Sean Abel

Scott Smith and his family moved from the USA to the Netherlands and discovered that despite living in the most heavily surveilled moment in human history, neither his old country nor his new one can figure out how to relate to them.

I’ve gone through this myself, in both directions, repeatedly, over a decade, moving back and forth between Canada, Europe and the USA. It’s not just the kafkaesque process of getting working papers and figuring out how to pay your taxes (try convincing the British not to charge you tax on the income you paid tax on in California!), it’s all the rest of it: establishing credit, and, especially, working out access to all the clouds.

I have a Kindle account that I established with a US credit-card, which meant that, while I lived in the UK, I was able to buy US ebooks (but not UK ones, even after I established UK credit-cards too). For a while, the Amazon MP3 store would sell to me from its US branch, then not at all, then from its UK store. Now that I don’t have any UK credit-cards, I can’t buy from it at all again.

Phones are the worst. I changed my UK-based Three SIM to a pay-as-you-go plan, but I can’t top it up with a US-based credit-card (I used to have this problem with my Rogers Canada SIM, too, but then I switched to Wind, which lets me top up with a card from anywhere). I’m in Germany today, and I’ve made a dozen calls and online attempts to figure out how to get my phone working – and now I’ve been locked out of my account.

Did I say phones are the worst? No, utility bills are the worst. Getting set up with the local gas and power companies – a prerequisite, weirdly, for enrolling our daughter in public school! – was a bizarre process of showing up with money-orders (sometimes) or cash (sometimes) and handing it across the counter, getting stamped pieces of paper, bringing them to other windows, and…

Actually, banking is the worst. I got set up with my local credit union (who also needed those utility bills!), only to discover that I couldn’t install their app on my phone. The nice thing about a local credit union is that level-two tech support is the CTO. My CU’s CTO put me in touch with the company’s mobile app developer, who told me that they had deliberately locked their apps so that they wouldn’t install on Android devices that were registered to non-US Gmail accounts, and that Googlerequired them to do this.

Luckily, I know some very senior googlers. But they shamefacedly told me that as far as Google Play and its Android services were concerned, I would always be a UK resident, because I’d turned on merchant services for my Gmail account, so that I could accept payments. Once that bit has been flipped, it could never be unflipped. If I wanted to have a US Android domicile, I’d need to set up a new identity, buy all my apps all over again, and, depending on how I wanted to do things, get all new devices to run that identity on.

Plan B: I got the head of communications for Google Play to give me an on the record statement that said that Google Play doesn’t require region-locking of its vendors, and in fact, it actively discourages the practice. Armed with this statement and the evidence that my CU’s vendor had built apps for half a dozen other US financial institutions that could be installed on UK-based devices, I spent five months helping my credit union’s CTO lobby the vendor to turn off its region-locking bit. As of last week, I have my credit union’s app on my phone.

This all may sound like First World Problems, but it’s just the reverse. The vast numbers of refugees fleeing conflict zones have all of these problems and more, because they’re traumatized and broke as well as disoriented and tempest-tossed. They don’t know senior googlers. They struggle with language barriers. They don’t have high-priced immigration lawyers who go to battle on their behalf.

Changing countries is very nearly impossibly bureaucratic for people with agency, money, connections, and the luxury of time to plan and think. When I get cut off from my SIM, I can pick up another one and email my relatives to let them know how to reach me. But if your relatives are refugees in a distant camp, losing your phone number can mean losing your family (possibly forever).

The borderless world of money and business is, ironically, a world of ever-more-imposing borders for humans. For example, governments have made ineffectual gestures at getting multinationals to pay their taxes, creating systems that assume an adversary with a huge and well-oiled accounting machine. The resulting system is virtually impossible for individuals to understand or comply with.

This is getting worse, not better. I’ve been a country-swapping expatriate for all of this century, and it keeps getting harder – even as the number of people who’re doing what I did, involuntarily, without the support and resources I have, continues to grow.

Awkward Engineer’s Model AWK-105 Analog Voltmeter Clock costs $139; it began life as a successful Kickstarter and is now an object of commerce, in off-white or khaki. I love that the “twitchy” analog needles that display the time are connected to an Attiny44 CPU. (via Red Ferret)

Gartner’s top strategic predictions for 2016 and beyond (my 2¢)

Daryl Plummer, VP of Gartner, announced Gartner’s Top Predictions during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando. It’s all about digital business, the race against competitive autonomous machines, IoT and smart devices talking to each other, the relationships between people and machines et cetera. Usual stuff, if you’re following. Therefore, let’s see what 27 analysts (!) have produced:

By 2018, 20% of all business content will be authored by machines.

Well, good and easy call. Business content is fuzzy enough and there already enough players in the market, wich are working on automated shareholder or market reports, press releases, sports news and white papers. Most likely.

By 2018, 6 billion connected things will be requesting support.

Interesting narrative development. They’ve probably thought: We’re oversaturated of simple IoT devices forecasts. So let’s add “they need support” and create something unique and new. Well done. I wonder what would happen if 6 billion devices request suppport at the same time? Denial-of-service.

By 2020, autonomous software agents outside of human control will participate in 5% of all economic transactions.

Hm. Just 5%? What about all the fintech bots and algorithmically driven agents that conclude deals in milliseconds, execute VC investment decisions, support financial advisors with automated advices and the general development of electronic trading? What about the Blockchain? And don’t forget the socio-tech trend, that rich people increasingly prefer to get their financial advice from robots. Pent-up demand.

By 2018, more than 3 million workers globally will be supervised by a “roboboss.”

Trending topic atm, so I’m surprised to see it here. But a quick internal search shows, that the issue had already been adressed last year. Furthermore, there are a lot of portents for a Mechanical Turk economy. In a probable future, we’ll only get jobs because we’re cheaper than machines. With the words of Lilly Irani: “Automation doesn’t replace labor. It displaces it.”. Highly recommended talk: Johannes Kleske - Mensch, Macht, Maschine. Automatophobia.

By YE18, 20% of smart buildings will have suffered from digital vandalism.

YE18? Do we see here the the emergence of a new calendar1? Anyway, digital vandalism in smart environments is just another term for hacked infrastructure. It’s an unsettling thought and YES we need better security and privacy systems for home automation, smart homes, offices, their APIs etc. But I’m looking forward to friendly art hacks where nobody gets hurt. And keep in mind: Not everything has to be connected. Be sure to read “Understanding the connected home” by Peter Bihr and Michelle Thorne for more informations about the ecosphere of smart homes, UX and future settings. Futures noir.

By 2018, 50% of the fastest-growing companies will have fewer employees than instances of smart machines.

Digital Transformations = speed, cost savings and productivity improvements. I don’t know current market stats and figures but if you’re looking at the success of UBER, WhatsApp, Airbnb, Alibaba etal and A16z presentations you’ll see the gigantic market power of software driven companies. The interface is where the profit is. Software is eating the world.

By YE18, customer digital assistants will recognize individuals by face and voice across channels and partners.

Ahm, I don’t understand this one tbh. According to Gartner, a customer digital assistant is powered by facial recognition, voice identification, emotion detection, natural-language processing and audience profile data. A pimped up Siri or PS4 if you like, that has access to your profile and interaction data. Think of a mobile (!) skype call with an animated character instead of using the amazon website. Confused.

By 2018, 2 million employees will be required to wear health and fitness tracking devices as a condition of employment.

Antoher futures noir prediction, if you ask me. Sure, wearables can provide remote monitoring of biometrics to send help immediately if required. But they internalize also the haunted spirit of 1984, if you’re thinking about insurances, corporate rules and national security fears. Smart systems for a convenient worklife balance or all-seing and surpressive eyes for efficient and productive work? Two face.

By 2020, smart agents will facilitate 40% of mobile interactions, and the post-app era will begin to dominate.

Another trending topic. Big fan. Instead of using apps, we’ll rely on textinterfaces and (human/bot) agents in the future. Hybrid AI, Intelligent Assistants, social robots, domestic AI, on-demand mobile Virtual Assistants, Personal Assistants or Assistive Intelligence. Call it as you like. We’ll have to face NLP- and machine learning driven software and hardware, orchestrating our life over APIs and hidden backchannels. But first we have to talk about trust. AI.

Through 2020, 95% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault.

People have always been the greatest security risk. Don’t know why that should change, or is worth mentioning. No brainer.

Conclusion

You have to admit, that they know how to write predictions and forecasts, although 27 authors are 22 too much (somehow they have to justify their prices). No matter. There’s enough background material if you’re willing to sign up. The predictions are therefore more conjectures - reasoned speculations about the future - than mysterios omens based on augury or hepatoscopy (= hype cycle methods).

However, the underlying dystopian echo is surprising. A lot of the predictions advertise futures with a bad aftertaste. Even the summary sounds like a prelude to a mediocre near-future robo-corporate-surveillance-scifi flick:

The dramatic rise of smart machines and autonomous devices is driving radical shifts in business practices and individual behaviors. Enterprises and individuals face the urgent need to define and develop harmonious relationships between people and machines.

Either way. At the end, all of the predictions above are marketing material. If you’re afraid, ask Gartner. If you want to make money, ask Gartner. If you want to know more, ask Gartner. If you want to know what the future brings, ask Gartner. Don’t believe me? Here’s Gartner’s top 1 recommendation:

Use Gartner’s predictions as planning assumptions on which to base your strategic plans.

At least they’re honest. And now: Everyone please stand up and follow Gartner into the future.

Footnote: Spelling and Grammar unaudited.

Mobile urban apartments let users move to new city via app

Maciej Cegłowski’s posted another of his barn-burning speeches about the Internet’s problems, their origins and their solutions (previously), a talk from the Fremtidens Internet conference in Copenhagen called “What Happens Next Will Amaze You.”

Cegłowski traces the history of “clickfraud,” the practice of using software bots to load, click on, and interact with ads in order to generate fraudulent income for unscrupulous “publishers” who run the bots. In order to defeat the advertisers’ countermeasures, the bots grew incredibly sophisticated – watching videos, filling in forms, and otherwise impersonating legitimate traffic – and so did the countermeasures.

This created a full-blown ecosystem of ad-tech that aggressively monitored users and aggressively shoved ads into their face (as Cegłowski notes, it was considered fraud when a bot tricked an advertiser into thinking an ad had been seen, but it’s totally legit for an advertiser to trick you into seeing an ad), and fraudbots that figured out how to get past the countermeasures.

Meanwhile, all this surveillance was changing the way ads were delivered. If you have a ton of data on readers and their activities across the Web, why not use that to target and re-target ads that follow them.

These databases have not yet been publicly breached, but they will rupture, because all databases rupture. The tracking data held by ad-tech companies is vaster and potentially more damaging than the data breached by Ashleymadison, the Office of Personnel Management, and other high-profile dumps.

Some people try to draw a distinction between government surveillance and corporate surveillance, but it’s a distinction without a difference. The NSA and other spy agencies use advertising tracking cookies as a cheap and easy way of tracking individual users across multiple devices, locations and accounts.

That means that regulators who are supposed to be overseeing ad-tech companies are working for governments who depend on mass-scale ad-tech surveillance to make government spying cost-effective.

Cegłowski finishes his talk with a set of six proposals aimed at regulators, tech companies, publishers and users. I don’t necessarily agree with all of them, but they’re provocative and plausible, and let us know that all hope is not lost.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden uses an exceptionally silly Guardian op-ed about New York City as a “dangerous, intoxicating fantasy of freedom from nature” to extol big cities’ environmental virtues: places where no one need own a car; where energy and resource reclamation and recirculation are common; where, in short, we all need to be.

In fact, logically, unless your “save the planet” dreams include the deaths of billions of people (which might well happen), the last thing we need to do is reject “the metropolis” in favor of “rustic aspirations.” What purveyors of the Jonathan Jones variety of handwringing pastoralism don’t get, and are very invested in not getting, is that the big, crowded, dirty, dense metropolis, the kind where people can actually live happily without owning a car, is in fact hugely better for the planet than the way most First Worlders live.

The average Vermonter burns 540 gallons of gasoline per year, and the average Manhattanite burns just 90.

8% of Americans don’t own a car. In Manhattan, it’s about 77%.

I’m sure that in his dim, sentimental “trees good, skyscrapers bad” way, Jonathan Jones means well. But if our children and our children’s children really do wind up in a world of apocalyptic climate change, “incompatible with human civilization”, then cliche-ridden, thought-free nonsense like what Jonathan Jones is selling will be a part—a small part, admittedly, but a part—of what gets us there.

Syrian war spurs first withdrawal from doomsday Arctic seed vault

Well, this is not only a fascinating piece of infrastructure, but also a scifi trope merging into real life.

Syria’s civil war has prompted the first withdrawal of seeds from a “doomsday” vault built in an Arctic mountainside to safeguard global food supplies, officials said on Monday.

The seeds, including samples of wheat, barley and grasses suited to dry regions, have been requested by researchers elsewhere in the Middle East to replace seeds in a gene bank near the Syrian city of Aleppo that has been damaged by the war.

If you’ve wondered why it matters that the Internet of Things is being born with the inkjet printer business model, here’s why.

Your Epson professional printer will refuse to print more pages when it senses that your ink-levels have dropped below 1%. However, when Bellevue Fine Art sliced open those allegedly empty cartridges (which retail for $1465 as a set) they discovered that as much as twenty percent of the ink remained.

Back in 2002, the Lexmark, a division of IBM sued a company that was refilling its toner cartridges. Lexmark had used DRM to detect whether the cartridge had been refilled, and the competitor, Static Controls, figured out how to bypass this. Since section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes bypassing “an effective means of access control” for copyrighted works, and since the DRM itself was composed of copyrighted software, Lexmark argued that SCC was breaking the law. Section 1201 carries both civil and criminal liability, with first offenses punishable as felonies by up to five years in prison and $500,000 in fines.

The Federal Circuit thought this was bullshit. The judge said that the DMCA existed to prevent piracy, not competition, and since the only copyrighted work the DRM was protecting was itself, there was no there there, and Lexmark lost.

That was in 2004. 11 years later, something funny has happened to toner cartridges: they’ve gotten a lot smarter. Off-the-shelf controllers for disposable consumables like cartridges (and smart lightbulbs, and a thousand other IoT gewgaws) have real, no-fooling copyrighted works – sometimes whole operating systems.

The companies that have come to rely on DMCA 1201 include John Deere (its tractors’ wheel-sensors collect centimeter-accurate soil-density maps that it keeps secret from farmers and monetizes by using to predict regional crop yields ahead of the market); GM (who use DRM on engine diagnostic data to lock out third party mechanics who might buy parts from its competition), as well as companies that make voting machines, insulin pumps, implanted defibrillators and pacemakers, mobile devices, and many, many others.

It’s the whole IoT. The computers that control the buildings and cars and airplanes we entrust our bodies to. The medical implants and prostheses we attach to (or put inside) our bodies.

The Epson case is not an aberration. It’s not a coincidence that a company that can put its competitors in jail “accidentally” used shitty sensors that add a 20% premium to its $1465 consumables. If you create a law in which the government offers to spend an unlimited number of tax-dollars defending abusive business models, you should expect abusive business models. To do otherwise isn’t just naive, it’s criminal.