Legal is defined as everything connected with the system of law within a country or area. The definition Law is a system of rules created and enforced to regulate behaviour, usually it belongs to a country or an area.
Online and innovation have often evolved way in advance of laws and the legal system’s ability to cope.
The emphasis that different systems have produces a number of challenges. China’s systems are locked down under their view of cyber sovereignty to avoid a contagion of western ideas. Yet they and other authoritarian regimes treat the open western systems as a battle space to destabilise other countries and attack their critics.
The US system favours free speech over privacy, which directly clashes with European values. Much of these European values were shaped in the aftermath of having lived under Warsaw Pact era authoritarian regimes.
There is a clash of the ages undertaken over ethics and power and what’s legal. The law offers up more questions and ethical traps than answers. It’s into this legal morass that my posts tend to land, usually at the point of intersection between ethics, the law and technology.
When I started using the web I believed that it was a unique extra-legal space similar to what John Perry Barlow outlined at the start of the ‘web’ as we now know it. The reality is that the net has already been staked out by businesses that look rather similar to the robber barons of the gilded age. Authoritarian regimes found it surprisingly easy to bend to their will and now sell their expertise around the world.
Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism by Angela Zhang sounds exceptionally dry to the uninitiated. Zhang is a senior legal academic who works at the University of Hong Kong, which until recently got a front row seat to China disputes with both the European Union and the United States. Given the recent changes in Hong Kong where she lives, we may not see as frank a book of its quality come out of Hong Kong academia again on this subject matter if it was viewed to fall under the purview of ‘state secrets’. With the new security law that has come in, definitions have been left deliberately vague and wide-reaching.
So why is Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism of interest?
If like me, you’ve worked on brands like Qualcomm, Huawei or GSK you realise how much of an impact China’s regulatory environment can have on your client’s success. Around the time I worked on one client, they were shamed on the evening TV news and some of their staff disappeared for questioning by the authorities. They then reappeared months later looking haggard and worn out. It is new important for everything from technology to the millions of COVID deaths that happened in China due to a lack of effective vaccines.
Zhang breaks down the history of China’s antitrust regulatory environment, how it works within China’s power structures and how it differs from the US model. The rise of antitrust was as much down to bureaucratic politics of the Chinese government.
What becomes apparent is that Chinese power isn’t monolithic and that China is weaponising antitrust legislation for strategic and policy goals rather than consumer benefit.
Zhang talks about how regulatory hostage taking and public shaming was a tool of the regulatory authorities from early on.
The book then looks at foreign reactions to Chinese government from EU investigations to current US-China trade restrictions and discusses how China weaponised its regulatory frameworks making ‘hostage taking’ trans-national in nature.
Last of it’s type?
Zhang’s book won awards when it first came out in 2021, and is still valuable now given the relatively static US-China policy views. More on Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism here. More book reviews here.
I eagerly anticipated reading A Hackers Mind, being a long-time follower of Bruce Schneier’s blog. A Hackers Mind caters to the well-informed individual. Schneier commences by defining what constitutes a hacker, delving into the essence of hacking and its widespread prevalence.
Subsequently, Schneier takes us on a journey into a hackers mind, guiding us through fundamental hacks targeting:
ATMs (automatic teller machines or cash machines)
Casinos
Airline frequent flier miles
Sports systems
Financial networks
The legal realm
Politics
Through these examples, Schneier aims to illustrate the parasitic nature of hacks on the systems they target, offering various techniques to impede or render them unfeasible. In doing so, he makes a broader socio-political statement about how the very foundation of the economy and society is continuously ‘hacked’.
The implication is that power lies in a hacker’s mind being applied to the systems that govern our lives. And that with the right mindset and ‘hack’ the ordinary person can turn the tables on those in power.
When this happens it makes great film or television. (A classic example of this would be ITV’s People vs. Post Office which told the story of postmasters combating wrongful prosecutions due to software defects. The reality was that in that particular case, it actually took the media coverage around the TV drama being shown to actually start moving the needle.)
Schneier in his book recognises that over time societies have evolved to become more equitable over time. He also attributes late stage capitalism to the hackers mindset, mixed with resources and technical capability in law or finance. The book is designed to wake the public up with a view to them also developing a A Hackers Mind and hacking the system back to equilibrium.
It’s an interesting light read, but I think VR pioneer and author Jaron Lanier writes better books focusing on the inequities inherent in the intersection of technology, culture and society. A great example of this is his book Who Owns The Future?
I don’t think Schneier gets close to inspiring his desired outcome with A Hacker’s Mind, but if you want something above the usual airport reading then it gets a thumps up from me, but it won’t be staying on my book shelf for me to re-read it at a later date. For more book reviews and recommendations go here. For recommendations of non-fiction books in particular go here.
The racket sport padel seems to have got the zeitgeist, if not the player numbers yet. We haven’t really seen a surge in sports fads since the 1980s. During that time skateboarding rose from a peak in the late 1970s, to a more stable underground sport that we have today. The closure of a squash racquet factory in Cambridge, saw the sport globalise manufacture and playing. In a few short years rackets went from gut strings and ash wood frames to synthetic strings and carbon fibre composite rackets. It was as much a symbol of the striving business man as the Filofax or the golf bag. Interest was attracted by a large amount of courts and racket technology that greatly improved the game.
Squash had its origins in the late 19th century and took the best part of a century to reach its acme in the cultural zeitgeist. Skateboarding started in the late 1940s and took a mere 30 years to breakout. Padel falls somewhere between the two. Padel was invented in 1969. But it took COVID-19 to drive its popularity in Europe and North America.
There is a new world professional competition circuit for 2024. And it has attracted the interest of court developers looking to cater to what they believe is latent consumer demand.
Finally, you can get three padel courts in the space for one tennis court. More on the padel gold rush from the FT.
The challenge is if padel is just a fad, or has it longevity? Skateboarding is popular, but many councils didn’t see the benefit of supporting skate parks built in the 1970s around the country. Squash still has its fans but doesn’t have the same popularity that it enjoyed in the 1980s.
What’s it like being a Disney adult? – The Face – this is much more common in Hong Kong, but then people had annual passes to go there. I found it interesting that The Face othered it as a sub-culture
Vittles Reviews: There Is Always Another Province – Province-chasing isn’t just a Western phenomenon; China is still so vast that when the barbecued food of Xinjiang, one of China’s border provinces, showed up in a former sausage shop on Walworth Road at Lao Dao, it didn’t need to open to the general public for months, choosing only to take bookings via Chinese social media. The paradox is that the success of regional Chinese restaurants has created a Western audience which wants more, but that same success has allowed these restaurants to bypass those customers altogether
Culture
Television: one of the most audacious pranks in history was hidden in a hit TV show for years. – Watch enough episodes of Melrose Place and you’ll notice other very odd props and set design all over the show. A pool float in the shape of a sperm about to fertilize an egg. A golf trophy that appears to have testicles. Furniture designed to look like an endangered spotted owl. It turns out all of these objects, and more than 100 others, were designed by an artist collective called the GALA Committee. For three years, as the denizens of the Melrose Place apartment complex loved, lost, and betrayed one another, the GALA Committee smuggled subversive leftist art onto the set, experimenting with the relationship between art, artist, and spectator. The collective hid its work in plain sight and operated in secrecy. Outside of a select few insiders, no one—including Aaron Spelling, Melrose’s legendary executive producer—knew what it was doing. The project was called In the Name of the Place. It ended in 1997. Or, perhaps, since the episodes are streamable, it never ended
Rode acquire Mackie | Sound On Sound – this is big for podcasters, but also for artists that record in their own studios. Mackie mixers have powered the home grown set-ups of artists like The Prodigy, The Crystal Method, Brian Eno, Daft Punk and Orbital.
Health
China e-cigarette titan behind ‘Elf Bar’ floods the US with illegal vapes | Reuters – In the United States, the firm simply ignored regulations on new products and capitalized on poor enforcement. It has flooded the U.S. market with flavored vapes that have been among the best-selling U.S. brands, including Elf Bar, EBDesign and Lost Mary. In the United Kingdom, by contrast, Zhang has complied with regulations requiring lower nicotine levels and government registration while building an unmatched distribution network — and driving a surge in youth vaping
Hong Kong’s first ‘patriots-only’ district council poll reflects political tale of two cities, as some eagerly rush to vote and others shy away | South China Morning Post – Hong Kong on election day splits into two camps, with one eager to vote out of civic duty and others giving polling stations wide berth over lack of political diversity. ‘I thought more people would come and vote because there has been more publicity,’ one elector says after discovering sleepy atmosphere at local polling station – the question is will Beijing take anything from this voter turn out? Does it signal suppressed but indignant separatists, or Hong Kongers who are more focused on prosperity and weekend Netflix? If they suspect the former then the security situation is likely to get more dire
Inside Louis Vuitton’s Hong Kong spectacle | Vogue Business – While Hong Kong is gradually recovering from the pandemic lockdowns, growth in Mainland China is slowing. According to HSBC estimates, luxury sales there are expected to grow 5 per cent in 2024, a sharp deceleration compared with 2023’s projected 18 per cent.
Over the past few years we’ve seen a plethora of watch registry platforms spring up. There have been a number of reasons for this happening:
European Union regulations
Business processes
Crime
European Union regulations
The European Commission Health and Digital Executive agency have been championing the idea of digital product passports across a range of sectors including textiles and various manufactured goods. This includes:
Electrical and electronic equipment
Batteries
Food waste
Textiles
Packaging and packaging waste
Even if a watch is mechanical in operation and doesn’t come with a sewn strap, it still comes with packaging. Digital product passports mean that watchmakers end up with a watch registry service almost by default for newly manufactured watches.
The EU digital product passport sits at the intersection of a number of EU related policies including the Ecosystem for Sustainable Products regulation and the Cyber Resilience act. The focus on sustainability is designed to facilitate a circular economy of manufactured, serviced and recycled materials. Having a product’s documentation follow it through its life helps prevent fraud and regulatory non-compliance in a similar way to animal passports as part of the common agricultural policy. It isn’t perfect but it makes criminal activities harder to do and easier to uncover. For such a system to work, it would need to resist the efforts of bad actors like Russia.
There are secondary benefits to the digital product passport including inserting friction in the global trade of products made outside of the EU for importation into the trading bloc, such as fast fashion items.
Luxury items, by their nature have less to worry about, but given their high value, at a future date analysing watch registry data may help understand and intercept money laundering schemes.
There have been existing watch registry players for instance The Watch Register which is a spin-off of the Art Loss Register.
Business processes
As well as using the digital product passport for regulatory purposes and a watch registry. Digital product passports allow product traceability to facilitate:
Manufacturing including quality control and quality assurance
Service and repair
Customer relationship management
Product recycling or remanufacture
Proof of authenticity throughout the life of the product, provided as a watch registry function
Crime
Non manufacturer related platforms have been very upfront about their concern to help combat watch thefts that seems to have surged. Between 2021 and 2022 luxury watch thefts in London surged over 40 percent. London as a global city has rapidly built a reputation for itself as a centre for watch thefts. It has been suffienctly out of control that a luxury auction house and secondary market dealers have been warning prospective and existing customers of the crime risk. The idea is that by having traceable ownership of timepieces in a watch registry, the stolen watches would be harder to fence and would likely be seized when submitted for service, repair or resale.
For secondary dealer watch related fraud has also been an issue with a high profile allegations against Anthony Farrer aka The Timepiece Gentleman (TPG).
The Watch Register
The Watch Register was founded in 2016. For a 20 percent fee, they will store the details of a stolen watch. Watch dealers then check inventory that they are about to receive against the their database. This is problematic for a number of reasons:
You can’t register your watch unless it’s been stolen.
Police are now reluctant to provide a crime number to watch thefts, which you need to register your watch.
There’s a 20 percent fee for registration
The watch, its box and papers may have all been stolen. Which might make having the watch number to hand all the more difficult.
Reviews on watch forums of the service have been mixed. Given the forthcoming regulations coming through The Watch Register is likely to be relegated only to older watches and its 20 percent commission fee looks expensive versus both manufacturer offerings and Digital Watch Vault.
Blockchain and Watch registry
Some of these services have adopted blockchain as their technology stack of choice. I am sceptical of blockchain as a technology in general due to its relatively slow transaction rate compared to relational databases and high speed payment networks operated by the likes of Visa, Mastercard and American Express.
Arianee digital passport
Arianee is a SaaS business and a governing body for a protocol. It offers digital passport and membership services that are used by luxury fashion brands, luxury retailers and beauty brands. Several watch brands have adopted Arianee’s digital passport offering. The product is white labelled and different brands might use different functions, but it is based on top of a block chain technology stack.
Audemars Piguet
Breitling
MB&F
Panerai
Roger Dubuis
Vacheron Constantin
Breitling was the first of the brands to launch its digital passport service in 2020, Panerai rolled their version out in October 2023. There isn’t cross-brand interoperability to make a registry of registries. They all seem to operate as ‘shards’ or instances.
Aura digital product passport
Aura is an LVMH led consortium for the deployment of blockchain based solutions focused not he luxury sector. Other luxury groups including Richemont and Prada Group are members. Much of the use has focused on luxury fashion brands like Loro Piana and Prada. Cartier is also involved and the service is pitched at luxury watch makers. Watchmakers involved include
Bulgari
Cartier
Chopard
H Moser
Hublot
Like Arianee there isn’t cross-brand interoperability for the watch registry function.
Digital Watch Vault
Digital Watch Vault is a platform that has been put together by individuals involved in the secondary market for watch. There is no charge to submit the details of your watch.
Digital Watch Vault is a new service. It has a number of high profile advocates as well as some detractors.
Is Open AI the equivalent of Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim? Maxim invented the Maxim gun. A belt fed machine gun that helped colonial powers grab territory in the scramble for Africa. It was reputedly used by one British official to help clear game from land that was soon to be put to farming use in Kenya. Later on it was used by both sides in the Russo-Japanese war and World War 1, due to Maxim’s business associate Sir Basil Zaharoff.
Investors are betting that Open AI will have a similar role in the battle shaping out between tech giants over generative machine learning related processes.
Sam Altman of Open AI
When a company that has issues with making profits can raise money at a valuation of $85bn, it becomes abundantly clear that investors in generative AI have taken leave of their senses
I can understand the argument that Richard Windsor is making with this argument. While others might point out how dominant funding drove Amazon’s present-day monopoly, there are other precedents like Netscape, General Magic, Uber and WeWork that others can point to.
There are bigger questions about whether the LLM approach is in itself a limited model to pursue? If so, Open AI could look more like when IBM bet the farm on Josephson Junctions. The use of synthetic data implies that LLM scaling might already be at its limit. Nvidia looks like a better bet from this angle despite its own extremely high valuation.
Brand purpose has a lot of issues, but it’s worthwhile bearing in mind the kind of marketing Unilever was pushing out prior to buying fully into the concept. These efforts came to light from social sharing about the the British ‘vulgar wave’ that contextualised Russell Brand.
Unilever Heart Brands UK
While China’s ads skewed conservative compared to the UK’s vulgar wave of 1997 – 2012, this Axe (Lynx in the UK and Ireland) ad isn’t exactly on brand purpose. The spokesperson in the advert is Edison Chen. At the time Chen was a star in Hong Kong’s entertainment circles. But getting involved in street fights and a leaked hard drive full of pornographic images of girlfriends he dated meant he withdrew from the industry. Now he is better known for owning streetwear brand CLOT.
Dove Sparks Boycott Calls Over New Partnership—’Never Buy Them Again’ | Newsweek – controversial question, but have Unilever gamed out that conservatives are more likely to use Irish Spring or similar products over Dove? I suspect that there might be something in the semiotics of cleanliness in this. African Americans by contrast might have challenges like ashen skin that would benefit from soap that cleans and moisturises, hence the popularity of shea butter based products.
Hong Kong
Architect Demi Lee on Kowloon’s Walled City. The comparison with the idea of rhizome was very interesting.
Ideas
Demi Lee’s video on how elements of cyberpunk are leaking into our current reality.
