Traffic Rules Part I

By | November 22, 2011
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Traffic1The difference between a developed metropolis and a developing one isn’t transportation — it’s the rules and discipline about how that transportation is used. A city like Hong Kong flows because everyone follows the rules. A city like Jakarta doesn’t because people don’t. It’s not about building more roads, or more subways, or more bus lanes, but about developing rules that ensure existing transportation is used as it should be. Cars, people, trains and buses flow because they each agree to a set of rules that ensure that flow. In effect it’s like one big sliding puzzle. The bits move around because there’s space for them to move around.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s just people stopping at red lights, or people allowing passengers to alight before they try to embark. The rules can be sophisticated or basic, but they only work if they’re followed: In Hong Kong a taxi driver won’t cross a thick white line even if there’s no traffic around; in Jakarta there are several red lights around the city that cars don’t bother to even stop at. In one city nothing is negotiable; in another everything is. A new buslane in Jakarta that’s officially off limits to all vehicles except buses and emergency vehicles is already awash with ordinary traffic.

Somehow in Hong Kong the rules have become the norm, and no one needs to be around to enforce them. Everyone keeps everyone else in line. In Jakarta, the rules are seen as an obstacle, something to be overcome. It’s not as if drivers in Hong Kong are somehow collaborating in a fit of consideration, but there is a tacit recognition that by following the rules, everyone will benefit. Even in pedestrian overpasses, somehow a rule establishes itself — everyone walks on the left, say, and the two-way flow is optimized. It doesn’t seem hard and fast; the next day everyone seems to be walking on the right. But it works. A self-organizing system.

Jakarta is not. It’s a free-for-all. Or actually, it’s has its own rules. It’s just they’re not optimized for the situation. The bigger the vehicle, for example, the more it will take precedence over other vehicles. And a car in Hong Kong won’t pull into traffic if by doing so it will slow down that traffic. This is what the Stop/Give way/Yield sign is for. A car in Jakarta will do the opposite: It will pull out slowly, inching into the road until the traffic is forced to slow down to accommodate it. In fact the dominance of unwritten traffic rules in a city like Jakarta ensure that traffic will never work efficiently.

Until those rules are replaced with rules that work and the discipline to ensure they’re followed, developing cities will never become developed ones. It’s not about the infrastructure. It’s about the way it’s used.

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Wagging The Journalist Tail

By | November 22, 2011
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I’m a bit late on this, but if you’re a journalist it’s an interesting glimpse on just how much effort PR puts into spin: Microsoft’s PR agency sends its memo on a Wired journalist to the journalist himself (the dossier is here).

Much has been written about how it is normal practice to have PR closely monitoring a journalist, and we shouldn’t be surprised. True, I guess. What surprises me about the episode is the degree of influence/control those writing the memos assume they have over the process. Take these examples from the emails in the memo:

  • Spin: They are requesting a photo session with Jeff Sandquist {Microsoft’s director of platform evangelism} so we’ve secured the focus of our story. Translation: We wanted them to write about Sandquist and they are.
  • Interference: Fred will be writing early this week and we expect him to finish mid-week and will be in touch with him throughout the process. We should have a look at it early March and it should run late March for the April issue. Translation: We will be exerting influence over the writer as he writes.
  • Influence: We’re pushing Fred to finish reporting and start writing. Translation: We are exerting influence over the timing of the journalistic process.
  • Professional pressure: We will continue to push Fred to make sure there are no surprises. Translation: We will exert influence over the journalist to ascertain the content of the article and (implicitly) seek to remove anything we don’t like.
  • Personal pressure: I would hate for them to feel like the story somehow missed the true essence in which Channel 9 and 10 came to be…I know it would be pretty disappointing to them if those elements weren’t captured somehow. Translation: We will use all tools in our kit including personal feelings and guilt to ensure the journalist writes what we want.

We should point out that Chris Anderson at Wired has written about how Waggener Edstrom, the PR company, were not given a draft of the story, they were faxed a proof (i.e. a final version that cannot be corrected.) I can understand the sense in doing this, but I’d say it’s still one step too much (and it doesn’t quite gel with what Wired’s research director Joanna Pearlstein says in a comment, that “we do not share copies of stories with sources prior to publication, period.” Might be worth clarifying this.)

We should also be careful about concluding that just because the PR flaks think they’re heavily influencing the process, they may not be. The proof, of course, is in the pudding. Was the final story what they were aiming for?

Journalistic integrity is the issue. Jeff Sandquist, the subject of the story, has written about how Wired has been trying to apply the lessons of transparency learned from Microsoft to its own institution. This might or might not be true. Transparency is fine, but more important is opacity. PR shouldn’t be granted, or assume that they’re being granted, such extensive access to the journalistic process. That should be sacrosanct.

There’s a simple way of looking at this. Replace Microsoft as the subject with a government. Would a publication and its readers feel happy about this degree of involvement by officialdom in the framing of a story? I’m sure it happens, but as a reader I guess I’d just hope it doesn’t. As a reader I’d be saddened by all this; not because PR is doing something it shouldn’t, but that from the tone of the emails, it sounds as if PR assumes extensive rights to be intimately involved in the story. That means this kind of thing is common.

I’m a journalist, so my interest is simple: to ensure that what I write is what I think is correct and that I have managed to filter out as much as the spin as possible, so that what remains is as close to the truth as I can get it. For the record, I would never tolerate this degree of involvement in the process. Of course I’m lucky; I intentionally live and work a long way from anyone who can personally manipulate me through relationships, and although I write for The Wall Street Journal I’m no big fish. In fact, I have a lot of problems securing even basic stuff like a copy of Office 2007 to review; in the light of this episode I’m quite grateful. I’d rather be ignored than be subjected to this kind of pincer movement.

Bottom line: It’s sad that there’s no sense of irony here that so much effort is put into trying to control the message that is ‘there is no control’.

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The Power of Morse

By | November 22, 2011
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Watching BBC correspondents and analysts poring over footage of the British sailors being ‘interviewed’ by their captors on Iranian television reminds me, as it must others, of the Vietnam war, and how captured American pilots were wheeled out for propaganda purposes.

What has this got to do with technology? Well, if you recall, one Jeremiah Denton, a co-resident of the Hanoi Hilton with John McCain, managed to subvert the propaganda value for his captors and also convey important information to his superiors by blinking the word ‘torture’ in Morse Code. According to his official biography:

Throughout the interview, while responding to questions and feigning sensitivity to harsh lighting, denton blinked his eyes in morse code, repeatedly spelling out a covert message: “T-O-R-T-U-R-E”. the interview, which was broadcast on American television on May 17, 1966, was the first confirmation that American POWs in Vietnam were being tortured.

Independence Day made some homage to this when it had survivors of the alien attack communicating around the globe via Morse Code. The point? It wouldn’t make much sense, in this era of sophisticated communications, to teach British soldiers Morse Code. But as a survival tool an old technology like Morse Code might prove invaluable.

Lesson? We shouldn’t ever reject old communications technologies because we never know when we might need them.

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Goertzel, Rugby and the Sweet-talking Scam

By | November 22, 2011
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The South China Morning Post reports (I’ve got the hard copy here; everything there is behind a subscription wall, so no full link I’m afraid) of a clever scam where the bad guys steal just enough stuff — cards + identity — from a victim to be able to social engineer their way into trust, but not enough for the mark to realise there’s anything missing before the sting. This takes some doing.

This is how it works: The fraudsters swipe a wallet or handbag from under chairs and tables at a weekend sporting event in Hong Kong. They remove bank ATM card and a business card of the owner and replace everything else. They then research the individual (presumably online, though they may have access to other information, I guess, from associates on the inside at a bank?).

They then wait a day and then call up the mark, identifying themselves as from the victim’s bank, asking some personal details and then asking if they’ve lost their ATM card. This may be the first time the mark has realised the card is lost. Along with a professional and comforting tone, and any personal details that the fraudster has been able to unearth online, this would further lure the victim into a false sense of security.

It’s then the fraudster would say he will cancel the cards and provide a temporary password once the account holder has typed their PIN into the phone. I like this bit; it would be easier and tempting, as in other scams (like this one in the UK) to try to persuade the victim to just give out their PIN verbally. But asking them to enter it into the keypad of their phone adds to the ‘illusion of formal procedure’ that social engineering relies so heavily on. The fraudster, of course, is easily able to attach a device to their phone to capture the tones of the PIN and decode it. They could even just record the tones and play them back against a set of tones. (Each digit has a different tone, according to something called dual tone multifrequency, or DTMF. Tones can be decoded using the Goertzel algorithm, via software like this.)

Once the PIN is handed over, the account is emptied. In the case cited in the SCMP, some HK$47,000 was removed with 82 minutes of the fraudster obtaining the PIN.

So, the obvious and slightly less obvious go without saying:

  • Never give your PIN to anyone, even a smooth-talking fella calling himself “Peter from HSBC.”
  • Regularly check your purse to see whether all your cards are there. If not, cancel them immediately.
  • Don’t put your name cards, or other revealing personal details, in the same place as your credit cards.
  • Don’t ever accept a call from your bank without taking down the person’s name and number and a telephone number you can verify independently (on statements or online.) Then call the bank back. Banks don’t like to do this, because it might mean you call them up when they don’t want to, but tough.
  • Give your bank hell every time they call you up and start asking you questions like “you have a credit card with us, is that right, sir? Would you like to up the limit on that card?” This is just asking for trouble, since calls like that are one small step away from a social engineering attack “Please just give me the card details and some personal information and we’ll increase that limit rightaway, sir”. If not that, it at least sows the idea in the customer’s mind that their bank phones them, and that somehow that’s OK.
  • Be aware that Google et al can, when combined, a pretty clear picture of who you are, even if you’re not a blogger or other form of online exhibitionist. So don’t be lulled by someone calling who seems to know enough about you to be able to pretend to be someone official. 

Anyone at the Rugby Sevens this weekend, take note.

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Phones Aren’t About Telephony

By | November 22, 2011
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Skype is a powerful tool because it’s found its way into the hands of people who need it most — ordinary folk. Now it and the companies that make devices to use Skype on need to understand that it’s not about telephony anymore, if it ever was. It’s about two or more people sharing each others’ presence. Now we need the products to make that happen.

I was chatting with someone last night, a gent in his early 60s from LA, who should have retired but decided to take on one more project, in Hong Kong. He was in two minds about it because it would mean a year away from his wife, but he was persuaded because he knew Skype would keep him in touch. Of course it could be any VoIP tool, but the point here is that Skype was the first to cross the threshold into this market because it was easier (and worked better) than all the others at the time. Now the guy can chat with his wife every night and being apart is bearable and not making him too poor.

But he was still using it as a phone: Call the other person up, chat and then hang up. Had he ever thought about just leaving the line open, I asked him? Why would I do that? he replied. Because it won’t cost you anything, and then you’ll hear the sounds of home, which in a way is what you’re really missing. Your wife banging around in the kitchen, the kids arguing, a dog barking, the sound of the wood pigeon in the garden (OK, that’s more my memory of home than his. Not sure they have wood pigeons in LA.)

I then realised that actually there would be a great line of products here. Wireless devices that you could place around the house, outside, some that are just microphones picking up sound, and others that also serve as speakerphones, so his wife can just wander around and, when she wants to, chat as well. Of course, a Bluetooth headset might do the trick, and maybe there are some wireless handsets that might work. I’ve done a quick search and not found any obvious candidates. Most seem to assume you want to use Skype as a phone. But Skype is not really about phones anymore. It’s about presence — on one side, showing other people whether you’re available, etc, and on the other, allowing you to teleport yourself to the person you’re with without the old restrictions of the phone: cost, the structured nature of phone conversation, having to press a device to your ear.

Manufacturers, it’s true, are beginning to wake up to the idea that we don’t use our devices in the way, or the place, they’re designed for. Take the percushion pillow phone, for example, which finally solves that problem of trying to have a conversation with someone while you’re trying to get to sleep. That’s a good start. Now lets see devices that use sound and vision to make anyone, including my new homesick friend, to really feel they’re home.