PassWord – 10th June 2015

Speaker A: This program is brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM. If you like what you hear and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm.

Speaker B: Hello and welcome to Password, the technology radio show that dips behind the headlines and makes a few of its own on Resonance FM with me, Peter Warren. In this week’s show, an exclusive look into the measures that the world’s leading countries are being pushed to adopt to deal with the deluge of cybercrime and child pornography. A new app that lets you share video with the people in your address book rather than every Tom, Dick, and Harry on social media. The handheld robot tools that can turn you into Leonardo, and that’s the artist rather than the mutant ninja turtle, and the technology that lets you come back from the dead and speak to your loved ones at the events that age or illness may have prevented you attending in the past. But first, cybercrime has now quite literally reached endemic proportions. Not a week goes past without news of yet another website being breached or a database being stolen. This week it was the turn of the US to cry foul as 4 million records were stolen from a government database, allegedly by the Chinese, and the US Department— Defence Department website went down under an attack apparently from the Syrian Electronic Army. So what does it all mean? Well, the theft of records is part of an ongoing attempt by the criminals to simply steal information. We’re in the information age, and the criminals know that there is value in any information. They don’t know what it is, but they know the data is valuable to someone, so they pile it together in illegal servers on the dark web and sell it to whoever wants it. A situation that has seen the Chinese state hackers buying data from Russian crime gangs that gave them the IDs to penetrate US computer systems, and US and Israeli state hackers buying backdoors into computer systems known as zero-day exploits to build a computer software weapon known as Stuxnet that attacked an Iranian uranium enrichment plant that was crucial to its nuclear program. What is more worrying is the mundanity of what is bringing us down. Unprotected home computers infected with computer viruses known as zombies are sending out details on their owners, spam, the digital junk mail of our time, and the viruses to turn other computers into zombies. Cumulatively, they are joined into what is known as botnets. Millions of computers that can be aimed at important computers to bring them down. The computerized control system we depend on, known as the critical national infrastructure, is vulnerable, and state and criminal cybercrime gangs are running around all over the internet, which is why the London Action Plan, an international organization that brings together 140 of the world’s top technology countries, their law enforcement agencies, and the technology companies themselves, has decided enough is enough. Speaking in an exclusive interview with Password, John Levine, president of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, has set out the extreme measures the organization is calling for to deal with the issue.

Speaker C: It’s called Operation Safety Net, and the goal here is to provide something that’s comprehensive enough that it can provide advice for both network operators and governments to figure out how to structure their operations, and it also gives advice that they can give to individual users to make their online and mobile experience safer and more reliable.

Speaker B: So basically you want to get rid of cybercrime, or you want to at least drop it from the levels it’s currently at?

Speaker C: Well, we’d love to get rid of it. I don’t think that’s realistic. But yeah, the levels are very severe. I mean, every time you turn on the radio or the TV, you know, you’ll see some new report of cybercrime. And since it’s so easy to send stuff internationally over the internet, this requires coordination among multiple providers and multiple governments, which is why, I mean, the goal here is to have a baseline of useful information that that many governments can use and many providers can use so they can provide a consistent level of service and they can support each other so criminals can’t just be kicked off one network and hop across the border to another.

Speaker B: So what is the plan then?

Speaker C: Well, we have multiple sections of advice. We certainly don’t have time to go into every single one here. It’s basically what we call it capacity building. I mean, it’s just trying to educate people about the techniques that we already understand how to do. We already understand lots of ways to make our networks more secure. I mean, and the issue is simply to tell the providers to actually take advantage of them and make the networks more secure. And to the extent that there are laws that would make it more or less difficult, you know, adjust the laws so that the security stuff can It can be done.

Speaker B: What do you want to see then? What is the world that you want to see in the future?

Speaker C: Well, you know, I wrote the book Internet for Dummies over 20 years ago. And at that point, the internet was sort of an obscure cult thing. When we first wrote it, we were surprised that anybody bought the book at all. And needless to say, in 20 years, a lot of people have shown a lot of interest in the internet. And what we want is for the Internet to be as useful as it possibly can be, and all the services on it to be as useful as it can possibly be, but to be reasonably safe. We’re sort of in a world— it’s like the world before cars had registration, or when they just started to have registration, and they would blow up all the time. And now cars are, considering how ubiquitous they are, they’re pretty safe. So I think we need to come up with a balance of adequate regulation to make things safe and adequate freedom so that people can do all the stuff they want to do. So we have a concern that governments are not well enough educated in how to do this. So the point of this— one of the big points of this report is to be a credible source of information. The London Action Plan has multiple governments contributing to it and running it. So this is, you know, sort of like to the extent that the government looks at it, this is government-to-government advice about, you know, what are the best practices that you want them to do.

Speaker B: One of the things, the points that somebody would make is they would say, hang on a minute, the problem with all of this is the network and the technology that you are using. You are using technology that was never designed with security in mind. It doesn’t have the locks in place. And you have got a router system which actually allows anonymity to be confirmed on the communications of the people who are using it.

Speaker C: That is entirely true. I mean, I go to technical meetings where we tear our hair out, and, you know, if we could wind things back 30 years and make a few little changes to the way things work, you know, we would do it. But, you know, at this point, you know, trying to upgrade the network is like doing a heart transplant. You can’t just turn the internet off and say, well, we’re going to blow the dust out of it now and improve things. So we have a curse of success that we can make incremental changes. But the other point you made, there’s no security to the routing, and there’s relatively little security on email, and there’s very iffy security on websites. It’s a big problem. And what we’ve had to do, and what we’ve spent a lot of time here at MOSS thinking about. You know, given that we can’t just turn it off and start over, you know, what incremental changes can we make that will keep things working but also make them more secure?

Speaker B: Apologies for the quality of the line. That was Jon Levine of the London Action Plan, who along with President Obama’s former acting Cyber Czar, Melissa Hathaway, is calling for the extraordinarily controversial step of forcing the telecom providers to clean the porn, junk, and viruses from the digital pipes that pump data to our phones and computers. Now, someone who wants to actually add more traffic to those pipes, but stuff we actually want, is Florent de Bodeman, the founder of Skigle, a new app that lets you send video only to the people in your address book. And he’s here in the studio with me to explain why I want to do that. Hello and welcome to Password, Florent.

Speaker E: Good afternoon, Peter.

Speaker B: Now, Skigle, what is it?

Speaker E: Skigle is a mobile application that we’ve designed to let people share little moments of their lives together with their friends. Skigull actually in Old Scottish means a little drop, and that fits pretty well what we think people will use it for, meaning really small moments of their life together with their friends and families.

Speaker B: So it’s a live streaming service, isn’t it?

Speaker E: It is a live streaming service. But it’s not limited to live streaming. The core of the service is actually live streaming, but all the videos that are made on the service are kept in the cloud and made available for the audience in replay, because we recognize that live streaming is great, but not all of your audience will be online at the moment you actually want to share.

Speaker B: Okay, so, and it’s, it’s yet another free service, is it?

Speaker E: It’s a free service. We’ve had the chance to be backed up by EE and we actually support the first 4G connected action camera that was launched yesterday. So we provide the capacity for that camera to actually stream directly on the net. So it’s a free service indeed and it’s important for us that where people can share their lives freely. But it’s not yet another service because it’s the first live stream service that lets you stream to your friends and family privately.

Speaker B: So what’s the business model then? Because everybody’s always very, very puzzled about this. You know, if it’s free, I’m not the customer.

Speaker E: So as I said, we’ve had the chance to be backed up by EE, who’s quite keen to support innovation., and has always been in advance, I would say, in that field. In the future, it could be that we will introduce new functionalities that may be charged to the user. At this moment, it’s free and we want to keep it like this.

Speaker B: Okay. Now, I mean, there’s an interesting point at the bottom of all of this, isn’t there? Which is, why have we suddenly developed this compulsive desire to record everything we do?

Speaker E: I think it’s not that sudden. From all time, humanity has tried to represent their lives. So they were painting in caves at the moment they were living in caves. Then came the painting on paper, oil painting and so on, where people were representing moments of their lives basically and themselves. And with the technology and the storage capacity Now everybody has a camera in their hands and video becomes a natural evolution of this.

Speaker B: So there you go, cave painting on your mobile phone. Thank you very much, Florent. Thank you. This is Password with Peter Warren on Resonance FM, and after us you can hear Kitchen Magic Time. And if you’re listening to the repeat, then it’s the Organ Presents: The Other Rock Show. Now, just when you thought it was safe to go out onto the high street and nothing more could change, comes the rollout of the handheld robot. Researchers at Bristol University at a part robot that will be able to tell us what we are doing and help us do it. It might sound like something from the children’s hit film Transformers, but according to Professor Walter Meil Cuevas— actually, I should do that again— Walterio Meil Cuevas, the future of tools is enhancing our abilities to make them more intelligent.

Speaker A: The applications for a handheld tool in principle, for a handheld robot in principle, can be anywhere where a handheld tool is used, and that really is almost anything. But let’s take, for example, the simple case of trying to ensure that you are cleaning a hospital room. A human may actually forget to clean a specific area or overlook an area, but a robot that is able to track its position very accurately can actually direct that person to go and properly clean that spot that hasn’t been cleaned.

Speaker B: Okay, so in a sense what you’re saying is that these robots are going to be enhancements to people, and the aim of the exercise is just to make sure that everybody does a job better.

Speaker A: And you may also think this from the point of view of people enhancing robots, right? So it’s both ways, and this is the interesting thing because As I said a moment ago, one possibility is to expect that robots do everything, which is very unrealistic at the moment. And the other possibility is that people do everything, which is again not necessarily the best way forward. So this type of research, the handheld robot research, can potentially be seen as supporting both ends. How to enhance people, but also how to take robotics research closer to applications now. So very specifically, when we talk about handheld robots, it’s really literally things that you can hold in your hands. And this is actually very different from, as you say, going into a vehicle. Because things that you held in your hands are extensions to your arms, are very close to your eyes, and very close to your senses. It’s very different to trying to operate a robot car or things like that. And we think that getting closer to applications that are in the tool space is really where the interesting things are.

Speaker B: So is this a development of technology that we’ve already seen that, for example, allows surgeons to do an operation remotely? Is that a similar idea?

Speaker A: So it’s very good that you mentioned the medical applications because. Because it happens that in the medical field, there have been some examples which are perhaps the closest things to what we’re trying to do here. But they are kind of limited because they are, for example, scalpels that compensate the vibrations of the motion of the hand of the surgeon. But again, these type of tools we see are not necessarily pushing towards the things that we are aiming to develop here, which is this cooperation with the person, this task knowledge,, and applications which are much wider and well beyond the medical area.

Speaker B: Well, that was Professor Walterio Mael Cuevas, and his research student Austin Greg-Smith now tells us about the tools he has already made.

Speaker A: So I’ve been mostly working on the low-level building the robot and then running the experiments part of things. So The first project, well, the first robot I built, a light and compliant 4-degree of freedom, well, a manipulator. So, we looked at 2 different tasks with this. So, first we had a simulated painting task where the user has to fill in, there’s a predefined pattern that the user is supposed to paint and they’re supposed to fill it in as quickly and accurately as possible. And we recorded how long it took them to do the task and how accurately they did it. And then we also had them fill out a NASA TLX questionnaire, which is the NASA Task Load Index that measures the perceived user workload. So a lower perceived user workload is better because it is perceptually easier to perform the task. And we found that when they used the intelligent tool, it reduced the task completion time, and I think the accuracy was about the same. But it also dramatically reduced the perceived workload of the task, which was one of the things we were trying to find out.

Speaker B: Right, so in short, it did it quicker and it made it easier.

Speaker A: Yes, which is not that surprising, but we wanted to find out how much of an effect it was.

Speaker B: Now, of course, when somebody’s listening to this, they’re thinking— when you talk about painting, they’re perhaps thinking that you could be, uh, one of the apprentices of Leonardo da Vinci. But you’re talking about painting a wall, aren’t you?

Speaker A: Uh, yes, although we weren’t painting a blank wall. It was a pattern on the wall, so it was more approaching Leonardo da Vinci than just painting a wall one color.

Speaker B: Well, now a warning to sensitive people: the next item may make you cry. In the 2009 film P.S. I Love You, the film’s heroine finds that her former lover has left her a series of messages and pre-planned events for her to attend after he dies from illness. Now David Lammenby has decided to extend a similar service to all of us, and he’s on the line from a hotel in Jersey to tell us about Swan Song.

Speaker D: Hello, David.

Speaker B: Hello, Peter. Hello. Hello.

Speaker D: Welcome to Password. Thank you very much.

Speaker B: Thank you. So what was it that prompted you to put Swan Song together?

Speaker D: Well, I’d been thinking about the idea for quite a long time, and I guess I was inspired by films. In fact, you mentioned like P.S. I Love You. And other thoughts I had. Now I know that traditionally, you know, people would leave a note and hide it in the cupboard or a shelf, that type of thing, but I think a lot better could be done with technology today, a lot nicer messages where you can actually record a video, and someone would see you, your loved one would see you, um, giving, you know, a wonderful message to them after you’ve gone.

Speaker B: So, so what is the technology then? Is it, is it a mixture of stuff from, uh, social media and video, or is it just recording that media video so it can be played at, say, you know, 21st birthday?

Speaker D: Uh, right, the idea is that using your smartphone or your tablet, you’re able to record a number of different types of messages, video messages, say text messages, or you can even send a letter via it. And then once you’ve created the messages, they get uploaded to a server in the cloud, so it can’t be lost, in other words., and then in the event that at the time of your passing, two or more of your trusted friends would log onto the system to notify the system that you’d gone, and the messages will be delivered according to your wishes. Some are delivered instantly, like, you know, to your immediate other half that you leave behind, and but some of them are delivered on a delayed basis. Now, that can be determined by the person that has written all the messages. So it could be like on that person’s birthday they receive a message. Um, now, yeah, I hope that that wouldn’t be distressing. If they found it distressing, they can just opt out of receiving further messages.— but I think it’s something that once you know that it’s coming, you would just look forward to it because it’s truly from the heart of your loved one that’s departed. The messages, the words that they would have for you would be new, never been heard before.

Speaker B: It’s a rather unique idea. No, no, no, I mean it is. Those are the sort of circumstances that you’re envisaging that it would be, you know, I don’t know the birth of a grandchild, the wedding, or, or some anniversary.

Speaker D: It could be. There’s many things. Another thing is that my grandfather passed away when I was 4 years old, so I never knew him. So you would actually be passing over a heritage, if you like, of your images to future generations to see. There’s certainly a lot of interest in knowing where people originate from.. And I think that would be a great benefit. You could actually hear them and they would be giving a message to you and it would be—

Speaker B: it’s just something that can be done there, you know, rather than having scraps of paper. So are you planning to incorporate this into social media? I mean, one of the things that has been happening on social media is that people have been keeping their friends’ Facebook pages alive.

Speaker D: I mean, is that something else that you’re thinking of? No, we are aware of that, but this is really like personal messages that you leave behind for your loved ones, and it’s not for— generally not for public airing. It’s personal, and it goes straight to your loved ones that you’ve left behind. If, for instance, it’s somebody famous, a famous actor or film star, they may wish to have a message put out on Facebook, uh, yeah, on the public arena. But, um, that’s something that they’ve got to decide. But generally they’re always private, and I think they should be really, because it’s quite private nature really there.

Speaker B: Okay, well, your son’s part of your company.

Speaker D: Have you any plans to leave him any post-mortality messages? I certainly will. Um, as soon as I get the apps completed, I, I will— I’ll complete the messages because the idea is that you never know quite what’s around the corner. And you hope— everybody hopes they’ve got a long life ahead of them. But, uh, you know, things do happen in this world. You know, air travel, boat travel, there’s always things unforeseen that can happen. So I’d say generally get the messages done in the same ways you would get a will written, because, you know, it’s best to get it done, and you just don’t know what’s around the corner. Also, while you’re fit and well and able to do it, you know, before— God, heaven forbid—

Speaker B: then, you know, some nasty disease strikes you down. Right, now, final question then. Swan Song. Why? Well, I mean, obviously the swan song is the last song of the dying swan. Why have you—

Speaker D: why have you spelt it S-W-O-N-S-O-N-G? Right, well, it still does say— sound the same, and that was the idea, that was the inspiration behind it. But, uh, if you try to acquire the domain name, you’ll find it’s taken already because it’s quite a popular name. So, uh, it is a name as such, and we do intend to roll it out in more than one country, and they won’t all recognize the spelling. So we just thought, you know, we, we would call it Swan Song. Um, which sounds the same and, and means the same. It is, um, the last words, it means, uh, or final performance.

Speaker B: So, um, it’s just slightly different spelling.

Speaker D: So when can we, we expect to see this, David? Um, we’re going all ahead now with the writing of, of the apps, both for use on Android and Apple devices, iOS devices. So that would be like iPhones, iPads, and tablets, and the Android smartphones, tablets. And it would— we’re hoping to have it available in the market by about October, and that would be in the iTunes Store and Google Play for Android.

Speaker B: Okay, well, David, thank you. Thank you very much.

Speaker D: We’ll let you get back to your holiday now.

Speaker B: Okay, Peter, very nice talking to you. Thank you very much. Well, finally, there is a ray of light for musicians and artists suffering from piracy in the anarchy of the internet, courtesy of the technology that underpins Bitcoin. Known as blockchain, the technology can be used to keep tabs on your digital products and has been developed by Bruce Pong of the Berlin-based company Ascribe. He tells our German correspondent Jane Wyatt all about it.

Speaker F: The way that we’re going to make money out of Ascribers, we are working with the marketplaces. So a lot of times, if somebody were to steal your work or just to use your work, if it’s on a blog, there’s not really a commercial bend to it. Maybe they’re using it, maybe they’re even praising you and saying, “I really want people to consume this material.” You’re not going to go after them. And the point where we see a real benefit is on marketplaces because there’s a lot of latent value that’s out there in the digital world that’s not being sold because people don’t really know how to buy and sell that from a marketplace perspective. So right now you have something like Amazon iTunes or Amazon and iTunes, and when you buy an ebook or a song, the moment it’s on your device, it’s worthless. There’s no residual value. And that makes it so that there’s no resale market. And without a resale market, the digital product actually has no value except the usage that you can get out of it on your device. And marketplaces, if we can make it so that you sell the rights, and that rights, not the digital file, but the actual rights of use can be bought and sold, then you create secondary markets. And if marketplaces can establish this, then we can take a little bit of a cut, you know, half a percent or quarter of a percent for each transaction. That’s kind of how we’re seeing how to monetize. Another way potentially is to also show you your own digital wallet and to track whatever creative work that you’ve released. So for instance, you know, it’s free to transfer, it’s free to register, there’s a lot of things that you can do with it. But let’s say that you’re a prolific creator and your stuff gets shared and spread around the internet. Well, we’re looking at maybe making it possible to show you where your stuff has gone. Maybe it helps you in your next, um, you’re a journalist and you want to get your next article from New York Times, and you can prove that in your last article that you wrote for the New Yorker, you were able to get 50,000 views or reads or copies. And we’re hoping to give that type of transparency on where your stuff goes. So it’s not just like take-down requests and infringements, you can also look at it from the perspective of where did my stuff end up on the internet, and maybe I can use that to monetize or for, for a positive benefit.

Speaker D: Well, that sounds like it’s win-win for creators.

Speaker F: What about consumers? How will they benefit? So here’s— I was just in Warsaw this weekend and I was giving a presentation to a photography conference, and I wanted to use this really amazing image. So, and I found it on Google like most everybody, and I reversed image searched that item. I couldn’t find the rights holder, and I thought, hmm, you know, I think the majority of people in the world, they would happily pay something for content if it was easy. And I looked for the rights holder, I couldn’t find them, and in the end I used that image anyways, but I could have paid $1 or $0.50 or whatever for the use of that for the presentation. And I think that there’s a lot more people out there in this world. I’m fundamentally optimistic about humanity, but just like iTunes and Napster— Napster made it so people got used to sharing content. iTunes made it so that people felt good about sharing that content or taking, downloading that content. We think that there’s a— it’s not just music or books, it’s anything digital. We all feel good when we know that there’s a person who benefits at the end of the line. I mean, there’s definitely a portion of society who’s happy to steal and stuff like that. But I generally believe that if you make it easy for people to find out who the rights holder is, more often than not, people are gonna do something, do the right thing. And I think that that’s what’s missing right now in our digital economy, and Ascribe is working to make that happen.

Speaker B: Well, that was Bruce Pong of Ascribe, pointing out in an age that appears to be all about surveillance of one sort or another, how you can turn that to your advantage and take back ownership of your digital creations. If you’ve just tuned in, you’re listening to Password, and unfortunately you’ve just missed it because that’s all for this week. Password is brought to you by Future Intelligence, and you can find out more about the world of technology on our website, futureintelligence.co.uk.

Speaker A: This program has been brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM. If you liked what you heard and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm.