Edward Gottesman
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Market failure has been much in the news of late, but one notable breakdown has attracted little attention: spam. Some 200bn junk emails are sent daily. More than 40bn come from the US and Canada, and about 6bn from Britain. Estimates vary, but the best guess is that more than 90 per cent of all email is spam.
What causes this stupefying supply for which there is no apparent demand? The answer is simple: sending an email is free. Yet billions of junk messages take a toll in complex and haphazard spam filters, productivity losses and misuse of increasingly crowded bandwidth. Spam is used to spread viruses and sell fake or fraudulent goods. Moreover, there is an increasing risk that spam will make legitimate email a form of second-class post.
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Andrew Currah
“The newsroom was electric,” an editor told me after the discovery of nine-year-old Shannon Matthews, who went missing for 24 days in February 2008. “Minutes after publishing the story, we watched the clicks go up like a petrol pump. In just an hour, we had 60,000 hits!”
As newspapers and broadcasters move online they are finding new ways to judge what makes a big story. Using the latest “web analytics” technologies, publishers can now monitor the trails of the “clickstream”—a measure of what their users are choosing to read, watch and share. Newsrooms now feature both giant flat screens suspended from the ceiling and small desktop widgets that shower staff with a relentless flow of web statistics. Never before has the marketplace of journalism been so visible.
This brave new world has positive aspects. Media companies can offer precisely targeted “behavioural” advertising, allowing their clients to aim messages at well-defined groups of users. Some are even using the tools of neuroscience to measure the subconscious foundations of the clickstream—drawing on biometric data (brainwave activity, eye tracking and skin response) to assess the effectiveness of online advertising formats. When advertising budgets are being squeezed, such innovations may save the media industry’s skin.
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Steven Johnson
Hemingway had it easy. Writing books in the 1920s involved little more than pen and ink. The period’s most advanced tool was a Remington typewriter. No such luck for the modern author. Yes, we have access to a wealth of information unthinkable a few decades ago. But we confront a problem unknown in Hemingway’s day: the proliferation of software designed to help to organise our thoughts before sitting down to write.
Because my books weave together multiple disciplines—one was even subtitled “the connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software”—and in part because I write about technology, people often ask me how I write. As it happens, I have developed an idiosyncratic writing system. My basic tools, like word processors, have varied. (I swore off Word after one book, and used another programme for the next two before returning sheepishly to Microsoft.) But the one constant is a truly ingenious piece of software, called Devonthink.
Devonthink is a database programme into which you can copy anything from PDFs to snippets of text, web pages and images. There are dozens of other similar programmes, among them Evernote, Nota Bene, and even a Microsoft product called OneNote. But Devonthink is set apart by an elegant semantic algorithm: a mathematical formula that detects relationships between different bits of text. The programme can take your words, or anyone else’s, and suggest related passages from its database.
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Jaron Lanier
It is strange to be an elder, a museum piece exhumed from the past, at the tender age of 48. But that’s what happened to me in early February when I went to the 25th anniversary of TED, perhaps the world’s most exclusive conference.
At $6,000, tickets to TED—which stands for technology, entertainment and design—are surprisingly hard to come by. The event gathers some of the most clever and powerful people on the planet to give 18 minute talks on their specialism to an audience of peers. It attracts everyone from Bill Gates to Daniel Libeskind, creating a gathering comparable to the World Economic Forum in Davos.
TED talks, filmed at the conference, have taken the online world by storm. I was an early practitioner and innovator of the format—mine was an exaltation, an almost evangelical cry of optimism, for science, technology and the future. (In truth, I was emulating the rhetorical style of Alan Watts, a mid-20th century British philosopher of eastern religious ideas.)
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Peter Bazalgette
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Are you reading this online? If not, what did you last read on the internet? Perhaps you browsed a vintage wine list, planned a holiday or—more in keeping with the times—investigated which newly nationalised bank offers the best rates. Would you object to advertisements popping up for Chateau Latour, Caribbean resorts or Bradford & Bingley? Might you feel your privacy had been violated by new companies able to record your surfing habits and feed you adverts based on where you had been? Or would you welcome this as a useful service?
Six months ago I thought the biggest obstacle to “broadband Britain” was our inadequate infrastructure—limited bandwidth, copper wires into houses and slow speeds for the downloading of bulky data such as video. But there has been real progress since then. In September 2008 British Telecom announced a further investment of £1.5bn into broadband networks in return for concessions from its regulator Ofcom. Yet increasingly privacy, not pipes, is the real source of contention in the online world. Technology now exists to track everything we do online. This makes advertisers excited. There’s an old industry adage: half of all advertising is wasted, but no one knows which half. Now we may be on the verge of finding out. Advertisers are willing to fund much of the information and entertainment we receive in the future—but in exchange for knowing precisely how and when we have received their promotional messages. Such intense scrutiny alarms some consumers and is leading to a state of war between commercial pioneers and privacy campaigners. At stake is a potentially huge expansion of the online economy.
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Becky Hogge
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What did you do when last on the net? Perhaps you emailed a client a confidential quote? Or contributed pseudonymously on a web forum? Or, more in keeping with the times, anonymously uploaded to a whistle-blowing website copies of the $450,000 bill run up by executives of AIG? If you did, Peter Bazalgette isn’t interested. He sees the internet as a giant shopping mall, which is a shame. Yes, the net has revolutionised commerce over the last decade. But daily communications, and even civic engagement, all now take place online. What we do over our internet connections reveals more about us than any other activity.
Mistaking the biggest innovation in communications technology since the Gutenburg press for a high street shopping parade is just the first error in Bazalgette’s ill-informed apologia for Phorm—the dangerous new behavioural tracking technology currently being trialled by the UK’s biggest internet service provider (ISP), BT. Much of what Bazalgette writes about the advertising industry—that it currently funds much media production and may fund more, that it aspires to engage consumers using increasingly integrated and fine-grained targeting techniques—represents an uncomfortable reality that most normal people have grudgingly learnt to live with. It may come as a surprise to Bazalgette to find out that, as the head of one of the privacy campaigns he namechecks, the Open Rights Group, I believe that people should be free to choose what relationships they establish with media outlets or corporate brands. And this should include how much they wish to reveal about their everyday lives.
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Jonathan Zittrain
The internet and the PCs attached to it are sometimes known as “generative” technologies, meaning that they allow anyone to build and share new uses for them without the approval of “gatekeepers.” Yet today, malicious code that seemed of little significance when it first appeared—such as viruses, and the spam email now known to everyone with an email account—threatens to drive people away from the internet and towards sterile, stand-alone appliances that can be manipulated only with the acquiescence of their manufacturers.
Our open technologies are now routinely subverted. One common type of “malware” compromises PCs to create “botnets”—networks of infected machines open to future instructions by the malware’s creator. Such instructions may include directing each infected PC to become its own email server, sending spam by the millions to addresses harvested from the hard disc of the machine or gleaned from internet searches, with the process typically going unnoticed by the PC’s owner. One estimate pegs the number of PCs involved in such botnets at 100 to 150m, or a quarter of all the computers on the internet as of early 2007. A study monitoring botnet activity in 2006 detected the emergence, on average, of 1m new bots per month. MessageLabs, a company that monitors spam, recently stopped counting bot-infected computers because it could not keep up. It says it quit when the figure passed about 10m. And since not all bots are active at any given time, the number of infected computers may be much higher.
Modern worms and viruses routinely infect vast swathes of internet-connected PCs. In 2004, the Sasser worm infected more than half a million computers in three days. The Sobig.f virus, which replicated through email, was released in August 2003 and within two days accounted for around 70 per cent of all email in the world. In May 2006, a virus exploiting a vulnerability in Microsoft Word propagated through the computers of the US department of state in east Asia, forcing the machines to be taken offline during critical weeks prior to North Korea’s missile tests. As these numbers show, viruses are not simply the province of computing backwaters. The war is being lost across the board.
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Rob Gifford
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In the US, there are nine cities with more than 1m inhabitants. In China, there are 49. You can be travelling across China, arrive in a city that is twice the size of Houston, and think: I’ve never even heard of this place. That is how it is for many foreign visitors to Hefei (population 4.7m). I have been travelling to China as a journalist, or living here, for nearly 20 years and visited Hefei (pronounced Huh-fay) for the first time only last year for the book I have just written about the new China. There had never been any reason to come. But as in so many cities in China, the local government is trying to change that. After centuries of inland poverty, Hefei, like all Chinese cities, is opening up.
Like dye dripped upon a piece of cloth, a moderate level of wealth is seeping to inland cities. The new Route 312—which runs all the way from Shanghai to the western border with Kazakhstan—is part of the change, dramatically cutting the journey time for people and goods going to Nanjing, Shanghai and the coast. The spread inland of factories and companies in search of lower costs has helped too, as have remittances from migrants working near the coast. This growing wealth is in turn changing some of the patterns of inland migration. Shanghai is still the promised land for migrant peasants, but there are now more mini-promised lands: regional capitals such as Hefei, or other cities further inland, such as Xi’an and Lanzhou, to which people are travelling to find work because there is now work there. For the first time, some factories on the coast have a labour shortage, and one reason is that people can now find jobs (albeit not so well paid) in China’s interior.
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David Birch
Gordon Brown’s first six months in power present an opportunity to review many policy commitments, and one that is sure to be on his list is the national identity card scheme. It remains, in principle, popular with the public, but support is ebbing away as some of the civil libertarian attacks start to hit home and the costs rise. A useful checkpoint is coming up. Last year, as chancellor, Brown commissioned a public-private forum on identity management under the former head of HBOS, James Crosby, to look at the potential uses of the proposed scheme by business. The forum is due to report towards the end of the year, and this provides a convenient opportunity for reviewing the project. I say this not because I want Brown to scrap it—I’m sure he will not—but because I want him to take the time to make it better. That is, to make it simpler, cheaper and more useful.
Why? Well, not having an identity scheme is clearly sub-optimal, but I don’t think the proposed scheme is optimal either. I would prefer to see a third way: a scheme that takes into account both the march of technology and the practicalities of deployment; that meets the government’s goals but sets aside its presumed solution. We lack a technologically informed, socially aware vision for national identity management, and we need to construct one.
Will the database be secure?
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Victor Keegan
I am sitting on my patio without a care in the world, contemplating the water as it falls softly down the rocks before splashing into a swirling pool beneath, watched over by gently swaying palm trees. It is an idyllic scene, and it is a shame that not everyone can enjoy it.
Well, actually, they can. This is not the real world, but a three-dimensional simulation created by millions of “residents” in Second Life, the phenomenon that may be taking the internet in a whole new direction. Some say it will be a nine-month wonder, others that it will gradually take over much of the time we spend watching television and eventually become a major economy in its own right, generating jobs and income for millions.
How does it work?
Second Life (SL) is not a game: it is what it says it is on the label—a second life, running parallel to, and overlapping with, your “first” life. To envisage it, imagine you are watching a film on television—only instead of actors walking around, there is a three-dimensional representation of you (an “avatar,” who may or may not bear a physical resemblance to you), whose movements you control using your computer keyboard. As you walk—or fly—around, you can go shopping, listen to music, attend political meetings, take university classes, start a business or visit a strip joint. You can start building houses or objects on your own, by manipulating basic building blocks (cubes, spheres and so on) in various ways. Most importantly, you can talk, hang out, flirt or fight with your fellow inhabitants. (In some respects, SL resembles a more interactive version of The Sims, the bestselling computer game in history.)
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