google

The ethics of contact tracing

Peter Cripps architecture, comment , , ,

After a much publicised “U-turn” the UK government has decided to change the architecture of its coronavirus contact tracing system and to embrace the one based on the interfaces being provided by Apple and Google. The inevitable cries of a government that does not know what it is doing, we told you it wouldn’t work and this means we have wasted valuable time in building a system that would help protect UK citizens have ensued. At times like these it’s often difficult to get to the facts and understand where the problems actually lie. Let’s try and unearth some facts and understand the options for the design of a contact tracing app.

Any good approach to designing a system such as contact tracing should, you would hope, start with the requirements. I have no government inside knowledge and it’s not immediately apparent from online searches what the UK governments exact and actual requirements were. However as this article highlights you would expect that a contact tracing system would need to “involve apps, reporting channels, proximity-based communication technology and monitoring through personal items such as ID badges, phones and computers.” You might also expect it to involve cooperation with local health service departments. Whether or not there is also a requirement to collate data in some centralised repository so that epidemiologists, without knowing the nature of the contact, can build a model of contacts to see if they are serious spreaders or those who have tested positive yet are asymptomatic, at least for the UK, is not clear. Whilst it would seem perfectly reasonable to want the system to do that, this is a different use case to the one of contact tracing. One might assume that because the UK government was proposing a centralised database for tracking data this latter use case was also to be handled by the system.

Whilst different countries are going to have different requirements for contact tracing one would hope that for any democratically run country a minimum set of requirements (i.e. privacy, anonymity, transparency and verifiability, no central repository and minimal data collection) would be implemented.

The approach to contact tracing developed by Google and Apple (the two largest providers of mobile phone operating systems) was published in April of this year with the detail of the design being made available in four technical papers. Included as part of this document set were some frequently asked questions where the details of how the system would work were explained using the eponymous Alice and Bob notation. Here is a summary.

  1. Alice and Bob don’t know each other but happen to have a lengthy conversation sitting a few feet apart on a park bench. They both have a contact tracing app installed on their phones which exchange random Bluetooth identifiers with each other. These identifiers change frequently.
  2. Alice continues her day unaware that Bob had recently contracted Covid-19.
  3. Bob feels ill and gets tested for Covid-19. His test results are positive and he enters his result into his phone. With Bob’s consent his phone uploads the last 14 days of keys stored on his phone to a server.
  4. Alice’s phone periodically downloads the Bluetooth beacon keys of everyone who has tested positive for Covid-19 in her immediate vicinity. A match is found with Bob’s randomly generated Bluetooth identifier.
  5. Alice sees a notification on her phone warning her she has recently come into contact with someone who has tested positive with Covid-19. What Alice needs to do next is decided by her public health authority and will be provided in their version of the contact tracing app.

There are a couple of things worth noting about this use case:

  1. Alice and Bob both have to make an explicit choice to turn on the contact tracing app.
  2. Neither Alice or Bob’s names are ever revealed, either between themselves or to the app provider or health authority.
  3. No location data is collected. The system only knows that two identifiers have previously been within range of each other.
  4. Google and Apple say that the Bluetooth identifiers change every 10-20 minutes, to help prevent tracking and that they will disable the exposure notification system on a regional basis when it is no longer needed.
  5. Health authorities of any other third parties do not receive any data from the app.

Another point to note is that initially this solution has been released via application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow customised contact tracing apps from public health authorities to work across Android and iOS devices. Maintaining user privacy seems to have been a key non-functional requirement of the design. The apps are made available from the public health authorities via the respective Apple and Google app stores. A second phase has also been announced whereby the capability will be embedded at the operating system level meaning no app has to be installed but users still have to opt into using the capability. If a user is notified she has been in contact with someone with Covid-19 and has not already downloaded an official public health authority app they will be prompted to do so and advised on next steps. Only public health authorities will have access to this technology and their apps must meet specific criteria around privacy, security, and data control as mandated by Apple and Google.

So why would Google and Apple choose to implement its contact tracing app in this way which would seem to be putting privacy ahead of efficacy? More importantly why should Google and Apple get to dictate how countries should do contact tracing?

Clearly one major driver from both companies is that of security and privacy. Post-Snowden we know just how easy it has been for government security agencies (i.e. the US National Security Agency and UK’s Government Communications Headquarters) to get access to supposedly private data. Trust in central government is at an all time low and it is hardly surprising that the corporate world is stepping in to announce that they were the good guys all along and you can trust us with your data.

Another legitimate reason is also that during the coronavirus pandemic we have all had our ability to travel even locally, never mind nationally or globally, severely restricted. Implementing an approach that is supported at the operating system level means that it should be easier to make the app compatible with other countries’ counterparts, which are based on the same system therefore making it safer for people to begin travelling internationally again.

The real problem, at least as far as the UK has been concerned, is that the government has been woefully slow in implementing a rigorous and scaleable contact tracing system. It seems as though they may have been looking at an app-based approach to be the silver bullet that would solve all of their problems – no matter how poorly identified these are. Realistically that was never going to happen, even if the system had worked perfectly. The UK is not China and could never impose an app based contact tracing system on its populace, could it? Lessons from Singapore, where contact tracing has been in place for some time, are that the apps do not perform as required and other more intrusive measures are needed to make them effective.

There will now be the usual blame game between government, the press, and industry, no doubt resulting in the inevitable government enquiry into what went wrong. This will report back after several months, if not years, of deliberation. Blame will be officially apportioned, maybe a few junior minister heads will roll, if they have not already moved on, but meanwhile the trust that people have in their leaders will be chipped away a little more.

More seriously however, will we have ended up, by default, putting more trust into the powerful corporations of Silicon Valley some of whom not only have greater valuations than many countries GDP but are also allegedly practising anti-competitive behaviour?

Update: 21st June 2020

Updated to include link to Apple’s anti-trust case.

Trust Google?

Peter Cripps comment , , , ,
Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash

Google has just released data on people’s movements, gathered from millions of mobile devices that use its software (e.g. Android, Google Maps etc) leading up to and during the COVID-19 lockdown in various countries. The data has been analysed here to show graphically how people spent their time between six location categories: homes; workplaces; parks; public transport stations; grocery shops and pharmacies; and retail and recreational locations.

The data shows how quickly people reacted to the instructions to lockdown. Here in the UK for example we see people reacted late but then strongly, with a rise of about 20-25% staying at home. This delay reflects the fact that lockdown began later, on March 23, in the UK though some people were already staying home before lockdown began.

What we see in the data provided by Google is likely to be only the start and, I suspect, a preview of how we may soon have to live. In the book Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari the chapter The Great Decoupling discusses how bioscience and computer science are conspiring to learn more about us than we know about ourselves and in the process destroy the “great liberal project” where we think that we have free-will and are able to make our own decisions about what we eat, who we marry and vote for in elections as well as what career path we choose etc, etc.

Harari asks what will happen when Google et al know more about us than we, or anyone else does? Facebook, for example, already purports to know more about us than our spouse by analysing as few as 300 of our ‘likes’. What if those machines who are watching over us (hopefully with “loving grace” but who knows) can offer us ‘advice’ on who we should vote for based on our previous four years comments and ‘likes’ on Facebook or recommend we should go and see a psychiatrist because of the somewhat erratic comments we have been making in emails to our friends or on Twitter?

The Google we see today, providing us with relatively benign data for us to analyse ourselves, is currently at the level of what Harari says is an ‘oracle’. It has the data and, with the right interpretation, we can use that data to provide us with information to make decisions. Exactly where we are now with coronavirus and this latest dataset.

The next stage is that of Google becoming an ‘agent’. You give Google an aim and it works out the best way to achieve that aim. Say, I want to lose two stone by next summer so I have the perfect beach ready body. Google knows all about my biometric data (they just bought Fitbit remember) as well as your predisposition for buying crisps and watching too much Netflix and comes up with a plan that will allow you to lose that weight provided you follow it.

Finally Google becomes ’sovereign’ and starts making those decisions for you. So maybe it checks your supermarket account and recommends removing those crisps from your shopping list and then, if you continue to ignore its advice it instructs your insurance company who bumps up your health insurance if you don’t.

At this point we ask who is in control. Google, Facebook etc own all that data but that data can be influenced (or hacked) to nudge us to do things we don’t realise. We already know how Cambridge Analytica used Facebook to influence the voting behaviour (we’re looking at you Mr Cummings) in a few swing areas (for Brexit and the last US election). We have no idea how much of that was also being influenced by Russia.

I think humanity is rapidly approaching the point when we really need to be making some hard decisions about how much of our data, and the analysis of that data, we should allow Google, Facebook and Twitter to hold. Should we be starting to think the unthinkable and calling a halt to this ever growing mountain of data each of us willingly gives away for free? But, how do we do that when most of it is being kept and analysed by private companies or worse, by China and Russia?

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace?

Peter Cripps comment , , , , , , , , ,

 

This-HAL-9000-Inspired-AI-Simulation-Kept-Its-Virtual-Astronauts-Alive
The Watching “Eye” of the HAL 9000 Computer from 2001 – A Space Odyssey

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

The last verse of Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, has a particular resonance during these dark and uncertain times caused by the COVID-19 pandemic[1].

The poem, which was also the name of a BBC documentary series by Adam Curtis[2], speaks of a time when we can return to nature and that mammals and computers will live together in “mutually programming harmony” with machines taking care of all our needs.

Things haven’t quite turned out like that have they?

In some kind of warped way maybe our machines are taking care of our needs but are they things we really need taken care of? If by “meeting our needs” we mean machines whose algorithms predict and dictate our shopping choices (Amazon), influence our voting behaviour (Facebook), satisfy our sexual preferences (Tinder, Grindr) or find us cheap rides and accommodation (Uber and Airbnb) then yes, maybe we have reached a mutually programmed harmony. I’m not sure that is exactly what Brautigan had in mind though.

If we think the “machines of loving grace” part of the poem have not quite happened in the way Brautigan predicted it could be that the “all watched over” part is about to become only too true however.

China, where the current coronavirus variant, SARS-CoV-2 originated, was already building the worlds largest social credit system whereby all citizens are given points from which the authorities make deductions for bad behaviour like traffic violations, and add points for good behaviour such as donating to charity. The full system is being rolled out during this decade at which point all citizens will be forced into using the system and everything from credit worthiness to political allegiance will be ‘measured’, not just by the system but by your peers as well. If trust is broken in one place restrictions will be imposed elsewhere meaning the untrustworthy will have reduced access to everything from jobs, to foreign travel, to bank loans and the internet.

Now, as a way of tracking peoples freedom of movement as its citizens come out of the coronavirus lockdown, the government has, through the ubiquitous Alipay and WeChat platforms, developed a “health code” service. This assigns users a colour-coded status based on their health and travel history plus a QR code that can be scanned by authorities. If you have a green code you are allowed to travel relatively freely. A yellow code indicates that the holder should be in home isolation, and a red code says the user is a confirmed COVID-19 patient and should be in quarantine. In China, which is not exactly known for its liberal attitude toward privacy, this may be acceptable as the price to pay for relative freedom of movement however as talk of such apps being rolled out in western liberal democracies start to become news, its citizens may not be quite as accepting of such uses of private data.

A similar system in South Korea that sends emergency virus text alerts has already revealed some embarrassing revelations about infected people’s private lives. These include a text saying “A woman in her 60s has just tested positive. Click on the link for the places she visited before she was hospitalised.” For many people the texts, whilst intended to be helpful, are creating a climate of concern by revealing a little too much personal information including revelations about extra-marital affairs.

At a country level there are already plentiful supplies of open data that allow apps such as this one to track COVID-19 statistics by country. The fact that we have systems and organisations that publish such data is to be applauded and should be seen as a good thing in providing us all (if we can be bothered to look) with plentiful amounts of data to help us come to our own conclusions and combat the unfortunately equally plentiful supply of fake news that abounds on social media about COVID-19. However once such data starts to get more personal that becomes a different matter.

Dominic Cummings, the Prime Ministers chief advisor, hosted a meeting at Downing Street on 11 March with technology company leaders to see how they could help develop an app to tackle COVID-19 and on Easter Sunday the UK government confirmed plans for an app that will warn users if they have recently been in close proximity to someone suspected to be infected with the coronavirus. Meanwhile Apple and Google have announced a system for tracking the spread of the new coronavirus, allowing users to share data through Bluetooth technology.

Four questions immediately arise from this situation?

  1. Should we trust corporations (especially Apple and Google) to be handling location data identifying where we have travelled and who we might have been close to?
  2. Can we trust the government to handle this data sensitively and with due regard to our privacy?
  3. What happens if not enough people use these apps?
  4. Once the pandemic is over can we trust the government and corporations to disable these functions from our phones and our lives?

Let’s take these one at a time.

First, are Google and Apple to be trusted with our private data? Historically neither exactly have a clean slate when it comes to protecting private data. In 2014 third-party software was used to steal intimate photos of celebrities from Apple’s cloud service iCloud, forcing the company to expand it’s two-step authentication service. More recently Hacker News revealed that Apple suffered a possible privacy breach in 2018 due to a bug in its platform that might have exposed iCloud data to other users.

Google’s failed social networking site Google+, which had already suffered a massive data breach in 2018 that exposed the private data of more than 500,000 Google+ users to third-party developers, was shut down earlier than planned in April 2019 following the discovery by Google engineers of another critical security vulnerability.

Despite the breaches of security suffered by these companies it is probably true to say that they have a deeper understanding of their platforms than most companies and government agencies. Putting something temporary in place during this potentially existential threat to society is probably not a bad thing however what happens once the pandemic is over then becomes critical.

Can we trust governments to behave properly with how they handle this data? Again governments do not have a good track records here. Edward Snowden, in his memoir  Permanent Record, reveals the extent of the mass surveillance that was taking place on US citizens by the National Security Agency from 2010 and beyond. If even democratically elected governments do this what chance for the dictatorial regimes of Russia and China? Even during these unprecedented times we should not be too hasty to give away the freedoms that we enjoy today without knowing the extent to which our data could be compromised. As John Naughton explains here there are ways of doing non-intrusive tracking of COVID-19 but to do so our smartphones have to be a bit, well, smarter. This is also a good reason why here in the UK, parliament should be recalled, even in virtual form, to ensure decisions being made in this area are challenged and subject to proper scrutiny.

Next, what happens if not enough people use the apps, either because they don’t trust the government or because not everyone has smartphones or they simply can’t be bothered to install the app and make sure it is active? It is estimated that in order for this to work there must be at least a 60% take up of the app. Can governments somehow enforce its usage and penalise users in someway if they don’t? Maybe they rule that only those who have smartphones with this app installed and active are the ones who will be allowed freedom of movement both to work, socialise and meet with other family members. Whilst this may encourage some to install the app it would alsonput a huge burden on police, the authorities and maybe even your employer as well as shops, bars and restaurants to ensure people moving around or entering their buildings have apps installed.  Also, what about people who don’t have smartphones? Smartphone ownership here in the UK  varies massively by age. In 2019, 96% of 25-34 year olds owned smartphones whereas as only 55% of 55-64 year olds owned these devices and only 16% (figures only available for 2015) of people over 65 owned them. How would they be catered for?

Finally, what happens when the pandemic is over and we return to relative normality? Will these emergency measures be rolled back or will the surveillance state have irrevocably crept one step closer? Recent history (think 9/11) does not provide much comfort here. As Edward Snowden says about the US:

“The two decades since 9/11 have been a litany of American destruction by way of American self-destruction, with the promulgation of secret policies, secret laws, secret courts, and secret wars, whose traumatising impact – whose very existence – the US government has repeatedly classified, denied, disclaimed, and distorted.”

Will our governments not claim there will always be a zoonotic-virus threat and that the war against such viruses, just like the “war on terror” will therefore be never ending and that we must never drop our guard (for which read, we must keep everyone under constant surveillance)?

An open letter published by a group of “responsible technologists” calls upon the NHSX leadership and the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care to ensure new technologies used in the suppression of Coronavirus follow ethical best practice and that if corners are cut, the public’s trust in the NHS will be undermined. The writer Yuval Noah Harari, who is quoted in the open letter by the data campaigners, warns that such measures have a nasty habit of becoming permanent. But he also says this: “When people are given a choice between privacy and health, they will usually choose health.”

Once the surveillance genie has been let out of its bottle it will be very difficult to squish it back in again allowing us to return to times of relative freedom. If we are not careful those machines which are watching over us may not be ones of loving grace but rather ones of mass surveillance and constant monitoring of our movements that make us all a little less free and a little less human.

  1. COVID-19 is the disease caused by the 2019 novel coronavirus or to give it its World Health Organisation designated name severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 or SARS-CoV-2.
  2. No longer available on the BBC iPlayer but can be found here.

The story so far…

Peter Cripps comment , , , , , , , ,

 

Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash
Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash

It’s hard to believe that this year is the 30th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee’s great invention, the World-Wide Web, and that much of the technology that enabled his creation is still less than 60 years old. Here’s a brief history of the Internet and the Web, and how we got to where we are today, in ten significant events.

 

#1: 1963 – Ted Nelson begins developing a model for creating and using linked content he calls hypertext and hypermedia. Hypertext is born.

#2: 1969 – The first message is sent over the ARPANET from computer science Professor Leonard Kleinrock’s laboratory at University of California, Los Angeles to the second network node at Stanford Research Institute. The Internet is born.

#3: 1969 – Charles Goldfarb, leading a small team at IBM, developed the first markup language, called Generalized Markup Language, or GML. Markup languages are born.

#4: 1989 – Tim Berners-Lee whilst working at CERN publishes his paper, Information Management: A Proposal. The World Wide Web (WWW) is born.

#5: 1993 – Mosaic, a graphical browser aiming to bring multimedia content to non-technical users (images and text on the same page) is invented by Marc Andreessen. The web browser is born.

#6: 1995 – Jeff Bezos launches Amazon “earth’s biggest bookstore” from a garage in Seattle. E-commerce is born.

#7: 1998 – The Google company is officially launched by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to market Google Search. Web search is born.

#8: 2003 – Facebook (then called FaceMash but changed to The Facebook a year later) is founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommate and fellow Harvard University student Eduardo Saverin. Social media is born.

#9: 2007 – Steve Jobs launches the iPhone at MacWorld Expo in San Francisco. Mobile computing is born.

#10: 2018 – Tim Berners-Lee instigates act II of the web when he announces a new initiative called Solid, to reclaim the Web from corporations and return it to its democratic roots. The web is reborn?

I know there have been countless events that have enabled the development of our modern Information Age and you will no doubt think others should be included in preference to some of my suggestions. Also, I suspect that many people will not have heard of my last choice (unless you are a fairly hardcore computer type). The reason I have added this one is because I think/hope it will start to address what is becoming one of the existential threats of our age, namely how we survive in a world awash with data (our data) that is being mined and used without us knowing, much less understanding, the impact of such usage. Rather than living in an open society in which ideas and data are freely exchanged and used to everyones benefit we instead find ourselves in an age of surveillance capitalism which, according to this source, is defined as being:

…the manifestation of George Orwell’s prophesied Memory Hole combined with the constant surveillance, storage and analysis of our thoughts and actions, with such minute precision, and artificial intelligence algorithmic analysis, that our future thoughts and actions can be predicted, and manipulated, for the concentration of power and wealth of the very few.

In her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff provides a sweeping (and worrying) overview and history of the techniques that the large tech companies are using to spy on us in ways that even George Orwell would have found alarming. Not least because we have voluntarily given up all of this data about ourselves in exchange for what are sometimes the flimsiest of benefits. As Zuboff says:

Thanks to surveillance capitalism the resources for effective life that we seek in the digital realm now come encumbered with a new breed of menace. Under this new regime, the precise moment at which our needs are met is also the precise moment at which our lives are plundered for behavioural data, and all for the sake others gain.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World-Wide Web then gave it away so that all might benefit. Sadly some have benefited more than others, not just financially but also by knowing more about us than most of us would ever want or wish. I hope for all our sakes the work that Berners-Lee and his small group of supporters is doing make enough progress to reverse the worst excesses of surveillance capitalism before it is too late.

Software is Eating the World and Some Tech Companies are Eating Us

Peter Cripps comment , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Today (12th March, 2018) is the World Wide Web’s 29th birthday.  Sir Tim Berners-Lee (the “inventor of the world-wide web”), in an interview with the Financial Times and in this Web Foundation post has used this anniversary to raise awareness of how the web behemoths Facebook, Google and Twitter are “promoting misinformation and ‘questionable’ political advertising while exploiting people’s personal data”.  Whilst I admire hugely Tim Berners-Lee’s universe-denting invention it has to be said he himself is not entirely without fault in the way he bequeathed us with his invention.  In his defence, hindsight is a wonderful thing of course, no one could have possibly predicted at the time just how the web would take off and transform our lives both for better and for worse.

If, as Marc Andreessen famously said in 2011, software is eating the world then many of those powerful tech companies are consuming us (or at least our data and I’m increasingly becoming unsure there is any difference between us and the data we choose to represent ourselves by.

Here are five recent examples of some of the negative ways software is eating up our world.

Over the past 40+ years the computer software industry has undergone some fairly major changes.  Individually these were significant (to those of us in the industry at least) but if we look at these changes with the benefit of hindsight we can see how they have combined to bring us to where we are today.  A world of cheap, ubiquitous computing that has unleashed seismic shocks of disruption which are overthrowing not just whole industries but our lives and the way our industrialised society functions.  Here are some highlights for the 40 years between 1976 and 2016.

waves-since-1976

And yet all of this is just the beginning.  This year we will be seeing technologies like serverless computing, blockchain, cognitive and quantum computing become more and more embedded in our lives in ways we are only just beginning to understand.  Doubtless the fallout from some of the issues I highlight above will continue to make themselves felt and no doubt new technologies currently bubbling under the radar will start to make themselves known.

I have written before about how I believe that we, as software architects, have a responsibility, not only to explain the benefits (and there are many) of what we do but also to highlight the potential negative impacts of software’s voracious appetite to eat up our world.

This is my 201st post on Software Architecture Zen (2016/17 were barren years in terms of updates).  This year I plan to spend more time examining some of the issues raised in this post and look at ways we can become more aware of them and hopefully not become so seduced by those sirenic entrepreneurs.

A Step Too Far?

Peter Cripps comment , , , , , ,

The trouble with technology, especially it seems computer technology, is that it keeps “improving”.  I’ve written before about the ethics of the job that we as software architects do and whether or not we should always accept what we do without asking questions, not least of which should be, is this a technology step too far that I am building or being asked to build?

Three articles have caught my eye this week which have made me ponder this question again.

The first is from the technology watcher and author Nicholas Carr who talks about the Glass Collective, an an investment syndicate made up of three companies: Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers whose collective aim is to provide seed funding to entrepreneurs in the Glass ecosystem to help jump start their ideas.For those not in the know about Glass it is, according to the Google blog, all about “getting technology out of the way” and has the aim of building technology that is “seamless, beautiful and empowering“. Glasses first manifestation is to be Internet-connected glasses that take photos, record video and offer hands-free Internet access right in front of a users’ eyes.

Clearly the type of augmented reality that Glass opens up could have huge educational benefits (think of walking around a museum or art gallery and getting information on what you are looking at piped right to you as you look at different works of art) as well as very serious privacy implications. For another view on this read the excellent blog post from my IBM colleague Rick Robinson on privacy in digital cities.

In his blog post Carr refers to a quote from Marshall McLuhan, made a half century ago and now seeming quite prescient:

Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit by taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.

The next thing to catch my eye (or actually several thousand things) was around the whole sorry tale of the Boston bombings. This post in particular from the Wall Street Journal discusses the role of Boston’s so called fusion center that “helps investigators scour for connections among potential suspects, by mining hundreds of law enforcement sources around the region, ranging from traffic violations, to jail records and criminal histories, along with public data like property records.”

Whilst I doubt anyone would question the validity of using data in this way to track down people that have performed atrocities such as we saw in Boston, it does highlight just how much data is now collected on us and about us, much of which we have no control over of broadcasting to the world.

Finally, on a much lighter note, we learn that the contraceptive maker Durex has released their “long distance, sexy time fundawear“. I’ll let you watch the first live trial video of this at your leisure (warning, not entirely work safe) but let’s just say here that it adds a whole new dimension to stroking the screen on your smartphone. I guess this one has no immediate privacy issues (providing the participants don’t wear their Google Glass at the same time as playing in their fundawear at least) it does raise some interesting questions about how much we will let technology impinge on the most intimate part of our lives.

So where does this latest foray of mine into digital privacy take us and what conclusions, if any, can we draw? Back in 2006 IBM Fellow and Chief Scientist Jeff Jonas posted a comment on his blog called Responsible Innovation: Designing for Human Rights in which he asks two questions: what if we are creating technologies that go in the face of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and what if systems are designed without the essential characteristics needed to support basic privacy and civil liberties principles?

Jeff argues that if technologies could play a role in any of the arrest, detention, exile, interference, attacks or deprivation mentioned in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights then they must support disclosure of the source upon which such invasions are predicated. He suggests that systems that could affect one’s privacy or civil liberties should have a number of design characteristics built in that allow for some level of auditability as well as ensuring accuracy of the data they hold. Such characteristics as, every data point is associated to its data source and every data point is associated to its author etc. Given this was written in 2006 when Facebook was only two years old and still largely confined to use in US universities this is a hugely prescient and thoughtful piece of insight (which is why Jeff is an IBM Fellow of course).

So, there’s an idea! New technologies, when they come along should, be examined to ensure they have built in safeguards that mean such rights as are granted to us all in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are not infringed or taken away from us. How would this be done and, more importantly of course, what bodies or organisations would we empower to ensure such safeguards were both effective and enforceable? No easy or straightforward answers here but certainly a topic for some discussion I believe.

Is the Raspberry Pi the New BBC Microcomputer?

Peter Cripps creativity, education , , , , , ,

There has been much discussion here in the UK over the last couple of years about the state of tech education and what should be done about it. The concern being that our schools are not doing enough to create the tech leaders and entrepreneurs of the future.

The current discussion kicked off  in January 2011 when Microsoft’s director of education, Steve Beswick, claimed that in UK schools there is much “untapped potential” in how teenagers use technology. Beswick said that a Microsoft survey had found that 71% of teenagers believed they learned more about information technology outside of school than in formal information and communication technology (ICT) lessons. An interesting observation given that one of the criticisms often leveled at these ICT classes is that they just teach kids how to use Microsoft Office.The discussion moved in August of 2011, this time at the Edinburgh International Television Festival where Google chairman Eric Schmidt said he thought education in Britain was holding back the country’s chances of success in the digital media economy. Schmidt said he was flabbergasted to learn that computer science was not taught as standard in UK schools, despite what he called the “fabulous initiative” in the 1980s when the BBC not only broadcast programmes for children about coding, but shipped over a million BBC Micro computers into schools and homes.

January 2012 saw even the schools minister, Michael Gove, say that the ICT curriculum was “a mess” and must be radically revamped to prepare pupils for the future (Gove suspended the ICT Curriculum in September 2012). All well and good but as some have commented “not everybody is going to need to learn to code, but everyone does need office skills”.

In May 2012 Schmidt was back in the UK again, this time at London’s Science Museum where he announced that Google would provide the funds to support Teach First – a charity which puts graduates on a six-week training programme before deploying them to schools where they teach classes over a two-year period.

So, what now? With the new ICT curriculum not due out until 2014 what are the kids who are about to start their GCSE’s to do? Does it matter they won’t be able to learn ICT at school? The Guardian’s John Naughton proposed a manifesto for teaching computer science in March 2012 as part of his papers digital literacy campaign.  As I’ve questioned before should it be the role of schools to teach the very specific programming skills being proposed; skills that might be out of date by the time the kids learning them enter the workforce? Clearly something needs to be done otherwise, as my colleague Dr Rick Robinson says, where will the next generation of technology millionaires come from? bbc micro

Whatever shape the new curriculum takes, one example (one that Eric Schmidt himself used) of a success story in the learning of IT skills is that of the now almost legendary BBC Microcomputer. A project started 30 years ago this year. For those too young to remember, or were not around in the UK at the time, the BBC Microcomputer got its name from project devised by the BBC to enhance the nation’s computer literacy. The BBC wanted a machine around which they could base a series called The Computer Programme, showing how computers could be used, not just for computer programming but also for graphics, sound and vision, artificial intelligence and controlling peripheral devices. To support the series the BBC drew up a spec for a computer that could be bought by people watching the programme to actually put into practice what they were watching. The machine was built by Acorn the spec of which you can read here.ba8dd-bbcmicroscreen

The BBC Micro was not only a great success in terms of the television programme, it also helped spur on a whole generation of programmers. On turning the computer on you were faced with the screen on the right. The computer would not do anything unless you fed it instructions using the BASIC programming language so you were pretty much forced to learn programming! I can vouch for this personally because although I had just entered the IT profession at the time this was in the days of million pound mainframes hidden away in backrooms guarded jealously by teams of computer operators who only gave access via time-sharing for minutes at a time. Having your own computer which you could tap away on and get instant results was, for me, a revelation.

Happily it looks like the current gap in the IT curriculum may about to be filled by the humble Raspberry Pi computer. The idea behind the Raspberry Pi came from a group of computer scientists at Cambridge, England’s computer laboratory back in 2006. As Ebon Upton founder and trustee of the Raspberry Pi Foundation said:

Something had changed the way kids were interacting with computers. A number of problems were identified: the colonisation of the ICT curriculum with lessons on using Word and Excel, or writing webpages; the end of the dot-com boom; and the rise of the home PC and games console to replace the Amigas, BBC Micros, Spectrum ZX and Commodore 64 machines that people of an earlier generation learned to program on.

Out of this concern at the lack of programming and computer skills in today’s youngsters was born the Raspberry Pi computer (see below) which began shipping in February 2012. Whilst the on board processor and peripheral controllers on this credit card sized, $25 device are orders of magnitude more powerful than anything the BBC Micros and Commodore 64 machines had, in other ways this computer is even more basic than any of those computers. It comes with no power supply, screen, keyboard, mouse or even operating system (Linux can be installed via a SD card). There is quite a learning curve just to get up and running although what Raspberry Pi has going for it that the BBC Micro did not is the web and the already large number of help pages as well as ideas for projects and even the odd Raspberry Pi Jam (get it). Hopefully this means these ingenious devices will not become just another piece of computer kit lying around in our school classrooms.e65ef-raspberrypi

The Computer Literacy Project (CLP) which was behind the idea of the original BBC Micro and “had the grand ambition to change the culture of computing in Britain’s homes” produced a report in May of this year called The Legacy of the BBC Micro which, amongst other things, explores whether the CLP had any lasting legacy on the culture of computing in Britain. The full report can be downloaded here. One of the recommendations from the report is that “kit, clubs and formal learning need to be augmented by support for individual learners; they may be the entrepreneurs of the future“. 30 years ago this support was provided by the BBC as well as schools. Whether the same could be done today in schools that seem to be largely results driven and a BBC that seems to be imploding in on itself is difficult to tell.

And so to the point of this post: is the Raspberry Pi the new BBC Micro in the way it spurred on a generation of programmers that spread their wings and went on to create the tech boom (and let’s not forget odd bust) of the last 30 years? More to the point, is that what the world needs right now? Computers are getting getting far smarter “out of the box”. IBM’s recent announcements of it’s PureSystems brand promise a “smarter approach to IT” in terms of installation, deployment, development and operations. Who knows what stage so called expert integrated systems will be at by the time today’s students begin to hit the workforce in 5 – 10 years time? Does the Raspberry Pi have a place in this world? A world where many, if not most, programming jobs continue to be shipped to low cost regions, currently the BRIC, MIST countries and so on, I am sure, the largely untapped African sub-continent.

I believe that to some extent the fact that the Raspberry Pi is a computer and yes, with a bit of effort, you can program it, is largely an irrelevance. What’s important is that the Raspberry Pi ignites an interest in a new generation of kids that gets them away from just consuming computing (playing games, reading Facebook entries, browsing the web etc) to actually creating something instead. It’s this creative spark that is needed now, today and as we move forward that, no matter what computing platforms we have in 5, 10 or 50 years time, will always need creative thinkers to solve the worlds really difficult business and technical problems.

And by the way my Raspberry Pi is on order.

Educating an IT Workforce for the 21st Century

Peter Cripps education , , , ,

A report on the BBC Today programme this morning argues that the “Facebook generation needs better IT skills” and that UK schools should be providing courses in programming at GCSE. The report bemoaned the fact that so called Information and Communications Technology (ICT) GCSEs did little more than teach students how to use Microsoft Office programmes such as Word and Excel and did not prepare students for a career in IT. The backers of this report were companies like Google and Microsoft.This raises an interesting question of who should be funding such education in these austere times. Is it the role of schools to provide quite specific skills like programming or should they be providing the basics of literacy and numeracy as well as the more fundamental skills of creativity, communication and collaboration and leave the specifics to the industries that need them? Here are some of the issues related to this:

  1. Skills like computer programming are continuously evolving and changing. What is taught at 14 – 16 today (the age of GCSE students in the UK) will almost certainly be out of date when these students hit the work force at 21+.
  2. The computer industry, just like manufacturing before it, long ago sent out the message to students that programming skills (in Western economies at least) were commoditised and better performed by the low-cost economies of the BRIC nations (and now, presumably, the CEVITS).
  3. To most people computers are just tools. Like cars, washing machines and mobile phones they don’t need to know how they work, just how to use them effectively.
  4. Why stop at computer programming GCSE? Why not teach the basics of plumbing, car mechanics, cookery and hairdressing, all of which are in great demand still and needed by their respective industries.
  5. Public education (which essentially did not exist before the 19th century, certainly not for the masses) came about to meet the needs of industrialism and as such demanded skills in left-brained, logical thinking skills rather than right brained, creative skills (see Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk on why schools kill creativity). As a result we have a system that rewards the former rather than the latter (as in “there’s no point in studying painting or music, you’ll never get a job in that”).

In an ideal world we would all be given the opportunities to learn and apply whatever skills we wanted (both at school and throughout life) and have that learning funded by the tax payer on the basis it benefits society as a whole. Unfortunately we don’t live in that ideal world and in fact are probably moving further from it than ever.

Back in the real world therefore industry must surely fund the acquiring of those skills. Unfortunately in many companies education is the first thing to be cut when times are hard. The opposite should be the case. One of the best things I ever did was to spend five weeks (yes that’s weeks not days), funded entirely by IBM, learning object-oriented programming and design. Whilst five weeks may seem like a long time for a course I know this has paid for itself many, many times over by the work I have been able to do for IBM in the 15 years since attending that course. Further, I suspect that five weeks intensive learning was easily equivalent to at least a years worth of learning in an educational establishment.

Of course such skills are more vital to companies like Google, Microsoft and IBM than ever before. Steve Denning in an article called Why Big Companies Die in Forbes this month quotes from an article by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal (called A Caveman Won’t Beat a Salesman). Denning uses a theory from Steve Jobs that big companies fail when salesmen and accountants are put in charge of and who don’t know anything about the product or service the company make or how it works. Denning says:

The activities of these people [salesmen and accountants] further dispirit the creators, the product engineers and designers, and also crimp the firm’s ability to add value to its customers. But because the accountants appear to be adding to the firm’s short-term profitability, as a class they are also celebrated and well-rewarded, even as their activities systematically kill the firm’s future.

Steve Jobs showed that there was another way.  Namely, to keep playing the offense and focus totally on adding value for customers by creating new and innovative new products. By doing that you can make more money than the companies that are milking their cash cows and focused on making money rather than products.

Companies like Google and Microsoft (and IBM and Apple) need people fully trained in the three C’s (creativity, communication and creativity) who can then apply these to whatever task is most relevant to the companies bottom line. It’s the role of those companies, not government, to train people in the specifics.

Interestingly Seymour Papert (who co-invented the Logo programming language) used programming as a tool to improve the way that children think and solve problems. Papert used Piaget‘s work of cognitive development (that showed how children learn) and used Logo as a way of improving their creativity.

Finally, to see how students themselves view all this see the article by Nikhil Goyal’s (a 16-year-old junior at Syosset High School in New York) who states: “for the 21st century American economy, all economic value will derive from entrepreneurship and innovation. Low-cost manufacturing will essentially be wiped out of this country and shipped to China, India, and other nations” and goes on to propose that
“we institute a 21st century model of education, rooted in 21st century learning skills and creativity, imagination, discovery, and project-based learning”. Powerful stuff for one so young, there may yet be hope for us.

Five Software Architectures That Changed The World

Peter Cripps architecture , , , , , ,

Photo by Kobu Agency on Unsplash
Photo by Kobu Agency on Unsplash

“Software is the invisible thread and hardware is the loom on which computing weaves its fabric, a fabric that we have now draped across all of life”.

Grady Booch

Software, although an “invisible thread” has certainly had a significant impact on our world and now pervades pretty much all of our lives. Some software, and in particular some software architectures, have had a significance beyond just the everyday and have truly changed the world.

But what constitutes a world changing architecture? For me it is one that meets all of the following:

  1. It must have had an impact beyond the field of computer science or a single business area and must have woven its way into peoples lives.
  2. It may not have introduced any new technology but may instead have used some existing components in new and innovative ways.
  3. The architecture itself may be relatively simple, but the way it has been deployed may be what makes it “world changing”.
  4. It has extended the lexicon of our language either literally (as in “I tried googling that word” or indirectly in what we do (e.g. the way we now use App stores to get our software).
  5. The architecture has emergent properties and has been extended in ways the architect(s) did not originally envisage.

Based on these criteria here are five architectures that have really changed our lives and our world.

World Wide Web
When Tim Berners-Lee published his innocuous sounding paper Information Management: A Proposal in 1989 I doubt he could have had any idea what an impact his “proposal” was going to have. This was the paper that introduced us to what we now call the world wide web and has quite literally changed the world forever.

Apple’s iTunes
There has been much talk in cyberspace and in the media in general on the effect and impact Steve Jobs has had on the world. When Apple introduced the iPod in October 2001 although it had the usual Apple cool design makeover it was, when all was said and done, just another MP3 player. What really made the iPod take off and changed everything was iTunes. It not only turned the music industry upside down and inside out but gave us the game-changing concept of the ‘App Store’ as a way of consuming digital media. The impact of this is still ongoing and is driving the whole idea of cloud computing and the way we will consume software.

Google
When Google was founded in 1999 it was just another company building a search engine. As Douglas Edwards says in his book I’m Feeling Lucky “everybody and their brother had a search engine in those days”. When Sergey Brin was asked how he was going to make money (out of search) he said “Well…, we’ll figure something out”. Clearly 12 years later they have figured out that something and become one of the fastest growing companies ever. What Google did was not only create a better, faster, more complete search engine than anyone else but also figured out how to pay for it, and all the other Google applications, through advertising. They have created a new market and value network (in other words a disruptive technology) that has changed the way we seek out and use information.

Wikipedia
Before WIkipedia there was a job called an Encyclopedia Salesman who walked from door to door selling knowledge packed between bound leather covers. Now, such people have been banished to the great redundancy home in the sky along with typesetters and comptometer operators.

If you do a Wikipedia on Wikipedia you get the following definition:

Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project based on an openly editable model. The name “Wikipedia” is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning “quick”) and encyclopedia. Wikipedia’s articles provide links to guide the user to related pages with additional information.

From an architectural point of view Wikipedia is “just another wiki” however what it has bought to the world is community participation on a massive scale and an architecture to support that collaboration (400 million unique visitors monthly more than 82,000 active contributors working on more than 19 million articles in over 270 languages). Wikipedia clearly meets all of the above crtieria (and more).

Facebook
To many people Facebook is social networking. Not only has it seen off all competitors it makes it almost impossible for new ones to join. Whilst the jury is still out on Google+ it will be difficult to see how it can ever reach the 800 million people Facebook has. Facebook is also the largest photo-storing site on the web and has developed its own photo storage system to store and serve its photographs. See this article on Facebook architecture as well as this presentation (slightly old now but interesting nonetheless).

I’d like to thank both Grady Booch and Peter Eeles for providing input to this post. Grady has been doing great work on software archeology  and knows a thing or two about software architecture. Peter is my colleague at IBM as well as co-author on The Process of Software Architecting.

What Would Google Do?

Peter Cripps creativity, education , , , ,

Readers of this blog will know that one of my interests/research areas is how to effectively bring together left-brain (i.e. logical) and right-brain (i.e. creative) thinkers in order to drive creativity and generate new and innovative ideas to solve some of the worlds wicked problems. One of the books that have most influenced me in this respect is Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind – Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. Together with a colleague I am developing the concept of the versatilist (first coined by Gartner) as a role that effectively brings together both right- and left-brain thinkers to solve some of the knotty business problems there are out there. As part of this we are developing a series of brain exercises that can be given to students on creative, problem solving courses to open up their minds and start them thinking outside the proverbial box. One of these exercises is called What Would Google Do? The idea being to try and get them to take the non-conventional, Google, view of how to solve a problem. By way of an example Douglas Edwards, in his book I’m Feeling Lucky – The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59, relates the following story about how Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, proposed an innovative approach to marketing.“Why don’t we take the marketing budget and use it to inoculate Chechen refugees against cholera. It will help our brand awareness and we’ll get more new people to use Google.”

Just how serious Brin was being here we’ll never know but you get the general idea; no idea is too outrageous for folk in the Googleplex.

To further backup how serious Google are about creativity their chairman Eric Schmidt, delivered a “devastating critique of the UK’s education system and said the country had failed to capitalise on its record of innovation in science and engineering” at this year’s MacTaggart lecture in Edinburgh.  Amongst other criticisms Schmidt aimed at the UK education system he said that the country that invented the computer was “throwing away your great computer heritage by failing to teach programming in schools ” and was flabbergasted to learn that today computer science isn’t even taught as standard in UK schools. Instead the IT curriculum “focuses on teaching how to use software, but gives no insight into how it’s made.” For those of us bought up in the UK at the time of the BBC Microcomputer hopefully this guy will be the saviour of the current generation of programmers.

US readers of this blog should not feel too smug, check out this YouTube video from Dr. Michio Kaku who gives an equally devastating critique of the US education system.

So, all in all, I think the world definitely needs more of a versatilist approach, not only in our education systems but also in the ways we approach problem solving in the workplace. Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, who revealed last week that he was stepping down once told the New York Times: “The Macintosh turned out so well because the people working on it were musicians, artists, poets and historians – who also happened to be excellent computer scientists”. Once again Apple got this right several years ago and are now reaping the benefits of that far reaching, versatilist approach.