Babbage

SECURITY types and privacy watchdogs rarely agree on anything. They do, however, both concede the importance of transparency. The rub is that whereas for human-rights advocates this means no underhand shenanigans impinging on citizens' civil liberties, security experts think of the ability literally to see through people and detect whether they are carrying any potentially threatening implements. The latest spat erupted in January when Raymond Kelly, New York's police commissioner, declared that his force is working with America's defence department to have so-called T-ray scanners mounted on squad cars. Mr Kelly said that the technology offers "a great deal of promise" in detecting concealed weapons without a physical search.

Terahertz radiation, to give T-rays their less jazzy name, makes up a band of the electromagnetic spectrum squeezed in between microwaves and infrared, equivalent to frequencies of 300 billion-3 trillion cycles per second. Everything with a temperature of 10 degrees above absolute zero or more emits T-rays. What is more, different substances sport characteristic terahertz tags. Scientists have had some success in using T-rays to distinguish similar substances and hope one day to be able to tell, say, cancerous tissue from healthy one, or benign plastic from plastic explosives. Today's terahertz scanners are, however, clever enough to tell a human body, which emits copious amounts of the stuff, from, say, a metal handgun, which produces much less. And they can do this from a distance, without shining a beam on its target first, as is the case with X-rays.

Since 2004 ThruVision, a spin-out from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, a national research facility in Oxfordshire, has been building scanners which it claims can do just that. Three years ago the company rolled out a device the size of a big loudspeaker, called T5000, which it has since sold to the Dubai Mercantile Exchange and London's second financial centre, Canary Wharf, among others, where it aims to pick out biggish concealed objects non-invasively as far away as 25 metres. Last year it announced that the United States Air Force purchased an upgraded version of the T5000, the TS5, whose range stretches up to 30 meters for large objects.

Predictably, the idea has civil libertarians up in arms. The New York Civil Liberties Union, an advocacy group, told the New York Times that "the public needs more information about this technology, how it works and the dangers it presents." It may draw comfort from legal precedents. In 2001 the Supreme Court ruled that the police need a warrant to deploy a thermal-imaging systems to detect high-intensity lamps of the sort used to grow marijuana. Earlier this year it handed down a decision forbidding law enforcement agencies to track suspects using GPS without a judicial thumbs-up. Terahertz scanners will no doubt spur similar legal wrangles.

IT IS becoming increasingly apparent that the Vietnamese authorities' relationship with Facebook is of the love-and-hate variety. In January Vuong Dinh Hue, the finance minister, said in an internet interview that using Facebook to reach out to the public is a terrific idea (though he has yet to set up his own account; he admitted that his daughter used the social-networking site more than he did). This in a country where Facebook has been blocked since late 2009.

The block was a response, many observers believe, to assorted political groups using it as a forum and to organise protests. Yet the government has never publicly acknowledged the policy, and it had no qualms about letting Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder, visit the north of the country with his girlfriend over Christmas (albeit not on business). Small wonder that Vietnamese netizens have taken little notice of the tacit ban.

In part, that is because, as we have written previously, the not-so-great firewall of Vietnam is easy to circumvent. Many users—not just tech whizzes—need no more than a few moments to tweak a necessary internet settings before going back to Farm Ville. It was stepped up at the end of 2010, in anticipation of the 11th Party Conference—the government tends to clamp down on anything that smells like fun prior to important political events—but even that did not have a huge effect.

Mr Hue's embrace of the social network is presumably an attempt to burnish his image of a friendly and open sort of chap, a novelty in a country used to dour, anonymous leaders in drab suits. But he is not alone. State-owned papers such as Thanh Nien News have their own Facebook pages embedded in their stories. And in early January General Director of the country's National Administration of Tourism, Nguyen Van Tuan, declared that tight budgets meant major overseas campaigns to promote the country would have to be by taking "full advantage of new technologies, especially Internet, including social networks such as Facebook and Twitter". 

“The saga of Facebook in Vietnam is an insight into the inner working of the regime,” says Carl Thayer, a Vietnam expert at the Australian Defense Force Academy in Melbourne. As with many authoritarian regimes, no one really knows what is going on because so many contradictory signals are issued. One message is clear, though: the Vietnamese state is not as monolithic as it would like everyone to think. Don't expect that one to be posted on Facebook.

RESEARCHERS are used to explaining scientific processes. Recently they have taken to explaining themselves. As we reported last week, on January 20th scientists who have created a new, more contagious form of bird flu explained in Science and Nature that they would take a 60-day hiatus from their research. The work of Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Centre, in Rotterdam, and Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, had created such alarm that American officials had asked the two leading scientific journals to censor it. Drs Fouchier and Kawaoka said that the moratorium would give them time to explain the merits of their work.

Now the would-be censors have offered their own rationale, in a comment published online on January 30th by both publications, leaving the virus as just about the only party not to weigh in on the matter. Paul Keim, a who chairs America’s National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), argues that he and his colleagues “found the potential risk of public harm to be of unusually high magnitude” and that the “NSABB was unanimous that communication of the results in the two manuscripts it reviewed should be greatly limited in terms of the experimental details and results.”

More interesting, perhaps, is Dr Keim’s question-and-answer session with Nature, posted beside the NSABB's open letter. No matter, Dr Keim argues, that Dr Kawaoka’s virus is not highly pathogenic. His methods could be used to create a more dangerous virus. As for arguments that the paper (which was submitted to Nature; Dr Fouchier's work was accepted by Science) will help to improve surveillance, Dr Keim responded that “it is important to convey how unprepared, on every level, the world is for an H5N1 pandemic.” But, he continued, the assessments of research by authors, editors and reviewers are inadequate. Better, he says, to create a standardised screening system for designated researchers, lest the sensitive nitty-gritty fall into the hands of mischief-makers.

Health officials and researchers, increasingly divided among themselves, are already girding their loins for a right dust-up. They are set to gather at a meeting in Geneva in mid-February under the aegis of the World Health Organisation.

FOR years urban planners have emphasised the needs of the motorist over those of the pedestrian. Thanks partly to greenery, partly to a greater understanding of how pedestrians behave, and partly to concerns about social cohesion, priorities are changing.

London provides two good examples of this shift. On February 1st Exhibition Road, a landmark street near many of the city’s museums, is being formally reopened after a three-year construction project to turn it into something that transport engineers like to call a “shared space”. Kerbs have been stripped out, along with the usual road markings, to create a thoroughfare that is designed to be shared by cyclists, pedestrians and cars alike. The idea, adopted from continental Europe, is to create an area which is not just more pleasant for people on foot but also safer because it encourages drivers to pay closer attention to their surroundings. 

Less experimentally, big improvements have already been made to Oxford Circus, one of the city’s busiest intersections. The junction between Oxford Street and Regent Street sees as many as 40,000 people pass through every hour, and only 2,000 vehicles. Until 2009, however, pedestrians came well down the pecking order. In the language of planners, pedestrians were unable to follow their desire lines, the paths they want to take as opposed to the ones they are meant to. At Oxford Circus, giving rein to people’s desire lines has meant ripping out guard railings that hemmed pedestrians in and allowing people to cross the junction diagonally as well as from side to side (a feature known as a pedestrian scramble). 

Desire lines can be seen in virtually every public park as the informal dirt trails trampled by walkers as they head off path networks to their preferred destination. They also exist over longer distances within cities. Pedestrians seem to prefer routes that afford most visibility, for example. An experiment carried out by Jan Wiener and colleagues at Freiburg University in Germany gave people a choice of two paths in a virtual environment: they reliably chose the direction which had the longest line of sight. 

Continue reading "Walk this way"»

THE comely women in abbreviated, form-fitting dresses or in tight shirts and hot pants would seem more appropriate as servers at Hooter's or a modern gentlemen's club. Yet "booth babes" are walking the floor at Macworld|iWorld, a professional conference aimed both at consumers and at professionals in the creative arts and information technology. A minor uproar accompanied their annual appearance at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in January, but they are both more typical there and seem less unusual among the mostly male attendees and amid the other sorts of Sin City's public and private entertainment.

Babbage has attended Macworld nearly every year since the late 1990s, and it was previously not uncommon to find well-turned-out female and male marketing types at the front of booths using their gender as a slight advantage to attract an audience that was only slightly male-heavy. Distaff engineers, executives and attendees are unremarkable because the Macintosh platform was long used primarily in professions, like graphic design, in which gender ratios in the workplace are typically even. Married couples are a frequent sight roaming the aisles at the trade show portion, sometimes in matching vintage rainbow Apple logo shirts.

But a few years ago the first professionally contracted female forms arrived at the show. (The show is run by IDG, a privately held publishing and event firm; Apple stopped its participation in 2009.) Despite the high level of female visitors, Chippendales equivalents are nowhere to be seen. Your correspondent has a variety of conflicting feelings about the booth babes, who were the topic of much discussion. Deployment of pretty young things to reel men in is so blatant a ploy that cognitive dissonance soon sets in. Being a man, Babbage cannot deny evolution's impact on his admiration of attractive women. Yet he resents it being used against him.

Worse is in the company of female colleagues, such as friend and fellow writer Dori Smith, when encountering a member of the gazelles with booth numbers or, most egregiously, 2D bar codes upon their derrieres and logos at their crotches. Babbage runs through desire, repulsion, embarrassment (for himself), embarrassment (for his colleagues) and embarrassment (for the models). The hired hands, by the way, are at ease and either enjoying themselves or superb actresses.

Ms Smith has an informal chart from a few years ago addressing the booth-babe issue in which she plots how the use of the terms women, babes and chicks varies by age and looks. As for companies, she tells Babbage, there are three sorts. Those with a product sell it at the show. Those without one plug what is coming. The remainder hire models.

(Photo credit: G.F.)

UNLIKE their American counterparts, European carmakers have long been associated with small, compact runarounds like the Fiat 500, Citroen 2CV, Mini Cooper, or more recently the Smart car. That has always made sense. Many roads are narrower and parking spaces pokier in Europe than they are across the Atlantic. And most people rarely drive the vast distances where a bigger car's greater comfort is worth paying for (though, in fairness, nor do most Americans—at least not any more). Now, a consortium of seven firms from Spain's Basque country and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab have taken this to extremes.

Their prototype of a tiny electric vehicle was unveiled on January 24th by José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commssion, who climbed into the car, gave a thumbs-up, and called it a “systematic solution to major societal challenges”. The two-door Hiriko, whose name derives from the Basque word for "city" or "urban", was designed by MIT engineers, but built by Basques. Starting next year, a trial manufacturing run is set to begin at Vitoria Gasteiz, outside Bilbao.

The Hiriko is brimming with sexy gimmicks. It folds upwards when parked, scrunching up to one-third the length of a standard European parking space. Like some compacts models of old, both passenger and driver enter through a folded-out windshield. Its wheels that can turn 90 degrees, to make parallel parking nightmares a thing of the past.

Denokinn, the Basque investment group backing the venture, wants to price the Hiriko at €12,500 ($16,400). The company is planning to flog the cars to cities across Europe looking to expand their car-sharing schemes: so far Berlin, Barcelona and Malmö have expressed interest. The car's limited range of 120km per charge may put off range-anxious individual buyers.

However, although many consumers and cities are looking to save cash (and the planet), supercompact cars have not done nearly as well as their proponents had hoped. Sales of city cars, known is the industry as “A-segment”, have stagnated in the last year, their global sales slumping from 6.2m units in 2010 to about 5.9m in 2011, according to figures from IHS Global Insight, a research outfit. It expects city-car sales to rebound slightly in 2012, to around 6.1m. Smart, a joint project between Germany's Daimler and Swatch, a Swiss watchmaker, has sold under a million units worldwide in the last ten years. And car-sharing schemes, like Zipcar, the largest company, have not warmed to electric vehicles, relying instead on traditional combustion engines, as well as some hybrids.

Tim Urquhart of IHS notes that cars like the Hiriko are low-value, low price "and, therefore, they are low-margin". The Basque start-up has a big hill to climb, one that Daimler and Renault, its French rival, have been struggling up for some time.

ALEXANDER NEMEROV'S primary concerns as he teaches his winter-term art-history survey course for Yale University's undergraduates, covering the Renaissance to present, are that the images of works he discusses are clearly visible in a darkened room, and that he brings sufficient energy and attention to make each oration fresh and unique. The audience did not always seem to appreciate the effort, however. From their vantage point at the back of the room Dr Nemerov's teaching assistants reported that a good quarter of scholars would tap away at phones and laptops. 

Yet he does not think trotting out a list of prohibitions is the best way to begin a class. So he took the seemingly remarkable step this term of selecting an auditorium that holds fewer students than the typical venue in part because it lacked Wi-Fi service. The Yale Daily News first reported this story to explain why only 270 students would be allowed in the course, which has been popular for decades, even though over 500 were "shopping" it, Yale-speak for auditing the first few days.

Dr Nemerov recalls that he first set his sights on the college's art-gallery auditorium because it may be kept darker than the law-school hall in which the class is often taught. But when he discovered that it is a rare zone without wireless networking, and that mobile-phone service is also poor to none, he needed no further convincing.

The good professor is no Luddite. He realises that a request to turn off the hall's Wi-Fi routers during a class may meddle with other nearby needs. (And it would in any case be useless in blocking mobile 3G and 4G signals.) Some students, he concedes, clearly use the internet to enhance his lectures, looking up artwork he discusses to get a closer or different view, or taking notes. But some engage in less pertinent online activities. Dr Nemerov debated with himself whether to note the signal blockage in his course syllabus but ultimately decided to leave students to discover this for themselves.

Continue reading "Radio silence"»

ON JANUARY 28th each year, governments and companies in America, Canada and across the European Union come together to promote “Data Privacy Day”. The idea is to use the occasion to raise public awareness about privacy and the need for people to guard their personal data carefully. This year’s event will be especially timely. On January 24th Google announced a number of changes to its privacy policy, at least one of which is already raising many eyebrows.

The web giant plans to stage a huge publicity campaign over the next few weeks to prepare its users for the changes, which will come into effect on March 1st. (The firm has already been running adverts addressing different aspects of online privacy in various media, including The Economist.) Among other things, the company is going to jettison over 60 separate privacy notices and replace them with a single, overarching master policy. It is also rewriting its rules to make them simpler and clearer. And it intends to introduce a new one giving it the power to use data generated by users signed in to one of its services in other areas of its business too.

Some of this is welcome and arguably long overdue. Too many web firms have a smorgasbord of privacy documents laden with legal jargon that appear deliberately designed to deter people from reading them. If Google’s new master policy is more accessible and concise than its existing plethora of notices—and preserves the safeguards embedded in them—then it will be a great improvement over the status quo.

But the search firm’s plan to expand the ways in which it can use data provided by someone signed into a service such as Gmail, its e-mail service, or YouTube, its video-streaming site, is likely to provoke heated debate. Announcing the change in a blog post, Alma Whitten, Google’s director of privacy, product and engineering argued that it would create “a simpler, more intuitive Google experience”. For instance, using data about a person’s interest in soccer gleaned from their e-mails sent via Gmail, Google would be able to, say, highlight videos of soccer matches when that user logs on to YouTube.

But there are other, unspoken reasons that Google is keen to make this change. By creating comprehensive profiles of users by combining crumbs of data they leave across its services, the firm is betting it can target more online ads at them more accurately. It also wants to position itself as a comprehensive online portal in order to compete more effectively with Facebook, which is soaking up an ever-increasing amount of web surfers’ time.

All this explains why Google is refusing to allow its users to opt out of the upcoming changes. Critics fret that this is a departure from its traditional habit of giving people power over their data (for instance, by letting them extract it easily from Google if they want to as part of the firm’s “data liberation” initiative). “Winning its battle with Facebook to remain king of the web requires Google to escalate the digital data arms race,” says Jeffrey Chester of the Centre for Digital Democracy, an American privacy watchdog. Whether or not it is damaging its prospects in the process would make a great subject for a debate on Data Privacy Day.

SUNNY countries are often poor. A shame, then, that solar power is still quite expensive. But it is getting cheaper by the day, and is now cheap enough to be competitive with other forms of energy in places that are not attached to electricity grids. Since 1.6 billion people are still in that unfortunate position, a large potential market for solar energy now exists. The problem is that although sunlight is free, a lot of those 1.6 billion people still cannot afford the cost of the kit in one go, and no one will lend them the money to do so.

Eight19, a British company spun out of Cambridge University, has, however, devised a novel way to get round this. In return for a deposit of around $10 it is supplying poor Kenyan families with a solar cell able to generate 2.5 watts of electricity, a battery that can deliver a three amp current to store this electricity, and a lamp whose bulb is a light-emitting diode. The firm reckons that this system, once the battery is fully charged, is sufficient to light two small rooms and to power a mobile-phone charger for seven hours. Then, next day, it can be put outside and charged back up again.

The trick is that, to be able to use the electricity, the system’s keeper must buy a scratch card—for as little as a dollar—on which is printed a reference number. The keeper sends this reference, plus the serial number of the household solar unit, by SMS to Eight19. The company’s server will respond automatically with an access code to the unit. 

Users may consider that they are paying an hourly rate for their electricity. In fact, they are paying off the cost of the unit. After buying around $80 worth of scratch cards—which Eight19 expects would take the average family around 18 months—the user will own it. He will then have the option of continuing to use it for nothing, or of trading it in for a bigger one, perhaps driven by a 10-watt solar cell. 

In that case, he would go then through the same process again, paying off the additional cost of the upgraded kit at a slightly higher rate. Users would thereby increase their electricity supply—ascending the “energy escalator”, as Eight19 puts it—steadily and affordably. Simultaneously, the company would be able to build a payment record of its clients, sorting the unreliable from the rest. 

According to Eight19’s figures, this looks like a good deal for customers. The firm reckons the average energy-starved Kenyan spends around $10 a month on paraffin—sufficient to fuel a couple of smoky lamps—plus $2 on charging his mobile phone in the market-place. Regular users of one of Eight19’s basic solar units will spend around half that, before owning it outright. Meanwhile, as the cost of solar technology falls, it should get even cheaper. The company hopes to be able to supply users with a new, low-cost and robust sort of solar cell, printed onto plastic strips, within two years.

The scheme has so far been tried out among a couple of hundred Kenyan families. With the aid of a charitable loan to accelerate its roll-out, Eight19 is planning to disperse 4,000 solar units in Kenya, Malawi and Zambia over the next two months. If the idea works, solar power will have a whole, new set of customers and the days of the paraffin lamp may be numbered.

THE idea of collecting cash online through a mix of patronage and prepayment sprouted informally a few years ago. Initially bands used it to raise money for studio rental and the production costs for releasing an album. But the idea took off and is now offered by a plethora of middlemen, and embraced by all manner of creative types. In 2011 Kickstarter, the most successful of the online enablers, received nearly $100m in pledges for over 27,000 projects launched at its site.

This newspaper has written about Kickstarter several times in the past two years, including an overview of how crowdfunding works after the firm had raised about $15m in its first year. At the time, it was unclear whether such crowdfunding (also called micropatronage) was a passing fad or a rising alternative to conventional starter financing for creative media.

Kickstarter's performance in 2011 bolsters the latter case. The $99.3m pledge figure represents all commitments, backed by valid credit cards, to over 27,000 projects launched last year. The two biggest categories were film (with $32.5m pledged) and music (with $19.8m). Only those projects which reach a pledge target they set themselves within either 30 or 60 days receive the cash, which is charged to donors' credit cards. (These are validated on making the pledge, so Kickstarter's collection rate is close to 100%.) Last year 46% of the projects managed the feat; those that fall short do not get the cash and their donors are not charged.

In 2011 nearly 12,000 projects were financed through contributions by 960,000 unique donors with a median pledge of $25. Kickstarter's Medici, with the handle "H.T.", supported 724 projects. Yancey Strickler, one of Kickstarter's founders, says that just over $83m was collected. Projects which do reach their goal typically surpass it, typically hitting 130% of the target amount, and raising on average $4,500. However, ambitious ideas routinely muster $100,000 or more, and record holders have come within a whisker of $1m. (The company features a page listing its biggest success stories.) Unsuccessful campaigns rarely pass 20% of the goal. 

Continue reading "Micro no more"»

THE cast of characters in a controversial case involving alleged online piracy of copyrighted content seems like it could have come straight from an action-film script. There is Kim Dotcom (pictured, after the arrest), a German internet entrepreneur who changed his surname from Schmitz to reflect his passion for the web, and at whose mansion in New Zealand the police reportedly seized a load of luxury cars, including, yes, a pink Cadillac. There is a bunch of activist hackers, or “hacktivists”, collectively known as “Anonymous”. There are Hollywood film and music companies. And there are the G-men from America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). 

Yet there is nothing remotely fictional about the accusations that have been made against Megaupload.com, an online file-sharing site that Mr Dotcom founded. On January 20th the FBI and authorities in a number of other countries, including Hong Kong, Britain and the Netherlands, seized servers or other assets of the firm, effectively shutting down the service. Mr Dotcom and several other people allegedly involved with the site were arrested in New Zealand the same day.

These moves were a response to charges brought by American prosecutors, who have accused the site of criminal copyright infringement and money laundering on a massive scale. A lawyer representing Megaupload has said that the company intends to “vigorously contest” the allegations, which are “without merit”. The case will be watched closely by entertainment companies in America, whose efforts to get legislation passed to make it easier to pursue copyright violators have just been stymied by opposition from the internet industry, as we reported in this week's print edition. 

That legislation was aimed at companies operating entirely outside America. In Megaupload’s case, the Hong Kong-based firm was already vulnerable to a legal challenge from the United States because it used a large number of servers on American soil. Like other so-called “cyberlockers”, the firm enabled customers to store films, music and other content on its servers and then to create links to the material to be shared electronically. People wanting to keep large amounts of stuff on Megaupload—and to take advantage of faster uploading and downloading speeds—paid a fee to the firm, which touted its services in videos such as this one, which claims that the site accounted for 4% of all internet traffic. 

These fees plus revenue from online adverts allowed Megaupload to make megabucks. According to prosecutors, the firm had generated over $175m since 2005. They also say that when entertainment companies complained to the company that their copyrighted material was being exchanged illegally via its service, it removed some offending links to the material, but not the content itself. This is said to have deprived copyright owners of over $500m in revenue. 

Whatever the eventual outcome of the case, it has already elicited a swift response from two very different quarters. The entertainment industry has been quick to point out that if Megaupload hadn’t had operations in America, it would have been beyond the reach of its prosecutors. Industry lobbyists say this shows why new legislation is badly needed to target copyright violators with no presence in the country.

The other response came from Anonymous. After news of Megaupload’s fate emerged, outraged members of the group launched a series of cyberattacks on several websites, including those of the FBI, America’s Department of Justice and the New Zealand police service. The hackers appear to have used large numbers of computers to overload the target sites with traffic, knocking them offline, in what is known as a “distributed denial of service” attack. The sites were eventually able to recover from this digital assault. Megaupload will find bouncing back from the legal one it faces much harder.