Password – 4th February 2015

Speaker A: Hello and welcome to Password with Peter Warren. In today’s show, as Google and Uber announce the race is on to bring driverless cars to our cities, we have the first interview with the man behind the driverless buses that will be soon rolling along the streets of Greenwich. We also take surveillance to a new place. Cameras are now recording in our cowsheds. You heard it here first. Next year it will be on the arches. And we meet the winner of our competition to create the sound of travelling through time. First, here’s Jane Wyatt with a round-up of the latest technology news.

Speaker B: Security company FireEyes just released a new report about how they targeted the Syrian Electronic Army using female avatars on Skype to create a virtual honey trap, and by chatting to other people such as humanitarian relief workers and journalists in the conflict zone. Behind the Syrian Conflict’s Digital Frontlines is available online from FireEye. Britain’s Information Commissioner has just been granted new powers from 1 February to force National Health Service bodies to open the books on their data protection. This means all our confidential medical records are now subject to compulsory audit. The Commissioner, Christopher Graham, says the NHS has until now been one of the worst performers in protecting sensitive information, a major cause for concern. A report in the Times says that some of Alan Turing’s top-secret papers, which were used to repeatedly crack the Enigma codes used by the Nazis in World War II, have been discovered at the Bletchley Park code-breaking centre. They had been used as draft excluders and stuffed into cracks in the walls of Hut 6, where the historic breakthroughs were made by Turing and his team. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, is calling on the European Union to keep net neutrality in Europe. Sir Tim says in a blog post on the European Commission website that there should be no restrictions to internet access based on economic motivations. Back to you, Pete.

Speaker A: Right, now we’re joined in the studio by Tom Armstrong from the French computer security company Dashlane. They’ve carried out a survey which found that half of the people questioned are worried and confused about their online security. Dashlane aims to help by providing a virtual vault where you can store all your passwords. A different one for each of your social media channels, email, smartphone, bank account, the whole lot. Tom, welcome to Password.

Speaker C: Thank you very much.

Speaker A: So what did the survey show, and what do you think are the most worrying aspects about this struggle to keep lots of different passwords?

Speaker C: So as you’ve already touched on, Peter, the survey found that Brits are overwhelmed by their technological lives, and that’s due to a number of different factors. So there’s a fear factor in place. There’s obviously been a number of different security breaches over the past couple of years, such as Heartbleed and the iCloud incident, and more recent ones as well. There’s also a frustration factor. There’s a number of different online accounts that we’re now all logged into on a daily basis. We’re online the majority of the day. With the Internet of Things arising, this is only going to multiply. So it’s really an overwhelming amount of data online that we’re currently living in. And essentially what people are doing is they’re sacrificing their security online for their own convenience. So as you said, using the same passwords on a number of different accounts, and this is making them vulnerable to attacks.

Speaker A: So, I mean, with your system though, you keep— you store all of the passwords in one encrypted vault. But surely then if I get the password to your encrypted vault, I get the lot.

Speaker C: Well, essentially what happens is your— the encryption is based on your own personal master password. Dashlane do not have that password. We essentially lock the vault and we throw away the key. That encryption is then based on your master password. So it’s an incredibly secure system that we have, and we feel it’s a much more secure option than having the same password everywhere.

Speaker A: Right. So, um, although I think, I think your system also, uh, uses an IP address or something, or, or an actual address for a device as well.

Speaker C: That’s right. Actually, you’re, you’re, you’re, Your devices actually do need to be verified as well, so you can’t just log on to Dashlane on any device. That device has already needed to be verified on Dashlane via either a token or an email authentication.

Speaker A: Now, I mean, so very interesting coming up with this. Passwords have bedeviled everybody for ages. There’s been a number of different stories about, you know, people giving their passwords away for £100 or for a USB stick or for a suite. But so now though, I mean, some of the banks want to do away with passwords. Passwords just for that reason. I mean, do you think the day of the password is actually really over?

Speaker C: No, I don’t. I mean, I feel that passwords have been a de facto standard for, for a while now. And you know, this is because, you know, they’re convenient to use on a mass scale. Uh, and it really is that there hasn’t been a viable option yet that can be adopted, um, across the market. I mean, really, the, the issue is not with passwords per se, it’s with the way that we interact with them and the way that we use our passwords. We need to take on a more responsible with our passwords and with the data that we keep online.

Speaker A: But I mean, there’s been no signs of that happening, have there? For, I think, over the 30 or so years that I’ve been writing about technology, the first, the password that most people use is 1234 or 4 ones, or they use their name, or I think sex has been 5, the 5th most favorite password for a long time. They do seem not to really be something that we’re very responsible with.

Speaker C: I agree that the majority of people do tend to opt for a laissez-faire attitude towards their online security. But now with the rise of services such as Dashlane and password managers, you can be— you can have that convenience and that security at the same time. You can essentially remove passwords, remove the worry and the information of passwords from, from your own brain and, and leave that to someone else. So you’re outsourcing the need to make up secure passwords.

Speaker A: But I mean, in the future, it seems clear that our identity access will be made up of a number of things, doesn’t it? I mean, you’ve mentioned two already, that’s a device identifier and a password, but people are talking about a PIN code, a biometric, and your GPS as well, and even analyzing your behavior to know that the person who is actually using the particular device is you. Is that how it’s going to have to go?

Speaker C: I think so. I think that there will be a number of different points for authentication going forwards. I mean, biometrics is an interesting one. I mean, the issue there is obviously you can’t change your, your fingerprint or your eye display, so it could never completely replace something like passwords, which can constantly be changed. So I think passwords will certainly be a key core of, of security going forwards. However, other points for authentication may also come into play as well.

Speaker A: It is a constant battle, isn’t it? Because we even had the example of, I think it was Apple rolling out one of their phones which had been meant to have a fingerprint reader on it, and yet people found that they could actually copy that fingerprint reader, fingerprint in one way or another.

Speaker C: Exactly. There have been cases of people taking fingerprints from CCTV footage. There have been very rare cases of what they’ve called sleepjacking, of people, you know, taking someone’s fingerprint and opening their device when they’re sleeping. I mean, that’s a slightly more bizarre one, but, you know, these new The new options aren’t foolproof, and passwords, if used responsibly, are still the core of our security lives, we feel.

Speaker A: Tom Armstrong from Dashlane, thanks very much.

Speaker C: Thank you very much.

Speaker D: Thank you for joining us.

Speaker A: It’s a story that’s been around forever. There were even cases of people putting fingerprint readers which had thermal recognition systems on them, and apparently twice some people managed to lose their fingers. Commenting on that. Anyway, you’re listening to Password on Resonance FM, and after this on Wednesday you can hear Kitchen Magic Time. After the Friday edition, it’s the other rock show. And in next week’s show, we’ll have full details of all the fundraising events and exciting prizes you can bid for in our online auction. If you can’t wait until next week and you don’t want to miss any of the gigs, log on to http://fundraiser.resonancefm.fm. Now, driverless cars are revving up to change our travel habits, with Uber and Google throwing down a gauntlet today. But London’s already ahead of the game with robotic buses all set to roll out on the Greenwich Peninsula, linking locals and tourists with the museums, parks, and galleries, as well as a new cruise ship terminal, the Emirates cable car to Docklands, and the North Greenwich tube station. The new bus is called the Navia, and it is standing room only. No seats, no sides. It’s packed with the latest technology and can run as a regular stopping service or a hop-on hop-off shuttle bus, or like a minicab. You can call it up from an app on your phone. Jane Wyatt’s been talking to Pierre Lefebvre of PhoenixWings about the robot buses.

Speaker D: How it works, it uses lidars to localise.

Speaker B: What are they?

Speaker D: It’s kind of a special system using lasers. The vehicle does 25 times per second a map of the environment.

Speaker B: It can see— 25 maps per second?

Speaker D: Yes. Yeah, it can see 200 meters, 360 degrees around, and it makes a map and it compares the map with the one he had just before. And that’s the way it localizes. It’s very accurate. It has also cameras and 3 braking systems, for example.

Speaker B: How is it powered?

Speaker D: It’s electric. We have 2 motors. On the next one, we’ll have 4 motors, 4 steering wheels.

Speaker B: And how will people use it? Is it going to be hop on, hop off like a tour bus, or will you call it up on the phone or with an app?

Speaker D: It’s both, because during peak hours you can ask for like a bus a bus line service stopping at the bus stop with scheduled time. But the rest of the time you can just, on demand, we have a smartphone application, you can call it.

Speaker B: And will they actually be on the street, or are you going to put them in special lanes?

Speaker D: That’s a good question. I cannot answer it. I mean, by the technology we don’t need dedicated land. Regarding the regulation, that’s something that really is on its way. We’ve been testing in public streets. In Singapore, it’s running on the street. We have had quite a lot of tests in France, in Switzerland, but the regulation is not there for the moment, so we keep it on private Areas.

Speaker B: So you’ve got it in kind of campus places. Let me just, um, ask a rather critical question. If it’s something that moves very slowly, it’s open to the elements, and it, it’s powered by a battery so it can’t really go all day for very long distances, how useful would it really be? Can you see car owners leaving the car at home and getting into your Navia?

Speaker D: No, it’s not my purpose. What I’m— again, what I’m looking for is remove private cars from part of the city. I don’t pretend we’ll remove all cars, but I really think an area like this peninsula could be car-free. So what does that mean? It means that maybe there will be parking at the entrance of the peninsula, And there will be a dedicated lane, quite fast, to come up here. And the vehicle will be able to get out of the dedicated lane and go to the exact place where the user wants to go, as a business or residential at the other side, you know. So it will not replace all the system. It’s a complementary thing between the underground up to the next parking outside the area. And it can be fast, you know, if we have some dedicated lane. Like, for example, there is a route, two lanes dedicated to buses. This one can be used to a fast system. It will be faster than the bus.

Speaker B: Faster than the bus?

Speaker D: Yeah, of course. You know why? Because it’s small. It’s small, so you don’t take time to get in and out. I mean, in a big bus, 70 people to get in and out, it’s a very long time. And if you look at the road, you will see that usually there are 4 or 5 buses at the same time at same place. What does that mean? That means that it’s blocking the traffic. And it’s not a service because 5 buses at the same place means 350 people waiting.

Speaker A: Well, that was Pierre Lefebvre from PhoenixWings, the robotic bus company. Presumably you have to worry when they do get sides because that will mean the robots have taken over and you’ve been taken prisoner. Jane, you interviewed Pierre. What do you— presumably you’ve seen these things?

Speaker B: I’ve seen his presentation, yeah. So the thinking behind not having sides on the bus is that you might want some help. For example, there’s a huge B&Q in the little part of Greenwich where they’re going to be running about, and they’re also going to knock down the huge Sainsbury’s and put a huge IKEA there. So if you’ve got a flat pack or a big load of compost for your garden or whatever, but you’re not taking the car, right onto the peninsula, you’re only taking it as far as the car park. The idea is you can hop on this little robot bus and load it up with all your stuff and just have a—

Speaker A: You can pick your own wall up with the IKEA stuff.

Speaker B: No, no, no, just as a way of transporting large things or if you’ve got buggies or wheelchairs, stuff like that. It’s more flexible without sides and without seats. And if you’ve ever been on a London bus, you’ll appreciate that. It definitely is. And I said, well, what about the weather? And in the presentation, They’re already running these in Switzerland, where it’s pretty cold, I guess, in Lausanne. And they’re also running them in Singapore and in the United States, in Florida and in Indianapolis, where there are extremes of weather—hot, cold, humid. And everywhere they run them, people prefer them with open sides, according to Pierre. That’s what he says.

Speaker A: But I think I’d prefer an open-sided bus in Florida or Indianapolis or— The thing is, if you’re out though— Because it’s warm. Whereas, I mean, you know, Greenwich Peninsula is quite windblown. There you are, you’re on the wrong side of the bus. I mean, I could see these things getting quite unbalanced as people move over to one side to get out of the wind.

Speaker B: No, it’s not like sailing. I know you’d like it to be, but it’s not like sailing. Obviously they’re perfectly stable. Anyway, I haven’t had a ride in one yet, but that’s coming very soon, and they’re hoping to get them ready for the tourist season. So, and you can imagine, if you are a tourist, it would be quite an attractive option, especially if you’ve got luggage or you don’t really know where you’re going. Because of all the smart technology on board, you know, you can program it to go to your postcode where your destination is.

Speaker A: Well, so you get on, you put in your postcode, and it just essentially comes up with a route that drops everybody off at all of the different places they want to go to.

Speaker B: Apparently so, yes.

Speaker A: So long as they live in the Greenwich Peninsula.

Speaker B: Well, it will have a certain range, yeah, because obviously battery-powered cars, as we know from test driving them, they do have a limited range and you have to top them up, keep them topped up.

Speaker A: So what, but is the council’s idea that this will just operate in that peninsula area or will it be within the council area?

Speaker B: It’s an experiment. The Greenwich Peninsula is supposed to be a so-called smart city which will have little sensors everywhere and so that the sensors on the lampposts and, you know, the traffic lights and everywhere will be helping to guide these little buses. In fact, it’s quite a sort of old vision, really, because when they first built the Millennium Dome and they started reclaiming the land on the Greenwich Peninsula, there was supposed to be a thing called a guided bus, which would be— was meant to be a bit like an old trolleybus. Guided on wires, yeah? And so now the 21st century version of this is a robot bus instead. Right.

Speaker A: Isn’t though, you know, I mean, I think that there are some other more fundamental ideas that you should play around with these robots. And if anybody out there is a venture capitalist, I’ve got a very good idea, and if they want to talk to me about it, You mustn’t say it on the radio, someone will run off with it.

Speaker B: Yeah, that’s good. Anyway, we’ll just have to wait and see with the robot buses.

Speaker A: So there you go, surveillance culture has taken over. Even the buses know where you live. Now CCTV cameras, they make some people feel reassured and others annoyed because they don’t like being watched. But for farmers at this time of year, a camera in the cowshed or the lambing shed can save time money and the lives of newborn animals. I’ve been to North Yorkshire where dairy farmer Peter Dowson has installed cameras to keep an eye on his herd and hooked them up to a mobile phone app. Peter showed me how it works and how the pregnant heifers benefit.

Speaker E: This makes sure it means a little bit easier life looking after the cattle rather than being there all the time and standing and watching. It just gives a little bit more ideas to what they’re doing and when they’re going to calve, as opposed to going and finding a calf laid there and you’re too late, it’s dead, you know, either smothered in its afterbirth or calving in an awkward position or things like that. Whereas keeping an eye on the cameras gives us more scope to look at them more regularly.

Speaker A: So does it also mean that you can also look back over a history? Does it record a history?

Speaker E: If, if we do record some, it does. My son, what he does sometimes, if they calve late on an evening, he’ll set it to record so that breakfast time in the morning he can quick look through it and see whether that calf’s got up in the night and suckled the mother, which is very important to its, you know, to its getting up, getting going really. The colostrum that that calf gets in the first 6 hours is vital for its immunity system and everything. If it doesn’t get that within the first 6 hours, that calf’s more prone to getting all sorts of scours and bits and pieces like that. It’s a must really to get that calf suckled in the first 6 hours or so. There’s even sometimes we actually go and milk the animal and we get what we call a stomach tube and we actually drench the animal just to make sure it has got that colostrum in the first hours of life. That’s vital to its total immune system and everything.

Speaker A: So I mean, obviously we can watch here, but do you get sound as well? Because I should think sound is—

Speaker E: sound is very— but we do get sound, but actually doesn’t come through on the computer. It only comes through on the TV and on that little small monitor. There will be a little bit of sound on that. It tends to be crackly. It’s not the best reception in this one. You just get a crackle, so we don’t bother too much. But so on your TV upstairs, on the TV, yeah, in the bedroom, it is, it is sound and everything. It’s a full screen picture, you know, like a decent outdoor.

Speaker A: So does that mean that you can actually sleep, hear a cow in distress, wake up?

Speaker E: You probably, you probably could actually. That is something that does happen. I know that sometimes even you can hear the sounds via the windows from the buildings. You can hear a cow in distress and you’ll hear it making that awful noise. It’s the noise you’ll always recognize at calving. It’s not just a normal bellow, it’s a distressed bellow, like, you know, the pain bellow type thing. And so it is really, yeah, it does, it works very, very well.

Speaker A: So is this something that all farmers now have, or is this just, are you particularly innovative?

Speaker E: There’s a few farms have it, I know some don’t, and one or two have been to see our system and they’ve actually installed systems whereby they can keep an eye on things. So actually, I don’t know what it was that made us put it in the first place. I think it was just we felt that we just weren’t keeping a constant watch on them at the right time. So we just thought, these cameras weren’t particularly expensive, you know, I’d say £300 or £400. It’s the life of, you know, if you save the life of one calf, it’s paid for itself. It just gives us a little bit more freedom to come in and have a cup of coffee in peace and drink a cup of coffee, watch this and think ‘Ah, we should have been there, you know, watching that,’ or ‘Should have been there,’ whereas now we can, you know.

Speaker A: But so, I mean, it must actually though save you some money.

Speaker E: It must mean that it just saves— it’s the time thing as well. You don’t— you’re not always— you can be doing other things and not have to worry too much because somebody’s keeping an eye on this, you know. My wife watches it, she’ll keep an eye on it, and she’ll give us a shout, ‘Ah, go look at that cow because, you know, I think there’s something happening.’ So it does— it just— it gives us, you know, we’re busy doing something else. And this is how it goes. So it’s good for you and it’s good for the cow? Yeah, good for us, good for the cow. My son has it via— he can pick up the signal on his mobile phone as well. So when he’s at work at another farm, he can have a quick peek at it himself, or if he’s not on the farm, he can use it on his mobile phone. So that’s another advantage. You can see what’s going on.

Speaker A: So basically the technology is allowing you to maximise everybody?

Speaker E: Exactly, without having to just sit around and wait all the time. It can be a bit of a waiting game, especially on an evening. You just want to settle down and sit down for a couple hours, whereas if you have this thing just sat there on a screen, you can keep peeping at it and, you know, you’re not having to go out in the cold and wet and miserable. You can stay over the fire a bit longer.

Speaker A: I thought that was all part and parcel of being a farmer.

Speaker E: Well, it is, yeah, but it gets a bit silly after you’ve been calving for about 2 or 3 weeks and you’ve been up every night looking at cattle and messing around. It just gives you that little bit of a a rest sometimes, as not to be rushing around outside. We find it good to watch sometimes, just to see the activity of the animals and what they actually do, just to keep an eye on them for all sorts of reasons, you know, see if the cows are okay. We’ve had one, a heifer, that calved 2 or 3 nights ago, and she was a little bit off colour, and we wanted to watch her a little while, so Chris recorded her that particular night to see whether she got up during the night and whether she ate or whether she went to the water trough to drink. Whereas it’s these things you would never notice. You can’t be with them 24/7. You know, you try to be at certain times, like the calving time. We try to spend as much time as we can among the animals so we know what’s going to calve, so you can identify them and put them in these areas ready for calving because they’re all lovely clean boxes, you know, and you can see what’s going on.

Speaker A: Easy to manage. It might sound a little bit of a stupid question, but Because obviously you look at, watch animals all of the time, but does it give you a different sort of insight into them? Do they behave differently?

Speaker E: I think they do, actually. Yeah, yeah. I think going out in amongst them can be a little bit disturbing for them, you know, somebody coming wandering about. I mean, they are very quiet, our cattle. A lot of them are hand-reared. We do rear a lot via a bucket and feed, and they’re hand-reared, so they’re a lot quieter animals than some. And so, I mean, some animals, you’d go into these pens and they would try and jump out the other the other side. They’re a bit wild, but these, they’re just like pets in a way, but you know, to a point. But these are really quiet animals, and you can wander about among them. You know, you can go in this— you can’t see now, but that building below there, it’s all bedded up like this one, and there’ll be cows and calves laid in there. And you go in and even just walk around among them, they don’t move, just sit there, what’s he want type thing. But it does sometimes, when you’re watching them, you do see things that you wouldn’t normally see. You know, the behavior, how they interact with each other, how the calves interact with other animals, the cows. I mean, there is some calves, they’re cheeky little monkeys, they’ll come and try and suckle other cows other than their own mother, which is quite, you know, it’s quite entertaining sometimes. You see this mother thinking, what’s going on here, you know? Then she’ll give it her nose and push it away type thing. And then you do get some animals that will let any calf suckle them. They’re like a mother to everything. So, which is not always good because they end up trying to feed 2 or 3 calves, which is not good for them because it depletes their energy sources and they’re trying to produce too much milk to feed calves that aren’t theirs.

Speaker A: Well, that was Peter Dowson with those cheeky little calves. If you don’t think that that is a very good use of technology, you should have been up in Yorkshire. It was absolutely freezing. I nearly got snowed in. You’re listening to Password with Peter Warren, and this month We’re part of Resonance FM’s fundraising drive. We’re raising money to improve the website at www.resonancefm.com and get a DAB digital radio service while keeping Resonance FM independent and free from advertising. One of the tech prizes available in the auction is a Bluetooth speaker by House of Marley, the eco-friendly company set up by Bob Marley’s many children in his memory to create a beautiful fair trade music accessory. The other House of Marley speaker is a prize for our second studio guest today, Matt Shoplan, who created the best sound effect for time travel in our competition. We’re going to use it in our audiobooks about children who travel back in time to meet important figures from history. And Matt Shepherd joins us now. Welcome and well done, Matt. Hello, thank you. So how did you make the sound?

Speaker F: Well, I was recording a vocal line for a song and I went wrong and I laughed into the microphone. I used this laugh and I did some things with it, not to ruin the magic of the audiobook, but reversed it, added some echoes and reverbs, and added a synthesizer sound and layered some things up, and that’s the sound that got created.

Speaker A: So what kind of music do you usually make?

Speaker F: Usually I produce, so I work with lots of rock, indie, acoustic solo artists and bands and make their music. So at the moment I’m working with a band called Ask, and I’m getting an EP together for them, and the EP’s out soon. Search for Ask.

Speaker A: Am I allowed to plug music? I think, I think lots of people plug music here. Now, I believe you’re also studying music.

Speaker F: Tell me about your course. So I’m finishing off a degree at the University of Westminster, um, so I’ll be looking for work soon. Uh, it’s a great uni, um, there’s a performance and a production course on there, so that is really good. Work with lots of artists and music makers.

Speaker A: So it’s in music that you want— you actually want to find a career?

Speaker F: Oh yes, definitely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve been doing music since I was very little. I knew very early what I wanted to do, so I was lucky in that sense.

Speaker A: So what’s your ideal, the thing you want to be, the thing you want to do?

Speaker F: I just want to make music with great people and great bands. I also produce music, be it for chart music or film or whatever. I’m kind of a jack of all trades, I suppose, and that’s it.

Speaker A: Right, well, Matt Chopland, thanks for joining us. I hope you enjoy the speaker and We’ll listen out for you on the audiobook. You’re listening to Password with Peter Warren on Resonance FM, and if you’ve just joined us, you’ve missed it. But we’ll be back next week, and you can find out more about new technology in society on our website, Future Intelligence. Follow me on Twitter @petewarren and sign up for our regular newsletter. Password is made by Angel Media Productions CIC. Thanks for listening. Goodbye.