PassWord – 23rd September 2015

Speaker A: This program is brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM.

Speaker B: If you like what you hear and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm. Hello and welcome to the Password Radio Show here on Resonance FM with me, Peter Warren. The show that shows you the shallows. The deeps and the hidden currents in our new high-tech reality. In today’s program, the battle in cyberspace going on in the depths of the internet as high-tech states and superpowers play a game of cloak and dagger in pursuit of each other’s vital secrets. It’s a battle that is pushing some countries to the brink of conflict and leading to calls for a change in the Geneva Convention to include a definition of cyber-aggression. And though technology might be making some very dangerous jungles, it is also helping us to make some sense of real jungles by ingeniously creating a sound picture of what proper jungle should be like and then turning that into a visual image.

Speaker C: We have backpacks just like anyone else, but instead of being kind of filled with nets and traps, they’re filled with small but high-definition recording devices.

Speaker B: Also in a packed show Why the French want their law on the right to delete to go worldwide. Why Sir Clive Sinclair, one of the pioneers of the computer age, wants to rewind the clock and get tech retro and get us coding in the way that they did in the age of the Austin Allegro. It’s not enough to drive the Mini Cooper. Sir Clive wants us to program like the programmers of old on another icon of the age. A Sinclair ZX80 Spectrum. And finally, the hipster fashions may scent of the 1970s, but to be really hip in London Fashion Week, you have to have high-tech fibers in your threads. Fashion is weaving the internet and surveillance into our clothes.

Speaker D: It’s a really exciting time in fashion and technology, and they’re coming together, creating new, exciting things.

Speaker B: Last week, cybersecurity experts claimed that hackers dubbed the Dukes were working office hours while pursuing information on behalf of the Russian state and were hacking from either St. Petersburg or Moscow. According to the Finnish cybersecurity company F-Secure, the Dukes are working for the Russian government. Here’s Arturi Lettil, the researcher for F-Secure who unpicked the computer viruses the Dukes built to gather information on Chechnya, missile deployment in Poland, and the armed conflict in Ukraine.

Speaker E: They’ve been engaging in apparent cyber espionage since at least 2008, and based on the evidence we’ve gathered, we believe they’re working for the Russian Federation and that the intelligence they collect is used in support of Russian foreign and security policy decision-making.

Speaker F: And so what evidence do you have to show that?

Speaker E: We’ve been able to connect both the technical means, the tools and the malware, to their operations and the tactics that have been used over these years. There’s been a lot of clues found in the malware already earlier as well towards the Russian connection, or that they’re Russian language. But especially now that we’ve been able to track more the operational side and the tactics and the methods, we are quite confident that it has to be a group who’s either directly within the government or working directly for the government engaging in this. We are confident that it’s a Russian-speaking group. And a group who operates from Russia. So if you put those two together, then it has to be the— then it points to the Russian government as being behind this cyber espionage operation.

Speaker F: Okay, but I mean, obviously all of those are pretty strong statements. So what has led you to be able to make those conclusions? What has led you to be able to say that they are operating on behalf of Russian policy?

Speaker E: On a technical perspective, the connections to Russia are a lot to do with things like Russian language artifacts that have been found in a lot of the samples and Russian language error messages. Also, we’ve looked at their apparent working times, the timestamps of these samples when they’ve been created or the malware has been created, and that coincides with time and with the working time in the Moscow time zone. And there are some other clues as to the time zones in which they’re operating. Again, that coincides with the Moscow time zone, or the Moscow Standard Time time zone, which is why we believe they’re operating from Russia. Then, the governmental connections come from the fact that they seem to be solely targeting governmental organizations or government-affiliated organizations, where the only value we can see in targeting those organizations is for political purposes. It’s clearly related to politics. In that sense, and that’s why we believe it’s so close to the government.

Speaker F: So what you’re saying is that one of the things that they’ve been doing is basically going for these cyber espionage targets or targets that the Russian government would be keen on attacking. What are those targets?

Speaker E: They’ve been especially interested in Eastern European and Central Asian governments, ministries of foreign affairs or parliaments or ministries of defense. But also more widely Western governments and think tanks, for instance. And in some cases even African and Asian ministries of foreign affairs have also been targeted.

Speaker F: So you say that they have been attacking Western and Eastern European governments. Which ones?

Speaker E: For instance, we point out in the white paper some old cases where they appear to have targeted, for instance, the Polish government, the Czech government. Georgia has been a recurring theme as well. These are all cases where we don’t know whether these governments were compromised, but we do know that they were targeted.

Speaker F: Obviously, much is made about advanced persistent threats, threat attacks from China. Is this an equivalent sort of attack? Is this something that you could call an advanced persistent threat? I mean, it’s persistent, isn’t it? It’s been going on for 7 years.

Speaker E: It’s definitely an advanced persistent threat in the same sense as what, what the Chinese advanced persistent threats as well are. That definitely counts in the same category.

Speaker B: As we’ve heard, the Russians aren’t alone in building this type of advanced persistent threat software. The US have accused China of using APTs to steal trade secrets and to take all of the 14 million records of US government employees from the Office of Personnel Management. Chinese cyber espionage has been pushing the US’s patience to the limit. An issue in the US presidential nominations, it’s claimed White House officials have drawn up economic sanctions for the worst offenders. Ahead of the Chinese president’s visit to the States, China and the US might make peace. The US think tank, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, recently released a report called “False Promises: The Yawning Gap Between China’s WTO Commitments and Practices.” Co-author Stephen Eazel of the ITF joins us from New York to explain. Stephen, welcome.

Speaker G: Thank you for having me.

Speaker B: Thank you. Now, Stephen, what’s the background to all of this?

Speaker G: Well, the background is first that China has consistently failed to live up to the commitments it signed up to when it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. And we see that in China contravening large number of its obligations, such as not forcing the transference of technology or intellectual property as a condition of market access when doing business in China, forcing local production as a condition of market access, not protecting foreign intellectual property rights. And the result of this is that Chinese economic growth is increasingly characterized by what we call innovation mercantilist strategies. These are policies that attempt to seek to grow innovation-based industries in China by favoring domestic Chinese producers at the expense of foreign ones. And as you’ve been talking about, theft of intellectual property has been a large part of the strategy. In fact, a recent study by the Commission on the theft of American intellectual property finds that Chinese IP theft alone costs the US economy $300 billion per year.

Speaker B: So cyber espionage then, it’s an actual part of Chinese overall policy. Is it a core part of their policy?

Speaker G: Absolutely. What’s been interesting is to see the evolution of China’s attempts in this space at least What China really wants to do is to accumulate foreign technology and intellectual property so that it can catch up to the global technology frontier, so to speak. And in the past, the way it tried to achieve that is by, again, getting companies to have to share their technology and their IP as a condition of joint venturing with Chinese companies to get access to Chinese markets. So they were trying to put in place rules that would induce its shift.

Speaker B: Okay, Stephen, we’ve already heard that the Russians are involved in this, and according to the Chinese, the US are doing the same to them. Isn’t everybody doing it?

Speaker G: Well, let me just say that the second step for China, as maybe US companies have moved some of their manufacturing or production activities over there, they’ve kept the high-end stuff like the design of the Apple iPhone, you know, here in the United States. And what China’s cyber espionage is intended to do is to get at that type of intellectual property to move up the value chain that they haven’t been able to get through other means. Now, to your question, you know, isn’t the United States and other countries doing the same thing? And the answer largely with the United States in the industrial competitiveness space is no. The U.S. government does not run active programs to go online and to leverage the internet to try and pilfer the intellectual property of other enterprises across the world and then hand that to our companies for the purpose of being competitive.

Speaker B: Okay, Stephen, Stephen, Stephen.

Speaker G: They will give advice on how they can defend against cyber attacks, but they don’t do it proactively to get industrial advantage.

Speaker B: Okay, we’re going to have to wrap it up there, unfortunately, Stephen. There is talk of the Chinese and the US signing an agreement on all of this tomorrow, but Perhaps we can come back to you and talk to you about that later. Okay, Stephen, thank you.

Speaker G: Thank you very much.

Speaker B: Thank you. Now, from the high-tech jungle to the real jungle, courtesy of high-tech. Eddie Game, the Asian-Pacific lead scientist for the global conservation group The Nature Conservancy, has pioneered a new method called bioacoustics that measures the health of a jungle by the sounds it emits and turns that into a visual image. It’s efficient, fast, and has a minimal impact on the wildlife. The technique where we could put forests back and soak up CO2. Eddie is in Papua New Guinea, and I asked him about the problems with mapping the jungle here.

Speaker C: Papua New Guinea jungle is deep, steep-sided ravines. So, I mean, really steep jungle. It’s amazing it even clings to the cliff, and it’s really wet. And then kind of up on these ridges and these hilltops, you have these little villages perched. They clear a space in the jungle, and they tend to garden around the villages, and they hunt. And the villages that we work in are completely subsistence subsistence villages. So they basically get everything they need from gardening or hunting, but that also takes a toll on the forest, especially with the increasing population. And so what the villagers do is try and organize their use of that forest so that they don’t degrade everywhere.

Speaker B: So basically what you wanted to do prior to this sonification was that what you wanted to do was find out exactly what species were in this huge jungle and in this very inaccessible jungle.

Speaker C: Yeah, and perhaps most importantly, we wanted to find out whether the areas, these conservation areas that we were trying to retain all of these species in, whether they were working, whether all of these species were still being retained there, or whether, like many other patches of forest around the world, we were sort of gradually losing the biodiversity.

Speaker B: And that would have been a tremendous task, wouldn’t it, given the jungle and given how many things are in there? You, you, you, the Prior to that, you have to go and count it, yeah?

Speaker C: Yeah, so traditionally this would have been done by a team of taxonomic experts. They sort of gather people from museums and universities, and you trek in there with this enormous field team and set up a big camp, and you put nets up to catch bats and birds and traps out to pick up mammals, and you have an insect guy, an entomologist, there looking, and they’ll collect all these samples. And then usually what would happen is it’s hard to identify samples, especially insects, in places like Papua New Guinea, because many of them are undescribed. So you’d wait years and years to know exactly how many species you found. So it was a big expensive process that really not many organizations have the resources for anymore.

Speaker B: Okay, so what is this new method?

Speaker C: Yeah, so we were using an approach called acoustic ecology where, you know, I guess to describe it, we have backpacks just like anyone else, but instead of being kind of filled with nets and traps, they’re filled with small but high-definition recording devices. And we would trek into the middle of different patches of forest all throughout these communities and strap them to trees at random but predetermined points, and then we’d leave them out for a few days, come back and collect them, and then analyze the sound we’re hearing. And what we’re looking for in that sound is basically kind of how complete the soundscape is. So there’s this theory that in an intact forest, animals have evolved so that they can hear each other essentially, so they don’t outcompete each other for sound. So what that means is that they occupy a lot of different places in the in the sound frequency, and they vocalise in different ways. Because they’re vocalising to be heard by each other, they, you know, an intact forest should have most of those frequency niches filled. Now, as you lose species, you also lose some of those niches. So we can analyse the sound and basically look at how complex and how full the soundscape is and use that as a measure of the number of species that are there.

Speaker B: It’s almost like a palette of colours, isn’t it, Eddie? I mean, you’re seeing A healthy forest is very vibrant, full of colour, and then something that is less healthy is a bit more pallid.

Speaker C: In fact, it’s just like a palette of colour, because what we do with the sound is analyse, take, we sort of sample it and we turn it into a set of colours. And so in order to visualise what 24 hours of sound looks like in the forest, we calculate a whole pile of indices of that sound and represent them as colours. To do this, we work with some really clever computer scientists at the Queensland University of Technology who help us process these huge amounts of data. Traditionally, when you look at sound, you would look at something called a spectrogram, which is essentially the frequency of a sound by the time of the sound. If we were to look at a 24-hour period in the rainforest on a spectrogram at the conventional scale, it would be a 13-kilometre-long image. So you can imagine just scrolling forever on your computer. But with the help of these computer scientists, what we’ve been able to do is essentially compress that to a colourful 24-hour image. That means we can kind of rapidly compare what 24 hours in the sound of a forest looks like in different places.

Speaker B: Eddie Game of The Nature Conservancy. Meanwhile, the French government wants to create a similar healthy datascape and extend its act to delete irrelevant information on us on the internet, just as dead trees fall down and decay, the French think dead facts should too. France thinks that the data about you should be relevant, and it’s been trying to force the data giant Alphabet, the technology company formerly known as Google, to comply. But will they? Here is Florence Chaffiol-Chaumont, head of data privacy practice at the Paris law firm Auguste Duboussy.

Speaker H: Google is saying that the French data protection authority is trying to have an extraterritorial application of French law.. But the CNIL answers that it’s just compliance with the European law and it’s not just specific for France. It should be applied like that in all other European countries and not only in France. So there might be other decisions, data protection authorities in Europe which will have the same approach. If a U.S. citizen asks something to google.com, a delisting, I’m not sure it’s going to work, but if a French citizen asks a delisting of an URL, then it’s going to— it should apply according to the CNIL also on google.com. So it would be globally, you know, all over the world. And the new regulation should change the financial sanctions. And the amount of the fines could go up to 5% to 7% of the global turnover of a company. And then maybe it’s going to change for Google because they will maybe try to comply at least a little bit with the data protection authorities’ requests, just to avoid financial sanctions which could be much higher than the ones they can have now.

Speaker B: Florence Chaffiol-Chaumont on the line from Paris. Now, Sir Clive Sinclair, the inventor of the British calculator, is coming out of retirement to encourage us all to learn coding. He’s doing it on his old Spectrum ZX80 using an emulator you can log on to via the web. Best remembered for the Sinclair C5 scooter, he was ahead of his time in the 1980s when the Austin Allegro was the ultimate in transport technology. Here’s Sir Clive’s old friend David Levy of Retro Computers to tell us why coding matters.

Speaker I: I suppose the main difference about ours is that we’ve simplified the whole process of learning to code, and we’ve provided some software, what we call a coding teacher, which monitors the child as they’re coding and tells the child when they’re making a mistake and how to correct it, how to put things right. It’s like having a computerized human teacher who watches your every move as you’re writing code and tells you where you’re going wrong.

Speaker F: Okay, so what was the inspiration for this? Why did you suddenly decide that this was something that you had to do?

Speaker I: I’ve actually been very enthusiastic about teaching young people to code ever since I left university, got my first job teaching software programming at Glasgow University Computer Science Department. And I always felt, having had that experience, that it would be possible to teach even younger people to code. And I’ve tried in various ways over the years and got to the point now where we’ve just launched the product, which is a retro version of the Sinclair Spectrum. And in order to try to regain this country’s having young people coding, which is the way we were in the 1980s. We’ve launched this new scheme to make it really easy for young people to learn to code.

Speaker F: So what was the problem? I mean, as you said, we were once at the forefront of computing, and now suddenly all of that computing, all of those computer whiz kids that we used to know, we don’t really see very much about in the newspapers.

Speaker I: Well, that’s right. I think what’s happened is, broadly speaking, is this: in the early 1980s, there were products like the Sinclair Spectrum, there was the the BBC Micro, there was the Commodore 64, and all of those products were very straightforward for people to learn to code. But as computers became more sophisticated and we— one saw things like the IBM PC and the computers themselves became more sophisticated and writing code for them, I think discouraged a lot of people who had been enjoying coding as a hobby. It just discouraged people from learning to code and trying their hand at it. And so from being the, probably the world leader in coding for young people, we sort of slipped back into a kind of quagmire. And obviously over the years, a lot of people all over the world have learned to code in more advanced languages than the ones that were popular in the ’80s. But we see a possibility now with products like the ZX Vega, which is the retro version of the Spectrum,, and with the software that we’ve launched free of charge, on the internet for young people to code for what is essentially a very simple computer.

Speaker B: Jack Schofield was the editor of Practical Computing back in the days when the UK boasted of being at the forefront of computing, and anyone who could string some code together was called a computer whizkid. Jack tells us why he thinks those days actually have gone.

Speaker J: I think it’s probably impossible, but I also think it’s a terrible idea. It wasn’t very good the first time round, and I think, you know, the world has moved on and coding has moved on too.

Speaker F: In what sense though? Why has coding moved on? Do you think then that the days of the Spectrum ZX80 were then and that they can’t be applied to now?

Speaker J: Well, the whole idea of programming in BASIC is very old-fashioned. BASIC derived from a 1950s programming language called Fortran. In the 1960s, it was a very good way of relating to the kind of computers that we had then, which were basically text-based and programmatic in a sense. I mean, you know, one thing happened after another. There’s actually a much better programming language for children called Scratch, a programming environment that was developed by the guy who did Smalltalk, Alan Kay. So it’s an object-oriented language and it has lots of graphics primitives., and a man at MIT called Mitch Resnick converted this into something called Scratch, which is actually a very good environment for children to program. It is actually quite widely used in the UK and has been— what, came out in 2003? So there’s more than a decade of serious academic research and serious experimentation into the value of doing things this way rather than the the way we did it in 1982.

Speaker F: So why do you think Sir Clive Sinclair is wanting to do this then? Do you think it’s yet another sort of one exercise in one of his ideas, and he had many that didn’t seem to work, or do you think it is a serious attempt?

Speaker J: Well, there’s a commercial angle because retrocomputing is obviously selling £100 Spectrum emulators which have got an ARM chip inside. Which is quite something because you can download a free Spectrum emulator and run it on your PC or probably your phone or iPad or any other device, and there are also Spectrum emulators that run in browsers. So it is an exercise in nostalgia rather than having kind of a lot of sound logic behind it. The cynic in me suggests that it might be a response to the BBC doing the micro:bits, you know, where the BBC is giving away these tiny, tiny computers on a credit card-sized board to British schoolchildren as a way of introducing simple programming. So I don’t know. There was a long battle between Uncle Sir Clive and Acorn over getting the contract for the BBC Micro. The BBC got it, which more or less meant that Spectrums didn’t get used in schools., and it meant that most schoolchildren learned BBC BASIC rather than Sinclair BASIC.

Speaker B: Now, you’ll know if you’ve looked at my pictures online that I’m no fashion expert, although one of my smartphones is a Prada. So I was happy to learn this week that tech is the new black when it comes to the autumn/winter collections. Engageworks, the London-based wearables company, claims that technology, like the mobile phone, will be an indispensable part of fashion. To be hip, our clothes will be happening.

Speaker D: Here’s researcher Amelia Coleman of Engageworks to tell us more. It’s the fashion designers who understand that they have to embrace technology in order to innovate. It’s one of the driving forces, I think, in general in society and in industry right now, and fashion is no different. So it’s definitely paying attention to what’s happening with the latest technologies, and it’s using it to create create a new kind of fashion and develop things that haven’t been done before. So it’s a really exciting time in fashion and technology, and they’re coming together is creating new exciting things. There’s fun things like clothes that can tell your mood and they change color with how you are feeling. So they sort of adapt and you can have this personal personalized look to you. So as your moods change over the evening, this is reflective in your clothes, and it’s a great conversation piece. It’s also really unique and sort of a beautiful standout statement. So that’s one of the more fun examples, but then there’s things that are really exciting taking place. Like for instance, there’s these hair extensions now that are capacitive and with a touch interface. So for instance, I could be having a conversation with you and sort of twirling my hair, stroking it, and you wouldn’t even notice probably.

Speaker B: But meanwhile, I would be recording the conversation that we are having that’s taking place. And then there’s solar fiber as well.

Speaker D: Tell us about that. What’s solar fiber? This is something that I think has been coming for a while. You know, where green technology, you know, they’ve been playing around with sustainable fashion for a long time, but sort of the problem with it has been that it hasn’t been that fashionable. And while people are behind the movement, they’ve been sort of reluctant to embrace the clothes because maybe they aren’t quite up to the standards of the fashion taste that people expect. So what’s really exciting now is that there’s We’re starting to come up with very wearable solar fiber clothes that actually use the energy from our bodies to collect solar energy that can, for instance, charge your iPhone or be used in other ways to collect the energy and store it.

Speaker B: So is that energy that I’m actually generating from, say, walking around? Or, I mean, if it’s my body heat, then, you know, theoretically they may be able to power me down. I might be the thing that loses charge instead of my phone.

Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, they say that, um, with 60% of the energy that we consume through food escapes the body through heat. So Solar Fiber, it’s figured out a way to capture this energy to, to power your smartphones to power your watches to be renewable. And it’s also, the yarn can be used in lots of different ways, so they can be for bags, for jewellery, bikinis, hats, jackets, and this is sort of maybe the future. Maybe we won’t need chargers for our smartphones in the future, it will just be in our clothes and it will be part of the fabric of life, if you will.

Speaker B: Now, Tim Spith, my producer, is here to tell us what we’ve got on the programme next week.

Speaker A: Tim, what’s coming up? So next week we’re going to be talking to two cyborgs from New York, and your eyes, eyebrows might raise at the idea of a cyborg, but what we’ve got is a guy who was born colourblind and has got an antennae sticking out of his head. And what that antennae does is it allows him to hear colours. So not only will we be speaking to him, but we’ll be hearing the sounds that he perceives colours through.

Speaker B: Yeah, but, and then he had quite a nasty accident, didn’t he?

Speaker A: Or something happened to him that wasn’t exactly nice. Well, a theme that we often pick up on this show of cybersecurity. His antennae was actually hacked. So as we move into the Internet of Things and wearables, it just opens the door, doesn’t it, for how, as our bodies get more connected to the internet, so too do they become more vulnerable to cyber hacking.

Speaker B: And there’s some films coming up, some film that a lot of people will be interested in.

Speaker A: What’s that? Exactly. And it’s not the first film about Steve Jobs, but it is a high-profile one. Michael Fassbender starring in that, and we’re going to be looking at has Apple lost its X factor?

Speaker B: Good, right. Well, you’re listening to Password on Resonance FM with me, Peter Warren, and I’m afraid if you’ve just joined us, you’ve 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. Password is produced by Angel Media Productions, CRC.

Speaker E: Goodbye.

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.