PassWord – 28th January 2015

Speaker A: Hello and welcome to Password with me, Peter Warren, on Resonance FM. Today we bring you the nurse in your bed, the lie detector in your pocket, and the the mother of electronic recordings. And we’ve details of our radio station’s fundraising auction, so get ready to bid for some sought-after tech, art, and music prizes. But first, Facebook has been hacked. The Lizard Squad hackers who brought down Sony’s PlayStation over Christmas have claimed responsibility, but were they really responsible? My sources in cyber security tell me that it’s much more likely to be a technical fault that caused the outage. That’s what Facebook itself says, and the fact that it affected all Facebook accounts worldwide for a round number of minutes is cited as further evidence. Adam Wynn at OpsWatch points out that the outage was global and simultaneous. That sort of monumental DDoS attack would have come with much louder bragging from Lizard Squad if it were true. A DDoS, of course, is a distributed denial-of-service attack in which a website is bombarded with thousands or millions of requests so that it crashes under the burden. Good, so now we’ve got to the bottom of that. What about the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, boldly going forth into the internet age and promising online voting by the time of the next general election in 2020? Michael Grant is an IT architect who’s worked on online voting systems here in London and in San Francisco, where he was Chief Technical Officer for Senator Mike Gravel’s presidential campaign. Mike was very skeptical about the speaker’s promise.

Speaker B: I think this is a terrible, unworkable idea, certainly by 2020. I have to say, in theory, I’m for electronic voting, but in practice it’s not possible, at least not with the current technology. There are just so many security issues involved with it that it’s not going to be possible anytime in the near future. I think the Digital Open Rights Group had a a very nice quote as part of this, and I’ll just read it for you. It says, voting is uniquely— is a uniquely difficult question for computer science. The system must verify your eligibility to vote, know whether you have already voted, and allow for audits and recounts. Yet it must always preserve your anonymity and privacy. Currently, there are no practical solutions to this highly complex problem, and existing systems are unacceptably flawed. And it’s a very, very true statement, and I think people take the privacy part for granted. A question I get asked a lot is, well, what about banks? I mean, banks keep your information private, and they— you know, you have a login for a bank, and we trust our money to the bank. But the one real difference between a bank and the government is that you need to tell the government that you voted and give them your vote, but you don’t want the government knowing How you voted, and you might say, well, gosh, you know, why do I care? Why do I care how, you know, if I tell the government how I voted? Well, I mean, okay, it’s maybe not so important to you if you vote, you know, mainstream, you know, but if you vote something that you wouldn’t want people knowing, I don’t know, if you vote for some terrorist party, you know, you wouldn’t want the government then coming back and tracing you if that was your, you know, your desire to vote that way.

Speaker C: Or even not terrorists, there’s a Pirate Party now. I mean, a lot of their platform, their manifesto is about civil disobedience, things that could get you into trouble. So that’s one example where you might not want anyone in the government or the authorities to know where you voted.

Speaker B: Very true. And I guess you could also have the argument, well, if these parties were there, maybe we should make our votes public to get rid of these parties. But that’s another point of view altogether.

Speaker C: So how does it work in places where it is the norm?

Speaker B: Well, it’s hardly the norm anywhere. The only country I know that’s doing it at the moment is Estonia. And I know there are also some big concerns over the privacy and the security of their system. I don’t know how long they’ll keep doing it. I don’t know if they’ll eventually run into some mass problem at some point. I guess time will play that one out.

Speaker C: What sort of problem could that be?

Speaker B: Okay, so when you have an online voting system— well, okay, when you don’t have an online voting system, you go in to vote, you, you know, you put your ballot in the box and/or check whatever it is, there’s a paper ballot to back it up, where you go, you physically have to go somewhere to show up to vote, even if it’s done electronically on site. That’s a lot harder to defraud because you have to affect millions of people. Than it would be if you could do it all electronically behind the scenes so that one person or a small group of people could affect an entire election. That’s a very scary thing.

Speaker C: What are the chances though? How easy would that be?

Speaker B: Oh, it could be very easy. You get someone writes a special virus that goes around and infects all the computers and then changes all the votes halfway down the pipeline somewhere or someone breaks into the the main voting computer and changes all the votes and the fraud. There’s just so many ways. It’s uncountable. It’s not a problem that’s easy to get your head around because it’s not like plumbing where just water is involved. There’s all these electronic systems that it’s very difficult to know exactly what each component is doing and secure each component of everything along the way.

Speaker C: But there must be systems like that where you’ve got scrutiny over the whole system.

Speaker B: In the computer world, it’s just not true. We’re not there. The technology does not exist to do that. Things are too vastly complicated at too many different levels to secure every level, and there are just too many ways to intercede electronically in any digital system.

Speaker A: The 2015 election campaign’s well underway now, and the National Health Service is a big issue. Jane Wyatt’s been finding out how new technology could help to join up health and social care and prevent the winter bed crisis in hospitals by helping older or chronically ill patients to go home with an app instead of taking up space on the wards. There’s a nurse in your bed, a Finnish app called Beddit. It’s a sensor that goes in the bed under the bottom sheet. Lasse Lepiköpi explains how it works.

Speaker D: Yeah, I think it’s an option for other monitoring techniques. I think there will be more advanced— I think in any case the monitoring will become ambient, so that there will be either some like implants that will provide data or sensors that are integrated into the somewhere in the bed structures or even the rooms, there are already some, like, really preliminary results just using the Wi-Fi networks to detect the heart rate of the people in the room or whatever. But in any case, I would say that the monitoring will become ambient, and sensor in the bed is just one one option in that, and that’s already here.

Speaker C: So when you talk about ambient sensors, do you think these will be everywhere in hospitals? If they’re in Wi-Fi, what about privacy issues? Surely there might be a danger that people’s private data, their health metrics, might somehow be made public? What’s the prognosis there?

Speaker D: Even the systems today, others in the same room or in the room next to that room are listening. So it’s never, never, it’s like solid proof of being total privacy. But the benefits of having these like digital archives of health data and maybe using some codes for the people instead of names or some IDs that then somehow combine this information so that you can have all kinds of data moving in all kinds of networks. But if you don’t have like an ID to the person, for example, you have a code that could be only combined to that person and ID in a certain place, which is very secure. So then you can already move all kinds of data in all kinds of networks. There are a lot of possibilities, but the benefits will overrule these technical issues and privacy questions. Because the benefits are so huge.

Speaker A: That’s Lasse Lepikirpi in Espoo, Finland. And right here in London, a team at Imperial College have created another app called the Accupebble. Professor Esther Rodriguez-Villegas believes it has a great future in screening, diagnosis, and management of chronic breathing problems.

Speaker E: The thing is that many old people suffer from chronic conditions, and one of the things that you would want to be monitoring in chronic conditions is actually breathing. And many breathing-related parameters. So I just told you sleep apnea, but our device can also do things like breathing rate, or we have started to work on things like lung volumes that are important, for example, for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. So obviously, that is clearly an application of this technology for all people. We just have to developing more in that direction, let’s say.

Speaker C: What about the problem of data security? Obviously the, the readings are very personal, they’re confidential. How can that stay confidential if people have access to it?

Speaker E: So it depends because there are different levels of information that we are going to provide. So the, the, the basically there is the level of information in which your data has already been processed. And there is very little extra that can be extracted from that. And there is obviously the raw signal as well. In any case, we are encrypting that data. So if you are talking of the breach of information during transmission, we encrypt the data. And once it reaches the doctor’s office, if it’s the doctor who wants to see it, well, it’s the same problem that you could face with any clinical record, let’s say.

Speaker C: Of course, if you’ve got elderly people using these devices, they might feel uncomfortable or confused about them, and they might miss having someone actually to take care of them, either in hospital or coming to them at home. To what extent can the technology really do the job of caring?

Speaker E: Well, that’s the thing, that I wouldn’t say—

Speaker F: First, we are not—

Speaker E: our aim was never to either eliminate the medical professional or to completely say, okay, we are not going to need— we are going to eliminate any kind of human care. Never. In fact, that’s totally part of the equation. Our aim with this thing was let’s make diagnosis possible for people for which it wouldn’t be possible, or let’s improve the standard of care which already exist, but not we are going to substitute things. No, that’s not the point. The point is there are no resources to address everybody or to address the problem, and that this can optimize it. But I am by no means an advocate of getting rid of, you know, the human part of the equation, let’s say, of the specialist care.

Speaker A: Professor Rodriguez, who’s developed the Accupebble with her team at Imperial College in London. And if you were listening to last week’s show, you’ll remember we interviewed the scientific advisor behind Ex Machina, the new science fiction film about a man possibly modeled on a cross between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates who creates lifelike female robots with near-perfect artificial intelligence. That’s also the theme of a new book called Skin Job by Australian technologist and writer Bruce McCabe. Bruce’s book is set in the near future where robots with lifelike skin and polymer muscles can substitute for wives and girlfriends. But the really scary predictions in this book are about the police.

Speaker G: We’re only a step away from most citizens being extremely, um, involved in their own security and having an app downloaded on the smartphone with a push button away from the police department and streaming live video and audio, you know, whether from their pocket because they’re under duress or in a public place because they’ve just seen something.

Speaker A: One of the things that you instantly reminded me of is there is a CCTV initiative over in the UK at the moment that was started up by an individual who said that He decided to do it and to run this community CCTV initiative because he’d rung the police up and the police, because there were people in his garden, and the police had said, well, have they broken in yet? And he said no. And they said, well, ring us up when they break in. Now obviously what you’re talking about is that if you can get some subscription from the community and the police and they’re working together sharing resources, then you’ve actually got some pull on the police as well.

Speaker G: Yeah, and also new challenges. Look, the last one, Pete, which is a central part of the book, is the idea of handheld lie detectors, which although they seem sci-fi, are extremely real, and I’ve had some of the technology demonstrated to me. They’re just not as accurate as they need to be. I had a demonstration of lie detection software being used by an insurance company in its call centre. So testing claimants over the phone through voice stress analysis as to whether they might be lying about their claims. And then there was a technology deployed, I think it was 2008, in Afghanistan and Iraq by the US military in handheld form, very similar. It was called the PCAS. So don’t ask me what the acronym stands for now, but it was a preliminary sort of assessment tool. The idea was if you’re interviewing someone beside the on the road near an unexploded device or an incident, then you might ask them some baseline questions to baseline your polygraph, and then you might ask them whether they knew anything about the bomb, and it would give red or green lights. Very, very provocative technology. Red for lying or green for telling the truth. It was withdrawn after some considerable controversy when it became public it was being used. In trial form. But that technology features at the very top of the wishlists of US police departments for an investigative tool. So in Skinjob, I’ve really had a tremendous amount of fun looking at a specialist investigator in the FBI who carries one and the social consequences of that. That’s the really fun part. You know, having a cop stick something under your nose in the street while he interviews you and it gives out red and green lights. How does that change your attitude to the interview? And what if he strays from the questions about the particular incident at hand and asks you other questions which could be self-incriminating? And what does internal affairs do with that? And what does this cop’s, you know, what do his colleagues think of him and do they kind of avoid him, which they do of course in my novel. Keep their distance. So all sorts of complications and interesting scenarios come out of policemen running around with lie detectors. But I have to say that not only is it at the top of the wish list for these guys, but the technology is developing very rapidly, and it needn’t be perfect to be deployed because the pressure, as I say, is moving with terrorism—

Speaker A: to speed.

Speaker G: They want to triage people on site and quickly find out who or who isn’t involved in an incident. So whether we like it or not, and personally I find it extremely disturbing, these devices will appear in police hands and it will be in the not too distant future.

Speaker A: Bruce McCabe with his vision of the spy in our pockets. And thanks to impassioned speeches by 4 noble lords, an edited version of the Snooper’s Charter was prevented from being included in the new counter-terrorism bill bill this week. Lord Strassburger called it a gratuitous affront to parliamentary democracy and called instead for a proper debate on surveillance. This is Password with Peter Warren on Resonance FM, and after this, on Wednesday, you can hear Kitchen Magic Time. After the Friday edition, it’s The Other Rock Show. Now, the smartphone’s everyone’s essential bit of kit, and ahead of the Mobile World Congress next month, All the manufacturers are polishing their shiny new models. But Jane’s got a new smartphone that promises to not only keep her connected, but also save the world. It’s called a Fairphone and aims to bring fair trade into the electronics market. Daria Koniuszkina, on a Skype call from Amsterdam, explains how.

Speaker F: So we are taking a holistic approach and we are making interventions in 5 different action areas. So one of them is mining. Everything starts from the ground, right? Phones are no exception. And actually, some people would be surprised to know that every smartphone contains about 40 different minerals. Some of them, yeah, and some of these minerals such as tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold in many cases are mined in conflict zones such as the Democratic Republic of Congo. In the mines controlled by armed militia. So in this way, the mobile industry in fact fuels the war. So at Fairphone, we want to source materials that support local economies and not armed groups. So far, we have only managed to make the first step and ensure that two minerals, tin and tantalum, in our first Fairphone come from conflict-free mines in Congo. And we are researching how to take the next step and look at the other minerals and to integrate more conflict-free and fairly mined minerals in our next phone. But that’s work in progress. And then, so mining is at the one end of the phone supply chain, and at the other end there is manufacturing, where minerals after a long journey throughout the whole world come to a factory in the form of phone components for assembly. So as well as miners and any other people in the world, we think that factory workers deserve safe conditions, fair wages, and worker representation. And the list of standards that can be improved here is, well, endless, to be honest. So this is why we are working closely with manufacturers that want to invest in employee well-being. The factory we’ve been working with to produce the first Fairphone is based in China. And it doesn’t mean that we magically found a fair factory in China, but we were looking for companies that would share our values-based business practices and be willing to offer transparency. So before the start of our production, there was conducted a social assessment of the factory, and the factory made certain improvements according to the recommendations drawn from the assessment. For example, better fire safety, improved lighting, free lunch for employees. So small things, but they make a difference as well. And yeah, actually, to be fully transparent, we put this social assessment report on our website. And further, to enable workers the ability to voice and address their needs and concerns, we, we’ve built the Worker Welfare Fund. Together with the factory. So for each Fairphone produced, $5 is invested in this fund, and the money in the worker welfare fund is spent on projects that benefit workers. So such projects are proposed to the board of the fund by worker representatives that are elected by the entire factory.

Speaker C: We already, some of us, buy, for example, fair trade bananas or coffee, and we expect to pay more for that. So how does the pricing work on the Fairphone?

Speaker F: We do want to show that if you put social and environmental values first, it doesn’t mean that your product necessarily will become much more expensive than other products in the market. So the first Fairphone is priced at €310, that’s around £250. We actually have published a cost breakdown on our website so that anyone can actually see why it is priced like that, what makes the price.

Speaker C: So it’s all transparent and it’s all clear. How is it going? Are you actually making a successful business out of it?

Speaker F: We have sold almost 60,000 Fairphones in 1.5 years. And we, we think that, yeah, this really shows that there is demand for more ethical products also in the electronics industry. And yeah, we are so far, we are operating, we are designing our next phone. Yeah, certainly so far so good.

Speaker A: You can find more about that mobile phone at fairphone.com. Jay’s been finding out too about the Information Age exhibitions at the Science Museum in Kensington, where you can trace the history of electronic music from its earliest beginnings.

Speaker C: This is the story of electronic sound, and it all started in the UK with Daphne Oram, who was born in 1925 and worked at the BBC in the 1950s and early 1960s. And she used natural sounds and tape recorders to produce many compositions and dreamed of making machines that would give her complete control of composing and creating sound. So long before the synthesizer, Daphne Oram, working at the BBC BBC had often taken the opportunity at night to make music with any equipment she could find, using things she’d heard in avant-garde art music from Germany and France. She urged the BBC to establish the experimental music studio, the Radiophonic Workshop, which eventually opened officially in April 1958. She left the BBC within a year of its opening to set up a a private electronic music studio, almost certainly the first run by a woman. So all that happened in the 1950s, and there’s some lovely black and white pictures here of Daphne Oram bespectacled, wearing a smart suit, the short 1950s hair, bending over all these antique machines in the BBC. But the music she made really sounds quite modern. And that’s extraordinary because her inspiration came from a book written in 1627, The New Atlantis by Francis Bacon. And there’s a quote from that book here alongside inside Daphne Oram’s machine. We also have sound houses where we practice and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmonies which you have not, of quarter sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Diverse instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have, together with bells bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep. Likewise, great sounds extenuate and sharp. We make diverse tremblings and warblings of sounds which are in their original entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which set to the ear do further the hearing greatly. We have also diverse strange and artificial echoes reflecting the voice many times and as it were tossing it, and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper, yea, some rendering the voice differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have also means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances. So that was the inspiration, the Soundhouse from the New Atlantis. You can see here Daphne Oram’s machine. It looks like something that Heath Robinson might have made with film and wires. And cables and a sort of Meccano set holding it all together and some enormous BBC speakers. This is part of the archive kept at Goldsmiths University in South London in memory of Daphne Oram’s work. This is how ARAMIC works. It has two principal components. The waveform scanners are at its heart, a glass slide with the drawn sound is inserted into the scanner, where a flying spot from a cathode ray tube traces the shape repeatedly. The speed at which it happens determines the pitch of the sound. The output of the scanning tube is then passed through the drawn volume controls and passed to a recording device or an audio amplifier. And this is how it sounds.

Speaker A: The sound of aromics. This is Password on Resonance FM, and if you’ve just joined us, you’ve missed it. But if you do like listening to Resonance FM, and we like you listening to it, what we’d also like is for you to help raise money for it. Now, we’re having an auction on Resonance FM in which you can buy tech, art, and music, and some of the most fabulous prizes The fundraising events will be listed on the fundraising website fundraiser.resonance.fm. There you’ll be able to get details of the entire competition and some of the amazing things that are on offer. We’ll be back next week, and you can find out more about new technology in society on our website Future Intelligence and sign up for our regular newsletter. Password is made by Angel Media Productions CIC. Thanks for listening. Goodbye.

Speaker C: This is Vanilla Fielding. I’m listening to Resonance FM, London.