Author: loughlin

Competition Time!

Bank Holiday puzzler: can YOU work out the connections here?

‘Google and Microsoft have made a pact to protect surveillance capitalism’, 2/05/2016

Microsoft and Google, two of the world’s greatest monopolies, have been bitter rivals for nearly 20 years. But suddenly, in late April, they announced a startling accord. The companies have withdrawn all regulatory complaints against one another, globally. Rather than fighting their battles in public courts and commissions, they have agreed to privately negotiate.
…

And here the most sinister upshot of Microsoft’s decision to stop needling Google with legal disputes becomes clear. “A key theme I write about is that surveillance capitalism has thrived in lawless space,” says Zuboff. “Regulations and laws are its enemy. Democratic oversight is a threat. Lawlessness is so vital to the surveillance capitalism project,” she continues, “that Google and Microsoft’s shared interest in freedom from regulation outweighs any narrower competitive interests they might have or once thought they had. They can’t insist to the public that they must remain unregulated, while trying to impose regulations on one another.”

Data privacy is as important as tax, Google exec warns Noonan, 12/04/2015

In November, the Finance Minister met with Google’s vice president of engineering Urs Holzle, the company’s eighth employee and the man who leads its technology planning and data centre efforts. Google Ireland chief John Herlihy also attended.

Data privacy was one of the main topics of conversation, records show. Holzle raised Ireland’s policy of requesting information from internet companies, urging Minister Noonan to make sure the rules are clear.

‘Get off Facebook if you value your privacy, EU commish tells court’ , 26/03/2015

In the current case, a group called Europe v Facebook, led by privacy activist and “Angry AustrianTM” Max Schrems, alleges that Facebook violated European citizens’ “fundamental rights” (defined in the European Convention on Human Rights) by transferring their personal data to the US National Security Agency (NSA).

After the Irish data protection commissioner refused to investigate, citing Safe Harbour rules, the case was referred first to the Irish High Court and now the ECJ.

Europe’s highest court strikes down Safe Harbor data sharing between EU, US, 6/10/2015

Europe’s top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), has struck down the 15-year-old Safe Harbour agreement that allowed the free flow of information between the US and EU. The most significant repercussion of this ruling is that American companies, such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter, may not be allowed to send user data from Europe back to the US.
…

The case was originally sent to the CJEU by the High Court of Ireland, after the Irish data protection authority rejected a complaint from Maximillian Schrems, an Austrian citizen. He had argued that in light of Snowden’s revelations about the NSA, the data he provided to Facebook that was transferred from the company’s Irish subsidiary to the US under the Safe Harbour scheme was not, in fact, safely harboured.

Minister Richard Bruton T.D. Joins Microsoft to mark the start of construction of Microsoft’s new €134m Campus, 20/10/2015

“Technology is an area we have specifically targeted as part of our Action Plan for jobs and we have put in place a range of measures to support growth in this area. Microsoft was one of the first US companies to choose Ireland as a location for its EMEA operations.”

‘DRI challenges independence of Ireland’s Data Protection Authority’, 28/01/2016

Digital Rights Ireland has instructed its lawyers to serve legal papers on the Irish government, challenging whether the office of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner is truly an independent data protection Authority under EU law.

Ireland’s position as the EU’s centre for technology multinational companies makes it critical for the protection of all EU citizens’ rights that the state has a world class data protection regulatory regime.

A series of cases from the CJEU, the EU’s top court, have stressed the critical importance of a truly independent data protection authority. Most recently, in the Schrems case on Safe Harbour, the lack of such an independent watchdog was cited as one of the most significant differences between the EU and US privacy systems.

DRI’s case is that Ireland has failed to properly implement EU data protection law, or to follow the requirements of the Charter of Fundamental Rights by failing to ensure the Irish DPC is genuinely independent from the Government.

The Bass Player Was From Suffolk

I finally finished a mix of Smiths cover versions I’ve been rolling around inside my head for the last month or so. As usual the greatest struggle was being concise and keeping it down to less than an hour.

[mixcloud width=”100%” height=”100%” cover=”1″ mini=”1″ light=”1″ autoplay=”1″ tracklist=”1″ artwork=”1″ iframe=”true” ]https://www.mixcloud.com/loughlin/the-bass-player-was-from-suffolk/[/mixcloud]

✩ Want You To Know: What A Load Of Teatox

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The weather forecast here is precipitation for the weekend. Probably beyond the weekend too and possibly even stretching into the next decade. I got this forecast from the Accuweather app, which big meteorology says is a liar.

Hooking up on the Internet has been mostly solved. Making friends hasn’t.

“The teatox industry is enormous … paying as much as a quarter of a million dollars per post …promoting teatoxes has become one of the fastest growing businesses on Instagram.” You learn something new, and a new word, every day. Teatox is also a load of unscientific teatox. There’s an impressive number of layers of shadiness on show here, from celebrity woo endorsements to the mystery of whether these ostensibly competing companies are actually all the same. Of course there’s a Mormon connection.

In this age of easily spread misinformation, who will debunk the famous debunkings of yore? Chuck Tingle?

Bad software has partially digested cars and maybe it might be better if we just admit defeat and let the self-driving ones take over.

Turns out the best Pixies cover version ever is by a bunch of yelling animals. It had never crossed my mind before, but this is just what a song about surrealism needed to complete it as a fully realised piece of art.

For your further listening pleasure here’s a couple of podcasts.

The latest episode of Let’s Make Mistakes is called ‘hashtaggarbagefire’ and is about writing good copy for the Web, which not enough people know how to do. C’mon folks, Jakob Nielsen has been wittering on about this for twenty years now. Also digs into how to do superficial customer service well on Twitter. Placating angry people rather than fixing problems works, for a while at least.

‘Pls Pee On Me’ from The Heart covers an app that lets people talk about sexytimes with their partners without directly talking to them. Raises an interesting point about how comfortable people have become with talking via text as compared to face-to-face.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

‘Daily Life: April 2016’

Totally Confused

First mall contact, flirting responses, Rube Goldberg forms, wood pulp caused bad journalism and on bullshit jobs.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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✩ Want You To Know: Bits And Bots

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All the breathless tech world chatter of the moment is about bots that chatter back at you and, more importantly, try to sell you things and / or replace customer support jobs. The feeling seems to be that the public have had a taste of the botty future through interacting with the digital butlers on their phones over the past couple of years and are now ready for swarms of the things to pop up, often unbidden, in every corner of their digital spaces.

Full disclosure of my experience in this field – I have made a few somewhat generative Twitter bots, taught Slackbot to be a snobby grammarian and display doomy demotivational quotes on startup and rejected all the advances of the personal assistant on my phone.

heller-slack-quote.png-large

After reading that there were now bots in Skype that would talk to me I tried a few out. The results were uninspiring.

Anyway, here are a few articles cleverer people than I have written about the coming bot supremacy.

Conversational UI is now trying to be a thing because, I think, enough people have said they want it to be a thing. At present the main outcome of this is that it increases the amount of clicking, tapping and guessing required to get something done. But at least the end user had a stilted experience along the way.

… messenger apps’ apparent success in fulfilling such a surprising array of tasks does not owe to the triumph of “conversational UI.” What they’ve achieved can be much more instructively framed as an adept exploitation of Silicon Valley phone OS makers’ growing failure to fully serve users’ needs, particularly in other parts of the world.

It turns out that a lot of these bots are actually people masquerading as bots, which is an interesting, or perhaps nonsensical inversion of the whole idea.

The goal for most of these businesses is to require as few humans as possible. People are expensive. They don’t scale. They need health insurance. But for now, the companies are largely powered by people, clicking behind the curtain and making it look like magic.

Just to reiterate, most of these bots aren't very good.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve played with a handful and have struggled to make much use of them. I recently needed to make a reservation for a work lunch. I fired up Operator to find me a table, and it quickly sent back a pleasant but unhelpful reply — declining my request, as it didn’t yet have that capability.

Mostly forgotten Philly psych-soul maestro Billy Paul died and the Guardian lists five of his best. Do also listen to this bass line which is one of the most elastic ever laid down.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

'Making Matzo in the Lower East Side'

Totally Confused

Uber Ex, new sarcophagus, incompetent robots, positive impostor syndrome and snow leopard show off.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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✩ Want You To Know: Get It Over With

It’s been a while, apologies for that but there was a serious amount of election ignoring, and then post-election to be done. My big pile of ignorage has probably never been so swollen. Yet still it continues.

Last night I listened to a live stream of a local Minnesota radio station. They were playing Prince‘s entire back catalogue in chronological order, interspersed with listener and staff anecdotes about him. Despite frequently being a garbagefire of despair the Internet can still amaze and move in surprising ways.

The ‘Purple Life’ mixtape on Mixcloud by Dave Wrangler and DJ Alykhan, done to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Purple Rain is worth squeezing into your earholes today. Next week’s New Yorker cover is beautiful.

Sort of continuing on that theme of what the Internet has wrought, this piece by Rex Sorgatz about growing up isolated in a very small town, leaving and returning is fascinating. There was no Internet so the source of knowledge was the library with subscriptions to a whole five magazines. Now everything has changed utterly, information-wise, whilst the town has mostly remained the same. There’s a great story about a scandal involving the naughty words in ‘The Catcher In The Rye’ as well.

Here are a few more things I’ve enjoyed reading over the last while, mostly about the intersection of media and technology.

Emily Bell wrote this piece about Facebook and the future of media and journalism, and it really sums up everything I’ve been thinking over the last few years about this. Tough times for publishers, certainly, but they have handed over control of the distribution of their product with barely a squeak of protest. As discrete items of content become separated from major media brands and appear free-floating in the streams of media consumers, where now for the brands?

There are huge benefits to having a new class of technically able, socially aware, financially successful, and highly energetic people like Mark Zuckerberg taking over functions and economic power from some of the staid, politically entrenched, and occasionally corrupt gatekeepers we have had in the past. But we ought to be aware, too, that this cultural, economic, and political shift is profound.

‘Don’t Trust Your CMS’ is a sobering look at the realities of publishing workflows inside media organisations. Learn to write in markdown folks.

“Can I share this video with my family?” ‘The Secret Rules Of The Internet’ delves into content moderation and the still haphazard and often exploitative way it is carried out.

While public debates rage about government censorship and free speech on college campuses, customer content management constitutes the quiet transnational transfer of free-speech decisions to the private, corporately managed corners of the internet where people weigh competing values in hidden and proprietary ways.

The New York Times gave an insight into how the media sausage is made nowadays with ‘How The Times Covers Breaking News: The First 12 Hours of the Brussels Bombings’. Eyewitness David Crunelle gave a rather startling view of this process from the other side of the newsdesk.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

‘Lost Parisian Cafes In Rainy Nights’

Totally Confused

Celebrity mountain lion, alsatians in totalitarianism, film dialogue broken down by gender and age, 38.0000,-97.0000 and making a bot that isn’t racist.

Yours etc., @loughlin

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13th Floor Elevators – May The Circle Remain Unbroken

https://twitter.com/loughlin/status/722725906322714625

Every Day Is Like Sunday

And every website looks the same, because people are lazy and unwilling to take chances. When I worked in web design and development around the turn of the century we had to work hard to convince clients that this was a different medium and they shouldn’t just shovel their existing marketing collateral onto their domain. Brochureware was everywhere.

Forbes was still writing about brochureware in 2010.

I recently came across online design package Visme, which among many other things will produce presentations. Rather grimly, the lacklustre template design of contemporary website has now slithered its way into presentation templates.

visme-template

Cog symbols and a wrench, curly brackets and a Wi-fi symbol equals technology now.

So Long And Thanks For All The Bricks

I Love You, You Pay My Rent

No, you don’t own that Internet of Things device, you’re just renting it. With renting must come great trust that the manufacturer won’t be acquired by a larger company, which had just recently itself been acquired by one of the largest companies of them all, which will then decide that it will go ahead and permanently switch off that snazzy household hub you thought you owned. More fool you.

The companies involved are, in this order, Revolv, Nest and Google. The product is a hub which acts as a controller for many connected devices in the home – lights, kettles, thermostats and so on.

☞ Google’s parent company is deliberately disabling some of its customers’ old smart-home devices (Business Insider)

From revolv.com, 7th April 2016

This is more than just a bit awkward and doesn’t bode well for people actually trusting tech companies to deliver the connected home of their dreams. (Wait, have people actually been dreaming about this?)

Google has a long history of shutting things down when they don’t work out the way Google had hoped. This isn’t in any way unusual in a successful business with multiple product lines that boast billions of customers worldwide. Strategic imperatives change, project champions are reassigned or leave the company entirely. Heck, things get ditched by Google because their videos are starting to creep the Internet out.

“There’s excitement from the tech press, but we’re also starting to see some negative threads about it being terrifying, ready to take humans’ jobs,” wrote Courtney Hohne, a director of communications at Google and the spokeswoman for Google X.

Having said all that, surely customers could expect a product not to be unilaterally switched off by the company that made it, or in this case the one that has inherited the obligations of the company that made it?

For a lot more about what may or may not be going on at Nest, it was covered in a fair bit of detail on the Jay & Farhad Show not that long ago.

https://soundcloud.com/jay-yarow/trouble-at-nest

Yum Yum

As software continues to eat the world, this leaves your average consumer in a bit of a bind when going about their dutiful business of consuming. When previously making purchase decisions about commonplace household devices they didn’t have to consider whether they trusted the manufacturer not to switch the thing off entirely at some unspecified time in the future.

We have recently become accustomed to shortened product lifecycles mostly through the galloping progress of mobile devices, moving rapidly from portable two-way communications tool to indispensable digital servant, companion and familiar. The industry’s marketing efforts are almost all directed to promoting the improvements available in the new versions of their devices. Longevity of any device or the software that makes it function is alien. In that world 18 months is now seen as a reasonable enough expectable lifespan for a product. Keen early adopters can easily find reasons to upgrade their phones on a much shorter cycle.

Built in obsolescence has been a thing that manufacturers have half-heartedly tried to deny for close on a century now, ever since the Phoebus cartel of light bulb manufacturers brazenly created the concept in 1924. The damn light bulbs were just too well made to be profitable enough. Members of the cartel were fined if their bulbs worked for too many hours.

☞ There Is A Light That Never Goes Out (99% Invisible podcast, 16 minutes)

The cloud isn’t magic – it’s just someone else’s hard drive*.

What is the ownership model anyway? As a consumer you own the device, but not the service? So if the hardware in your house requires the continued existence of the service, and Google decides to kill the service then you’re just plain out of luck? That seems … decidedly unfair. Not illegal, obviously, because you read through the massively long EULA, right?

You would expect your car to keep working far longer than 18 months after manufacture of the model is discontinued. Although your car can now be disabled remotely if you don’t keep up the repayments.

Are we customers suffering from an outmoded way of thinking about ownership and simply haven’t caught up with the companies who understand that they are renting these things to us, but are not yet entirely upfront about telling us?

As software and hardware are now fully intertwined, with hardware devices like the Revolv hub requiring not just onboard software and an Internet connection to function, but also other software remotely located on someone else’s servers, what else could we predict might be switched off with little warning? Google’s much discussed self driving car? Smaller devices like Chromecasts?

I can’t imagine Apple or Samsung taking a decision to do something like this. They are both historically hardware companies first and foremost, with software and services to support this hardware. Google is a software and services company which is relatively new to hardware. It is hard to tell whether Google will modify its approach to connected hardware and provide guarantees of device lifespan from time of purchase, or whether other hardware manufacturers will learn from Google that switching off the servers is a very effective way of reducing support costs for a product line to near zero.

Tyrannical

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.

C.S. Lewis

Tiny Tapes

If you’re of a certain age you’ll remember tape to tape recording, or vinyl to tape recording, or waiting by the radio to press record when the DJ played that song you’d heard before and hoped he’d play again. You amassed a hodge-podge collection of physical playlists on a motley selection of tapes of different lengths – C-60, C-90, sometimes the rare and mostly useless C-120. Making a mixtape was a serious business. It was curation before everybody became a curator.

The delightful Mixtapr recaptures the frowningly intense process of making a mixtape. Listening to the tracks, making sure they worked back to back, changing the running order to make sure it all just worked.

Here’s one I made earlier.

https://play.spotify.com/user/~loughlin/playlist/6rjThq0SACtqQRD5elR9IZ

To my surprise 8tracks.com is still going, albeit in a somewhat reduced way for people outside the US & Canada because of licensing. Gotta keep up the efforts to region lock access if at all possible, because that’s the model of extracting rent the content owners understand. It now streams using YouTube.

Here’s one I made even earlier over there.

Well It’s A Start … from loughlin on 8tracks Radio.