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.

  • Folding phones + other things

    CNET took a look at the mechanics behind Motorola’s new folding phone. Other vendors have launched folding phones. Some of which have folded with the screen on the outside to not have too tight a kink on the screen. Motorola’s folding phones have their screen fold inwards, this is down the space provided by a cam mechanism and supporting metal plates that keep the screen in place and unstressed.

    Its good old-fashioned mechanical engineering rather than software that is facilitating mobile phones and it is a joy to behold. More design related posts here.

    watts towers
    Watts Towers by Paul Narvaez

    Before Ferguson, black lives matter or the Rodney King beating there was the Watts riots. Wattstax was a festival that addressed the underlying issues that kicked off the riots. It was put on by Stax Records. The accompanying documentary is amazing. Richard Pryor provides a narrative, beautiful photography and brilliant performances.

    More from Open Culture here: Wattstax Documents the “Black Woodstock” Concert Held 7 Years After the Watts Riots (1973)

    My computer monitor packed up. I couldn’t get it repaired through my usual suppliers so I got a refurbished monitor through Secondbyte Micro. I am getting rid of my dead monitor on eBay here.

    Tim Hwang has written a book comparing online advertising to the 2007-08 financial crash. Subprime Attention Crisis and I’ve pre-ordered a copy. Hoang reckons that there will be a big crash when marketers at large work up to two things:

    • Micro-targeting doesn’t work
    • Online ads were taking credit for sales that would have happened anyway through the ‘selection effect’. Basically the reason why performance marketing has fallen out of balance with brand marketing

    I am not convinced that there will be a big crash. I don’t think that anyone would be surprised that: tech companies don’t get marketing and don’t tell the truth. Previous generations would have sold shonky enterprise software and vapourware.

    I think budgets will try to be adjusted by marketers more towards brands. But at the rate that boards seem to go through marketing leaders; you first have to convince the C-suite to think about marketing strategically. Which ain’t going to happen thanks to the pervasiveness of Jack Welch’s blinkered perception of shareholder value.

    Finally, I think that this is the first time I have seen a manufacturer teardown its own product pre-launch for consumer audiences. I love that its done by one of Sony’s own engineers.

    The user serviceable dust traps were a particularly interesting touch to the device.

  • Antitrust investigation into Google + more

    Exclusive: China preparing an antitrust investigation into Google – sources | Reuters – it would be interesting to see how a Chinese antitrust investigation into Google would play out. I could understand an antitrust investigation being put on the table of the politburo, I am less sure how it would work. Chinese companies need Google advertising, whereas Google is shut out of the Chinese market already. Google could turn around and tell them to do one; it would lose one R&D centre. A bigger issue might be the forced rejigging of its Google Home | Nest product supply chain. I suspect an antitrust investigation into Google is more likely to happen in the US than China

    Behind China’s Decade of European Deals, State Investors Evade Notice – WSJ – the EU needs to wise up

    Are Luxury Brands Losing The Battle Against Alibaba’s Counterfeiters? | Jing Daily – of course Alibaba can’t be trusted (and neither can Amazon)

    The perils of life in Beijing’s backyard | Financial Times – while it is all too easy to stereotype China and its companies as pantomime villains, Hiebert is skilled at teasing out the nuances and ambiguities, including local elites who have welcomed Chinese money, sometimes under corrupt circumstances. For south-east Asian countries, Beijing has proved a more predictable partner than the US, continuing business as usual with Myanmar when it faced isolation under its former military dictatorship, then more recently when it faced international condemnation for the military crackdown on the Rohingya. Beijing continued military sales to Thailand after the most recent coup in 2014

    American Engagement Advocates Sold a Dream of Changing China – efforts to downplay the missionary impulse of engagement with China amount to historical gaslighting, an attempt to retcon the record to conceal the extent of failure. During the Cold War, American leaders justified engagement with China as reining in China’s revolutionary foreign policy, establishing a stable bilateral relationship, and countering the Soviet threat—all reasonable goals. But for the first 20 years of the post-Cold War era, American leaders, backed by their advisors and strategists, unambiguously sold engagement with China on the basis of fostering a democratic and responsible government in Beijing

    Daring Fireball: Apple Is Removing Feed Readers From Chinese App Store – this doesn’t surprise me in the least. I used to use an RSS reader app when I would go to China. It’s interesting that RSS is now undergoing that much of a focus in China though as the audience will be distinctly niche. More on my RSS adventures in China here.

    When coffee makers are demanding a ransom, you know IoT is screwed | Ars Technica – Security problems with Smarter products first came to light in 2015, when researchers at London-based security firm Pen Test partners found that they could recover a Wi-Fi encryption key used in the first version of the Smarter iKettle. The same researchers found that version 2 of the iKettle and the then-current version of the Smarter coffee maker had additional problems, including no firmware signing and no trusted enclave inside the ESP8266, the chipset that formed the brains of the devices. The result: the researchers showed a hacker could probably replace the factory firmware with a malicious one. The researcher EvilSocket also performed a complete reverse engineering of the device protocol, allowing remote control of the device. Two years ago, Smarter released the iKettle version 3 and the Coffee Maker version 2, said Ken Munro, a researcher who worked for Pen Test Partners at the time. The updated products used a new chipset that fixed the problems. He said that Smarter never issued a CVE vulnerability designation, and it didn’t publicly warn customers not to use the old one. Data from the Wigle network search engine shows the older coffee makers are still in use – the bit I don’t understand is why you would need these appliances connected to the internet in the first place

    Apple vs Epic may go to jury; Google finally speaks on Fortnite ban – While Judge Rogers merely upheld her previous position, and didn’t dismiss Epic’s case outright, she was very obviously skeptical of their claims. Actually, that might be an understatement — she outright said that Epic lied, and, regarding the separate payment apparatus Epic insists on calling a “hotfix,” she said, “Lots of people use hotfixes. That’s not the issue. The issue is that you were told, and you knew explicitly because of your contractual relations, that you could not have that, and you did. It’s really pretty simple.” She was also rather unimpressed with Epic’s repeated claims that they were being denied access to large market of gamers who play Fortnite only on iOS, saying there are many other avenues through which those players can access the game.”

    Ai Weiwei: ‘Too late’ to curb China’s global influence – BBC News – “The West should really have worried about China decades ago. Now it’s already a bit too late, because the West has built its strong system in China and to simply cut it off, it will hurt deeply. That’s why China is very arrogant.”

    China’s Leaders Can’t Be Trusted by Chris Patten – Project Syndicate – interesting read. It gives you a sense of the uphill battle China now faces with political elites

    China under Xi Jinping feels increasingly like North Korea – The Washington Post – across China, it has become extremely difficult to have conversations with ordinary folk. People are afraid to speak at all, critically or otherwise. Students and professors, supermarket workers and taxi drivers, parents and motorists have all waved me away this year

    Wong Kar-wai is back making films: here are some of his best | Dazed – great summary of Wong Kar-wai’s work

    Fashion brands design ‘waist-up’ clothing for video calls – BBC News – this makes a lot of sense

  • The merge

    I first heard of the merge from Sam Altman’s blog. He said that it was a popular topic of conversation in Silicon Valley to guess when (not if) humans and machines will merge. In a meaningful way rather than just a Johnny Mnemonic-style walking data storage unit.

    When I heard of this definition of the merge, I immediately thought of the digital series H+.

    H+ The Digital Series

    H+ told the tale of a technological hack that killed people by disrupting the implants in their heads. Some of the few survivors were out of cellular network reach in the basement of multi-story car park.

    He went on to explain that it may not be a hybridisation of humans literally with technology but when humans are surpassed by a rapidly improving (general purpose) AI. The third possibility was a genetically enhanced species surpassing humans in the same way that homo sapiens surpassed the neanderthal.

    What’s interesting is that some of the people don’t give ‘the merge’ a name at all. Back during the dot com boom, when Ray Kurzweil published his book Age of Spiritual Machines it was given the name The Singularity.

    Part of the resistance to this established term was that The Singularity implies a single point in time. I don’t think Kurzweil meant it in that way. But its been almost 20 years since I read Age of Spiritual Machines, and I suspect most of the debaters have only read about it from a Wikipedia article.

    Alton points out that in some ways the merge has been with us for a good while.

    The contacts app on our devices and social networks take the place of us remembering telephone numbers. I can remember my parents landline number and the number of the first family doctor that we had. But I wouldn’t be able to tell you my parents current cell phone number; or the number of my current doctor.

    On a grander scale; general knowledge and desire to read around has been depreciated by Google and Wikipedia. Our phones, tablets and laptops are not implanted in us, but at least one of them will be seldom out of reach. I learned to touch type and I am now not conscious of how I input the text into this post. It goes from my thought to the screen. Only the noise of the keys gives away illusion of mind control as I stare at the screen. Ironically voice assistance makes me more conscious of ‘the other’ nature of the device.

    But it no longer just about memory and our personal connectedness of the devices. Our device control us and suggest what to do and when. Social media platform curation affects how we feel.

    As Altman puts it:

    We are already in the phase of co-evolution — the AIs affect, effect, and infect us, and then we improve the AI. We build more computing power and run the AI on it, and it figures out how to build even better chips.

    This probably cannot be stopped. As we have learned, scientific advancement eventually happens if the laws of physics do not prevent it.

    Sam Altman – The Merge

    Innovation often spits out the same process in several waves before it works. Before Siri, Alexa and Google home there was Wildfire. Before Wildfire there were various speech recognition technologies including Nuance for call centres, Lernout & Hauspie, Dragon Systems and Kurzweil Computer Systems. The last two were founded in the mid-1970s. SRI International’s AI research started delivering results in the mid 1960s.

    AI in its broadest terms has gone through several research booms and busts. The busts have their own name ‘AI winters’. The cadence of progress could easily be far slower than Altman imagines.

    One could easily argue that machine learning might run its natural course to technical maturity without much more improvement. Google and other technology companies are basing their work on research done at Canadian universities in the 1980s during an ‘AI winter’ characterised by a lack of basic research funding. Canada continued to support the research when others didn’t.

    Silicon Valley companies not engaging in basic research themselves. As Judy Estrin observed in her book Closing The Innovation Gap back in 2008, Silicon Valley no longer engages in ‘hard innovation’. Without that basic research; a general purpose AI envisioned by Kurzweil and Altman maybe out of reach. Which is why Silicon Valley pundits put the merge as somewhere in a 50-year window.

    Altman also caveats his prediction based on the laws of physics. Aaron Toponce : The Physics of Brute Force provides an idea of the physical limits imposed by cracking cryptography. It would not be inconceivable that a general purpose AI may hit similar challenges. More on machine learning and innovation here.

  • Hair Growth Helmet + more things

    LG Launches Hair Growth Helmet to Combat Hair Loss | HYPEBAE – this looks totally legit. NOT. Yes, the FDA has certified other hair growth helmet treatments, but that was to indicate that they wouldn’t harm you or interfere with medications. It doesn’t validate the hair growth helmet actually working. But on the other hand lasers in the helmet….. More beauty category related content here.

    Why loneliness fuels populism | Financial Times – depicting loneliness solely in terms of how connected we feel to our friends, neighbours and colleagues risks occluding its other potent forms. Loneliness is political as well as personal, economic as well as social. It is also about feeling disconnected from our fellow citizens and political leaders, and detached from our work and our employer.

    “Buy British”: The viability of a nationalist commercial policy | VOX, CEPR Policy Portal – attempts by successive UK governments in the 1970s and early 1980s to initiate such import substitution policies were fraught with economic and legal difficulties. Indeed, accelerating globalisation and the rapid growth of imports in intermediate products for assembly into ‘British’ goods raise significant problems in defining a ‘national’ product – and the growth of tradable services (such as insurance, education and healthcare) presents an even more intractable problem

    Arkady Bukh: Man in the Middle | CyberScoop – go-to lawyer for hackers

    China bans Australian academics in apparent tit-for-tat retaliation | South China Morning Post – this has followed soon after a good report by Alex Joske and book by Clive Hamilton on China’s influence activities abroad

    Facebook removes fake accounts with links to China and Philippines | The Guardian – Facebook says it has removed hundreds of coordinated fake accounts with links to individuals in China and in the Filipino military that were interfering in the politics of the Philippines and the US – not very surprising. More details in the South China Morning Post – How a Chinese network of fake Facebook accounts influenced online debate on South China Sea, US politics | South China Morning Post 

    Ebay ex-CEO, PR head shared texts about taking down critics: DOJ – Business Insider – probably one of the most disturbing and bizarre things that I’ve read in a while

    China has the upper hand in corporate proxy wars with US | Financial Times – Mr Trump gave Mr Xi what he wanted on ZTE — a reprieve in the form of a new US commerce department settlement that allowed it to stay in business — and mistakenly assumed that this concession would smooth over the other matters. China quickly pocketed the ZTE present but continued to withhold approval of the Qualcomm-NXP deal. When the trade talks later started to unravel, Mr Xi let Qualcomm-NXP languish in regulatory limbo, where it eventually died. – Trump gave a concession too early

    How a local messaging app defeated WhatsApp in Vietnam – messaging app Zalo has been taking the country by storm for nearly a decade now. Zalo’s got a pretty firm grip on Vietnamese consumers. And now that it’s integrated mobile payment service ZaloPay into its messaging app, there’s plenty of potential for it to expand beyond being just a means of communication.

    The landlords are back – The families of China’s pre-Communist elite remain privileged | China | The Economist – The old elite began to suffer almost as soon as the Communist Party won the Chinese civil war in 1949. China’s new rulers quickly set about seizing land from people in the countryside, redistributing it among the landless, confiscating private businesses and executing many rural landlords and people who had worked for the overthrown Nationalist regime

    Listen to an unheard Steve Jobs NeXT keynote from 1988 – “But why it matters is that those explorations and that fun were in the end quite significant. It’s always useful to look back and to realize that even though the tech itself might seem quite primitive today, the people were already sophisticated. We know a lot more facts, and we can do more things, but I’m not sure we have gotten that much wiser.”

  • Hidden Hand by Clive Hamilton & Mareike Ohlberg

    Hidden Hand is written by two academics. Clive Hamilton is an Australian academic, who is currently professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra. Mareike Ohlberg is a senior fellow in the Asia Programme of the German Marshall Fund. Prior to that she worked for the German think tank; the Mercator Institute of China Studies.

    Hidden Hand by Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg
    Hidden Hand by Hamilton & Ohlberg (US hardback edition)

    Hidden Hand interest piqued

    Both of them are seasoned China watchers. China is a popular subject and Hidden Hand would have just gone into my Amazon wishlist but for the 48 Group Club. The 48 Group Club is a British China-orientated association that fosters cultural and social ties. It had threatened legal action over content that they alleged was incorrect or defamatory. My interest in Hidden Hand was piqued.

    So What’s it like?

    Hamilton and Ohlberg have pulled together an account of China’s relationships with various elites in countries around the world and intergovernmental bodies such as WHO. Having kept an eye on China for over a decade, little of the content was new for me.

    What I found was new, was the the way it is woven together in a cohesive pattern of activity in the Hidden Hand. A sustained, pervasive bid for global influence on a scale that most people couldn’t imagine. And those that could imagine would likely be thought of as excessively paranoid.

    One thing that immediately comes across is the depth of research that the Hidden Hand contains. The index and bibliography are a big chunk of the book. The facts come thick and fast, but delivered in a dispassionate manner.

    The reframe

    This book wouldn’t be as well received if it had been published 12 months ago. A split between Wall Street and manufacturing company CEOs, COVID and the steady drip of diplomatic clashes that China has had with western countries have reframed the view for Hidden Hand. Now you have an audience that is more receptive. They are more willing to take an objective, critical analysis of China rather than give them the benefit of the doubt like an errant teenager.

    Missing answers

    Hidden Hand tries to come up with starting points for answers. Holding elites accountable. Engaging members of the Chinese diaspora. Taking a multilateral stand. All of which are hard to do. There are changes happening to espionage related laws in the UK. The EU is taking a more policy-based approach and Trump administration officials have talked about US CEOs as being unregistered foreign agents. This is a long term battle, something that will go for decades.

    The Wall Street CEOs will be hunkering down; hoping to out wait Trump. In Europe and the UK, the root and branch work required to inoculate their countries are not yet underway.

    The final missing piece is understanding the first generation Chinese diaspora. In particular the way the communist party has successfully grafted itself into the very centre of what it means to be Chinese. And then thinking carefully about how to decouple that idea. It’s happened already in places like Taiwan (and young Hong Kongers), yet many first generation diaspora and older Chinese Malaysians are wedded to the idea.

    I think that would take a lot more research. China must be doing some things right in order to get that level of belief. But there was obviously a problem with the opportunities that China offered. Otherwise why would they come to the West? It must have offered more advantages; how are they opportunities highlighted and put in conflict with the belief in party/ Understanding this will then help the work on protecting the liberal democratic system from infiltration, subversion and exploitation.

    An example of that might come from Singapore, which managed to forge a distinct Singaporean identity, whilst still holding the best bits of cultural background. Though there are risks in trying to replicate the Singapore process. More China related content here and more book reviews here.