BBC: The Rise of Disappearables

By | July 28, 2020
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The transcript of my BBC World Service piece on wearables. Reuters original story here. 

Forget ‘wearables’, and even ‘hearables’, if you’ve ever heard of them. The next big thing in mobile devices: ‘disappearables’.

Unless it really messes up, Apple is going to do for wearables with the Watch what is has done with the iPod for music players, the phone with its iPhone, the iPad for tablets. But even as Apple piques consumer interest in wrist-worn devices, the pace of innovation and the tumbling cost, and size, of components will make wearables smaller and smaller. So small, some in the industry say, that no one will see them. In five years, wearables like the Watch could be overtaken by hearables – devices with tiny chips and sensors that can fit inside your ear. They, in turn, could be superseded by disappearables – technology tucked inside your clothing, or even inside your body.

This all may sound rather unlikely, until you consider the iPhone is only 8 years old, and see what has happened to the phone since then. Not only do we consider the smartphone a status symbol in the salons of New York, but they’re something billions of people can afford. So it seems highly plausible that the watch as a gizmo is going to seem quaint in 10 years — as quaint as our feature phone, or net book or MP3 player is now.


So how is this all going to play out? Well this year you’ll be able to buy a little earpiece which contains a music player, 4 gigabytes of storage, a microphone to take phone calls – just nod your head to accept – and sensors that monitor your position, heart rate and body temperature.

Soon after that you’ll be able to buy contact lenses that can measure things like glucose levels in tears. Or swallow a chip the size of a grain of sand, powered by stomach juices and transmitting data about your insides via Bluetooth. For now everyone is focused on medical purposes, but there’s no reason that contact lens couldn’t also be beaming stuff back to you in real time — nice if you’re a politician being able to gauge the response to your speech so you can tweak it in real time.

Or you’re on a date and needing feedback on your posture, gait, the quality of your jokes. 

In short, hearables and wearables will become seeables and disappearables. We won’t see these things because they’ll be buried in fabric, on the skin, under the skin and inside the body. We won’t attack someone for wearing Google Glasses  because we won’t know they’re wearing them. 

Usual caveats apply. This isn’t as easy as it looks, and there’ll be lots of slips on the way. But the underlying technologies are there: components are getting smaller, cheaper, so why not throw in a few extra sensors into a device, even if you haven’t activated them, and are not quite sure what they could be used for? 

Secondly, there’s the ethical stuff. As you know, I’m big on this and we probably haven’t thought all this stuff through. Who owns all this data? Is it being crunched properly by people who know what they’re doing? What are bad guys and governments doing in all this, as they’re bound to be doing something? And how can we stop people collecting data on us if we don’t want them to? 

All good questions. But all questions we should be asking now, of the technologies already deployed in our street, in our office, in the shops we frequent, in the apps we use and the websites we visit. It’s not the technology that’s moving too fast; it’s us moving too slow.

Once the technology is too small to see it may be too late to have that conversation.  

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The path to a wearable future lies in academia | Reuters

By | May 21, 2015
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The path to a wearable future lies in academia | Reuters:

My oblique take on wearables

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For a glimpse of what is, what might have been and what may lie ahead in wearable devices, look beyond branded tech and Silicon Valley start-ups to the messy labs, dry papers and solemn conferences of academia.

There you’d find that you might control your smartphone with your tongue, skin or brain; you won’t just ‘touch’ others through a smart Watch but through the air; and you’ll change how food tastes by tinkering with sound, weight and color.

Much of today’s wearable technology has its roots in these academic papers, labs and clunky prototypes, and the boffins responsible rarely get the credit some feel they deserve.

Any academic interested in wearable technology would look at today’s commercial products and say ‘we did that 20 years ago,’ said Aaron Quigley, Chair of Human Interaction at University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Take multi-touch – where you use more than one finger to interact with a screen: Apple (AAPL.O) popularized it with the iPhone in 2007, but Japanese academic Jun Rekimoto used something similar years before.

And the Apple Watch? Its Digital Touch feature allows you to send doodles, ‘touches’ or your heartbeat to other users. Over a decade ago, researcher Eric Paulos developed something very similar, called Connexus, that allowed users to send messages via a wrist device using strokes, taps and touch.

‘I guess when we say none of this is new, it’s not so much trashing the product,’ says Paul Strohmeier, a researcher at Ontario’s Human Media Lab, ‘but more pointing out that this product has its origins in the research of scientists who most people will never hear of, and it’s a way of acknowledging their contributions.’

VAMBRACES, KIDS’ PYJAMAS

Those contributions aren’t all pie-in-the-sky.

Strohmeier and others are toying with how to make devices easier to interact with. His solution: DisplaySkin, a screen that wraps around the wrist like a vambrace, or armguard, adapting its display relative to the user’s eyeballs.

Other academics are more radical: finger gestures in the air, for example, or a ring that knows which device you’ve picked up and automatically activates it. Others use the surrounding skin – projecting buttons onto it or pinching and squeezing it. Another glues a tiny touchpad to a fingernail so you can scroll by running one finger over another.

Then there’s connecting to people, rather than devices.

Mutual understanding might grow, researchers believe, by conveying otherwise hidden information: a collar that glows if the wearer has, say, motion sickness, or a two-person seat that lights up when one occupant has warm feelings for the other.

And if you could convey non-verbal signals, why not transmit them over the ‘multi-sensory Internet’? Away on business? Send a remote hug to your child’s pyjamas; or deliver an aroma from one phone to another via a small attachment; or even, according to researchers from Britain at a conference in South Korea last month, transmit tactile sensations to another person through the air.

And if you can transmit senses, why not alter them?

Academics at a recent Singapore conference focused on altering the flavor of food. Taste, it seems, is not just a matter of the tongue, it’s also influenced by auditory, visual and tactile cues. A Japanese team made food seem heavier, and its flavor change, by secretly adding weights to a fork, while a pair of British academics used music, a virtual reality headset and color to make similar food seem sourer or sweeter to the eater.

MAKING THE GRADE

It’s hard to know just which of these research projects might one day appear in your smartphone, wearable, spoon or item of clothing. Or whether any of them will.

‘I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that 99 percent of research work does not end up as ‘product’,’ says Titus Tang, who recently completed a PhD at Australia’s Monash University, and is now commercializing his research in ubiquitous sensing for creating 3D advertising displays. ‘It’s very hard to predict what would turn out, otherwise it wouldn’t be called research.’

But the gap is narrowing between the academic and the commercial.

Academics at the South Korean conference noted that with tech companies innovating more rapidly, ‘while some (academic) innovations may truly be decades ahead of their time, many (conference) contributions have a much shorter lifespan.’

‘Most ‘breakthroughs’ today are merely implementations of ideas that were unimplementable in that particular time. It took a while for industry to catch up, but now they are almost in par with academic research,’ says Ashwin Ashok of Carnegie Mellon.

Pranav Mistry, 33, has risen from a small town in India’s Gujarat state to be director of research at Samsung America (005930.KS). His Singapore conference keynote highlighted a Samsung project where a camera ‘teleports’ viewers to an event or place, offering a real-time, 3D view.

But despite a glitzy video, Samsung logo and sleek black finish, Mistry stressed it wasn’t the finished product.

He was at the conference, he told Reuters, to seek feedback and ‘work with people to make it better.’

(Editing by Ian Geoghegan)”

Chinese hackers target Southeast Asia, India, researchers say

By | May 21, 2015
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Chinese hackers target Southeast Asia, India, researchers say | Reuters

My piece on FireEye’s report about hackers. Other reports have appeared since. 

Hackers, most likely from China, have been spying on governments and businesses in Southeast Asia and India uninterrupted for a decade, researchers at internet security company FireEye Inc said.

In a report released on Monday, FireEye said the cyber espionage operations dated back to at least 2005 and ‘focused on targets – government and commercial – who hold key political, economic and military information about the region.’

‘Such a sustained, planned development effort coupled with the (hacking) group’s regional targets and mission, lead us to believe that this activity is state-sponsored – most likely the Chinese government,’ the report’s authors said.

Bryce Boland, Chief Technology Officer for Asia Pacific at FireEye and co-author of the report, said the attack was still ongoing, noting that the servers the attackers used were still operational, and that FireEye continued to see attacks against its customers, who number among the targets.

Reuters couldn’t independently confirm any of the assertions made in the report.

China has always denied accusations that it uses the Internet to spy on governments, organizations and companies.

Asked about the FireEye report on Monday, foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei said: ‘I want to stress that the Chinese government resolutely bans and cracks down on any hacking acts. This position is clear and consistent. Hacking attacks are a joint problem faced by the international community and need to be dealt with cooperatively rather than via mutual censure.’

The Cyberspace Administration of China, the Internet regulator, didn’t immediately respond to written requests for comment.

China has been accused before of targeting countries in South and Southeast Asia. In 2011, researchers from McAfee reported a campaign dubbed Shady Rat which attacked Asian governments and institutions, among other targets.

Efforts by the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to build cyber defenses have been sporadic. While ASEAN has long acknowledged its importance, ‘very little has come of this discourse,’ said Miguel Gomez, a researcher at De La Salle University in the Philippines.

The problem is not new: Singapore has reported sophisticated cyber-espionage attacks on civil servants in several ministries dating back to 2004.

UNDETECTED

The campaign described by FireEye differs from other such operations mostly in its scale and longevity, Boland said.

He said the group appeared to include at least two software developers. The report did not offer other indications of the possible size of the group or where it’s based.

The group remained undetected for so long it was able to re-use methods and malware dating back to 2005, and developed its own system to manage and prioritize attacks, even organizing shifts to cope with the workload and different languages of its targets, Boland told Reuters.

The attackers focused not only on governments, but on ASEAN itself, as well as corporations and journalists interested in China. Other targets included Indian or Southeast Asian-based companies in sectors such as construction, energy, transport, telecommunications and aviation, FireEye says.

Mostly they sought to gain access by sending so-called phishing emails to targets purported to come from colleagues or trusted sources, and containing documents relevant to their interests.

Boland said it wasn’t possible to gauge the damage done as it had taken place over such a long period, but he said the impact could be ‘massive’. ‘Without being able to detect it, there’s no way these agencies can work out what the impacts are. They don’t know what has been stolen.’

Pornchai Rujiprapa, Minister of Information and Communication Technology for ASEAN member Thailand, said the government was proposing a new law to combat cyber attacks as existing legislation was outdated.

‘So far we haven’t found any attack so big it threatens national security, but we are concerned if there is any in the future. That’s why we need a new law to handle it,’ he told Reuters.

(Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard in BEIJING and Pracha Hariraksapitak in BANGKOK; Editing by Miyoung Kim and Ian Geoghegan)”

(Via.)

BBC: Cluetraining Disruption

By | July 28, 2020
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Has technology, convinced of its own rectitude, lost its sense of moral direction? 

Disruptive innovation is one of those terms that worms its way into our vocabulary, a bit like built-in obsolescence or upselling. It’s become the mantra of the tech world, awhich sees its author Clayton Christensen, as a sort of messiah of the changes we’re seeing in industries from taxis, hotels and media. Briefly put the theory goes: existing companies are undercut and eventually replaced by competitors who leverage technology to come up with inferior but good enough alternatives — think the transistor radio displacing vacuum tube radios — or come up with wholly new products that eventually eclipse existing markets — think the iPhone killing off the MP3 player (and radios, and watches, and cameras, and guitar tuners etc.) 

Backlash 

A backlash has emerged against this theory, partly because it’s somewhat flawed — even Prof Christensen himself has misapplied it, as in the case of the iPhone — but also because it’s scary. Uber may be a great idea if you’re looking for a ride, but not if you’re an old-style cabbie. Airbnb is great for a place to crash, but feels like a car crash if you’re running a real b’n’b. And don’t get me started on being a journalist.   But there’s a much bigger problem here. The tech world is full of very inspiring, bright, charismatic people and that’s one reason I choose to write about it for a living. But it has changed in the past decade or so, undeniably. 15 years ago, just before the last dot.com crash, a tome appeared: The Cluetrain Manifesto, and you’d either read it or you hadn’t. It was a collection of writings by some fine thinkers, the great bloggers of the day like Doc Searls and Dave Weinberger. The main thesis: the Internet is unlike ordinary, mass media, because it allows human to human conversations — and that this would transform marketing, business, the way we think. Markets are conversations, it said.   For a while we were giddy with the power this gave us over corporations. We could speak back to them — on blogs, and later on what became known as social media. Even Microsoft hired a blogger and let him be a tiny bit critical of things at Redmond.

Last blast

Looking back, it was probably the last naive blast of the old dying Internet rather than a harbinger of the new. The language, if not the underlying philosophy, lives on in conferences and marketing pitches. Most social media conversations are harsh, mostly inhuman — we refer to deliberate online baiters as trolls, which I suppose makes them subhuman — and we’ve largely given up influencing the companies we do business with except in the occasional diatribe or flash hashtag full frontal mob assault.

And more importantly, there is no longer any of that idealism or utopianism in any startup movement that I can see. For sure, we cheer on these players because they seem to offer something very seductive, from free email, calendars, spreadsheets to cheaper rides, stays, music, video and goodies, to shinier bling, gadgets, wearables and cars. And they all sing the same mantra: we’re disruptive, we’re disintermediating, we’re leveraging technology, we’re removing friction, we’re displacing old cozy cartels, we’re doing it all for you.

The problem is that underneath this lies an assumption, an arrogance, that technology is a natural ally of good, that disruption is always a good thing, that the geeks parlaying it into products are natural leaders, and that those opposing it are reactionaries, doomed to the scrapheap.

Rapid cycle

The result: we’re just getting into a more rapid cycle of replacing one lot of aloof, cloth-eared giants with another lot, who in short order will be replaced by another. Microsoft, IBM, and HP, the giants of when Cluetrain was written, have been replaced by Amazon, Apple, Alibaba, Facebook and Google, all of them as hard to hold a conversation with as Microsoft ever was. And the big players of tomorrow, which may or may not be Uber, Airbnb, Tencent and Twitter, don’t seem particularly interested in a conversation either.

We need to recover some of that old Cluetrain idealism, naivety, when we thought that what we were doing was building a new platform for anyone to use, to talk back to authority, to feel heard and appreciated — and not just a cult-like celebration of the rugged individuals who dismantled Babel only to build a bigger, shinier and more remote one its place.

This was a piece I wrote and recorded for the BBC World Service. It’s not Reuters content – JW

BBC: Beyond the Breach

By | July 28, 2020
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The script of my Reuters story on cybersecurity. Podcast available here (mp3)

If you’re getting tired of internet security companies using images of padlocks, moats, drawbridges and barbed wire in their ads, then chances are you won’t have to put up with them much longer.

Turns out that keeping the bad guys out of your office network has largely failed. All those metaphors suggesting castles, unassailable battlements, locked doors are being quietly replaced by another shtick: the bad guys are in your network, but we’ll find them, watch what they do, and try to ensure they don’t break anything or steal anything valuable.

Which is slightly worrying, if you thought firewalls, antivirus and the like were going to save you.

You’re probably tired of the headlines about cybersecurity breaches: U.S. insurer Anthem Inc saying hackers may have made off with some 80 million personal health records, while others raided Sony Pictures’ computers and released torrents of damaging emails and employee data.

Such breaches, say people in the industry, show the old ways have failed, and now is the chance for younger, nimbler companies selling services to protect data and outwit attackers. These range from disguising valuable data, diverting attackers up blind alleys, and figuring out how to mitigate breaches once the data has already gone. It’s a sort of cat and mouse game, only going on inside your computers.

Cybersecurity, of course, is big business. $70 billion was spent on it last year.

Of course, we’re partly to blame. We insist on using our tablets and smartphones for work; we access Facebook and LinkedIn from the office. All this offers attackers extra opportunities to gain access to their networks.

But it’s also because the attackers and their methods have changed. Cyber criminals and spies are being overshadowed by politically or religiously motivated activists, and these guys don’t want to just steal stuff, they want to hurt their victim. And they have hundreds of ways of doing it.

And they’re usually successful. All these new services operate on the assumption that the bad guy is already inside your house, as it were. And may have been there months. Research by IT security company FireEye found that “attackers are bypassing conventional security deployments almost at will.” Across industries from legal to healthcare it found nearly all systems had been breached.

Where there’s muck there’s brass, as my mother would say. Funding these start-ups are U.S- and Europe-based venture capital firms which sense another industry ripe for disruption.

Google Ventures and others invested $22 million in ThreatStream in December, while Bessemer Venture Partners last month invested $30 million in iSIGHT Partners.

Companies using these services aren’t your traditional banks and  whatnot. UK-based Darktrace, which uses maths and machine learning to spot abnormalities in a network that might be an attack, has a customers like a British train franchise and a Norwegian shipping insurer.

But it’s early days. Most companies still blithely think they’re immune, either because they think they don’t have anything worth stealing or deleting, or because they think a firewall and an antivirus program are enough.

And of course, there’s another problem. As cyber breaches get  worse, and cybersecurity becomes a more valuable business, expect the hype, marketing and dramatic imagery to grow, making it ever more confusing for the lay person to navigate.

I’ve not seen them yet, but I’m guessing for these new companies the shield and helmet images will be replaced by those of SAS commandos, stealthily patrolling silicon corridors. Or maybe it’ll be Tom, laying mousetraps for his nemesis. Might be apt: Jerry the cheese thief always seemed to win.