cuttings
When bloggers attack: The Silver Ring Thing
There’s been a lot of stramash over the English schoolgirl’s Silver Ring Thing lawsuit in the press. She says it’s freedom of expression, her school says it’s a breach of their uniform policy… but there’s more to this story than meets the eye. Much more.
Brilliant blogging from the Ministry of Truth [via Mr Eugenides].
That britblog piece is online…
As promised, .net’s put my best British blogs feature online. You’ll find it here.
What if… the oil runs out?
Originally published in PC Plus magazine
We live in a world where technology delivers a multitude of little miracles. From the ubiquitous Blackberry to the sat-nav systems in our cars, we’re living in an always-on world of instant global communication, on-demand data and computing power that would have been undreamt of a few decades ago. Our economy is overwhelmingly electronic, from the zeroes and ones of electronic banking to the ecommerce sites killing big-name retailers, and in an increasingly cashless society we’ve replaced notes and coins with chip and PIN. The problem with these little miracles is that they all require power - and it’s running out.
In October, UK businesses were warned that they might need to close during the winter due to the double whammy of fuel shortages and rocketing energy prices. The predicted cold snap didn’t appear (or at least, it hasn’t so far) and an energy crisis was averted, but we’re not out of the woods yet. In early February we were stunned by a 22% increase in the cost of gas; by the end of the month, an explosion at the UK’s main gas storage field left the entire country with just two days’ worth of gas - one-seventh of the usual capacity, and one twenty-sixth of the European average.
The gas problems will go away, in the short term at least. However, when you look at the bigger picture the UK is in a very vulnerable position. Less than four percent of our electricity supply comes from renewable sources; if something were to restrict our fuel supplies, we’d be in trouble. According to think-tank the Foreign Policy Centre, if extremists controlled the world’s oil supplies and increased the price to $161 per barrel, we’d suffer “devastating economic problems” and energy rationing. The FPC even suggests a return to the days of the Blitz, but instead of air raid wardens we’d have “energy wardens”. The group suggests that “the mentality at community and householder level must be similar to that of the war years, or Britain will have no energy future.”
The FPC’s doomsday scenario assumes that any fuel shortage will be artificial rather than natural. However, many adherents of the Peak Oil theory believe that not only will our finite fuel resources run out, but that the process is already well underway.
Peak Oil was first proposed in 1956 by geophysicist Marion King Hubbert, who predicted that US oil production would peak by 1970 and that global production would peak in 2000. He was partly right: US production peaked in 1971, but global production continued to rise as 2000 came and went. Then again, Hubbert couldn’t have predicted the mid-70s oil crisis, which reduced demand and, perhaps, postponed the global peak.
As the Washington Post reported in June 2004, conventional oil production is indeed in decline: “For every 10 barrels of conventional oil consumed, only four new barrels are discovered. Without the unconventional oil from tar sands, liquefied natural gas and other deposits, world production would have peaked several years ago.” According to the Worldwatch Institute, in figures quoted by oil firm Chevron, oil production is declining in 33 of the 48 largest oil producing countries - but as developing nations grow more industrialised and our own insatiable desire for energy shows no signs of abating, demand for oil continues to rise. The most pessimistic estimates suggest that if demand stays relatively static, global oil production will peak in 2015.
The oil will not run out overnight - we’ve got a few decades after the peak - but as demand begins to significantly outstrip supply, energy prices will soar. In the absence of alternatives - how many of us drive hybrid cars or have energy-neutral homes? - and with promising technologies such as fuel cells still stuck in the labs, things could get nasty. Increased transport costs and energy costs will have a huge impact: they’ll increase firms’ costs and push up the prices of all products and services while taking an ever-larger chunk of our incomes; blackouts will become the exception rather than the norm, and we may have to endure 70s-style three day weeks. And that’s the best-case scenario. Pessimists predict that oil-producing nations will hold the rest of the planet to ransom, and that the oil-dependent nations will use force to secure fuel supplies.
So what are we doing about it? Not as much as we should, it seems. The government wants 10% of our energy to come from renewable sources by 2010 and 20% by 2020, but it seems that we won’t hit those targets in time - and if Peak Oil theorists are correct, by 2020 fuel supplies will already be in steep and irreversible decline. If new technology is going to save us from our dependence on oil, it really needs to get a move on.
What if… Luddism returns?
Originally published in PC Plus
In 1812 thousands of textile workers attacked a mill near Manchester, determined to destroy the power looms they believed threatened their jobs. Ten of them were shot dead, and in the aftermath a further four men were arrested, convicted and executed.
The men were Luddites, and if they thought power looms were scary, today’s technology would give them heart attacks. Technology is transforming everything: the way we work, the way we live, and even the genes inside us - and one day, it could become our master rather than our servant. As technology’s reach extends ever onwards, will Luddism live again?
Like King Canute, the Luddites get a raw deal from history: Canute was demonstrating his fallibility, not his power, and the Luddites weren’t a bunch of thugs protesting against technology for technology’s sake. They knew that the new mill machines – coupled with the abolition of price controls and the arrival of a free market – would destroy their jobs. They were right, and the issues they faced are back with a vengeance today.
The Luddites’ big problem was that the rest of the world couldn’t care less about their jobs. Sure, it was a tragedy if you were a skilled knitter whose job was replaced by a machine, but if you weren’t then new technology and the abolition of price controls meant cheaper fabric. The same thing happened in the 20th century as technology moved on to hot-metal printers, to car assemblers and to factory workers. Again, bad news for the people in those industries, but hey! Cheaper, colour newspapers! Better-built cars! Cheaper goods!
In the latter part of the 20th century, the combination of new technology and a free market was good news for lots of people. Areas such as Scotland’s Silicon Glen created new jobs in the form of circuit board population, computer case moulding and mobile phone assembly. Cheap imports slashed the cost of consumer goods as Asian firms perfected high-volume, high quality, low-cost manufacturing. Clothing had never been cheaper. Yes, the old jobs were gone, but we had new ones: high-tech firms! Retail! Call centres!
By the late 1990s, though, the cracks were beginning to show. The same electronics firms that had brought new hope to depressed areas started upping sticks, moving to other countries that offered the same level of technology but much lower labour costs (and in many cases, fewer environmental or workers’ protection regulations). In the first few years of the 21st Century such firms were leaving the UK en masse – and technology had turned its attention to the service sector.
While we were setting up call centres and teaching former shipbuilders to use PCs, technology’s march continued. We didn’t notice until we got our first telesales call from Mumbai, when we lost a lucrative contract to a cheaper, smarter, overseas firm, or when the tech support staff were made redundant and first-line support transferred to Bangalore. Suddenly everyone’s job was at risk, and Luddism was back.
Of course, nobody calls it Luddism – but when record companies demand government action against file sharers and new laws to criminalise copying; when IT workers campaign against outsourcing; when unions and tabloids protest as insurance firms shift their call centres to Bangalore; when retailers are wiped out by low-margin online shops; when book publishers attempt to stop Google from digitising everything ever printed… they’re all fighting against the relentless march of the terrible twins, technology and a global free market. In many cases it’s selective Luddism - anti-capitalist protesters make good use of cheaply made, imported mobile phones and computers to co-ordinate their protests, and video cameras to record them; the very firms that want protection from the relentless march of technology are quick to implement IT within their own businesses - but it’s still Luddism.
Stereotypical Luddism - a knee-jerk reaction to technology - is back too. You see it in the fringes of the environmental movement, in the reaction against GM crops, in campaigns against mobile phone masts, in the proliferation of quack homeopathic “cures” and in conversations with people who buy organic because “chemicals are bad”. While many - and probably most - of the people concerned about the environment, genetic research and so on have sound concerns, their concerns act as a magnet for the anti-technology crowd whose motto might as well be “if I don’t understand it, it’s evil.”
So should we expect angry mobs roaming the streets, destroying Dells and assaulting iPod owners? Probably not. However, whenever a speed or CCTV camera is destroyed, when GM crops are vandalised or anti-capitalist protests turn violent, it’s clear that neo-luddism has a distinctly ugly side. As technology’s influence on the way we live grows ever stronger, it’s a side we may see much more of.
Could PC viruses infect humans?
Originally published in PC Plus, November 2005
Of all the threats facing humans, viruses are the most dangerous. The prospect of Avian Flu jumping species is truly terrifying, but if that doesn’t get us there’s always MRSA and other “superbugs”. Worse still, developments in computer science could lead to new forms of virus infection: not from biological viruses, but from computer viruses.
Today’s computer viruses can only affect us by damaging our data, but as bytes and biology come together the prospect of hybrid machines - computers that integrate with the human body - grows nearer. The potential is incredible, but so is the potential for disaster.
Transhumanists believe that in the not-too distant future we’ll upload our consciousnesses to giant neural networks and live forever; cynics believe that the Transhumanists will last about ten minutes before a passing virus powers them off permanently. It’ll be several decades before we’ll discover which group’s right, but while the risk of computer viruses infecting humans is currently zero, new frontiers in computer science are creating the potential for all kinds of unpleasantness.
PC viruses haven’t been able to cross over to humans for one very simple reason: we’re not made of the same stuff as our silicon servants. However, as the lines between man and machine blur, the potential for viruses to do real damage to humans increases.
There are two key vectors for virus infection: Human Computer Interfaces and bio-molecular computers. The field of interfaces is a wide one, ranging from replacement parts (hearts, muscles, eyes and so on) to new ways of communicating; some pundits believe that within our lifetimes, we’ll go online by sticking a jack plug into the back of our necks.
Sticking computers into people only becomes a problem once those computers are networked, especially if they’re networked to the Internet. If you can locate something you can attack it, and while the prospect of implants causing Dr Strangelove-style tics is an amusing one, if the implanted device is there for live-saving reasons then any infection or hacking attempt could be catastrophic. In the case of the much-mooted jack plug in the back of your neck, a virus could drive you daft.
The risk of hacked implants is already here: Reading professor Kevin Warwick concealed the IP address of his arm implant during recent experiments where he controlled a robot arm on the other side of the world. The professor was concerned that if people could find the IP address of his implant, they’d try to hack it. Warwick is a big fan of networking humans and computers together, but warns: “We’re looking at software viruses and biological viruses becoming one and the same. The security problems (will) be much, much greater.”
He might be right, particularly as scientists turn to organic rather than silicon computers - machines that one day could live inside our bodies. It sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but it’s based on science fact: after all, computers are simply arrays of switches, and as the human brain shows, you can end up with very complex computational devices made from little more than meat.
In 2003, Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science unveiled a biological computing device. It didn’t look like a PC - it was a litre of salt solution - but it contained three trillion DNA computers, which taken together could perform 66 billion operations per second. As Udi Shapiro of Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science told CNN, “the ultimate application would be a ‘doctor in a cell,’ where a bio-molecular computer operates in the body.”
Bio-molecular computers are specifically designed to interface with living material - our cells, our nerve endings and so on - and their potential is stunning; as Shapiro explained to CNN, such machines could identify problems in our bodies and synthesise the appropriate drugs to solve the problem. If on the other hand they became compromised, we’d be in deep trouble.
The good news is that such machines are decades away, and even when they do arrive it’ll take more than a socially awkward teenager with a virus writing kit to infect them. Compromising the micro-machines would take a massive amount of scientific expertise, equipment and money, which would be beyond the reach of anyone bar governments and well-funded terrorist groups. It’s ironic: for years, we’ve spoken of terrorists as “the enemy within”; thanks to computing science, that’s exactly what they may become.
So are we safe in the short term? Possibly not. While viruses that can infect humans are a long way off, viruses that can *affect* humans aren’t hard to imagine - or to engineer. As we automate everything from medicine to motorways the potential damage from a rogue virus increases. For example, the government’s very interested in a satellite system that could automatically adjust the speed of every car on the road. Imagine the chaos - and carnage - if someone got a virus into that.