Terrific conversation about the technology threats of 10 years hence with Marcus Ranum on the Bruce Schneier blog.

Mary Meeker was an analyst who, back in the nineties, was accused of over-hyping dot com companies, helping them launch into publically listed existence. Many of her recommended picks failed, a few became the Internet powerhouses we see on the web today. Mary became very controversial for a while. Perhaps failing upwards, Ms. Meeker is now head of Morgan Stanley’s global technology research team.

She is here before us today, ranking countries in terms of their Internet ‘power,’ or who is leading the world in what.

The American news story focusses on America’s declining share of world GDP, which really should be welcome news for all, including Americans. What interests me is her assessment of world leaders in certain areas of Internet practice.

“In terms of the Internet — especially in technologies key to Web 2.0 success — the fastest growth is in non-U.S. markets. For example, Germany leads the e-commerce market, China leads in online gaming, South Korea leads in broadband, Japan leads in mobile payments, the United Kingdom leads in online advertising, Brazil and South Korea lead in social networking, and the Philippines leads in micro-transactions via SMS.”

Nice to know the UK leads in something. Pity it’s just advertising. Sadly, Ms. Meeker does not nominate a country as leader in the areas of IT security, information assurance, etc.

I bring this up because I wonder where people turn when they search for best practice. There was a time when the default might well have been the U.S. for many areas of technology. But I think that time passed around 1990.

There is, or should be, relevance to information assurance efforts in all of this, as a technology that undergoes its growth pains in another country and matures into commercial propositions can be introduced into the UK as a disruptive solution before anybody has had a chance to consider the implications. If it is introduced from a country where legislative and regulatory goals are vastly different, it could have implications for all of us.

Yesterday I posted about a Korean company that allows for mobile phone CCTV coverage of your house (it’s near the bottom of the post). But of course it doesn’t have to be your house. It can be anyplace you can stick a webcam. Great technology. But there are implications for privacy, security, all the things we go on about here at Blindside.

And a long time ago I asked if the UK was ready in any meaningful sense of the word to integrate best practice or leading edge technology currently available in other parts of the world, should they migrate here in full form. I didn’t get an answer… so I’ll ask again, using this as a specific case study.

Is the UK prepared, in terms of existing laws and regulation, in terms of social attitudes and acceptance, in terms of technology infrastructure, to accept a fully-formed technology that allows anyone to stick a webcam anywhere and view the results over a mobile phone?

Sigh. When it becomes time for government departments to monitor employee activity on computers, networks and government issued mobile devices, do they have the same rights as private sector employers? If you click through and read the story, look at comment #108 before you answer my question…

More prosaic than new robots, less dramatic than Galileo funding (eppur’ si muove), the DfES may compel an answer to the eternal schoolchild’s plaint, ‘Please sir, I want some more.’ Children who don’t want their fingerprints scanned may yet find a school dinner waiting for them.

What alternatives to full compliance are available to citizens who don’t want to be included in databases? The government compels private companies to offer opt-out mechanisms for commercial databases, and strongly prefers that such databases be opt-in only. Does this not suggest that the government understands that participation should not be compelled?

Just asking.

What with one thing and another, I forgot about this piece until just now, when I went to update the Web page for that column series (www.pelicancrossing.net/hpkcols.htm - it’s the interviews column I do for the Inquirer). In it, Nicko van Someren, founder and CTO of nCipher, talks about the problem of key management: as crypto systems proliferate, dealing with keys is becoming a major issue.Natiurally, nCipher has a solution it would be happy to sell people, but that’s not the point: the point is more that every new security system we adopt comes with a complex management cost. This is true at all levels, from the major corporation that has a server tied up for a day just changing keys at all its sites throughout the world to the individual at home who locked down their Airport so tightly they now can’t remember how to open a connection for a guest who wants to use the Internet. These costs are part of why humans, who prefer easy lives, bypass security or turn it off rather than be hassled…

wg

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”

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

…at State of Play, Doug Thomas told the story of the mother who emailed him for advice about her son. It seems that the previous weekend she’d gotten somewhat alarmed when he spent six hours straight playing World of Warcraft. She asked him to quit the game, and when he didn’t, she came over and turned off his computer. “But we were on the *final boss*!” Her question to Thomas: What happened? Thomas replied that what she had done was turn off the computer at the moment when his team had reached the final challenge of the day, leaving the 39 people relying on him stranded. Oh.

My friend Barbara used to talk about the ways that games could be made more family-friendly. For example, she and her son used to argue when mealtime or bedtime came along and he simply wasn’t at a stopping place. She felt that games would be a lot less contentious in a lot of families if designers paid more attention to things like making it possible to save the game at *any* point instead of only at certain, widely dispersed points, or making pause available throughout, and so on. I thought these were all good points, and the fact that so many games were not designed this way probably has or had something to do with the average demographic of the designers.

I don’t know what the solution might have been for WoW. The mother’s response to Thomas’s answer was something like, “Isn’t six hours a long time to play a game?” Well, it is. And especially so if you’re 13 or whatever and, as teenagers often do, fail to communicate to your parent in advance exactly what it is you’re signing up for this Saturday.

There has long been a lot of belief in some parts of the computer industry that virtual worlds are the future (or an important part of it). These kinds of issues will continue to resurface. At State of Play, the design panel talked about how architecture affects human behaviour, comparing real-life examples of public spaces with the virtual ones – in one case, they showed the same world with a big, central fountain around which people congregated and then without it, with people just randomly dispersing. Designers clearly think about this when they build their worlds. But there seems to me much less thought for the way the virtual world intersects with the demands of real life. There is no offline mode for Second Life, for example, so there is no way to sit offline on a plane and read the information you’ve collected in the world even though you can save notecards and other documents. The world itself is too big to download, but I don’t really understand why there is no offline mode for your own inventory and small home space. That, of course, gives the game gods complete control over your experience at all times – there’s always a wait when you log into the world while it downloads all the software updates since your last visit.

I’m in a session on Google click fraud, and the ultimate problem, Broward Horne, is saying is that the TCP/IP and the Web were never designed to uniquely identify individual people or enforce identity - but that is what Google’s business is based on (when it charges and pays based on clicks on advertising links). So far, this fundamental mismatch has not hurt Google’s business or its stock price, but eventually…

…a link that turned up to a Wired article by Bruce Schneier points out that this problem is endemic online and turns up all over the place, hence so many systems (captchas, etc.) to ensure that a real human is at the keyboard. We can fool computers better than they can fool us.

wg

Happy Monday to you all.

Non-flood related news… From Kable, “An NAO report has said the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency should consider using automatic number plate recognition to estimate the level of vehicle tax evasion. The report says that despite receiving many plaudits for its electronic vehicle licensing (EVL) system, which enables customers to pay vehicle excise duty (VED) and obtain a licence online, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency has experienced a significant rise in tax evasion.”

What does HMG want from ANPR? If they want to use it to catch car thieves or monitor serious organised crime, they should use it for that and only that. Then people will support it and comply with it.

If HMG wants to use it to beat people up on taxes, people will dislike it and work to defeat it. Then it won’t be fit for purpose for the more important tasks that ANPR is most appropriate for.