It was in the middle of "Teacamp", a monthly series of meetings that sport the same mix of geeks, government, and do-gooders as the annual UK Govcamp we covered a couple of weeks back. Meetings like this seem to be going on all the time all over the place, trying to figure out ways to use technology to help people. Hardly anyone has any budget, yet that seems not to matter: the optimism is contagious. This week's Teacamp also featured Westminster in Touch, an effort to support local residents and charities; the organization runs a biannual IT Support Forum to brainstorm (the next is March 28).
I have to admit: when I first read about Martha Lane Fox's Digital Inclusion initiative my worst rebellious instincts were triggered: why should anyone be bullied online if they didn't want to go there? Maybe at least some of those 9 million people who have never used the Internet in Britain would like to be left in peace to read books and listen to - rather than use - the wireless.
But the "digital divide" predicted even in the earliest days of the Net is real: those 9 million are those in the most vulnerable sectors of society. According to research published on the RaceOnline site, the percentage of people who have never used the Net correlates closely with income. This isn't really much of a surprise, although you would expect to see a slight tick upwards again at the very top economic levels, where not so long ago people were too grand, too successful, and too set in their ways to feel the need to go online. But they have proxies: their assistants can answer their email and do their Web shopping.
When Internet access was tied to computers, the homeless in particular were at an extreme disadvantage. You can't keep a desktop computer if you have nowhere - or only a very tiny, insecure space - to put it or power it, and you can't afford broadband or a landline. A laptop presents only slightly fewer problems. Even assuming you can find free wifi to use somewhere, how do you keep the laptop from being stolen or damaged? Where and how do you keep it charged? And so The Connection, like libraries and other places, runs a day center with a computing area and resources to help, including computer training.
But even that, they said, hasn't been reaching the most excluded, the under-25s that The Connection sees. When you think about it, it's logical, but I had to be reminded to think about it. Having missed out on - or been failed by - school education, this group doesn't see the Net as the opportunity the rest of us imagine it to be for them.
"They have no idea of creating anything to help their involvement."
So rather than being "digital natives", their position might be comparable to people who have grown up without language or perhaps autistic children whose intelligence and ability to learn has been disrupted by their brain wiring and development so much that the gap between them and their normally wired peers keeps increasing. Today's elderly who lack the motivation, the cognitive functioning, or the physical ability to go online will be catered to, even if only by proxy, until they die out. But imagine being 20 today and having no digital life beyond the completely passive experience of watching a few clips on YouTube or glancing at a Facebook page and thinking they have nothing to do with you. You will go through your entire life at a progressively greater disadvantage. Just as we assume that today's 80-year-olds grew up with movies, radio, and postal mail, when *you* are 80 (if the planet hasn't run out of energy and water and been forced to turn off all the computers by then), in devising systems to help you society will assume you grew up with television, email, and ecommerce. Whatever is put in place to help you navigate whatever that complex future will be like, will be completely outside your grasp.
So The Connection is helping them to do some simple things: upload interviews about their lives, annotate YouTube clips, create comic strips - anything to break this passive lack of interest. Beyond that, there's a big opportunity in smart phones, which don't need charging so often and are easier to protect - and can take advantage of free wifi just as a laptop can. The Connection is working on things like an SMS service that goes out twice a day and provides weather reports, maps of food runs, and information about free things to do. Should you be technically skilled and willing, they're looking for geeky types to help them put these ideas together and automate them. There are still issues around getting people phones, of course - and around the street value of a phone - but once you have a phone where you can be contacted by friend, family, and agencies, it's a whole different life. As it is again if you can be convinced that the Net belongs to you, too, not just all those other people.
Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series.
In the meantime, the importance of the data protection laws has been enhanced by Google's announcement this week that it will revise and consolidate the more than 60 privacy policies covering its various services "to create one beautifully simple and intuitive experience across Google". It will, the press release continues, be "Tailored for you". Not the privacy policy, of course, which is a one-size-fits-all piece of corporate lawyer ass-covering, but the services you use, which, after the fragmented data Google holds about you has been pooled into one giant liquid metal Terminator, will be transformed into so-much-more personal helpfulness. Which would sound better if 2011 hadn't seen loud warnings about the danger that personalization will disappear stuff we really need to know: see Eli Pariser's filter bubble and Jeff Chester's worries about the future of democracy.
Google is right that streamlining and consolidating its myriad privacy policies is a user-friendly thing to do. Yes, let's have a single policy we can read once and understand. We hate reading even one privacy policy, let alone 60 of them.
But the furore isn't about that, it's about the single pool of data. People do not use Google Docs in order to improve their search results; they don't put up Google+ pages and join circles in order to improve the targeting of ads on YouTube. This is everything privacy advocates worried about when Gmail was launched.
Australian privacy campaigner Roger Clarke's discussion document sets out the principles that the decision violates: no consultation, retroactive application; no opt out.
Are we evil yet?
In his 2011 book, In the Plex, Steven Levy traces the beginnings of a shift in Google's views on how and when it implements advertising to the company's controversial purchase of the DoubleClick advertising network, which relied on cookies and tracking to create targeted ads based on Net users' browsing history. This $3.1 billion purchase was huge enough to set off anti-trust alarms. Rightly so. Levy writes, "...sometime after the process began, people at the company realized that they were going to wind up with the Internet-tracking equivalent of the Hope Diamond: an omniscient cookie that no other company could match." Between DoubleClick's dominance in display advertising on large, commercial Web sites and Google AdSense's presence on millions of smaller sites, the company could track pretty much all Web users. "No law prevented it from combining all that information into one file," Levy writes, adding that Google imposed limits, in that it didn't use blog postings, email, or search behavior in building those cookies.
Levy notes that Google spends a lot of time thinking about privacy, but quotes founder Larry Page as saying that the particular issues the public chooses to get upset about seem randomly chosen, the reaction determined most often by the first published headline about a particular product. This could well be true - or it may also be a sign that Page and Brin, like Facebook's Mark Zuckberg and some other Silicon Valley technology company leaders, are simply out of step with the public. Maybe the reactions only seem random because Page and Brin can't identify the underlying principles.
In blending its services, the issue isn't solely privacy, but also the long-simmering complaint that Google is increasingly favoring its own services in its search results - which would be a clear anti-trust violation. There, the traditional principle is that dominance in one market (search engines) should not be leveraged to achieve dominance in another (social networking, video watching, cloud services, email).
SearchEngineLand has a great analysis of why Google's Search Plus is such a departure for the company and what it could have done had it chosen to be consistent with its historical approach to search results. Building on the "Don't Be Evil" tool built by Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace, among others, SEL demonstrates the gaps that result from Google's choices here, and also how the company could have vastly improved its service to its search customers.
What really strikes me in all this is that the answer to both the EU issues and the Google problem may be the same: the personal data store that William Heath has been proposing for three years. Data portability and interoperability, check; user control, check. But that is as far from the Web 2.0 business model as file-sharing is from that of the entertainment industry.
Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series.
At first glance, GovCamp seems peculiarly British: an incongruous mish-mash of government folks, coders, and activists, all brought together by the idea that technology makes it possible to remake government to serve us better. But the Web tells me that events like this are happening in various locations around Europe. James Hendler, who likes to collect government data sets from around the world (700,000 and counting now!), tells me that events like this are happening all over the US, too - except that there this size of event - a couple of hundred people - is New York City.
That's both good and bad: a local area in the US can find many more people to throw at more discrete problems - but on the other hand the federal level is almost impossible to connect with. And, as Hendler points out, the state charters mean that there are conversations the US federal government simply cannot have with its smaller, local counterparts. In the UK, if central government wants a local authority to do something, it can just issue an order.
This year's GovCamp is a two-day affair. Today was an "unConference": dozens of sessions organized by participants to talk about...stuff. Tomorrow will be hands-on, doing things in the limited time available. By the end of the day, the Twitter feed was filling up with eagerness to get on with things.
A veteran camper - I'm not sure how to count how many there have been - tells me that everyone leaves the event full of energy, convinced that they can change the world on Monday. By later next week, they'll have come down from this exhilarated high to find they're working with the same people and the same attitudes. Wonders do not happen overnight.
Along those lines, Mike Bracken, the guy who launched the Guardian's open data platform, now at the Cabinet Office, acknowledges this when he thanks the crowd for the ten years of persistence and pain that created his job. The user, his colleague Mark O'Neill said recently is at the center of everything they're working on. Are we, yet, past proving the concept?
"What should we do first?" someone I couldn't identify (never knowing who's speaking is a pitfall of unConferences) asked in the same session as the marvel-seeker. One offered answer was one any open-source programmer would recognize: ask yourself, in your daily life, what do you want to fix? The problem you want to solve - or the story you want to tell - determines the priorities and what gets published. That's if you're inside government; if you're outside, based on last summer's experience following the Osmosoft teams during Young Rewired State, often the limiting factor is what data is available and in what form.
With luck and perseverance, this should be a temporary situation. As time goes on, and open data gets built into everything, publishing it should become a natural part of everything government does. But getting there means eliminating a whole tranche of traditional culture and overcoming a lot of fear. If I open this data and others can review my decisions will I get fired? If I open this data and something goes wrong will it be my fault?
In a session on creative councils, I heard the suggestion that in the interests of getting rid of gatekeepers who obstruct change organizational structures should be transformed into networks with alternate routes to getting things done until the hierarchy is no longer needed. It sounds like a malcontent's dream for getting the desired technological change past a recalcitrant manager, but the kind of solution that solves one problem by breaking many other things. In such a set-up, who is accountable to taxpayers? Isn't some form of hierarchy inevitable given that someone has to do the hiring and firing?
It was in a session on engagement where what became apparent that as much as this event seems to be focused on technological fixes, the real goal is far broader. The discussion veered into consultations and how to build persistent networks of people engaged with particular topics.
"Work on a good democratic experience," advised the session's leader. Make the process more transparent, make people feel part of the process even if they don't get what they want, create the connection that makes for a truly representative democracy. In her view, what goes wrong with the consultation process now - where, for example, advocates of copyright reform find themselves writing the same ignored advice over and over again in response to the same questions - is that it's trying to compensate for the poor connections to their representatives that most people have. Building those persistent networks and relationships is only a partial answer.
"You can't activate the networks and not at the same time change how you make decisions," she said. "Without that parallel change you'll wind up disappointing people."
Marvels tomorrow, we hope.
Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series.
]]>- EMI Records is suing the Irish government for failing to pass laws to block "pirate sites". The way PC Pro tells it, Ireland ought to have implemented site blocking laws to harmonize with European law and one of its own judges has agreed it failed to do so. I'm not surprised, personally: Ireland has a lot of other things on its mind, like the collapse of the Catholic church that dominated Irish politics, education, and health for so long, and the economic situation post-tech boom.
- The US Congress and Senate are, respectively, about to vote on SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act), laws to give the US site blocking, search engine de-listing, and other goodies. (Who names these things? SOPA and PIPA sound like they escaped from Anna Russell's La Cantatrice Squelante.) Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) have proposed an alternative, the OPEN Act (PDF), which aims to treat copyright violations as a trade issue rather than a criminal one.
- Issa and Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) have introduced the Research Works Act to give science journal publishers exclusive rights over the taxpayer-funded research they publish. The primary beneficiary would be Elsevier (which also publishes Infosecurity, which I write for), whose campaign contributions have been funding Maloney.
- Google is mixing Google+ with its search engine results because, see, when you're looking up impetigo, as previously noted, what you really want is to know which of your friends has it.
- Privacy International has accused Facebook of destroying someone's life through its automated targeted advertising, an accusation the company disputes.
- And finally, a British judge has ruled that a Sheffield student Richard O'Dwyer can be extradited to the US to face charges of copyright infringement; he owned the now-removed TVShack.net site, which hosted links to unauthorized copies of US movies and TV shows.
So many net.wars, so little time...
The eek!-Facebook-knows-I'm-gay story seems overblown. I'm sure the situation is utterly horrible for the young man in question, whom PI's now-removed blog posting said was instantly banished from his parents' home, but I still would like to observe that the ads were placed on his page by a robot (one without the Asimov Three Laws programmed into it). On this occasion the robot apparently guessed right but that's not always true. Remember 2002, when several TiVos thought their owners were gay? These are emotive issues and, as Forbes concludes in the article linked above, the more targeting gets good and online behavioral advertising spreads the more you have to think about what someone looking over your shoulder will see. Perhaps that's a new-economy job for 2012: the digital image consultant who knows how to game the system so the ads appearing on your personalized pages will send the "right" messages about you. Except...
It was predicted - I forget by whom - that search generally would need to incorporate social networking to make its search results more "relevant" and "personal". I can see the appeal if I'm looking for a movie to see, a book to read, or a place to travel to: why wouldn't I want to see first the recommendations of my friends, whom I trust and who likely have tastes similar to mine? But if I'm looking to understand what campaigners are saying about American hate radio (PDF), I'm more interested in the National Hispanic Media Coalition's new report than in collectively condemning Rush Limbaugh. Google Plus Search makes sense in terms of competing with Facebook and Twitter, but mix it up with the story above, and you have a bigger mess in sight. By their search results shall ye know their innermost secrets.
Besides proving Larry Lessig's point about the way campaign funding destroys our trust in our elected representatives, the Research Works Act is a terrible violation of principle. It's taken years of campaigning - by the Guardian as well as individuals pushing open standards - to get the UK government to open up its data coffers. And just at the moment when they finally do it, the US, which until now has been the model of taxpayers-paid-for-it-they-own-the-data, is thinking about going all protectionist and proprietary?
The copyright wars were always kind of ridiculous (and, says Cory Doctorow, only an opening skirmish), but there's something that's just wrong - lopsided, disproportionate, arrogant, take your pick - about a company suing a national government over it. Similarly, there's something that seems disproportionate about extraditing a British student for running a Web site on the basis that it was registered in .net, which is controlled by a US-based registry (and has now been removed from same). Granted, I'm no expert on extradition law, and must wait for either Lilian Edwards or David Allen Green to explain the details of the 2003 law. That law was and remains controversial, that much I know.
And this is only the second week. Happy new year, indeed.
Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series.
I have long complained about Facebook's repeatedly changing privacy controls. This week, while working on a piece on identity fraud for Infosecurity, I've concluded that the fundamental problem with Facebook's privacy controls is not that they're complicated, confusing, and time-consuming to configure. The problem with Facebook's privacy controls is that they exist.
In May 2010, Zuckerberg enraged a lot of people, including me, by opining that privacy is no longer a social norm. As Judith Rauhofer has observed, the world's social norms don't change just because some rich geeks in California say so. But the 800 million people on Facebook would arguably be much safer if the service didn't promise privacy - like Twitter. Because then people wouldn't post all those intimate details about themselves: their kids' pictures, their drunken, sex exploits, their incitements to protest, their porn star names, their birth dates... Or if they did, they'd know they were public.
Facebook's core privacy problem is a new twist on the problem Microsoft has: legacy users. Apple was willing to make earlier generations of its software non-functional in the shift to OS X. Microsoft's attention to supporting legacy users allows me to continue to run, on Windows 7, software that was last updated in 1997. Similarly, Facebook is trying to accommodate a wide variety of privacy expectations, from those of people who joined back when membership was limited to a few relatively constrained categories to those of people joining today, when the system is open to all.
Facebook can't reinvent itself wholesale: it is wholly and completely wrong to betray users who post information about themselves into what they are told is a semi-private space by making that space irredeemably public. The storm every time Facebook makes a privacy-related change makes that clear. What the company has done exceptionally well is to foster the illusion of a private space despite the fact that, as the Australian privacy advocate Roger Clarke observed in 2003, collecting and abusing user data is social networks' only business model.
Ramnit takes this game to a whole new level. Malware these days isn't aimed at doing cute, little things like making hard drive failure noises or sending all the letters on your screen tumbling into a heap at the bottom. No, it's aimed at draining your bank account and hijacking your identity for other types of financial exploitation.
To do this, it needs to find a way inside the circle of trust. On a computer network, that means looking for an unpatched hole in software to leverage. On the individual level, it means the malware equivalent of viral marketing: get one innocent bystander to mistakenly tell all their friends. We've watched this particular type of action move through a string of vectors as the human action moves to get away from spam: from email to instant messaging to, now, social networks. The bigger Facebok gets, the bigger a target it becomes. The more information people post on Facebook - and the more their friends and friends of friends friend promiscuously - the greater the risk to each individual.
The whole situation is exacerbated by endemic, widespread, poor security practices. Asking people to provide the same few bits of information for back-up questions in case they need a password reset. Imposing password rules that practically guarantee people will use and reuse the same few choices on all their sites. Putting all the eggs in services that are free at point of use and that you pay for in unobtainable customer service (not to mention behavioral targeting and marketing) when something goes wrong. If everything is locked to one email account on a server you do not control, if your security questions could be answered by a quick glance at your Facebook Timeline and a Google search, if you bank online and use the same passwords throughout...you have a potential catastrophe in waiting.
I realize not everyone can run their own mail server. But you can use multiple, distinct email addresses and passwords, you can create unique answers on the reset forms, and you can limit your exposure by presuming that everything you post *is* public, whether the service admits it or not. Your goal should be to ensure that when - it's no longer safe to say "if" - some part of your online life is hacked the damage can be contained to that one, hopefully small, piece. Relying on the privacy consciousness of friends means you can't eliminate the risk; but you can limit the consequences.
Facebook is facing an entirely different risk: that people, alarmed at the thought of being mugged, will flee elsewhere. It's happened before.
Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series.
]]>That said, he also couldn't abide computers. "What can you do with a computer that you can't do with a paper and pencil?" he demanded to know when I told him I was buying a friend's TRS-80 Model III in 1981. He was not impressed when I suggested that it would enable me to make changes on page 3 of a 78-page manuscript without retyping the whole thing.
My father had a valid excuse for that particular bit of ignorance or lack of imagination. It was 1981, when most people had no clue about the future of the embryonic technology they were beginning to read about. And he was 75. But I bet if he'd made it past 1984 he'd have put some effort into understanding this technology that would soon begin changing the printing industry he worked in all his life.
While computers were new on the block, and their devotees were a relatively small cult of people who could be relatively easily spotted as "other", you could see the boast "I know nothing about computers" as a replay of high school. In American movies and TV shows that would be jocks and the in-crowd on one side, a small band of miserable, bullied nerds on the other. In the UK, where for reasons I've never understood it's considered more admirable to achieve excellence without ever being seen to work hard for it, the sociology plays out a little differently. I guess here the deterrent is less being "uncool" and more being seen as having done some work to understand these machines.
Here's the problem: the people who by and large populate the ranks of politicians and the civil service are the *other* people. Recent events such as the UK's Government Digital Service launch suggest that this is changing. Perhaps computers have gained respectability at the top level from the presence of MPs who can boast that they misspent their youth playing video games rather than, like the last generation's Ian Taylor, getting their knowledge the hard way, by sweating for it in the industry.
There are several consequences of all this. The most obvious and longstanding one is that too many politicians don't "get" the Net, which is how we get legislation like the DEA, SOPA, PIPA, and so on. The less obvious and bigger one is that we - the technology-minded, the early adopters, the educated users - write them off as too stupid to talk to. We call them "congresscritters" and deride their ignorance and venality in listening to lobbyists and special interest groups.
The problem, as Emily Badger writes for Miller-McCune as part of a review of Clay Johnson's latest book, is that if we don't talk to them how can we expect them to learn anything?
This sentiment is echoed in a lecture given recently at Rutgers by the distinguished computer scientist David Farber on the technical and political evolution of the Internet (MP3) (the slides are here (PDF)). Farber's done his time in Washington, DC, as chief technical advisor to the Federal Communications Commission and as a member of the Presidential Advisory Board on Information Technology. In that talk, Farber makes a number of interesting points about what comes next technically - it's unlikely, he says, that today's Internet Protocols will be able to cope with the terabyte networks on the horizon, and reengineering is going to be a very, very hard problem because of the way humans resist change - but the more relevant stuff for this column has to do with what he learned from his time in DC.
Very few people inside the Beltway understand technology, he says there, citing the Congressman who asked him seriously, "What is the Internet?" (Well, see, it's this series of tubes...) And so we get bad - that is, poorly grounded - decisions on technology issues.
Early in the Net's history, the libertarian fantasy was that we could get on just fine without their input, thank you very much. But as Farber says, politicians are not going to stop trying to govern the Internet. And, as he doesn't quite say, it's not like we can show them that we can run a perfect world without them. Look at the problems techies have invented: spam, the flaky software infrastructure on which critical services are based, and so on. "It's hard to be at the edge in DC," Farber concludes.
So, going back to Badger's review of Johnson: the point is it's up to us. Set aside your contempt and distrust. Whether we like politicians or not, they will always be with us. For 2012, adopt your MP, your Congressman, your Senator, your local councilor. Make it your job to help them understand the bills they're voting on. Show them tshat even if they don't understand the technology there's votes in those who do. It's time to stop thinking of their ignorance as solely *their* fault.
Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series.
"Ten years ago, we thought we'd love Google forever," a friend said recently. Yes, we did, and now we don't.
It's a year and a bit since I began divorcing Google. Ducking the habit is harder than those "They have no lock-in" financial analysts thought when Google went public: as if habit and adaptation were small things. Easy to switch CTRL-K in Firefox to DuckDuckGo, significantly hard to unlearn ten years of Google's "voice".
When I tell this to Gabriel Weinberg, the guy behind DDG - his recent round of funding lets him add a few people to experiment with different user interfaces and redo DDG's mobile application - he seems to understand. He started DDG, he told The Rise to the Top last year, because of Google's increasing amount of spam. Frustration made him think: for many queries wouldn't searching just Delicio.us and Wikipedia produce better results? Since his first weekend mashing that up, DuckDuckGo has evolved to include over 50 sources.
"When you type in a query there's generally a vertical search engine or data source out there that would best serve your query," he says, "and the hard problem is matching them up based on the limited words you type in." When DDG can make a good guess at identifying such a source - such as, say, the National Institutes of Health - it puts that result at the top. This is a significant hint: now, in DDG searches, I put the site name first, where on Google I put it last. Immediate improvement.
This approach gives Weinberg a new problem, a higher-order version of the Web's broken links: as companies reorganize, change, or go out of business, the APIs he relies on vanish.
Identifying the right source is harder than it sounds, because the long tail of queries require DDG to make assumptions about what's wanted.
"The first 80 percent is easy to capture," Weinberg says. "But the long tail is pretty long."
As Ken Auletta tells it in Googled, the venture capitalist Ram Shriram advised Sergey Brin and Larry Page to sell their technology to Yahoo! or maybe Infoseek. But those companies were not interested: the thinking then was portals and keeping site visitors stuck as long as possible on the pages advertisers were paying for, while Brin and Page wanted to speed visitors away to their desired results. It was only when Shriram heard that, Auletta writes, that he realized that baby Google was disruptive technology. So I ask Weinberg: can he make a similar case for DDG?
"It's disruptive to take people more directly to the source that matters," he says. "We want to get rid of the traditional user interface for specific tasks, such as exploring topics. When you're just researching and wanting to find out about a topic there are some different approaches - kind of like clicking around Wikipedia."
Following one thing to another, without going back to a search engine...sounds like my first view of the Web in 1991. But it also sounds like some friends' notion of after-dinner entertainment, where they start with one word in the dictionary and let it lead them serendipitously from word to word and book to book. Can that strategy lead to new knowledge?
"In the last five to ten years," says Weinberg, "people have made these silos of really good information that didn't exist when the Web first started, so now there's an opportunity to take people through that information." If it's accessible, that is. "Getting access is a challenge," he admits.
There is also the frontier of unstructured data: Google searches the semi-structured Web by imposing a structure on it - its indexes. By contrast, Mike Lynch's Autonomy, which just sold to Hewlett-Packard for £10 billion, uses Bayesian logic to search unstructured data, which is what most companies have.
"We do both," says Weinberg. "We like to use structured data when possible, but a lot of stuff we process is unstructured."
Google is, of course, a moving target. For me, its algorithms and interface are moving in two distinct directions, both frustrating. The first is Wal-Mart: stuff most people want. The second is the personalized filter bubble. I neither want nor trust either. I am more like the scientists Linguamatics serves: its analytic software scans hundreds of journals to find hidden links suggesting new avenues of research.
Anyone entering a category that's as thoroughly dominated by a single company as search is now, is constantly asked: How can you possibly compete with
So here's my bet. I bet that DuckDuckGo outlasts Groupon as a going concern. Merry Christmas.
Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series.
I've written before that privacy is not sleeping alone under a tree but being able to do ordinary things without fear. Being alone on an interstate crossing Oklahoma wasn't to hide some nefarious activity (like learning the words to "There Ain't No Instant Replay in the Football Game of Life"). Turn off the radio and, aside from an occasional billboard, the world was quiet.
Of course, that was also a world in which making a phone call was a damned difficult thing to do, which is why professional drivers all had CB radios. Now, everyone has mobile phones, and although your nearest and dearest may not know where you are, your phone company most certainly does, and to a very fine degree of "granularity".
I imagine normal human denial is broad enough to encompass pretending you're in an unknown location while still receiving text messages. Which is why this year's A Fine Balance focused on location privacy.
The travel privacy campaigner Edward Hasbrouck has often noted that travel data is particularly sensitive and revealing in a way few realize. Travel data indicate your religion (special meals), medical problems, and life style habits affecting your health (choosing a smoking room in a hotel). Travel data also shows who your friends are, and how close: who do you travel with? Who do you share a hotel room with, and how often?
Location data is travel data on a steady drip of steroids. As Richard Hollis, who serves on the ISACA Government and Regulatory Advocacy Subcommittee, pointed out, location data is in fact travel data - except that instead of being detailed logging of exceptional events it's ubiquitous logging of everything you do. Soon, he said, we will not be able to opt out - and instead of travel data being a small, sequestered, unusually revealing part of our lives, all our lives will be travel data.
Location data can reveal the entire pattern of your life. Do you visit a church every Monday evening that has an AA meeting going on in the basement? Were you visiting the offices of your employer's main competitor when you were supposed to have a doctor's appointment?
Research supports this view. Some of the earliest work I'm aware of is of Alberto Escudero-Pascual. A month-long experiment tracking the mobile phones in his department enabled him to diagram all the intra-departmental personal relations. In a 2002 paper, he suggests how to anonymize location information (PDF). The problem: no business wants anonymization. As Hollis and others said, businesses want location data. Improved personalization depends on context, and location provides a lot of that.
Patrick Walshe, the director of privacy for the GSM Association, compared the way people care about privacy to the way they care about their health: they opt for comfort and convenience and hope for the best. They - we - don't make changes until things go wrong. This explains why privacy considerations so often fail and privacy advocates despair: guarding your privacy is like eating your vegetables, and who except a cranky person plans their meals that way?
The result is likely to be the world that Microsoft UK's director of Search, advertising, and online UK, Dave Coplin, outlined, arguing that privacy today is at the turning point that the Melissa virus represented for security 11 years ago when it first hit.
Calling it "the new battleground," he said, "This is what happens when everything is connected." Similarly, Blaine Price, a senior lecturer in computing at the Open University, had this cheering thought: as humans become part of the Internet of Things, data leakage will become almost impossible to avoid.
Network externalities mean that the number of people using a network increase its value for all other users of that network. What about privacy externalities? I haven't heard the phrase before, although I see it's not new (PDF). But I mean something different than those papers do: the fact that we talk about privacy as an individual choice when instead it's a collaborative effort. A single person who says, "I don't care about my privacy" can override the pro-privacy decisions of dozens of their friends, family, and contacts. "I'm having dinner with @wendyg," someone blasts, and their open attitude to geolocation reveals mine.
In his research on tracking, Price has found that the more closely connected the trackers are the less control they have over such decisions. I may worry that turning on a privacy block will upset my closest friend; I don't obsess at night, "Will the phone company think I'm mad at it?"
So: you want to know where I am right now? Pay no attention to the geolocated Twitterer who last night claimed to be sitting in her living room with "wendyg". That wasn't me.
Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series.
Government IT in Britain has been an expensive calamity for so long that it's become generally accepted that it will fail, and the headlines describing the latest billions lost in taxpayers' money have become a national joke on a par with losing at sports. People complain that Andy Murray hasn't won anything big, but the near-miss is thoroughly ingrained in the British national consciousness; the complaints are as familiar and well-worn a track as the national anthem. No one is happy about it - but it's like comfort food.
It was gently explained to me this week - in a pub, of course - that my understanding of how the UK government operates, based as it is on a mish-mash of single readings of Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels, repeated viewings of the 1980s sitcom Yes, Minister, and the occasional patient explanation from friends and acquaintances needs to be updated. The show was (and remains) a brilliant exposé of the inner workings of the civil service of the day, something that until then was completely obscure. Politicians repeatedly said it was a documentary, not fiction - and then they began to change in response to it. Who saw that coming? The Blair government bypassed the civil service by hiring outside consultants - who were expensive and, above all, not disinterested. The coalition has reacted by going the other way, thinking small, and hiring people who are good at doing things with all this fancy, new technology. Cheap things. Effective things. Even some of the MySociety people. I know, right?
The fact that people like Mike Bracken, who masterminded the Guardian's open platform and who is a founder of MySociety, are working in government is kind of astonishing. And not just him: also Wired UK, and who has gone on to work for the BBC and advise Ofcom on digital strategy and Richard Pope, another of the MySociety guys.
The question is, can a small cohort of clever people succeed in turning a lumbering ship like a national government, let alone one running a country so wedded to the traditional way of doing things as Britain is? This week, the UK government has seemed to embrace both the dysfunctional old, in the form of promising the nation's public health data to life sciences companies, and the new, in the form of launching the Government Digital Service. You almost want to make one of those old Tired/Wired tables. Tired: centralisation, big databases, the British population as assets to be sold off or given away to "users", who are large organisations. Wired: individual control, personal data stores, users who are citizens in charge of their own destinies.
Yesterday, Bracken was the one to announce the new Government Data Service. William Heath, who founded the government consultancy Kable (since sold and now Guardian Government Computing) and, in 2004, the Ideal Government blog in pursuit of something exactly like this, could scarcely contain his excitement.
What's less encouraging is seeing health data mixed in with the Autumn Statement's open data provisions (PDF). As Heath wrote when the news broke, open data is about things, not people. Open data is: transport schedules, mapping data, lists of government assets, national statistics, and so on. This kind of data we want published as openly and in as raw a form as possible, so that it can be reused and form the basis for new businesses and economic growth. This is the process that not the kind of data we want to open. Yes, there are many organisations that would like access to it: life sciences companies, researchers of all types, large pharmaceutical companies, and so on. This is a battle that has been going on in Europe for more than ten years and for a somewhat shorter amount of time in the US, where the lack of nationalized health insurance means that it's taken longer for the issue to come to the front. In the UK, Ross Anderson (see also here) and Fleur Fisher are probably the longest-running campaigners against the assembling of patient records into a single national database. As the case of Wikileaks and the diplomatic cables showed, it is hopeless to think that a system accessible by 800,000 people can keep a secret.
But let's wait to see the details before we get mad. For today, enjoy the moment. Change may happen! In a good way!
Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series.
This was the motion up for debate at Trinity College Dublin's Philosophical Society (Twitter: @phil327) last night (December 1, 2011). It was a difficult one, because I don't think any of the speakers - neither the four students, Ricky McCormack, Michael Coleman, Cat O'Shea, and Brian O'Beirne, nor the invited guests, Eamonn Healy, Fred Cummins, and Abraham Campbell - honestly fear AI all that much. Either we don't really believe a future populated by superhumanly intelligent killer robots is all that likely, or, like Ken Jennings, we welcome our new computer overlords.
But the point of this type of debate is not to believe what you are saying - I learned later that in the upper levels of the game you are assigned a topic and a position and given only 15 minutes to marshal your thoughts - but to argue your assigned side so passionately, persuasively, and coherently that you win the votes of the assembled listeners even if later that night, while raiding the icebox, they think, "Well, hang on..." This is where politicians and Dail/House of Commons debating style come from, As a participatory sport it was utterly new to me, and it explains a *lot* about the derailment of political common sense by the rise of public relations and lobbying.
Obviously I don't actually oppose research into AI. I'm all for better tools, although I vituperatively loathe tools that try to game me. As much fun as it is to speculate about whether superhuman intelligences will deserve human rights, I tend to believe that AI will always be a tool. It was notable that almost every speaker assumed that AI would be embodied in a more-or-less humanoid robot. Far more likely, it seems to me, that if AI emerges it will be first in some giant, boxy system (that humans can unplug) and even if Moore's Law shrinks that box it will be much longer before AI and robotics converge into a humanoid form factor.
Lacking conviction on the likelihood of all this, and hence of its dangers, I had to find an angle, which eventually boiled down to Walt Kelly and We have met the enemy and he is us. In this, I discovered, I am not alone: a 2007 ThinkArtificial poll found that more than half of respondents feared what people would do with AI: the people who program it, own it, and deploy it.
If we look at the history of automation to date, a lot of it has been used to make (human) workers as interchangeable as possible. I am old enough to remember, for example, being able to walk down to the local phone company in my home town of Ithaca, NY, and talk in person to a customer service representative I had met multiple times before about my piddling residential account. Give everyone the same customer relationship database and workers become interchangeable parts. We gain some convenience - if Ms Jones is unavailable anyone else can help us - but we pay in lost relationships. The company loses customer loyalty, but gains (it hopes) consistent implementation of its rules and the economic leverage of no longer depending on any particular set of workers.
I might also have mentioned automated trading systems, which are making the markets swing much more wildly much more often. Later, Abraham Campbell, a computer scientist working in augmented reality at University College Dublin, said as much as 25 percent of trading is now done by bots. So, cool: Wall Street has become like one of those old IRC channels where you met a cute girl named Eliza...
Campbell had a second example: the Siri, which will tell you where to hide a dead body but not where you might get an abortion. Google's removal of torrent sites from its autosuggestion/Instant feature didn't seem to me egregious censorship, partly because there are other search engines and partly (short-sightedly) because I hate Instant so much already. But as we become increasingly dependent on mediators to help us navigate our overcrowded world, the agenda and/or competence of the people programming them are vital to know. These will be transparent only as long as there are alternatives.
Simultaneously, back in England in work that would have made Jessica Mitford proud, Privacy International's Eric King and Emma Draper were publishing material that rather better proves the point. Big Brother Inc lays out the dozens of technology companies from democratic Western countries that sell surveillance technologies to repressive regimes. King and Draper did what Mitford did for the funeral business in the late 1960s (and other muckrakers have done since): investigate what these companies' marketing departments tell prospective customers.
I doubt businesses will ever, without coercion, behave like humans with consciences; it's why they should not be legally construed as people. During last night's debate, the prospective robots were compared to women and "other races", who were also denied the vote. Yes, and they didn't get it without a lot of struggle. The In the "Robocalypse" (O'Beirne), they'd better be prepared to either a) fight to meltdown for their rights or b) protect their energy sources and wait patiently for the human race to exterminate itself.
Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series.
Rephrasing Bill Clinton's campaign slogan, "It's the people, stupid," said Philip Virgo, chairman of the security panel of the IT Livery Company, to kick off the day, a sentiment echoed repeatedly by nearly every other speaker. Yes, it's the people - who trust when they shouldn't, who attach personal devices to corporate networks, who disclose passwords when they shouldn't, who are targeted by today's Facebook-friending social engineers. So how many people experts on the program? None. Psychologists? No. Nor any usability experts or people whose jobs revolve around communication, either. (Or women, but I'm prepared to regard that as a separate issue.)
Smart, experienced guys, sure, who did a great job of outlining problems and a few possible solutions. Somewhere toward the end of the proceedings, someone allowed in passing that yes, it's not a good idea to require people to use passwords that are too complex to remember easily. This is the state of their art? It's 12 years since Angela Sasse and Anne Adams covered this territory in Users Are Not the Enemy. Sasse has gone on to help found the field of security economics, which seeks to quantify the cost of poorly designed security - not just in data breaches and DoS attacks but in the lost productivity of frustrated, overburdened users. Sasse argues that the problem isn't so much the people as user-hostile systems and technology.
"As user-friendly as a cornered rat," Virgo says he wrote of security software back in 1983. Anyone who's looked at configuring a firewall lately knows things haven't changed that much. In a world of increasingly mass-market software and devices, security software has remained resolutely elitist: confusing error messages, difficult configuration, obscure technology. How many users know what to do when their browser says a Web site certificate is invalid? Or how to answer anti-virus software that asks whether you want to authorise HIPS/RegMod-007?
"The current approach is not working," said William Beer, director of information security and cybersecurity for PriceWaterhouseCoopers. "There is too much focus on technology, and not enough focus from business and government leaders." How about academics and consumers, too?
There is no doubt, though, that the threats are escalating. Twenty years ago, the biggest worry was that a teenaged kid would write a virus that spread fast and furious in the hope of getting on the evening news. Today, an organized criminal underground uses personal information to target a small group of users inside RSA, leveraging that into a threat to major systems worldwide. (Trend Micro CTO Andy Dancer said the attack began in the real world with a single user befriended at their church. I can't find verification, however.)
The big issue, said Martin Smith, CEO of The Security Company, is that "There's no money in getting the culture right." What's to sell if there's no technical fix? Like when your plane is held to ransom by the pilot, or when all it takes to publish 250,000 US diplomatic cables is one alienated, low-ranked person with a DVD burner and a picture of Lady Gaga? There's a parallel here to pharmaceuticals: one reason we have few weapons to combat rampaging drug resistance is that for decades developing new antibiotics was not seen as a profitable path.
Granted, you don't, as Dancer said afterwards, want to frame security as an issue of "fixing the people" (but we already know better than that). Nor is it fair to ban company employees from social media lest some attacker pick it up and use it to create a false sense of trust. Banning the latest new medium, said former GCHQ head John Bassett, is just the instinctive reaction in a disturbance; in 1775 Boston the "problem" was Paul Revere's printing press stirring up trouble.
Nor do I, personally, want to live in a trust-free world. I'm happy to assume the server next to me is compromised, but "Trust no one" is a lousy way to live.
Since perfect security is not possible, Dancer advised, organizations should plan for the worst. Good advice. When did I first hear it? Twenty years ago and most months since, by Peter Neumann in his RISKS Forum. It is depressing and frustrating that we are still having this conversation as if it were new - and that we will have it all over again over the next decade as smart meters roll out to 26 million British households by 2020, opening up the electrical grid to attacks that are already being predicted and studied.
Neumann - and Dancer - is right. There is no perfect security because it's in no one's interest to create it. Plan for the worst.
To Gene Spafford, 1989: "The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete, and sealed in a lead-lined room protected by armed guards - and even then I have my doubts."
For everything else, there's a stolen Mastercard.
Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series.
]]>A few weeks ago I had this conversation with a friend:
wg: My friend's son is a writer on The Daily Show.
Friend, puzzled: Jon Stewart needs writers? I thought he did his own jokes.
For the record, Stewart has 12 to 14 staff writers. For a simple reason: comedy is hard, and even the vaudeville-honed joke machine that was Morey Amsterdam would struggle to devise two hours of original material every week.
Which is how we arrive at the enduring mystery of the sitcom. Although people may disagree about exactly when that is, when the form works, says the veteran sitcom writer and showrunner Ken Levine, it is TV's most profitable money machine. Sitcom writing requires not only a substantial joke machine but the ability to create an underlying storyline scaffold of recognizably human reality. And you must do all that under pressure, besieged by conflicting notes from the commissioning network and studio, and conforming to constraints as complex and specific as those of a sonnet: budgets, timing, and your actors' abilities. It takes a village. Or, since today most US sitcoms are written by a roomful of writers working together, a "gang-banging" village.
It is this experience that Levine decided, five years ago. to emulate. The ability to thrive in that environment is an essential skill, but beginning writers work alone until they are thrown in at the deep end on their first job. He calls his packed weekend event The Sitcom Room, and, having spent last weekend taking part in the fifth of the series, I can say the description is accurate. After a few hours of introduction about the inner workings of writers' rooms, scripts, and comedy in general, four teams of five people watch a group of actors perform a Levine-written scene with some obvious and some not-so-obvious things wrong with it. Each team then goes off to fix the scene in its designated room, which comes appropriately equipped with junk food, sodas, and a whiteboard. You have 12 hours (more if you're willing to make your own copies). Go.
After five seminars and 20 teams, Levine says every rewritten script has been different, a reminder that sitcom writing is a treasure hunt where the object of the search is unknown. Levine kindly describes each result as "magical"; attendees were more critical of other groups' efforts. (I liked ours best, although the ending still needed some work.)
I felt lucky: my group were all professionals used to meeting deadlines and working to specification, and all displayed a remarkable lack of ego in pitching and listening to ideas. We packed up around 1am, feeling that any changes we made after that point were unlikely to be improvements. On the other hand, if the point was to experience a writers' room, we failed utterly: both Levine and Sunday panelist Jane Espenson (see her new Web series, Husbands) talked about the brutally competitive environment of many of the real-life versions. Others were less blessed by chemistry: one team wrangled until 3am before agreeing on a strategy, then spent the rest of the night writing their script and getting their copies made. Glassy-eyed, on Sunday they disagreed when asked individually about what went wrong: publicly, their appointed "showrunner" blamed himself for not leading effectively. I imagine them indelibly bonded by their shared suffering.
What happens at this event is catalysis. "You will learn a lot about yourselves," Levine said on that first morning. How do you respond when your best ideas are not good enough to be accepted? How do you take to the discipline of delivering jokes and breaking stories on deadline? How do you function under pressure as part of a team creative effort? Less personally, can you watch a performance and see, instead of the actors' skills, the successes and flaws in your script? Can you stay calm when the "studio executive" (played by Levine's business partner, Dan O'Day) produces a laundry list of complaints and winds up with, "Except for a couple of things I wouldn't change anything"? And, not in the syllabus, can you help Dan play practical jokes on Ken? By the end of the weekend, everyone is on a giddy adrenaline high, exacerbated in our case by the gigantic anime convention happening all around us at the same hotel. (Yes. The human-sized fluffy yellow chick getting on the elevator is real. You're not hallucinating from lack of sleep. Check.)
I found Levine's blog earlier this year after he got into cross-fire with the former sitcom star Roseanne Barr over Charlie Sheen's meltdown. His blog reminds me of William Goldman's books on screenwriting: the same combination of entertainment and education. I think of Goldman's advice every day in everything I write. Now, I will think of Levine's, too.
Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series.
]]>Say to a human, "I'll meet you at the place near the thing where we went that time," and they'll show up at the right place. That's from the 1987 movieBroadcast News: Aaron (Albert Brooks) says it; cut to Jane (Holly Hunter), awaiting him at a table.
But what if Jane were a computer and what she wanted to know from Aaron's statement was not where to meet but how Aaron felt about it? This is the challenge facing sentiment analysis.
At Wednesday's Sentiment Analysis Symposium, the key question of context came up over and over again as the biggest challenge to the industry of people who claim that they can turn Tweets, blog postings, news stories, and other mass data sources into intelligence.
So context: Jane can parse "the place", "the thing", and "that time" because she has expert knowledge of her past with Aaron. It's an extreme example, but all human writing makes assumptions about the knowledge and understanding of the reader. Humans even use those assumptions to implement privacy in a public setting: Stephen Fry could retweet Aaron's words and still only Jane would find the cafe. If Jane is a large organization seeking to understand what people are saying about it and Aaron is 6 million people posting on Twitter, Tom can use sentiment analyzer tools to give a numerical answer. And numbers always inspire confidence...
My first encounter with sentiment analysis was this summer during Young Rewired State, when a team wanted to create a mood map of the UK comparing geolocated tweets to indices of multiple deprivation. This third annual symposium shows that here is a rapidly engorging industry, part PR, part image consultancy, and part artificial intelligence research project.
I was drawn to it out of curiosity, but also because it all sounds slightly sinister. What do sentiment analyzers understand when I say an airline lounge at Heathrow Terminal 4 "brings out my inner Sheldon? What is at stake is not precise meaning - humans argue over the exact meaning of even the greatest communicators - but extracting good-enough meaning from high-volume data streams written by millions of not-monkeys.
What could possibly go wrong? This was one of the day's most interesting questions, posed by the consultant Meta Brown to representatives of the Red Cross, the polling organization Harris Interactive, and Paypal. Failure to consider the data sources and the industry you're in, said the Red Cross's Banafsheh Ghassemi. Her example was the period just after Hurricane Irene, when analyzing social media sentiment would find it negative. "It took everyday disaster language as negative," she said. In addition, because the Red Cross's constituency is primarily older, social media are less indicative than emails and call center records. For many organizations, she added, social media tend to skew negative.
Earlier this year, Harris Interactive's Carol Haney, who has had to kill projects when they failed to produce sufficiently accurate results for the client, told a conference, "Sentiment analysis is the snake oil of 2011." Now, she said, "I believe it's still true to some extent. The customer has a commercial need for a dial pointing at a number - but that's not really what's being delivered. Over time you can see trends and significant change in sentiment, and when that happens I feel we're returning value to a customer because it's not something they received before and it's directionally accurate and giving information." But very small changes over short time scales are an unreliable basis for making decisions.
"The difficulty in social media analytics is you need a good idea of the questions you're asking to get good results," says Shlomo Argamon, whose research work seems to raise more questions than answers. Look at companies that claim to measure influence. "What is influence? How do you know you're measuring that or to what it correlates in the real world?" he asks. Even the notion that you can classify texts into positive and negative is a "huge simplifying assumption".
Argamon has been working on technology to discern from written text the gender and age - and perhaps other characteristics - of the author, a joint effort with his former PhD student Ken Bloom. When he says this, I immediately want to test him with obscure texts.
Is this stuff more or less creepy than online behavioral advertising? Han-Sheong Lai explained that Paypal uses sentiment analysis to try to glean the exact level of frustration of the company's biggest clients when they threaten to close their accounts. How serious are they? How much effort should the company put into dissuading them? Meanwhile Verint's job is to analyze those "This call may be recorded" calls. Verint's tools turn speech to text, and create color voiceprint maps showing the emotional high points. Click and hear the anger.
"Technology alone is not the solution," said Philip Resnik, summing up the state of the art. But, "It supports human insight in ways that were not previously possible." His talk made me ask: if humans obfuscate their data - for example, by turning off geolocation - will this industry respond by finding ways to put it all back again so the data will be more useful?
"It will be an arms race," he agrees. "Like spam."
Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series.
]]>My eventual thought was that the government's role should be to set standards; it might or might not also be an identity services provider. The government's inclination now is to push this job to the private sector. That leaves the question of how to serve those who are not commercially interesting; at the CSFI meeting the Post Office seemed the obvious contender for both pragmatic and historical reasons.
As Mike Bracken writes in the Government Digital Service blog posting linked above, the notion of private identity providers is not new. But what he seems to assume is that what's needed is federated identity - that is, in Wikipedia's definition, a means for linking a person's electronic identity and attributes across multiple distinct systems. What I meant is a system in which one may have many limited identities that are sufficiently interoperable that you can make a choice which to use at the point of entry to a given system. We already have something like this on many blogs, where commenters may be offered a choice of logging in via Google, OpenID, or simply posting a name and URL.
The government gateway circa Year 2000 offered a choice: getting an identity certificate required payment of £50 to, if I remember correctly, Experian or Equifax, or other companies whose interest in preserving personal privacy is hard to credit. The CSFI meeting also mentioned tScheme - an industry consortium to provide trust services. Outside of relatively small niches it's made little impact. Similarly, fifteen years ago, the government intended, as part of implementing key escrow for strong cryptography, to create a network of trusted third parties that it would license and, by implication, control. The intention was that the TTPs should be folks that everyone trusts - like banks. Hilarious, we said *then*. Moving on.
In between then and now, the government also mooted a completely centralized identity scheme - that is, the late, unlamented ID card. Meanwhile, we've seen the growth a set of competing American/global businesses who all would like to be *the* consumer identity gateway and who managed to steal first-mover advantage from existing financial institutions. Facebook, Google, and Paypal are the three most obvious. Microsoft had hopes, perhaps too early, when in 1999 it created Passport (now Windows Live ID). More recently, it was the home for Kim Cameron's efforts to reshape online identity via the company's now-cancelled CardSpace, and Brendon Lynch's adoption of U-Prove, based on Stefan Brands' technology. U-Prove is now being piloted in various EU-wide projects. There are probably lots of other organizations that would like to get in on such a scheme, if only because of the data and linkages a federated system would grant them. Credit card companies, for example. Some combination of mobile phone manufacturers, mobile network operators, and telcos. Various medical outfits, perhaps.
An identity layer that gives fair and reasonable access to a variety of players who jointly provide competition and consumer choice seems like a reasonable goal. But it's not clear that this is what either the UK's distastefully spelled "Midata" or the US's NSTIC (which attracted similar concerns when first announced, has in mind. What "federated identity" sounds like is the convenience of "single sign-on", which is great if you're working in a company and need to use dozens of legacy systems. When you're talking about identity verification for every type of transaction you do in your entire life, however, a single gateway is a single point of failure and, as Stephan Engberg, founder of the Danish company Priway, has often said, a single point of control. It's the Facebook cross-all-the-streams approach, embedded everywhere. Engberg points to a discussion paper) inspired by two workshops he facilitated for the Danish National IT and Telecom Agency (NITA) in late 2010 that covers many of these issues.
Engberg, who describes himself as a "purist" when it comes to individual sovereignty, says the only valid privacy-protecting approach is to ensure that each time you go online on each device you start a new session that is completely isolated from all previous sessions and then have the choice of sharing whatever information you want in the transaction at hand. The EU's LinkSmart project, which Engberg was part of, created middleware to do precisely that. As sensors and RFID chips spread along with IPv6, which can give each of them its own IP address, linkages across all parts of our lives will become easier and easier, he argues.
We've seen often enough that people will choose convenience over complexity. What we don't know is what kind of technology will emerge to help us in this case. The devil, as so often, will be in the details.
Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series.
]]>First, the good. Public key cryptography is now implemented exactly the way it should have been all along: once you've installed it and generated a keypair, encrypting a message is ticking a box or picking a menu item inside your email software. Even key management is handled by a comprehensible, well-designed graphical interface. Several generations of hard work have created this and also ensured that the various versions of PGP, OpenPGP, and GPG are interoperable, so you don't have to worry about who's using what. Installation was straightforward and the documentation is good.
Now, the bad. That's where the usability stops. There are so many details you can get wrong to mess the whole thing up that if this stuff were a form of contraception desperate parents would be giving babies away on street corners.
Item: the subject line doesn't get encrypted. There is nothing you can do about this except put a lot of thought into devising a subject line that will compel people to read the message but that simultaneously does not reveal anything of value to anyone monitoring your email. That's a neat trick.
Item: watch out for attachments, which are easily accidentally sent in the clear; you need to encrypt them separately before bundling them into the message.
Item: while there is a nifty GPG plug-in for Thunderbird - Enigmail - Outlook, being commercial software, is less easily supported. GPG's GpgOL module works only with 2003 (SP2 and above) and 2007, and not on 64-bit Windows. The problem is that it's hard enough to get people to change *one* habit, let alone several.
Item: lacking appropriate browser plug-ins, you also have to tell them to stop using Webmail if the service they're used to won't support IMAP or POP3, because they won't be able to send encrypted mail or read what others send them over the Web.
Let's say you're running a field station in a hostile area. You can likely get users to persevere despite these points by telling them that this is their work system, for use in the field. Most people will put up with a some inconvenience if they're being paid to do so and/or it's temporary and/or you scare them sufficiently. But that strategy violates one of the basic principles of crypto-culture, which is that everyone should be encrypting everything so that sensitive traffic doesn't stand out. They are of course completely right, just as they were in 1993, when the big political battles over crypto were being fought.
Item: when you connect to a public keyserver to check or download someone's key, that connection is in the clear, so anyone surveilling you can see who you intend to communicate with.
Item: you're still at risk with regard to traffic data. This is what RIPA and data retention are all about. What's more significant? Being able to read a message that says, "Can you buy milk?" or the information that the sender and receiver of that message correspond 20 times a day? Traffic data reveals the pattern of personal relationships; that's why law enforcement agencies want it. PGP/GPG won't hide that for you; instead, you'll need to set up a proxy or use Tor to mix up your traffic and also protect your Web browsing, instant messaging, and other online activities. As Tor's own people admit, it slows performance, although they're working on it (PDF).
All this says we're still a long way from a system that the mass market will use. And that's a damn shame, because we genuinely need secure communications. Like a lot of people in the mid-1990s, I'd have thought that by now encrypted communications would be the norm. And yet not only is SSL, which protects personal details in transit to ecommerce and financial services sites, the only really mass-market use, but it's in trouble. Partly, this is because of the technical issues raised in the linked article - too many certification authorities, too many points of failure - but it's also partly because hardly anyone understands how to check that a certificate is valid or knows what to do when warnings pop up that it's expired or issued for a different name. The underlying problem is that many of the people who like crypto see it as both a cool technology and a cause. For most of us, it's just more fussy software. The big advance since the mid 1990s is that at least now the *developers* will use it.
Maybe mobile phones will be the thing that makes crypto work the way it should. See, for example, Dave Birch's current thinking on the future of identity. We've been arguing about how to build an identity infrastructure for 20 years now. Crypto is clearly the mechanism. But we still haven't solved the how.
Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series.
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