Security is protection from, or resilience against, potential harm (or other unwanted coercive change) caused by others, by restraining the freedom of others to act. Beneficiaries (technically referents) of security may be of persons and social groups, objects and institutions, ecosystems or any other entity or phenomenon vulnerable to unwanted change. Security mostly refers to protection from hostile forces, but it has a wide range of other senses: for example, as the absence of harm (e.g. freedom from want); as the presence of an essential good (e.g. food security); as resilience against potential damage or harm (e.g. secure foundations); as secrecy (e.g. a secure telephone line); as containment (e.g. a secure room or cell); and as a state of mind (e.g. emotional security).
Back when I started writing this blog, hacking was something that was done against ‘the man’, usually as a political statement. Now breaches are part of organised crime’s day to day operations. The Chinese government so thoroughly hacked Nortel that all its intellectual property was stolen along with commercial secrets like bids and client lists. The result was the firm went bankrupt. Russian ransomware shuts down hospitals across Ireland. North Korean government sanctioned hackers robbed 50 million dollars from the central bank of Bangladesh and laundered it in association with Chinese organised crime.
Now it has spilled into the real world with Chinese covert actions, Russian contractors in the developing world and hybrid warfare being waged across central Europe and the middle east.
German nuclear plant infected with computer viruses, operator says | Reuters – So Sarbannes Oxley meant that a lot of corporates disabled USB ports. Technology company Huawei used to have ‘dirty machines’ and clean machines. Neither of which were connected by a network. The same was true in many agencies where I worked. Yet a German nuclear plant allows easy access via USB. Secondly, why do the USB chargers on airplane cockpits have any intelligence at all that would store a virus and allow it propagate? I would be very paranoid about using any USB chargers in coffee shops or an aircraft seat moving forwards. This is the problem when everything from light bulbs and doorbells now contain a Linux server. More security related content here.
iPhone maker Foxconn is churning out “Foxbots” to replace its human workers — Quartz – I am not convinced that they will be that successful. This is partly down to some of the manual dexterity required being similar to a watchmaker in some parts of the assembly. And that is down to Apple driving an industry race to squeeze phones into tighter factors for the guts. The process is repeatable, but hard to deliver. Back in the day Japanese consumer electronics manufacturers used to use pick-and-place machines for a lot of consumer electronics. It is why Japan went more towards micro-chips faster than players like Philips. Japan did a lot of component standardisation in terms of sizing and connectivity to the board. The boards were relatively simply designed and gave a bit of latitude to allow for a lack of precision from the machines. That meant slightly larger goods. More expensive devices like Sony’s Walkman Pro, were handmade because they crammed so much technology inside them .
Troublesome advanced engines for Boeing, Airbus jets have disrupted airlines and shaken travelers | The Seattle Times – this isn’t like the new engine in your car. The advanced engines in a jet engine are exposed to more heat and pressure than you can imagine. When you’re working on advanced engines for aircraft; you’re operating at the bleeding edge of materials and engineering. New metal alloys, titanium, engineering ceramics and carbon fibre all started in advanced engines for aircraft. What’s interesting is the way the problems have assailed multiple engine builders at the the same time. Almost as if there is a roadblock in the technium for advanced engines
Lost Liverpool #13: The Beat of Bold Street Part 2, the Mardi Gras and G-Love – Getintothis – wow I read this and it brought back a lot of memories. G-Love was the closest thing to the legendary Shoom vibe in Liverpool. It was a different kind of crowd to what you saw at the Quadrant Park or even Garlands. G-Love at the Mardi Gras is what I’ve measured every club experience against since and most of them have been miserable failures by comparison. Early Cream felt austere and corporate with its ‘no jeans’ dress code. G-Love was part 1960s love-in and part rave. It was Ibiza without even knowing where the Balearic islands were.
Applied Materials Sags on Weaker Revenue Outlook – Barron’s – looks promising overall for the semiconductor market. Applied Materials saw over 25% in machinery sales for making microchips and displays, indicating overall buoyant demand across consumer electronics manufacturers. Much of this is driven by memory chips that go into a wide range of products, from smartphones to cars. The main item of concern that I saw in Applied Materials sales was the high proportion of sales to Chinese manufacturers. This was in sharp contrast to a drop of supplies to Taiwan factories. As supply chains decouple from China, this reliance will be a real issue. Applied Materials also have to worry about having their devices torn down and reverse engineered by Chinese government sponsored efforts to become self sufficient.
WSJ City – China secures access to 70% of world’s lithium supplies – Chile is the low carbon equivalent of Saudi Arabia. The rosy numbers are based on: current consumption rates that are low (electric cars are still a novelty) and doesn’t pair it with their position on rare metals – China also dominates super capacitor technology. Time for hydrogen powered cars
This Is How a Newspaper Dies – POLITICO Magazine – In 1976, long before the internet arrived, Los Angeles Times media reporter David Shaw wrote in a lengthy Page One report about the newspaper’s worsening vital signs. “Are you now holding an endangered species in your hands?” he wrote. – I’d alluded to this here.
The debate over privacy on Facebook got me thinking about the internet we envisaged. Reading media commentary on Tim Cook’s recent address at Duke University prodded me into action.
What do I mean by we? I mean the people who:
Wrote about the internet from the mid-1990s onwards
Developed services during web 1.0 and web 2.0 times
I’ve played my own small part in it.
At the time there was a confluence of innovation. Telecoms deregulation and the move to digital had reduced the cost of data and voice calls. Cable and satellite television was starting to change how we viewed the world. CNN led the way in bringing the news into homes. For many at the time interactive TV seemed like the future of media.
Max Headroom
Starship Troopers
The Running Man
Second generation cellular democratised mobile phone ownership. The internet was becoming a useful consumer service. My first email address was a number@site.corning.com format email address back in 1994. I used it for work, apart from an unintended spam email sent to colleagues to offload some vouchers I’d been given.
My college email later that year was on a similar format of address; on a different domain. I ended up using my pager more than my email to stay in touch with other students. Although all students had access to the internet at college, the take-up was still very low. At college I signed up for a Yahoo! web email. I had realised that an address post-University would be useful. Yahoo! was were I saw my first online ads. They reminded me of garish versions of classified ads in newspapers.
After I left college I used to go to Liverpool at least once a week to go to an internet cafe just off James Street and check my email account, with a piece of cake and a cup of coffee. I introduced my friend Andy to the internet (mostly email), since we used to meet up there and then go browsing records, clothes, hi-fi, studio equipment, event flyers and books at the likes of HMV, the Bluecoat Chambers, Quiggins, The Palace and Probe Records.
I found out that I had my first agency job down in London when I was called on my cell phone whilst driving around to Andy’s house to catch up after a week at work.
The internet was as much as an idea as anything else and the future of us netizens came alive for me in the pages of Wired and Byte. Both were American magazines. Byte was a magazine that delved deeper into technology than Ars Technica or Anandtech. Wired probed the outer limits of technology, culture and design. At the time each issue was a work of art. They pushed typography and graphic design to the limits. Neon and metallic inks, discordant fonts and an early attempt at offline to online integration. It seemed to be the perfect accompanyment to the cyberpunk science fiction I had been reading. The future was bright: literally.
Hacking didn’t have consumers as victims but was the province of large (usually bad) mega corps.
I moved down to London just in time to be involved in the telecoms boom that mirrored the dot com boom. I helped telecoms companies market their data networks and VoIP services. I helped technology companies sell to the telecoms companies. The agency I worked for had a dedicated 1Mb line. This was much faster than anything I’d used before. It provided amazing access to information and content. Video was ropey. Silicon.com and Real Media featured glitchy postage stamp sized clips. My company hosted the first live broadcast of Victoria’s Secret fashion show online. It was crap in reality, but a great proof of concept for the future.
I managed to get access to recordings of DJ sets by my Chicago heroes. Most of whom I’d only read about over the years in the likes of Mixmag.
All of this pointed to a bright future, sure there were some dangers along the way. But I never worried too much about the privacy threat (at least from technology companies). If there was any ‘enemy’ it was ‘the man’.
In the cold war and its immediate aftermath governments had gone after:
Organised labour (the UK miners strike)
Cultural movements (Rave culture in the UK)
Socio-political groups (environmentalists and the nuclear disarmament movement)
I had grown up close to the infamous Capenhurst microwave phone tap tower. Whilst it was secret, there were private discussions about its purpose. Phil Zimmerman’s PGP cryptography offered privacy, if you had the technical skills. In 1998, the European Parliament posted a report on ECHELON. A global government owned telecoms surveillance network. ECHELON was a forerunner of the kind of surveillance Edwards Snowden disclosed a decade and a half later.
One may legitimately feel scandalised that this espionage, which has gone on over several years, has not given rise to official protests. For the European Union, essential interests are at stake. On the one hand, it seems to have been established that there have been violations of the fundamental rights of its citizens, on the other, economic espionage may have had disastrous consequences, on employment for example. – Nicole Fontaine, president of the european parliament (2000)
I advised clients on the ‘social’ web since before social media had a ‘name’. And I worked at the company formerly known as Yahoo!. This was during a brief period when it tried to innovate in social and data. At no time did I think that the companies powering the web would:
Rebuild the walled gardens of the early ‘net (AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy)
Build oligopolies, since the web at that time promised a near perfect market due to it increasing access to market information. Disintermediation would have enabled suppliers and consumers to have a direct relationship, instead Amazon has become the equivalent of the Sears Roebuck catalogue
Become a serious privacy issue. Though we did realise by 2001 thanks to X10 wireless cameras that ads could be very annoying. I was naive enough to think of technology and technologists as being a disruptive source of cultural change. The reason for this was the likes of Phil Zimmerman on crypto. Craig Newmark over at Craigslist, the community of The Well and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The likes of Peter Thiel is a comparatively recent phenomenon in Silicon Valley
We had the first inkling about privacy when online ad companies (NebuAd and Phorm) partnered with internet service providers. They used ‘deep packet inspection’ data to analyse a users behaviour, and then serve ‘relevant ads.
Tim Cook fits into the ‘we’ quite neatly. He is a late ‘baby boomer’ who came into adulthood right at the beginning of the PC revolution. He had a front row seat as PCs, nascent data networks and globalisation changed the modern world. He worked at IBM and Compaq during this time.
Cook moved to Apple at an interesting time. Jobs had returned with the NeXT acquisition. The modern macOS was near ready and there was a clear roadmap for developers. The iMac was going into production and would be launched in August.
Many emphasise the move to USB connectors, or the design which brought the Mac Classic format up to date. The key feature was a built in modem and simple way to get online once you turned the machine on. Apple bundled ethernet and a modem in the machine. It also came with everything you needed preloaded to up an account with an ISP. No uploading software, no errant modem drivers, no DLL conflicts. It just worked. Apple took care selecting ISPs that it partnered with, which also helped.
By this time China was well on its way to taking its place in global supply chains. China would later join the World Trade Organisation in 2001.
The start of Tim Cook’s career at Apple coincided with with the internet the way we knew it. And the company benefited from the more counter culture aspects of the technology industry:
Open source software (KDE Conqueror, BSD, Mach)
Open standards (UNIX, SyncML)
Open internet standards (IMAP, WebCAL, WebDav)
By the time that Facebook was founded. Open source and globalisation where facts of life in the technology sector. They do open source because that’s the rules of business now. It is noticeable that Facebook’s businesses don’t help grow the commons like Flickr did.
Businesses like Flickr, delicious and others built in a simple process to export your data. Facebook and similar businesses have a lot less progressive attitudes to user control over data.
Cook is also old enough to value privacy, having grown up in a less connected and less progressive age. It was only in 2014 that Cook became the first publicly gay CEO of a Fortune 100 company. It is understandable why Cook would be reticent about his sexuality.
He is only a generation younger than the participants in the riots at the Stonewall Inn.
By comparison, for Zuckerberg and his peers:
The 1960s and counterculture were a distant memory
The cold war has been won and just a memory of what it was like for Eastern Europeans to live under a surveillance state
Wall Street and Microsoft were their heroes. Being rich was more important than the intrinsic quality of the product
Ayn Rand was more of a guiding star than Ram Dass
They didn’t think about what kind of dark underbelly that platforms could have and older generations of technologists generally thought too well of others to envisage the effects. You have to had a pretty dim view of fellow human beings. More on privacy here.
Is Public Relations A ‘Bullshit Job’? | Holmes Report – If you find yourself in a company that doesn’t use public relations in a way that you find meaningful, and even occasionally inspiring, you’re in the wrong place. That doesn’t mean public relations consulting is a “bullshit job” but it may be an indication that you’re working for a shitty organization. – when I started in agency life I wondered if my new career was a mistake: was it a bullshit job? It didn’t help that I was working with a bunch of dot com startups and enterprise software companies.
I’d previously worked in industry formulating plastics and in the petrochemical industry. The chances are that if you drove a car from the early 1990s to the 2000s, I’d either helped develop part of your car, or helped provide the road surface that you drove on.
Agency life isn’t like that. It took me years to become comfortable on whether I had a bullshit job. That came as I started to see the difference to businesses that my work did. More related content here.
Folli Follie folly | FT Alphaville – interesting read, QCM used the companies own store finder function on their website – in order to determine that Folli Follie’s distribution wasn’t as healthy as claimed