal serious crime and terrorism.

    The UK already has used non-legislative means to force 95 per cent of internet access through a filtered system, predominantly BT’s Cleanfeed which blogs blacklisted sites or pages. It has been used to filter child pornography, there were discussions about using it to block content that was deemed to glorify terrorism and has the potential to block content in a similar way to other more authoritarian nations. In a well-known case Cleanfeed had blocked a Wikipedia page on The Scorpions Virgin Killer album originally issued in 1976.

    In addition, the UK government had evaluated (and rejected) internet connections being filtered for pornographic content by default – apparently due to a lack of appetite from parents for content filtering.

    The Digital Economy Act of 2010 allowed sites to be blocked and allowed prosecution of consumers based on their IP address which was problematic.

    So there is already a complex legal and regulatory environment that the Draft Communications Bill is likely to be part of.

    In essence, the Draft Communications Bill gives the capability to build a database of everyone’s social graph. Everyone you have called, been in touch with or been in proximity to.  It requires:

    • A wide range of internet services, not just ISPs to keep a record of user data for 12 months
    • That retained data to be kept in safe and secure way; just like say credit card information or user names and passwords
    • The ability to search, filter and match data from different sources allowing a complex near-complete picture to be built up of our digital lives. Which would be of interest to hackers, criminals, private investigators or over-zealous journalists (a la the recent News International phone hacking scandals)

    What the government have been keen to stress is that the process would not look at the content inside the communication. If we use the analogy of the postal service, recording all the external information on an envelope or parcel, but not peaking inside. The reason for this can be found in a successful case taken by Liberty and other organisations against the UK government in 2008. Article eight of the European Convention on Human Rights focuses on respect for private and family life, home and correspondence.

    During the 1990s, the UK government had intercepted calls, faxes and electronic communication placed internationally by people in Ireland via a specially built microwave communications tower in Capenhurst. The Electronic Test Facility was uncovered by Richard Lamont in 1999 and was subsequently covered by Channel 4 news and The Independent.

    Once the Electronic Test Facility came out into the public domain, the court case followed.

    There are concerns about how this information can be used indiscriminately to build up a Stasi-like picture of the UK population. This is more sensitive given the controversial  black list provided to the construction industry by The Consulting Association. Latent public anxiety about commercial services like Facebook and behavioural advertising also contribute to this mindset.

    Why all the power?

    Modern police work and intelligence work doesn’t look like Spooks, James Bond or Starsky and Hutch. In reality, it looks more like The Wire. Investigations revolve around informants and painstaking investigation work.

    A key part in this is network analysis. Understanding the structure of  relationships between participants allows them to be caught. A key part in the film The Battle of Algiers shows how French paratroopers looked to break suspects to find out the structure of their terrorist cells. If they can break them fast enough before conspirators flee, the French could roll up the terrorist infrastructure. The film’s main protagonist who instigates this policy is a portmanteau of numerous counterinsurgency specialists including Jacques Massu, Marcel Bigeard and Roger Trinquier, all of whom had been involved in the French counterinsurgency campaign from 1954 – 57 which had successfully  rolled up Algerian separatist networks in the capital Algiers.

    Move forward five decades and the US counterinsurgency work in Afghanistan and Iraq puts a lot of focus on degree centrality and social network analysis as part of its efforts to dismantle al-Qaeda and other fellow travellers.

    Secondly, good operational security techniques from the use of stenography or encryption of communications if implemented well can be difficult even for governments to crack. If you know the network structure, this gives you two options to gain information on the communications:

    • Look at the communications metadata: how much is going on, where is it being sent to, is the volume larger or less than normal. These can all be used as indicators that something maybe happening, changes in power within an organisation (who is giving the orders)
    • Focus resources on cracking communications that would be deemed important, for instance those to a particular number

    The all-up data picture would be deemed important to provide a better picture of network analysis. When I think about myself for a minute:

    I have a range of different online identities, many of which are due to the limitations of the service on which they are held or when I set them up.

    I have one main UK mobile phone number, but I have had different ancillary ones:

    • Work phones
    • Temporary PAYG numbers to sell things on The Gumtree and Craigslist
    • SIMs that I have used for data only on my iPad and smartphones over the years

    Now, let’s do a thought experiment, imagine a gang of drug dealers each with a set of pill boxes like old people have labelled up for each day of the week. In each section of the box would be a SIM card. They would then swap those SIMs in and out of their phones on a regular basis making their communications hard to track if you were just following one number. They could be using regularly changed secondhand mobile phones so that the IMEI number changes as well.

    The SIMs could be untraceable, they could be bought and topped up for cash if they were bought outside the UK. I can go into my local convenience store here in Hong Kong and buy and top-up them up for cash or a pre-paid credit card with no one asking to see my ID.

    Untraceable UK SIMs could be acquired along with bank accounts from students going home, paid off electronically, perhaps even with the debit cards attached to the accounts and the accounts topped up with ATM deposits.

    But if you interrogate a database once you have one or more numbers and look for numbers that appear on a network in the same location immediately after the number you know disappears you are well on the way to tracking down more of the mobile graph of the drug dealers.

    Now imagine the similar principles being applied to messaging clients, email addresses or social networking accounts in order to provide the complete network analysis of the gang of drug dealers created in the thought experiment.

    How does this fit in with the people?

    Under the previous Labour administration councils were given wide-ranging surveillance powers that were used to deal with incidents such as putting the wrong kind of materials in the recycling bins. This annoyed and educated British consumers on privacy. The Draft Communications Bill smacks to many as a similar kind of snoopers charter.

    The internet itself, has been political and has become political. If one goes back to the roots of the early public internet, one can see the kind of libertarian themes running through it in a similar way to the back to the land efforts of the hippies which begat the modern environmental movement. This was about freedom in the same way the American pioneers could go west for physical freedom the internet opened up a new virtual frontier where one could make one’s own fate. It was no coincidence that people involved in ‘the hippy movement’ like Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly were involved in setting the political tone of the internet.  Or that the Grateful Dead have had an online presence since 1995.

    When these freedoms have been overly curtailed or threatened, internet users have struck back; sometimes unsuccessfully. The Pirate parties that sprang out of The Pirate Bay | copyright discussion have had limited political success, which has misled many to believe that the internet isn’t a political issue. What they managed to do is highlight the issue and their concerns to a wider range of people, in a similar way to how far right movements put immigration on mainstream political agendas across Europe.

    It is also coupled with a decline in trust in authority, partly due to the financial crisis and the cosy relationship with the media which came to light during the phone hacking scandal.

    Even The Economist realised that something was going on and called internet activism the new green. It takes mainstream political systems a while to adjust to new realities. It took at least two decades for green issues to become respectable amongst mainstream politicians and it seems to be even harder for them to grasp the abstract concepts behind the digital frontier.

    The signs are all there for a change in the public’s attitude; when you have The Mail Online providing critical commentary of the Draft Communications Bill and providing recommendations of encryption software readers can use to keep their communications confidential you know that something has changed.

    How does this differ from what companies can derive anyway?

    This is probably where I think that things get the most interesting.

    Network analysis tools are available off the shelf from the likes of Salesforce.com, IBM or SAS Institute. They have been deployed to look for fraudulent transactions, particularly on telecoms networks, and are also used to improve the quality of customer service. Many of them get inputs directly from social network such as Twitter and Facebook.

    Deep packet inspection software and hardware again is available off the shelf from a number of suppliers. Companies like Narus and TopLayer Networks pioneered deep packet inspection for a wide range of reasons from surveillance to prioritising different types of network traffic. The security implications became more important (and lucrative) after 9/11; now the likes of Cisco and Huawei provide deep packet inspection products which are used for everything from securing corporate networks, preventing denial of service attacks and in the case of Phorm – behavioural advertising.

    Skyhook Wireless and Google have location data that services can draw down on providing accurate information based on cell tower triangulation and a comprehensive map built-up of wi-fi hotspots.

    Credit information can be obtained from numerous services, as can the electoral role. If this data is put together appropriately (which is the hard part), there is very little left of a life that would be private anyway.

    Companies are trying to get to this understanding, or pretend that they are on the way there. Google’s Dashboard shows the consumer how much it infers about them and information that consumers freely give Facebook makes it an ideal platform for identity theft.

    One of the most high-profile organisations to get close to this 360 view of the consumer is Delta Airlines who recently faced a backlash about it.

    So what does this all mean?

    We should operate on the basis that none of our electronic information is confidential. Technology that makes communication easier also diminishes privacy.  The problem isn’t the platforms per se but our behavioural adjustment to them.

    More content related to telecoms related issues can be found here.

    More information
    Giant database plan Orwellian | BBC News
    Directive 2006/24/EC (PDF)
    Written answers on internet pornography – They Work For You
    UK government rejects ‘opt in’ plans for internet porn – TechRadar
    Internet Filtering: Implications of the “Cleanfeed” System School of Law, University of Edinburgh Third Year PhD Presentation Series TJ McIntyre Background Document for 12 November 2010 Presentation (PDF)
    Councils’ surveillance powers curbed | The Guardian
    The new politics of the internet Everything is connected | The Economist
    Blacklist Blog | Hazards magazine
    UK government plans to track ALL web use: MI5 to install ‘black box’ spy devices to monitor British internet traffic | Mail Online
    Most UK citizens do not support draft Data Communications Bill, survey shows | Computer Weekly
    How Britain eavesdropped on Dublin | The Independent
    Cases, Materials, and Commentary on the European Convention on Human Rights By Alastair Mowbray
    U.S. Army Counterinsurgency Handbook By U S Dept of the Army, Department of Defense
    Draft Communications Data Bill – UK Parliament
    Deep packet inspection (DPI) market a $2 billion opportunity by 2016 – Infonetics Research
    Google Dashboard
    Big Brother Unmasked… As Delta Airlines – smarter TRAVEL

  • Threat score + more things

    The new way police are surveilling you: Calculating your threat score – The Washington Post – similar to China’s social credit score, the threat score sounds like a concept perilously close to ‘pre-crime’ in Minority Report. Also how will the threat score handle accusations of systemic racism or infringement of civil or constitutional rights?

    Moleskine 开出了第一家咖啡店，在日内瓦机场 | 理想生活实验室 – interesting brand collaboration in Germany with restaurateur Caviar House & Prunier

    El Chapo, journalists and readers – Scripting News – pre-approval of copy happens at the celeb level whether it is Madonna or an ‘in the public eye’ CEO, or ’embeds’

    Apple News App Is Off to a Rocky Start – WSJ – problems with traffic measurement

    Schibsted wants to circumvent the mobile adblocking apocalypse by making better, more effective ads » Nieman Journalism Lab – interesting online advertising research

    SoundCloud reportedly raises €32 million in debt funding – Tech.eu – interesting that its debt funding, did they originally go for VC funding and increased valuation?

    Yahoo’s Brain Drain Shows a Loss of Faith Inside the Company – The New York Times – 30 per cent attrition rate. When I worked there the attrition rate was high, this is combination of changing business needs and media / tech industry rotating doors in many roles

    2016 emerging food trends | Global Food Forums ™ – interesting set of insights

    Inside the tiny house revolution | Yahoo! – Katie Couric on downsizing

    Creating a marketing organisation for the Digital Age – HBR & Marketo – marketing automation getting Harvard Business Review onside with a substantial sponsorship deal no doubt

    UK defense industry slams snooper’s charter – It also states that the bill’s provisions “unduly interfere with the rights to privacy, freedom of opinion and expression.” The coalition also argues that Britain’s implementation of the bill will have far-reaching implications for the rest of the world as other countries seek to emulate the UK’s policies. – Reminds me of the overreach on the Digital Economy Bill, if that is anything to go by HMG will ignore feedback

    VR porn lends a hand. Masturbation will never be the same – CNET – so if you want to know if VR is likely to take off when the media world gets the content right, adult entertainment company Naughty America might be a good bellwether

    Behind the Numbers: Saudi Aramco Valuation – The Numbers – WSJ – the interesting thing is why do the Saudi’s want to sell now and what about the tension between domestic energy demand and the more profitable export sales? Once the red herring comes out details on the reserves and production facilities should be clearer

    Why Diesel is about to start advertising on Pornhub | Dazed – “I was always frustrated by those things that we all think but we’re not allowed to say,” admits artistic director Nicola Formichetti of what inspired this “transparency” – something which is continued in both in the brand’s SS16 campaign (exclusively released above) and a new strategy that involves ads on Tinder, Grindr, Pornhub and YouPorn. “What we see in advertisements is just selling fake dreams, fake things, this impossible beauty. I think we have to be honest. Yeah, this is an ad, we’re selling shoes. But it’s in an interesting way, and people smile.”

    Artificial intelligence: Can Watson save IBM? – FT.com – Part of the problem lies in digesting real-world information: reading and understanding reams of doctors’ notes that are hard for a computer to ingest and organise. But there is also a deeper epistemological problem. “On Jeopardy! there’s a right answer to the question,” says Ms Chin but, in the medical world, there are often just well-informed opinions – interesting delve into the limits of expert systems (paywall) – via Azeem’s great newsletter Exponential View

    Hoverboard inventor says he has made no money – mostly because of cheap Chinese knock-offs | South China Morning Post – Still, it grates with Chen that big supermarkets and department stores facilitate the counterfeiters by dealing in knockoffs. “It is very discouraging. The patent system is not working if something is popular. With something like Hovertrax, the patent is almost useless.” – Maybe IP authorities should look at Wal-Mart and co rather than the factories?

    UK Foreign Affairs committe considers probe on Sino-British ties: concerns about erosion of Hong Kong’s Basic Law | South China Morning Post – this could be just the thing required to knock the economic relationship on his head and give Cameron’s enemies the upper hand destabilising him further on his European stance

    The Internet of Things That Talk About You Behind Your Back | Motherboard – great article by Bruce Schneier

    Why The Fashion World Hates Wearables | Fast Co-Design – not practical, not subtle and butt ugly

  • Levenson report

    Levenson Report impact

    I have been viewing the outcomes of the Levenson Report from afar and decided to revisit my first post on all this:

    In the grand scheme of things the impact wasn’t that big. Whilst the News Of The World (NoTW) closed down, the replacement paper by News International has only managed to sell roughly half the NoTW’s circulation. I suspect that this is less about outrage and more about the disappearance of a well-loved brand – I was mildly surprised by the value in the NoTW brand.

    Murdoch’s resilience

    News Corporation’s resilience. What is probably most interesting about the whole debacle is the way Rupert Murdoch has used the opportunity to split the firm in two and structure News Corporation for future growth. The company has also changed its approach towards its news media properties. With the split, there is a less sentimental approach and something similar to a fast-failure model has been in play. But this has also spurred innovation:

    • Closing down The Daily
    • The Times adopting a subsidised tablet model in a clear nod to the mobile phone industry

    It was interesting that News Corporation used it as such a catalyst for change, either way it’s rivals will be competing against a leaner more dynamic business. They would have been better off with the status quo.

    The Confluence of Interests

    The confluence of interests. Whilst the Levenson Report was quite measured compared to some of the sentiment expressed, there was no way that it was going to get through on all recommendations. This would have upset the eco-system too much and there would have been likely blow-back in the future for the body-politic. Who knows the exact motivations but David Cameron’s administration took things about as far as they could. If one looks at the overall stance on the media industry from the Digital Economy Bill onwards, any greater moves would have been very out of character. The established media industry still has friends in power.

    More information

    The News Of The World: it’s probably not the revolution that you think it is
    An enquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the press by the Right Honorable Lord Justice Levenson – executive summary (PDF)

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