PassWord – 6th April 2016

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Speaker B: Hello and welcome to Password on Resonance 104.4 FM with me, Peter Warren, the technology program that bites through the bits of the web. In today’s show, the European-backed computer system that’s going to bring the internet to the remotest human settlements. And how to collect waste and energy using nanotechnology. And it is actually here. The doomsday computer that can accurately tell you how long you will live for based on your lifestyle using NHS data. Why one of the world’s leading legal minds thinks that the moves to identify us wherever we go are a move in the right direction. And the veteran investigative journalist Duncan Campbell’s view on privacy for the younger generation. But first, Watley, the computer that makes electricity, purifies water, and can put anywhere on the web, is coming to a wilderness near you. Here’s Marco Attesani, Watley’s creator, on why he wants to put a 14-ton, 40-foot-long piece of tech into the ends of the earth.

Speaker C: Watley is a computer. Is a thermodynamic computer. That means that as a computer, it calculates, it collects and sends data over the internet, it interacts with people, but it also generates its own electricity and it purifies water from any source of contamination by harvesting the power of the sun.

Speaker D: So essentially then, this is— it’s not just a computer, it’s almost like a a survival mechanism for people in remote areas?

Speaker C: Absolutely. If you imagine a machine like this, just to let the audience understand what we are talking about, we are talking about a machine 40 meters long and 15 tons. It’s a big machine. If you place that machine in an isolated location, completely off the chart, you can transform life of the people living there. By bringing instantaneously access to clean water, electricity, and connectivity, which I define to be the pillar of the modern civilization.

Speaker D: So how does this work then?

Speaker C: Wattly basically, as I said, works on solar energy, and it can do that because it combines two main technologies: the thermal solar and the photovoltaic technology. The first one deals with the heat of the sun, and through the heat we generate the sterilization, purification of water. And the other technology, the photovoltaic, deals with the light, and through that we generate electricity to empower this machine and the electronics inside this machine, and it’s also producing electricity for recharging external devices such as portable phones or computers.

Speaker D: Okay, so now 15 tons, I mean, this is going to be a big and expensive mechanism, isn’t it?

Speaker C: How much does it cost? This is a machine that is— must consider as an infrastructural machine. It’s not a gadget. With that, you can bring life, energy, and future to people. And a lot of them consider that machine can serve up a communities of up 3,000 people. It’s a considerable amount of people. So if you say— if you can imagine the pricing, that is like having a very luxurious car, but the difference is that it changes the life to thousands of people for 15 years. This is the estimated time span that we are declaring right now.

Speaker D: Okay, so you’re providing this luxury car to so many people, but again, I mean, there must be a cost to it.

Speaker C: How much is it? Listen, we are aiming at placing this machine around €350,000-€400,000. Very soon. This is good news because consider that this is still low-volume production. So by the time we increase our production and by the time technology becomes cheaper and cheaper and more powerful over time, we will be able to decrease significantly this price. So it’s just a question of starting somewhere.

Speaker D: It’s not a price that’s deterring people, is it? The European community are very much behind this idea.

Speaker C: They like it. Absolutely so. We are lucky enough to say that we have been granted almost €2 million from the European Commission. The Horizon 2020 program is always there.

Speaker D: And you have an Indiegogo campaign now as well?

Speaker C: Oh yes, basically we launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo because we want our community to be part of this revolutionary project.

Speaker D: Okay, so it’s a revolutionary project, it all sounds very good. What is the future? What would you like to see as a result of this?

Speaker C: I want to free people from suffering. I want to see these machines to become a smart grid eventually. Thousands and thousands of these machines connected to each other, creating the energy net where internet fuses together with electricity production and water management. And free millions of people from poverty. This is what I would like to see.

Speaker B: Marco Attesani on Watli, the computer at the end of the earth. And while you might be bemoaning the installation of technology in far-flung places, spare a thought for the people who live there. When I was with the Bushmen in the Kalahari, they asked me to come back to the UK and tell everyone that they wanted to be given the chance to live like other black men. Now I’ve kept my word. Next, and continuing in the vein of environmentally friendly systems, the nanomachines that can harvest the heat that we throw away. Here’s Jan Willem, boss of Heriot-Watt University, on the thermal generators powering the Mars rover that will soon be in your car.

Speaker E: The basis is that you can use a temperature difference, any temperature difference, to generate electricity. And you can do this using a semi-conductor conductor materials, and it relies on something called the Seebeck effect. And it’s— that is really simply just the diffusion of electrons from the hot side of your material to the cold side of a material.

Speaker D: Yeah, because apparently the electrons move from hot to cold, and in doing so, they generate a current.

Speaker E: Yeah, so they— yeah, they move from hot to cold, and then if you connect the hot and the cold end of that material with an electrical wire and you put like a resistor or a light in or something, you’ll see that that light bulb will start to give off light.

Speaker F: Yeah.

Speaker E: So you need this closed electrical circuit, but it’s driven by the temperature difference across your, across your semiconducting material. And if you put lots of materials in one device, then that’s called a thermoelectric generator.

Speaker D: That’s fascinating. So what’s been the problem up till now with these? What’s, what’s prevented us using lots and lots of these to stick on car exhaust pipes to make more electricity or put in lots of different places.

Speaker E: Yeah, I guess there are— I mean, there’s a problem with efficiency. So I guess the overall heat-to-electricity conversion efficiencies haven’t been very high, maybe on the order of 5% with using traditional materials. So that is a little bit low for many applications. And then there is also, of course, the cost per watt, which has been quite high because lots of these good thermoelectric materials use scarce elements, things like tellurium, lead, bismuth. So the challenge is really twofold. First, or maybe it’s one big challenge, but it’s to get kind of good efficiencies in a material that’s based on more abundant elements. So it’s kind of more cost-effective really as a technology.

Speaker D: Right. So you want to— if you can get an abundant material, then lots and lots of these generators will become available and people will start using them in lots and lots of places. But what does that mean? Does that mean that, say, that there were some abundant and efficient thermal generating devices that I could fill one of my walls with them and that that will then generate a lot of electricity for me.

Speaker E: What levels of electricity are we talking about here? So this is, I guess, so from your wall you might not get very much electricity and it’s because it really relies on having a temperature difference. So the larger the temperature difference, the better. So if you can have a hot side of 500°C and a cold side near room temperature, then that is where you’ll get kind of large power outputs. And typically you might get something like 1 watt per, say, square centimeter of your device area. So for those kind of applications, if you only have a temperature difference of 10 degrees between the inside of your house and the outside, then, then you’ll get a very small you get a small fraction of that. But of course, clearly, your wall of your house is a pretty large area, so you could compensate by getting low powers per square centimetre by having a large area. Clearly, that might be feasible, but you would need a lot more material, and therefore it’s so important that the cost of these things come down.

Speaker B: Reclaiming energy with Jan Willem Boss. Now, expending energy and effort is not something that we are prone to be thinking about all of the time. Perhaps we should, because a project being undertaken at the University of East Anglia is coming up with a method that will allow us to predict when we would die based on our lifestyle. Taking data from the NHS going back to the 1930s, the scientists are going to come up with a computer model that lets us work out when we will die. And part of the point of it is to let us usefully plan for our retirement. Here’s Professor Elena Kulinskaya to tell us why it’s not really macabre, just really a tool to help us make the most of our lives.

Speaker G: Well, first of all, we are getting a pretty big data set which includes 3.4 million patients, everyone born before 1960, and of course those Patients would have visited their GP a number of times, some several times per year, so it is pretty big data set. We are going to use this data to try to figure out how various chronic conditions and also various health interventions and perhaps some lifestyle factors may affect life expectancy.

Speaker H: So essentially you’re, you’re just mining through this big pool of data to see what you can, you know, to see what you come up with.

Speaker G: Um, no, we are not mining, uh, we are making informed statistical analysis of this data. When I say informed, uh, is, uh, means that I also have, uh, medical professionals on the team who can explain to us how various coexisting conditions or various drugs may affect life expectancy, that kind of thing.

Speaker H: Okay, so once, once you’ve done this, what are you going to do with this information?

Speaker G: This information can be used by many different bodies and by people themselves. So it can be used, for example, by public health professionals to see how some new recommendation by NICE would, for example, to expand the number of patients who would be getting statins, how would that affect life expectancy. Or it may be used by social care services because they need to understand how much pensions the state can afford to pay if the life expectancy will increase, say, 2 years on average. Or it can be used by individual people who would be retiring and they have a $100K pension pot and Now, due to pension freedom, we could perhaps start taking this money and spend it, but it would be nice to know for how long that money needs to, you know, stretch.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker H: And so what you’re saying, obviously there’s— this is an area that there’s considerable, not concern, but anxiety about, and about how data like this could be used. And what you’re saying is that this will be used by healthcare professionals to say to people, well, we know you smoke, for example, you’d be better if you did this or this or this or this?

Speaker G: Uh, well, I mean, uh, similar things already exist. Uh, it’s slightly different. Uh, for example, what exists now, uh, you can look at something called QRisk, and this is also used by health professionals. By your GP, for example. That QRisk program, after you use it online, say, to input some data about yourself, will tell you approximately your risk of having something like heart event, like heart attack, for example, or stroke in the next 10 years. So they will tell you your risk of that. We are looking only at life expectancy, not at a risk of particular events. So this is a slight distinction here.

Speaker H: Now, obviously somebody listening to this will say, oh, is there a piece of software somewhere where I can input information about myself and it’s going to tell me when I might die? That was suggested before. There was a watch that somebody had come up with that basically told you, it ticked off the days to when it suggested that you would die because of the way that you lived your life. Um, won’t there be a tendency for people to want to do that and then say, okay, so if I change my life, I could do this? Would that be something that would be possible?

Speaker G: And absolutely, this is exactly what we are doing. So basically, we are estimating many various influences on your life expectancy. So your, say, heart condition may be one of those, but smoking or If you start taking statins or beta blockers, would be other influences, and statins actually would, for example, extend your life expectancy by 2 years or so.

Speaker H: If, um, this sort of information, this sort of model, uh, was used by insurance companies who asked you specific and very detailed questions about your life and your lifestyle?

Speaker G: Actually, this is a good question, and I think I have a good answer to it. People demonize a little bit insurance company exactly like they demonize to some extent pharma companies. There are different insurance products and some insurance products, I mean, let’s take for example annuities. This is a product which was more popular previously than now with freedom of pensions, but still, suppose you’ve got a particular pension pot, say $100K, and you are about to buy annuity. If the insurance company knows that you have some health condition, they actually pay you more, not less. So that would be of benefit to particular person to reveal their health state to an insurance company. So that they are treated not like an average person of 60 years old, but even, say, as a smoker. I can assure you that as a smoker you would even now receive a slightly larger annuity than if you are a non-smoker.

Speaker B: Professor Kulinskaya on the computer system that tells you when your time will be up. So now technology will know about us from the cradle to the grave. Soon we might even be chipped at birth. Far-fetched? Well, this month it became a legal obligation to have your dog chipped. Who knows who will be next? With Google’s plans to implement a system that will use your face to validate payments, we could be being double-checked every time we buy anything.

Speaker E: Good?

Speaker B: Bad? Professor Fred Cate is a distinguished professor of law at Indiana University and director of the Indiana University Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, as well as an advisor to Microsoft and the US Department of Homeland Security. And he thinks it’s good, but only if we have the proper protections in place.

Speaker I: Well, I mean, yes and no. We should be worried about almost anything that has to do with security and the security of our infrastructure. And for most of us, you know, the mobile devices we use are a pretty critical part of our infrastructure. On the other hand, look, passwords are the single worst form of security imaginable. If you spent weeks and you gave a prize for the worst form of security, passwords would definitely be it. And so anything that helps us move beyond that, whether it’s fingerprint or face recognition or iris scanning, there are vulnerabilities in all of these, and there probably always will be. Be, but they are so much better than the password approach that I think we should, we should at least give them room to try to roll it out and get those, you know, make it work as well as possible.

Speaker B: That won’t that be the end of privacy?

Speaker H: Absolutely the end of privacy.

Speaker B: Because if every time I make a transaction, I update the record of my face, then I’m known forever.

Speaker I: Well, it could be, but it doesn’t have to be. In other words, it all depends on the rules, the laws laws that govern this. So for example, you don’t have to let it update the face every time. Or you can limit the use of that data. And I’m so glad you raised this point because it’s one of the things that I really feel strongly about, and that is too often we treat privacy like it’s a lost war. We’ve lost that war. If this technology comes out, it’s all over. And if we view it that way, then privacy was dead 50 years ago when the digital revolution began. I think quite the contrary. Privacy is going to be protected by strong law vigorously enforced and by good corporate behavior that is rewarded by the market. And that’s what we need to be focusing on far more than whether this technology or that technology is going to weaken privacy. It’s do we have the will to keep protecting privacy? Now so far I think we don’t. I mean I think almost across the board we’ve shown we don’t. But it doesn’t mean that we couldn’t win that war.

Speaker H: But you could take the algorithm from that face and use that algorithm to search through CCTV databases, which, for example, in the UK could possibly give you an incredible power to know where people were in urban areas.

Speaker I: Absolutely. But you could already do that. In other words, you could take all of those pictures posted on Facebook or or attached to tweets or instant messages. And you can already take those and search for them. And so it might be an incremental change, but as long as the use of facial recognition as a payment technology isn’t required, so that people who are worried about it don’t have to use it, and as long as we already have the situation in which hundreds of millions of people are posting their photographs online, and tagging themselves. I don’t think it’s that big of a change.

Speaker B: Professor Fred Cate on why we should fight for the rights to our identity. Now, last but not least, in March of this year, the great and good of the activist world descended on Berlin for a conference on surveillance, both virtually and in person. Chief amongst the virtual were Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, porting in from the ethereal worlds they have now been condemned to. While other thorns in the flesh of the establishment were more corporeal, such as the hacker Bernd Fix, tour architect Jacob Appelbaum, and veteran left-wing journalist Duncan Campbell. He found time to speak to Janet Wyatt about why he thinks the young will start to push for more privacy rights.

Speaker F: I think the jury is out. On what younger generations really do think. They don’t answer the conventional questions on privacy in the same way as my generation or the older generations, but they exhibit quite serious privacy-protecting behaviors. So I think as the understanding of audience engagement with internet grows, we will actually understand that concerns about privacy are expressed in a different way. The problem is that kids are confronted early with treasure troves of richness of information and cool things to do and applications, many of which seek to compromise their privacy. And the internet and parenting can only bring them to the understanding of safety in the same way that it does work or doesn’t, depending on the family. And on top of that, you’ve got to add a degree of technical knowledge. So I think it’s highly appropriate that international obligations such as coming from Europe or recommendations through the UN are taken seriously to modulate how children’s experience of the internet from early ages. Is affecting their judgment and ability to protect their own safety online.

Speaker G: So given, given that kind of background, how likely is it that this new law will come in and, and be welcomed, or, or perhaps not even noticed, in the UK?

Speaker F: I think the best quotation which was given to us the previous time they tried to put this kind of law through in Britain was that was by a former head of a prosecuting agency who took one look at it and said, “We are sleepwalking into a surveillance society.” Another senior lawyer holding a similar post has called the type of activity that’s now being proposed as a hellhole of the most sensitive of personal information being amalgamated together. Quite remarkable impassioned quotations. The problem is that partly thanks to Mr. Snowden, there is an adult discussion that never previously happened, including the involvement of people who run security and intelligence agencies, who actually do seek direct public approbation of what they do. And probably that’s mostly because they have recruit people who are not going to come to them. Nobody’s gonna, nobody’s gonna join a British security intelligence agency if its brand image is indeed that of the Stasi. And that’s a problem for them across their entire range of tasks. So there is a sense that outside the parliamentary process, the openness and cohesiveness of society forces values through in a way that manipulative politicians don’t care about, ignore, or work around. However, in the present British situation, on the fifth roll of the dice, the security advocates have got a government who’s prepared to bully to do their business, and they come to it having tried the last time round and having been utterly rebuffed. Rejected by Parliament, criticized and condemned, and because the ruling party in Britain were in a coalition— because the ruling party in Britain were in a coalition government, the minority partner, the Liberal Democrats, could simply say no, and that’s what they did. So that kind of thing tends to leave scars of a nasty sort on on determined politicians who decide, and that’s what we’re facing at the minute, that they will simply not allow scrutiny to get in the way by using their power through the way the votes were cast last time to simply force things down people’s throats.

Speaker B: Duncan Campbell on why he thinks the fight for privacy is being joined by the young. You’re listening to Password on Resonance FM with me, Peter And if you’ve just joined us, I’m afraid you’ve missed it, but we will be here again at the same time next week with more on what technological changes mean to our lives. Password is brought to you by Future Intelligence and the Cybersecurity Research Institute. If you want to find out more about the issues we have covered, then go to our website on www.futureintelligence.com. Thanks for listening and goodbye.

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