Ged Carroll

Category: technology | 技術 | 기술 | テクノロジー

It’s hard to explain to someone who didn’t live through it how transformation technology has been. When I was a child a computer was something mysterious. My Dad has managed to work his way up from the shop floor of the shipyard where he worked and into the planning office.

One evening he broad home some computer paper. I was fascinated by the the way the paper hinged on perforations and had tear off side edges that allowed it to be pulled through the printer with plastic sprockets connecting through holes in the paper.

My Dad used to compile and print off work orders using an ICL mainframe computer that was timeshared by all the shipyards that were part of British Shipbuilders.

I used the paper for years for notes and my childhood drawings. It didn’t make me a computer whiz. I never had a computer when I was at school. My school didn’t have a computer lab. I got to use Windows machines a few times in a regional computer labs. I still use what I learned in Excel spreadsheets now.

My experience with computers started with work and eventually bought my own secondhand Mac. Cut and paste completely changed the way I wrote. I got to use internal email working for Corning and internet connectivity when I went to university. One of my friends had a CompuServe account and I was there when he first met his Mexican wife on an online chatroom, years before Tinder.

Leaving college I set up a Yahoo! email address. I only needed to check my email address once a week, which was fortunate as internet access was expensive. I used to go to Liverpool’s cyber cafe with a friend every Saturday and showed him how to use the internet. I would bring any messages that I needed to send pre-written on a floppy disk that also held my CV.

That is a world away from the technology we enjoy now, where we are enveloped by smartphones and constant connectivity. In some ways the rate of change feels as if it has slowed down compared to the last few decades.

  • The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly

    I re-read Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants and then decided to revisit The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. The books make sense as ideal companions for each other, despite some overlap in terms of proof points.

    On the face of it The Inevitable is a less ambitious book than What Technology Wants. And when I started reading the book I didn’t get the kind of electrifying feeling that a big idea can bring, like when I read What Technology Wants.

    The inevitable

    In the book Kevin Kelly touches on the kind of areas one would expect in  typical presentation given by an innovation team at an advertising agency. He is an unashamed techno-optimist, but the key difference in his thinking is two-fold:

    • Kelly pulls it together as a coherent idea rather than 12 slivers. He provides in-depth cogent arguments that bind the trends together
    • Kelly argues that transparency in governments will compensate for the erosion of privacy. While I understand where the idea has come from, I don’t agree with this particular viewpoint at least as it would manifest itself in the west. I certainly don’t think that would be the case in the East either. The Nazis use of IBM technology damn near destroyed the world as we know it. The level of trust between the government and the governed is in decline

    There is a clear line of progression in Kevin Kelly’s works from Out of Control written at the start of the modern internet age through to The Inevitable.  If you are interested in how technology is shaping our world buy What Technology Wants; if you are still hungry for more follow it up with The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future.

    More book reviews here.

  • Digital News Report + more stuff

    Digital News Report by Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism latest findings discussed by Dr. Rasmus Kleiss Nielsen. This Digital News Report is based on a survey of more than 70,000 people across 36 countries.

    Economics

    The US gender wage gap is closing because women are making more and men are making less — Quartz – I wonder how this then fits into a feminist, social and larger economic agendas? Will there be a tension between all these? Is there a floor where aggregate male earnings will hit?

    FMCG

    P&G’s Pritchard Calls for Next Generation of Digital Ads | Special: Dmexco – AdAge – I kind of agree with him from a an overall sentiment point of view, but viewability is also a function of how much of the viewable area it fills? I realise that it would be hard to measure but it would be a function of ad size, scrolling speed and display size. In the real world think about the ads on the tube escalators.

    Innovation

    China May Own More Artificial Intelligence Patents Than US By Year-End – China Money Network – interesting speculation. I could understand it given that IBM is one of the largest filers of patents in the US and its machine learning efforts are overhyped

    Korea

    How Nike Sneakers Made a Billionaire of Park Yen-cha | BoF – interesting profile

    Legal

    WeWork accuses Chinese competitor UrWork of stealing its name and style: Shanghaiist – wait I thought WeWork’s style was stolen from the hipster catalogue?

    Media

    comScore Opens Global Access to Free Viewability Measurement – comScore, Inc – only for global advertisers, publishers, agencies and ad networks?

    P&G Asia brand director: ‘We were clickbaiters – and a giant duck still got more likes than we did’ – “I’ve been through generations of training in how to make a good Facebook ad, which has gone around 360 degrees and come back to the simple principles of marketing. We went through lots of complications in how to get clicks – we were clickbaiters. We honestly were. And yet that duck in Hong Kong Harbour got more likes than any of pure branded messaging, and we thought that’s maybe a good thing. But it’s not and it doesn’t help brands or businesses. It’s taken us time to get to where we are and the simplicity of those core marketing principles.”

    Security

    On the Equifax Data Breach – Schneier on Security – Surveillance capitalism fuels the Internet, and sometimes it seems that everyone is spying on you. You’re secretly tracked on pretty much every commercial website you visit. Facebook is the largest surveillance organization mankind has created; collecting data on you is its business model. I don’t have a Facebook account, but Facebook still keeps a surprisingly complete dossier on me and my associations — just in case I ever decide to join.

    I also don’t have a Gmail account, because I don’t want Google storing my e-mail. But my guess is that it has about half of my e-mail anyway, because so many people I correspond with have accounts. I can’t even avoid it by choosing not to write to gmail.com addresses, because I have no way of knowing if newperson@company.com is hosted at Gmail.

    Edward Snowden Interview: ‘There Is Still Hope’ – SPIEGEL ONLINE

  • iPhone X launch + more things

    iPhone X launch

    In terms of the news agenda, the iPhone X launch dominated the news. I wrote about it here and here.  This image from the Chinese internet summed everything about the iPhone X launch up for me.

    Chinese reaction to iPhone X

    We’re in a place of innovation stuckness at the moment – we’re celebrating incremental improvements in user experiences on smartphones as transformational, they aren’t. This is a category challenge, not a vendor-specific one. Even infrastructure and component vendor Qualcomm is struggling to envision ways to move things on.

    I have been mostly listening to this playlist from this years Love International Festival

    And FIP Radio

    Japanese group meforyouforme combining traditional Japanese culture and dance with modern tap dancing FTW


    Hong Kong stars Donnie Yen and Andy Lau go back to the 1970s with Chasing the Dragon – a thriller based on real characters involved in drug smuggling and organised crime in the turbulent go-go economic boom of Hong Kong – Lee Rock (Lui Lok) was a corrupt policeman nicknamed 500 million dollar Inspector, who avoided corruption charges by moving to Canada and then Hong Kong. Crippled (or Limpy) Ho was a triad called Ng Sek-ho who rivalled the 14K triad group.  It is against the backdrop of the post-1967 riots economic boom which saw Hong Kong blow up in manufacturing and financial services. This brought rich pickings in corruption which led to the formation of the ICAC – the Independent Commission Against Corruption.

  • Gimlet Media + other news

    Gimlet Media

    WPP locks in minority stake in Gimlet Media podcast network | Mumbrella – podcasting as an advertising / sponsorship format seems to have got over its measurability barrier. Gimlet Media was founded in 2014 and has a range of factual and entertainment content franchises including investigative journalism, comedy and commentary on internet culture. A number of Gimlet Media shows moved over from being produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to continuing on their podcasting network.

    Business

    UK car sales and registrations down – Business Insider – British people have a close to zero household savings rate, and way too much debt, making further car purchases difficult. Consumers are afraid a recession might be coming and have reduced their spending on expensive items. The PCP car loan trend may have peaked, flooding the market with nearly new used cars. – two things about this, the UK is way over leveraged at a government and consumer level. Brexit is just going to make this a lot worse. Secondly, the auto finance model is broken and the UK could be the contagion that causes a sub-prime two crisis to ripple around the world. It also make the UK market less attractive for European exporters, which means a harder time trying to get a deal for BREXIT

    Uber’s “clean air” fund | FT Alphaville – its actually a passenger tax, yet another reason to go with Addison Lee who already have hybrids in their fleet

    Finance

    China to Shut Bitcoin Exchanges – WSJ – interesting that the article doesn’t cite sources. Caixin broke this story at the end of last week. Is this down to these currencies providing black economy payments and capital flight?

    Ireland

    With direct flights to Dublin, Cathay takes big bet on Ireland | HKEJ Insight – huge for Ireland, expect more long haul flights in there

    Legal

    Qualcomm demonstrates their Sleaziness by Posting a Press Release Downplaying any possible iPhone X Advancements – Patently Apple – guessing Qualcomm thinks that it won’t be settling its law suits with Apple then

    Luxury

    Dapper Dan, the original tailor to hip-hop royalty, now has a deal with Gucci | Quartz – it was only a matter of time, really happy for Dan – if 30 years too late

    Strange Bedfellows? Collaborations Help Young Brands Make Ends Meet — The Fashion Law

    Online

    Why RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News | Fieldguide – couldn’t agree more

    Spotify Web Player No Longer Compatible With Apple’s Safari Browser – Mac Rumors – interesting that Spotify uses a Google plug-in with security issues

    Ecouter FIP | Radio Musicale Eclectique – very nice early morning listening

    Technology

    Fab equipment spending breaking industry records | Electroiq – foundries are anticipating continuing electronics demand rather than a flattening or a slow down

    Autonomous Cars: The Level 5 Fallacy – Monday Note – A two-to-three year engineering timeline isn’t unusual; five years is considered longterm. Beyond the five-year horizon? No thanks, I’ll switch to a more spiritually and financially rewarding pursuit. We’ll leave the worthy but nebulous commitments to Carnegie Mellon and Stanford. In other words: No Level 5 in the foreseeable, bankable future. Instead of the soothing vision of a saloon on wheels on the road tomorrow… That’s Uber’s autonomous aspirations fucked then and probably explains why Apple has scaled back its car ambitions for the time being. It also shows the corporate aversion to hard innovation now, compared to 50 years ago

    For Superpowers, Artificial Intelligence Fuels New Global Arms Race | WIRED – faster optimal approaches

    Web of no web

    The Inspection Chamber – BBC R&D – really nice project with voice activated services

    LTE Apple Watch uses same phone number as iPhone, some carriers to offer free/cheaper trial plans | 9to5Mac – is it just me or does sounds like a waste of space? I am more interested in the longer term if experiments like this provide Apple with a way to improve power management and consumption on their smartphones

  • FaceID

    @ WWDC

    Apple’s facial recognition aka FaceID has spurred a number of discussions about the privacy trade-offs in the iPhone X.

    Experts Weigh Pros, Cons of FaceID Authentication in iPhone X | Dark Reading – One concern about FaceID is in its current implementation, only one face can be used per device, says Pepijn Bruienne, senior R&D engineer at Duo Security. TouchID lets users register up to five fingerprints. If a third party obtains a user’s fingerprint and reproduces it, and the user is aware, they could register a different unique fingerprint.

    Can Cops Force You to Unlock Your Phone With Your Face? | The Atlantic – Even if Face ID is advanced enough to keep pranksters out, many wondered Tuesday if it would actually make it easier for police to get in. Could officers force someone they’ve arrested to look into their phone to unlock it?

    How Secure Is The iPhone X’s FaceID? Here’s What We Know | Wired – Marc Rogers, a security researcher at Cloudflare who was one of the first to demonstrate spoofing a fake fingerprint to defeat TouchID. Rogers says he has no doubt that he—or at least someone—will crack FaceID. In an interview ahead of Apple’s FaceID announcement, Rogers suggested that 3-D printing a target victim’s head and showing it to their phone might be all it takes. “The moment someone can reproduce your face in a way that can be played back to the computer, you’ve got a problem,” Roger says. “I’d love to start by 3-D-printing my own head and seeing if I can use that to unlock it.” 

    Now lets talk about the Apple Watch, which I consider to present more serious issues.
     
    The Apple Watch 3 is interesting from a legislative point-of-view. The software SIM in the Apple Watch clones the number of your iPhone. The security services of the major powers generally don’t broadcast their capabilities. Politicians are generally untroubled by knowledge of what is possible. Giving politicians an inkling is likely to result in broad sweeping authoritarian power. 
    Imagine what will happen when Amber Rudd goes into parliament looking for real-time access to everyone’s phones. She now can point to the Apple Watch 3 as evidence that LTE and 3G connections can be cloned. What kind of legislation will her special advisers start cooking up then?

    Secondly, it will only be a matter of time before criminals either work out how to do it themselves, or co-opt mobile carrier staff. Two factor authentication that depends on SMS is already compromised. This allows it to be compromised and undetectable.

    The Apple Watch 3 may have royally screwed us all.