PassWord – 28th October 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 on Resonance FM with me, Peter Warren. The technology show that challenges the part that it plays in our lives and asks whether other people should be doing so too. In today’s show, Smarter UK, the smart infrastructure initiative aiming to overcome the barriers to building the smart cities of the future. But do we want them? Are they safe? And in whose interests are they working? President Obama has designated October National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and in the UK this week it’s Security Serious Week. All a little ironic given the news of the TalkTalk fiasco a week ago. So we look at why the criminals are giving the police the runaround and why cybersecurity companies appear to be failing us. And finally, has the love affair launched by the internet in 1996 begun to run out of steam? In the studio we have two guests to talk about new projects to try to put something back into the electronic emptiness of our social media conversations. First, though, Dan Byles of TechUK, one of the people behind an idea to make our utilities, transport, and communication systems as smart as our phones, often by engaging with them, is on the line to explain why we want this. Dan, welcome to Password.

Speaker C: Good afternoon.

Speaker B: Dan, you’ve said, or the idea of this is that a smart city will improve our lives. Do you want to give me a few examples of how that will happen?

Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. I sometimes think we get wrapped up in the terminology. Nobody wants to live in a smart city. People want to live in a city where transport systems run more effectively, where there’s less congestion, where the air is cleaner, where our energy is delivered more efficiently and from more sustainable sources, and where we have more control. And increasingly we’re moving towards a world where we’re seeing more customization and individualization of services, and people are put in control of the sort of various factors that influence their lives. And that’s what smart cities are about. It’s about when people have used the most up-to-date technology in city planning for as long as we’ve had cities. This is about taking some of the recent advances in technology around the Internet of Things and big data and applying them to urban infrastructure.

Speaker B: Dan, we’re having a little problem with the signal. Could you stand still and perhaps talk up a little because you’re—

Speaker C: Yes, I do apologize.

Speaker B: That’s fine. That’s very good. One of the issues many of the commentators have said with this sort of infrastructure is You know, the smart city is going to be based on an infrastructure that’s actually quite insecure. What’s the point of putting something smart on something that appears to be a bit dumb at the moment?

Speaker C: Are you talking about data and—

Speaker B: Well, not just data, but also the infrastructure itself, the critical national infrastructure that a smart city sits on top of, the utility systems. A lot of that is not up to speed at the moment, is it?

Speaker C: Well, this is about making sure that things are up to speed. That’s the point. I mean, We already have a world in which almost all of these things sit on some sort of ITC system or computer system. So this isn’t just about, you know, is it secure or insecure by, you know, having increasing use of sort of IT systems. I mean, a key part of the sort of smart city debate is actually about resilience and resilient cities. And I see sort of successful smart infrastructure as playing a number of roles. One is about the citizens ultimately. It’s about easing the friction on the citizen’s path through life and enabling them to go about things in a smoother way. But in terms of security and resilience of infrastructure, it’s about making sure that infrastructure systems in cities are increasingly, for example, decentralized. Having a single energy system based on a large pipe that pumps energy in from one location is not as secure, for example, as having a distributed energy system based on microgrids where people are creating more energy in their own homes and in their own neighborhoods. So I don’t necessarily see that the concept of smart should create more security problems in terms of delivering infrastructure.

Speaker B: Okay, isn’t there an issue though with a lot of this that we’re actually locking ourselves into technology instead of actually being liberated and being freed by technology? We’re just becoming more and more and more dependent on it.

Speaker C: Well, I think it’s inevitable that we’re becoming more dependent on technology, and that is nothing new. But the concept of lock-in is a very real concern that I know some people have. And I think that’s because in perhaps older, more traditional ways of going about some of these contracts, you would get a single large company coming in, kind of trying to sign a multi-billion-pound contract for 20 years and gaining some kind of proprietary lock-in. And this is absolutely not about that, not when it’s being done in the way that most people in this sector are trying to operate. We’re increasingly seeing technology as being an enabling infrastructure based on open standards, based on open APIs. It’s actually trying to get away from the idea that you need a giant company to come in and do it all. So for the sake of argument, you look at London, you look at Copenhagen, these are cities that are opening up their data. They’re putting data that used to be locked inside systems sitting in sort of local authorities, sort of, you know, computer systems. They’re opening it up for free, and they’re making it available for SMEs, for small companies, even for citizens to access that data to create apps and applications to create new services in ways that they never could have done before. So it’s not actually locking us in, it’s actually freeing us and opening up things and creating a more sort of fertile ecosystem for ingenuity and innovation to improve people’s lives.

Speaker B: I mean, that’s the interesting point though, isn’t it? Because that’s one of the things that will actually have to be won. That’s the argument that will have to be won, isn’t it? Because it doesn’t appear as though there’s much demand from the person on the street for this at the moment.

Speaker C: I disagree, I disagree. Well, I understand the point, and I do— I agree with you that we have to make sure that people are satisfied that things like data privacy and data security are taken care of. But again, that’s not necessarily a new problem. I disagree with the idea that people don’t want this. If you look at some of the more obvious areas of what you might call smart infrastructure, Uber. What is Uber? Uber is starting to get away from the old capacity-led model of delivering transport. Here is a train, it goes from here to here at this time, you know, like it or leave it, like it or lump it., and it’s getting more towards the citizens being in control of their journey. Mobility as a service rather than buying a car, buying a train ticket. And they’re doing it through the use of real-time data based on their phone that knows where they are and where they want to go. It knows where the Uber taxi driver is. It puts them together through communication and creates a transaction. That is a smart city service. Oyster cards are a smart city service. These things are actually making people’s lives easier.

Speaker B: Perhaps. I mean, Oyster card’s a very good example, isn’t it? There you have an Oyster card, you have this technologically enabled transport system. However, the London transport system is probably the most expensive in the world. The reason for Uber is that people are actually after cheap transport. They want things that actually improve their lives. They want something that will help them get a job.

Speaker C: And that’s exactly what this is about. That’s exactly what this is about. As I said, it’s about ultimately trying to put the citizens more in control of their lives, more in control of the sort of data that swirls around that is currently used by other organizations sort of to do things to citizens. Actually, it’s about putting that data into the citizen’s hands, enabling them to use it to do things for themselves.

Speaker B: Okay. Well, then as a final question, how should the citizen engage? How can they become involved in this process? Where do they go to find information?

Speaker C: Well, I kind of have two layers here. So on the first hand, there is a danger that I recognize that we mustn’t allow this to create a sort of digital divide whereby citizens who understand and get engaged perhaps get access to better services, citizens who don’t can’t, don’t. So ultimately you shouldn’t have to actively engage, you should simply find that the streets are less congested, the air is cleaner, the city is becoming a better place to live. But for citizens who want to be actively engaged, it needs to be as simple as possible to do so. So for example, Copenhagen, the long-term plan in Copenhagen, once they put all of this data into this sort of citywide data hub, is to create a city app store whereby citizens who want to engage and do interesting things can come in and access that data themselves and write their own cycling app, write their own apps and make use of available data. It’s a bit early at the moment to be able to point to obvious locations where people can do that because we’re right at the start of this sort of revolution, if you like. But this has to have the citizens at the center of it at the end of the day. I mean, ultimately, smart cities are about 3 things. It’s about creating a smarter, more interesting economic return to cities, creating jobs, helping the environment. It’s about making them more sustainable. But the most important thing is about improving quality of life.

Speaker B: Wonderful. Well, Dan Biles, thank you very much. We await with bated breath. That was Dan Biles, one of the moving forces behind the development of smart cities. And as we have heard, there are some very real security concerns about the development of these digital metropolises, particularly in the light of the hacking attack that caused a meltdown at the communications company TalkTalk last week. So how much confidence should we have in these companies? TalkTalk should be at the heart of the smart infrastructure, but it’s been hit by hackers 3 times recently. The last, most catastrophic occasion used some of the most classic hacking tactics in the cybercriminal’s handbook, according to experts. A well-known weakness dating back some 8 years, known as an SQL injection—essentially overloading a website’s code to make it crash—was used as the basis of a distributed denial-of-service attack. In that, computer viruses are used to infect and take over poorly protected computers, usually ones used at home, and those computers then make ongoing requests for information or swamp the fields on a website where data is entered. It generates panic among those protecting the websites and is used as a diversionary tactic to distract those protectors while the hackers home in on the database of personal information that they are really after. And it’s a method that hackers have honed for over a decade now. Last Thursday, on the day TalkTalk announced it was under attack, I spoke to Christian Karam, one of Interpol’s top researchers, about the criminals who are now striking fear into the boards of big companies.

Speaker D: When you used to steal credit card details and you used them online, you would buy with them a MacBook or an iPhone or something valuable that you can resell. But there was always the risk of controlled deliveries. So now with a stolen credit card, you can actually just buy Bitcoins. And you can just transfer this fiat currency within the stolen credit card account into virtual currency that you can cash out at a later time, and no one can ask you where did you get this money from,, but there isn’t any mechanism right now to verify that. That allows a lot of the people involved in this activity, under our estimation and studies, to cash out and make money per day from these accounts around €20,000 per day. Now, it’s a very high number when it comes to how much they get, but still this number is undetected because whatever you lose in these credit card accounts is reimbursed directly by banks. There’s insurance. They don’t worry about that. It’s part of their costs and losses that they will assume every year as part of their risk management. But all of that money is actually being swept and being taken into organized crime, being used for them. And when you are able to use 6, 7, 10 credit cards per day and buy with them Bitcoins and make €20,000 worth of investment in exchanges with that, that becomes something important.

Speaker E: And the really important thing about this as well is people have a tendency to think that somehow or other online crime, digital crime, cybercrime doesn’t actually have an impact. But the profits of that online crime, that cybercrime, they’re reinvested into other crime, aren’t they?

Speaker D: It is actually. And a lot of the money that is taken goes back into drugs, goes back into human trafficking, goes back into funding terrorism. It’s a cycle of a lot of illegal activities happening here and there. A lot of it as well goes back into cyber wars. I would say having the money, you go and you buy another type of malware and use zero-day, and then you sell it back to different entity. You as organized crime, you play a really big game of trading and being a broker of cyber weapons. This defeats all the activities that we’re trying to do in terms of securing space for citizens, for communities, for the world in general at a global level.

Speaker E: Everything you’re describing, it sounds like big business, but just big business with bad intentions. I mean, this sounds like the way that any other business would work, except they’re investing in things that are criminal, things that are illegal, ongoing means to perpetuate what they’re doing. Are they also subverting systems that we use? So obviously they’re using databases, but are they using things like fraud systems that identify individuals?

Speaker D: I think what we can say about them is that they are involved in activities that allows them to also target people that are misconducting within organizations. We have seen in instances organized crime putting people under extortion or just subjecting them to extortion when these people are actually involved in fraud within their own companies. So you go today, you commit a data breach into a company, you go through the data, and these are the organized crime group, and now analyzes the data and realizes that someone within the company has been doing embezzlement, so been trying to actually do salami attacks, or been stealing money from the company. They don’t route them up, they don’t go and say their name in the public, but they actually contact them and they blackmail them for more information and to make them also part of potentially an insider and for another company or for another attack in the future. This is how currently the whole state is based on. They really think 3, 4, 5 steps, and they have backup steps for these steps. So they were talking about a business continuity plan, disaster recovery plan, intrusion strategy. It’s, it’s a whole lot of offensive security and defensive security at the same time.

Speaker E: So, I mean, I’ve heard of cases of people, uh, going into banks, finding out that a bank is conducting an illegal process, and then blackmailing the bank, saying, look, you’re doing some— you’re providing accounts to people that you shouldn’t, so we want some money.

Speaker D: Yeah, but we’ve, we’ve seen a lot of these instances as well. There’s a lot of this activity, uh, that it revolves around, uh, being involved with the wrong entity at some point, and this entity might or might not be be subject to collaboration with organized crime without knowing.

Speaker E: Okay, but one of the points I was driving at was, you know, these people do seem to, the cyber criminals do seem to appear to be using technological techniques that have been evolved by businesses to actually do criminal things. I mean, what you’re talking about in terms of that data analysis of individuals within an organization The, the, the computer software company Splunk has been saying, hey, use our software to help you in computer security, use our software to identify data intrusions. What you’re saying is that these people are so sophisticated that they’re capable of using this software but to identify criminals for criminal purposes.

Speaker D: I think, and I think that, that, that shouldn’t become a some— that, that shouldn’t be something of a surprise because because we’ve always used also similar tools. I mean, we use Google and criminals use Google at the same time. They just query different things than what we query. They look at things in a different perspective, different way, and I think if you need to beat them, you need to start thinking a bit like a criminal. A lot of the aspects that they have, I mean, if I want to talk about fairness of using the same tools, I would say that really the only difference between law enforcement and criminals is that law enforcement is subject to data protection at a very, very different rate, whereas criminals do not have data protection rules. We are not allowed to do data processing because we have to respect a lot of the privacy of the citizen depending on the legal frameworks in different countries, whereas criminals don’t have legal boundaries, don’t have a territory, don’t have a legal framework. They are allowed to use it and they use it tools at a far more efficient level than what we do.

Speaker B: Well, that was Christian Caram of Interpol on the new smart criminals that threaten both our smartphones and our smart lives. It’s a complexity that’s beginning to scare a lot of people, a world they are being encouraged to live in that they do not understand. Something that also concerns my next two guests: Anthony Rose, the former head of BBC Digital, who has developed Six Tribes, a new social media website that cuts out the irrelevant and inane babble of others, and philosophy buff and entrepreneur Ferenci Ketazi, whose website, e3nki, is intended to fill the spiritual and mental emptiness of the electronic age. Anthony and Frenkie, welcome.

Speaker F: Thank you.

Speaker G: Thank you very much.

Speaker B: Now, Anthony, Six Tribes— what is Six Tribes?

Speaker F: Six Tribes is a new social network that cuts out the noise and takes you straight to the good stuff. For those who are on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks, you know that your feed is filling up with more and more spam, sponsored content, irrelevant posts, and the problem is that by following people you went to school with, you’re seeing everything they post, whether it’s something you’re interested in, a subject, a passion for you, or their baby photos or cats. And that’s a substantial problem with existing networks. So we created the concept of Six Tribes, where you follow interests or locations to completely change things into authentic conversations with people who get the same things that you do. We then conducted a survey through YouGov of 2,000 people asking about, do people see this as a problem on existing social networks? And it turns out for millennials, 20-somethings in particular, but for all ages, there’s a substantial problem that I think we’ll see a lot more news about, that people are finding these existing feeds more and more irrelevant. More than half of millennials said that the posts in their Facebook feeds in particular were irrelevant. People used the words like violated, boring and sponsored content and spam a lot. So with Six Tribes, we find other people like you. We find your tribe, whether you’re into craft beer, coffee, philosophy, or something just in that location. Get the app and join those tribes. And we’ve even created a tribe for Resonance FM. So anyone listening to the show, please get the app, join the Resonance FM tribe, and you can post in questions, you can listen to music from the show, and actually create that community that perhaps turns the radio station from broadcast into two-way.

Speaker B: Okay, now, Ferenczi, you obviously also see that social media’s got its shortcomings, and what is it that you’re trying to achieve?

Speaker G: So we’re, I think, very much concerned about building smart cities and smart TVs and smartphones but we’re not so sort of thinking about how we become, how can we become more smart and how can we increase our intelligence. So EFRINICKI is really aiming at helping you fulfill your truest, highest expression of yourself. And we do that through philosophy. Philosophy has different connotations. What we believe philosophy is really about is the love for wisdom. So philosophy is really I mean, through the years there’s been lots of discussion about inauthenticity and authenticity and how to find it for the self. So people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau talked about it and argued that it’s something that comes from within and not from external sort of influences. So what we’re trying to do is to build a community where we discuss about those things and try to find answers for themselves. And it’s also, we try to provide the right tools, strategies in order to help people, ambitious people, to get there more quickly.

Speaker B: So both of you seem to be saying that really, you know, there’s so much rubbish out there. I mean, I got a list sent to me yesterday from a journalist saying, here are 10 tips for Facebook users. Obtain a cute cat, dog, child, and photograph it often so you always have something to post when you’ve nothing interesting to share. Photograph every meal you eat, no matter how crap it looks, you’ll always get someone to write nom nom nom. Is that really what you’re talking about, Anthony? Is this the—

Speaker F: Yes, precisely. I think the problem is, you know, if you go to a school reunion, everyone’s trying to impress themselves. They’re married, they’re earning a lot, whatever it is. And that’s the problem with social media. By connecting with people you’ve gone to school with, or whether you’re following, everything’s about projection. And projection leads to, you know, grandiose claims. Everyone’s sharing photos of the fabulous kids or the fabulous holidays, but no one’s having a a real proper conversation. The social networks often make it very difficult to have a real conversation. And imagine you want to talk about something that’s of interest. You know that every post you make goes to everyone from your mother to your kids to people, you know, the boss. It’s really weird. Wouldn’t it be great if you could find other places where you could connect with people who are really interested in that? And so what we find in Six Tribes is the conversations are a lot more genuine. Some people hang out in a selfie tribe and they post selfie photos there, and that’s fantastic., but other people can hang out in Critical Thinkers and discuss deep issues free from selfie photos and cats. So the nice thing is it lets you create the conversations and have really, you know, deep or really frivolous conversations, whatever takes your— whatever floats your boat.

Speaker B: But it’s interesting, isn’t it? We had somebody on the program last week who, they ran a literary salon. They said that the interesting thing about the literary salon was that people were actually going— really only going there to meet up with other people who are like minded. Isn’t that really what you’re talking about, Frankie? It’s the same thing.

Speaker G: Um, yeah, sort of, I guess. I mean, we’re, we’re very concerned about finding truth for ourselves, uh, so we need to look back into history, we need to find out what is true for us, and that comes with work with, with ourselves. We need to be very, um, sort of aware that we need to find that for ourselves and not look at other external influences to, to define that. Um, so it’s, it’s also, um, about time to go from the victim sort of mindset into responsibility for ourselves. And if we don’t actually stop and think about those issues and those priorities, then we’re never going to find a solution for it.

Speaker B: So it’s important to discuss about those issues. And isn’t this more just a question of us coming to terms with the technology? We’re realizing that the technology is a tool. Up till now, we’ve been fascinated and obsessed with it. We seem to think we have to do everything electronically. Now what we’re realizing is actually, no, we look We look at this and we extract from it what is useful to us and what’s useful for making those connections, maybe connect up with those people that we can face-to-face, and those we can’t, we’ll use the technology for.

Speaker F: I think that being a technologist, you know, I and others think that technology is always new, everything is new, but in fact, I think, think about it, very little is really new. Technology provides a new app expression on something that we’ve always done before. And so, for example, to go back to smart cities, you know, once upon a time, we bought directly from farmers, and then we bought from grocers, and then supermarkets came along, and we drove further to get better pricing, and the supermarkets became the big aggregators. And governments created monopolies, and you had to go as a consumer through these monopolies, and they were inefficient. And what technology does almost goes a step back. There was a lot of friction between you and a farmer, or you and a grocer, that meant it was very inefficient. Cars had to drive between, you know, the costs were high. Technology can free that up. So while no one is looking necessarily for a smart city, everyone is going, can I get microbrewery coffee? Can I get my, you know, favorite brand shoes? Can I order something and have it delivered in 20 minutes? And for that, technology should seamlessly provide that frictionless way of connecting people together. And connecting people with services and so on. So we see the rise of Airbnb, Uber, and so on. And I see six tribes like that. Can it remove the friction? That’s why we called it six tribes, the six degrees of separation. Can we remove that and connect you with people who share those interests? So I think whenever I see new technological things, I think, how does it in fact provide the same solution just in a less friction way than we were used to for hundreds of years, whether it be getting your food delivered. Imagine that you can do, you know, anything you want can arrive at your house in minutes. I mean, as a consumerist society, so you can order some food, but instead of a bicycle courier racing across town to get it to you, the smart network connects people, the nearest one will deliver to you from the nearest store, those kind of, so those are these enabling things. And I think connecting you with other people in the world who are thinking the same things of you as you, I think that’s amazing.

Speaker B: That’s what we try to do. So that’s essentially what you’re saying then, is this is an adjunct to the smart city that we heard around, heard about at the top of the program. And also what you appear to be saying is that the internet’s all about niches. So it’s not just wanting to get those niche things that you want, it’s also to be in contact with those niche people that you want. I mean, one of the other points in these 10 tips that I extracted yesterday, Frankie, is that it says always avoid sharing inspirational slogans unless your life really is that empty. But you seem to be saying that people need to be inspired by philosophy.

Speaker G: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, all the questions that we have, all the, you know, vulnerabilities or the doubts that we have about ourselves, if we look back in time, people have thought about those things before. So all the answers are there. There’s so much wisdom out there that we’re not making use of. So technology is making that available for us. So through technology, We’re building that platform that would enable each one of the users to use specific tools and strategies based on philosophy that would help them identify those things for themselves.

Speaker B: But Anthony, doesn’t this just mean that we’ve got all of these smart things, the one smart thing that we’re lacking is ourselves?

Speaker F: No, I think that we in fact are carefully picking and choosing from the enormous numbers of things that dot-com startups are creating to give us better ways to live ourselves. Sometimes the first generations are slightly weird, or sometimes they’re very good, but then they become too popular and they, you know, start becoming filled with, you know, irrelevant content. But I think we are ultimately all very smart individually and are optimizing to pick up the pieces that help us live better and sometimes more frivolously. You know, we always did frivolous things. We’d be sitting in the sun or go to the cinema. Or hang out at the beach.

Speaker B: They’re just online equivalents of those. Right. I’ll throw one question up to both of you, which is really hobbyist, enthusiast, etc., etc. Isn’t Facebook just some— it’s now a hobby platform, isn’t it?

Speaker F: Anthony?

Speaker B: I’m not sure exactly what hobby platform is, but— Well, I mean, being engaged in social media seems to be the biggest hobby that everybody is in for at the at the moment, isn’t it?

Speaker F: I think people are looking to— there are a range of things that people are looking to achieve online. One of them, people are looking for a sense of belonging and a sense of community. People are looking to project an image. People are looking to get hired. And there are different sides. People are looking to talk directly with friends in between different apps that serve some of these things. I think Facebook was initially to connect with friends, but it’s really outgrown that. And it has turned, I think, into a projection mechanism. And I think people are now looking for new things, hence the rise of Snapchat and WhatsApp and other apps, as people look to re-establish different personal community connections. It’s just an evolution of what people want and the new technology that’s available.

Speaker B: But don’t you actually think, Ferenkie, that this is just really— we have all of these mechanisms, but we’re all feeling just very, very, very lonely.

Speaker G: Perhaps, potentially. I think Facebook, I mean, for me, it’s more like a tool that— I mean, technology is a tool usually, so it depends on how we use it that it makes it effective or not. So there’s so much irrelevance on Facebook as well, and lack of authenticity as well. So people are projecting, as Anthony said, projecting themselves in a certain way, or they want to come across in a certain image, but most of the things are not relevant because of the lack that we feel inside.

Speaker B: Well, we could talk about this forever, but I’m afraid that’s all we have time for. Thank you both. You’ve been listening to Password on Resonance FM with me, Peter Warren, and I’m afraid if you’ve just joined us, then you’ve missed it. Join us again next week to hear more about the technology that we can To be with or without, if BT will only let us go.

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.