The world is changing now.

Ramps may replace stairs in homes and businesses to facilitate access to domestic robots. (Pure speculation on my part, this.)

Domestic robots charged with cleaning and other duties will be equipped with CCTV cameras. (Already exist and offered as a commercial service.)

Some bright lass or lad will equip these domestic robots with prosthetic arms for manipulating objects on command–or autonomously (already exist and working in the lab).

In addition to opening doors and pulling levers, etc., those arms will be able to manipulate tasers or pepper-spray projectors. Domestic robots will then have security responsibilities.

However, to prevent misuse and frivolous use, it is quite possible that the use of robots for security purposes must involve an enabling command from a certified security operator or even a law-enforcement agency, looped in on the feed from the robot’s CCTV camera. It might be a dual decision, with the security operator enabling the owner to actuate the device.

Which of course means the integrity and authenticity of all messaging must be iron-clad–encrypted, authenticated and secure.

So when, 10 years down the line, you are choosing which type of wood to use in the ramp that replaces your stairs, remember the information assurance implications.

And just in case you think this is too futuristic and science-fictiony to worry about, have a look at the first private spaceport–due to be finished in 2010–before Crossrail.

Hat tip to Robert Heinlein’s Door Into Summer, 1957.

The story is here.

“The electricity grid, power plants and refineries face increasing threats from computer hackers who could cause major disruptions and economic chaos, congressional investigators say.”

…”Langevin, D-R.I., noted the recent disclosure that government scientists at the Energy Department’s Idaho National Laboratory were able to hack into a simulated power plant control system and cause an electric generator to destruct.”

…”Lofgren said that was not the intent of Congress when it created the department. “We haven’t made any progress in the cybersecurity side for a long, long time,” she said.

The commission is considering more stringent standards for the electricity industry that a quasi-industry group, the North American Electric Reliability Corp., is developing.

As part of my job, I’ve been looking at the GPS and Galileo debate – but more of that in a later post. What I want to raise here is one aspect of GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite Systems) that I wasn’t aware of. Whilst the use of GNSS for positioning and navigational applications is obvious, less well known is its use as a timing reference in for example national power grids and telecommunications systems. Now many of you may be familiar with this, but for me it is a critical issue often overlooked in any consideration of the impact of loss of GNSS – possibly the only remaining defensible argument for continuing with Galileo.

This use of GNSS is discussed in the VOLPE report – the only detailed research I could find into the vulnerability of GPS.

To explain the blog title. This is reference to a story that was recently related to me – though probably an urban myth. Apparently the “culprit” for the US Eastern Seaboard blackout in 2003 was a trucker. He was having assignations with a lady and wanted to jam the GPS signals to his spy-in-the-cab. He purchased the jammer, turned it on, drove past a local national grid sub-station, affected the power phasing and set off a chain reaction – the rest is history.

It does seem fairly easy to jam GPS though, see here.

This is the first in a series of posts about other UK government groups that are looking at emerging technology and the future.
Yesterday, Chris Smith and I met with Dr. Harry Woodroof and Alun Rhydderch of the Horizon Scanning Centre.

Two programmes listed on the HSC website are immediately applicable to what we at Blindside are trying to do:

“Strategic Horizon Scans: two complementary scans looking ahead up to 50 years. The Sigma Scan covers future issues and trends across the full public policy agenda. The Delta Scan is an overview of future science and technology issues and trends

Wider Implications of Science and Technology (WIST): an expert and stakeholder appraisal combined with a public-facing engagement process, to explore the wider implications of new and emerging areas of science and technology.”

Another HSC feature that interests me, at least, is FAN, the Future Analysts Network, “a forum where those who have an interest in horizon scanning and futures analysis can meet to exchange new ideas, innovative thinking and good practice. Meetings, which are open to all, are held four times a year.”

The Strategic Horizons Scans are available at the websites maintained by the contractors who produced them: The Sigma Scan is available here and the Delta Scan is here.

If I understand correctly, the research output of WIST is fed through to government stakeholders and passed through to a website, Science Horizons.

I’ll have more to say about all of this later, after I’ve had a chance to read some of the material available. I urge you to do the same–many eyes, light work and all that. Comments, as always, most welcome.

This report card in Popular Mechanics rates 5 IPTV services. Some of them look like they will be winners. As someone without cable or satellite TV, I should be grateful. But Blindside has spoiled my innocent enjoyment. What will be the impact on Internet performance? In June of this year, 2.5 billion videos were downloaded from YouTube, according to Reuters.

If, as I think inevitable, the UK government migrates essential citizen services online, can commercial offerings degrade Internet performance to such an extent that it threatens those services? Could telecare, remote surgery and e-999 services be crowded out by new networks hogging the Internet? Well, no–it might even help it. Pure IPTV doesn’t really use the Internet–it’s more like a different cable channel into the home. But it is stimulating development of the technology to get it from the narrowcaster to the PC or TV, and some of that technology and associated infrastructure might actually improve the Internet experience. But in parallel with pure IPTV, video and movies are being delivered over the Internet, and that traffic is growing rapidly. Is it growing quickly enough to justify concern?

In China right now, there are 100 websites trying to do what YouTube does. Telegeography estimates that international Internet traffic grew by 57% last year (down from 74% the year before). However, the firm estimates that capacity grew by 68% last year… so is there a problem? Here the question becomes more business than tech. I suspect there is latent demand for video and movies downloaded over the Internet that will respond very quickly to an increase in supply, especially if supply comes with new technology that improves the experience. The growth in IPTV may provide this indirectly.

As HDTV becomes the norm, each video will be between 4 and 8 times as ‘heavy’ as a normal video today… and although there is unused capacity in the system today, if Internet consumption of rich media explodes (as I think quite likely) that unused capacity will get sucked into service quite quickly.

A company called Black Arrow has estimated that in the US alone, viewers will watch 8 billion hours of online video/TV/movies in 2008 (compared to 376 billion hours of ‘linear’ TV consumption–don’t these people do anything else?). And as you might expect, Cisco is doing its own research, (scroll down halfway) which estimates that total Internet traffic will reach 18 exabytes (quintillion bites) per month, of which 11 of those quintillion will be the transport of commercial video on demand. The article linked to here estimates that necarrier Ethernet equipment spending by providers will double to £7.2 billion annually in the next 3 to 4 years.

I hope it’s enough. Because I didn’t even talk about P2P networks or the growth in traffic associated with mobile use of the Internet, let alone impacts associated with pervasive computing…

One of the issues that emerging technologies will be used to address is the changing demographic profile of the UK. It is simple enough to say that the Boomers are getting old and there are a lot of us. It is also simple to say that thanks in no small part to emerging technologies, we can expect to live a lot longer–and that more of this extra allotment of life will be in good health.

Some of the technologies covered by Blindside that have foreseeable impact on this include nanotechnology and location-based services, and we can expect to see new services, medicines and government policies created to cope with this phenomenon.

But the ageing of the Boomers is happening in conjunction with another societal phenomenon that is just as important. Think of it as convergence of two demographic trends.

The second trend is the atomisation of social structures, in particular the family unit. Family sizes have gotten smaller. The mobility of the workforce has led to families being separated by larger distances. The same trend has led to fewer personal connections that are local and physical. Remote working means that there are people who really don’t have to get out of the house except to buy groceries–and now, even groceries can be ordered online and delivered to your door. And there are growing numbers of people living in splendid isolation. Let’s call them the ‘isos.’ Those who remember Isaac Asimov’s R. Daneel Olivaw novels will understand quickly.

The numbers affected by these trends will be large (although they may not constitute a majority of the population). The services they will ask for will be technological ennablement for the continuation of this lifestyle. But perhaps the services they (we) will need may in fact be more sociological, in the sense that the UK may be better served if society works to draw the ‘isos’ out of their shell and back into the world.

While people will be pressuring (mostly local) governments to provide better and more services electronically, those governments that see farther may push to provide neighbourhood watch schemes, better community centres and opportunities to volunteer.

Interesting times ahead. Aristotle once wrote that man is a social animal. If he were to visit the UK twenty years down the road, I wonder if he’d change his mind? Of course, he also wrote, “Man, when perfected, is the best of animals; but when isolated he is the worst of all”

Via Kable: The Office of Public Sector Information has launched an online forum on the commercial use of government data.

Go here. Register. Comment.

“Our users have posted a total of 0 articles
We have 1 registered users
The newest registered user is admin
In total there are 4 users online : 0 Registered and 4 Guests ”

If those numbers stay the same, I don’t ever want anyone to complain about how the UK government doesn’t listen, isn’t responsive, blah and yet again blah.

Here is your chance.

I have a piece in today’s Guardian (”Does antivirus software have a future?”) that was suggested to me by some comments Alan Cox made on one of the ORG lists. I think there are a couple of interesting points that emerged in researching the piece:

- the difficulty of finding an approximation of the truth between the natural tendency of vendors to deny (at least in public) that there is a problem and the natural tendency of researchers and journalists to want to find one

- the genuine escalation of threats

- new technology designs (virtualization, flashable firmware, software-controlled hardware) that create new opportunities (hardware you have to physically change is inherently secure from software threats)

- confusion because names stay the same while the technologies they represent change and the press does not alter its reviewing language or habits (antivirus software doesn’t work the way it did 10 years ago, but the press still tests AV software the same way and reports on it as though signatures were the key - several people complained about this)

The next stage seems to be leveraging the same connectedness that is bringing us botnets and infected Web pages to create collaborative intelligence that can identify the ever-stealthier, ever-more-targeted threats. (I discovered only afterwards that Google has started labelling pages it thinks are infected with a warning - while I can see the logic of their doing this, it’s a little worrying about the impact on a site or its business if Google gets it wrong - I see lawsuits of green…What a wonderful world…)

wg

I’m working on a piece that should run in the Telegraph on September 13 alongside the listing of new BCS Fellows. And the thing everyone wants to talk about (which has become the subject of the piece, and I hope my editor likes it) is the dropping numbers of kids going into IT. Of course, this has been true for women for a decade now - the numbers of women have been increasing in many sciences, but not computer science. But what I’m hearing now is that this is a much wider problem; there’s a variety of reasons and I’ll have numbers in the piece itself, but the short version is that we can look forward to a serious skills shortage in about ten years because the drop-off rate from GCSEs to A-level IT, to computer science in university, to PhDs is considerable at every stage of that progression. Kids are taught in school to be computer literate, but what that means to most teachers is that kids know how to use Word or Excel; not that they know anything about how they actually work inside (the much more fun bit).

Plus, kids get a really negative impression from ”The IT Crowd”.

The implications of this are wider than just “Who will fix the NHS network?” The economy depends on innovation; innovation in all sectors depends on IT; IT innovation depends on education (computer science) instead of training (how to program in Java). But also: who will update the NHS computer system, the banking financial models, the climate change models?

wg

Hi all,

I have referred in the past to Dave’s Bit Bucket, run by Dave Walker of Sun. His blog can be a bit of a slog as he actually has the temerity to post code up regarding his Trusted Extension work, which just glides gracefully over my head. However, when he turns his attention to other subjects, we have to pay attention. So I will perform a much-needed public service here and link to specific posts relevant to Blindside:

Dave’s earlier post on Microsoft Vista (Why Microsoft Windows Vista cannot be deployed in Government, Critical National Infrastructure, or Battlespace …and I may well have missed a few categories for the sake of a concise subject line, especially where Finance, Aerospace, etc are not specifically included under the banner of “Critical National Infrastructure”. Read this, and be startled. Update: Putting a black hat on for a moment, this also means that Microsoft’s licensing verification servers will be the number 1 target for any actual Black Hat who wishes to cause general chaos, rather than target specific organisations; taking the licensing servers down in a manner which resulted in an outage of significant duration would precipitate a worldwide Vista outage. Also, in battlespace, if you’re running Solaris and your enemy is running Vista, it may be within the rules of war to target Microsoft’s licensing infrastructure (with either electronic warfare methods or, depending on the sphere of conflict, ordnance) and watch your enemy’s C4I infrastructure collapse…)

led to Dave linking to this: “DRM bites again: the Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage servers (which every XP and Vista install phones home to) all failed sometime earlier today. The result? Every single Windows XP and Vista installation — except possibly those with volume license keys — is being marked as counterfeit when it tries to check in. Installations which are flagged as counterfeit switch to a “reduced functionality mode” which results in features like Aero and DirectX being disabled.”

When it comes time for Dave to renew his passport, he immediately sees a problem: “From the large list presented - and notwithstanding the extending clause of “someone of similar standing in the community” - I suspect that the average person wouldn’t have too much trouble finding someone who could be duped or bribed into providing a false assertion of identity for the Passport Office… ”

And, although we don’t want to stimulate plot ideas for 24, Dave looks ahead to future problems with remote working: With the continued rise in home-based and mobile working, the possibility of staff being forced to access and potentially modify data by suitably-armed ne’er-do-wells becomes a genuine - if niche - security issue. (…) Taking this into account, it’s possible that a well-designed system which authenticates users based on a username and password would require up to 4 passwords per user - one for legitimate login in a non-duress situation, and three more, one for each type of duress!