Death of the Bookstore (week 7 blog)

Is this the future of book stores?

How does an offline bookshop compare to an online bookshop?

First there’s no store front. This means that you don’t have to pay ludicrous amounts of rent to be in a location that people know, that you don’t have to pay to have equipment installed to monitor theft, that installations and aesthetics can now be damned, no money wasted on counter staff. The list continues to go on indefinitely. The other key advantage is that online stores can have warehouses in any location at all, meaning they can have large warehouses in cheap areas and store a larger variety of books in these locations.

But what does an offline shop offer to people? The first one is the same for every offline store – the ability to impulse buy and have it there and then. Everything else depends on the store with some offering nothing more than a shop front but at least some of them are moving towards having cafés and things inside so that you can drink coffee while you wait. Some say there is also human interaction in that the staff of the store make it an experience, however this is very hit and miss and not every store will have great staff. So in the end it comes down to the previously mentioned experience.

So for me that’s the difference. Online shops are cheaper but you have to wait for goods to be delivered where as offline stores offer social interaction and immediacy of owning goods.

In asking whether the bookstore can be saved we begin to start looking into how they can offer other things that online stores can’t offer. The social experience is good, but even regular hosting of events such as book signings and readings can only do so much. Niche market bookstores can be established to sell titles that even stores like Amazon wouldn’t have heard of, but these are generally suited to online retailers.

I would go as far as to say that leveraging off social experiences is only the first part and would be at best a means of putting off the inevitable. If they could address either the cost or the selection issues then possibly they may be able to continue to compete, but if both remain uncontested then it’s only a matter of time.

Did social media win the revolution? (week 11 blog)

The Arab Spring is a recent event as far as historical occasions go (aren't all times when governments are overthrown historical?) which refers to the recent revolutions that have recently been occurring in the MENA region with one of the prominent features being the use of the internet amongst members as a means of communication. However some state that without the internet these revolutions would not have occurred.

I am hesitant to attribute the success of anything to a single element, as doing so belittles other important aspects of revolutions such as the civil unrest that had slowly been building in these areas but at the same time I can’t clearly state that the revolution would have gone ahead without the internet.

Not all revolutions needed the internet, but would it have sped things up if they had it?

Part of the reason behind this is that I think there are two elements in revolutions that determine ultimately determine the winner.  The first is the organisation, as an unorganised group can be easily controlled by the authorities and the second is the number of people, as no matter how poorly organised a force is if it has enough people it becomes unstoppable. So the question then becomes whether the Internet was the key difference in either of these issues which is difficult to do.

In terms of technology that has been used in revolutions, unsurprisingly it seems to be whatever form of communication is dominant and available to the people at the time. Radio, fax machines, telephones and many others were used as forms of both organising people and also as attempts to incite people against the standing regime. While it can argued that without the internet people wouldn’t have been able to communicate, they may have just defaulted to an older form of technology (such as what happened in Egypt when the Internet shut down). However this doesn’t tell us whether these forms of communication would have reached as many people.

Opponents of the theory of the Internet being behind the revolution have stated things like “but Facebook is just where people were”, but they fail to take into account that this statement suggests that the reason that enough people heard about the protests, poor conditions and the likes is because of things such as Facebook and Twitter which allowed news and discontent to spread like fire. Despite this however I am again drawn to admit that although it addressed a lot of people rapidly this does not mean that it was the key difference between success and failure.

In fact, no matter what way you look at it the only conclusion you can draw from the use of the Internet in terms of revolutions is that it is a better technology then what happened before, but given we cannot have two revolutions occurring, one with Internet and one without, we are unable to tell with absolute certainty whether the Internet served as the ignition point for the fire of revolution, or was instead just added fuel which hastened the outcome.

Convergent Technology (week 6 blog)

So I have a new phone, one of the Samsung Galaxy S2 deals and I’ve only just started pulling it apart and seeing how it work. It’s got voice recognition stuff, apps for checking FaceBook and reddit and I suspect it can even call people, although I’ve only used skype and free-wifi to do this so I’m not 100% sure. It has apps that let it work as a media centre and if I could be bothered going through the programming or getting the apps I could probably make it control my TV and computer.

It’s a convergent technology – Something that has taken previous ideas and mixed them together to present something different and new.

The PS3 is also an example of a convergent technology

The reason that I state it is different and new is that it can achieve things that the other devices separately would not be able to achieve. For example, a schedule only functions as I enter information into it, not taking into account details from other schedules. As my phone works off the Android system it automatically synchronises my schedules from Facebook, Google Calenders as well as the individual one I have on the phone itself. Although you could state that this additional functionality was something that could be achieved by my direct interaction, the point of it is that by being connected it doesn’t need it.

That’s what I see as the point of convergent technologies – it takes every intermediary step that we as humans would have had to have done to transfer information from one piece of technology to another and does itself. It saves a lot of time in processing terms as calculations now happen at electronic speeds allowing hundreds of calculations per second with the data as opposed to waiting for people to update every step of the way.  While I can’t state what uses this has other than real time automatic FourSquare updates (I think that’s how it works?) I’m not going to preclude anything from happening any time soon with this information.

However is this the end? At the moment I don’t think so. I’ve read far too much science fiction and think that we won’t be happy until we achieve the singularity of devices, in which you will carry around one object which will do everything – start your car and drive it for you, have coffee ordered when you start to feel sleepy, essentially something to run our lives for us and leave us with only the important stuff to do. I dare hazard a guess as to the way recent trends go that this will probably be some form of revolutionary Angry Birds game.

“I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product”

Steve Jobs is dead, and like every other time a person of renown dies their biography has stampeded onto the market. The above is one of the key quotes that I found in the highlights because it addresses the ideas of the iPhone and Android conflict. The titled statement is from Steve Jobs, according to his biographer, but we have to take this one apart a bit. Clearly it isn’t the same product as the tech specs between the phones are different. Additionally the software in its entirety isn’t stolen either because they both function in slightly different ways.

 

What did android steal from the iPhone?

We’ll take care of the obvious stuff here – They share a similar design concept. There are many arguments that could be made for how certain elements are subtly different, or that others were improved upon drastically but when it comes down to it they do look similar – in both the software and the hardware.

Imagine that you have an iPhone and you show it to an elderly person whose idea of a complex phone is something that can send messages. So in essence someone that doesn’t have a great idea of technology. You are allowed 30 seconds to tell them about it and it’s features. Now imagine it’s a week later and that you have an Android and you show it to the same elderly person. You are given 30 seconds to explain it to them and tell them about its features. They wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between them.

So there is a lot of fuss on the part of Apple that Google is stealing the ideas behind the development of their smartphones and the fear can be argued either way as to whether it is justifiable or if it isn’t. You can say the same thing for tablet PC’s and you’d be correct there, with Apple filing copyright infringement documents to prevent the sale of any of their competitors devices on the grounds that they are too similar in appearance.

But why does this matter? We can argue that it isn’t about the money. Jobs himself has been quoted as saying

“I don't want your money. If you offer me $5 billion, I won't want it. I've got plenty of money. I want you to stop using our ideas in Android, that's all I want.”

And until contrarily shown we can agree that this must be accurate.

What else? From here everything is speculation and I have one theory– The thing that Jobs was afraid of being stolen was credit for the revolution

At the news of the death of Steve Jobs, the media ran with many different headlines as you may recall, but pretty much all of them had a variation of “Death of the man who revolutionised the world with the iPod” – and I’ll probably be blasted for making this accusation against a recently departed individual but I think that’s exactly what he wanted everyone to do – to credit him and ONLY him with these inventions that changed the world.

I’d also ask you who invented the light bulb? If you stated it was Edison then you’d be wrong. There were many other inventors before Edison, the most well known being Swan, whose light bulbs were used to provide light to England’s streets but even his version was a revision of a less famous inventors idea. But to keep a long story short the reasons that Edison became accredited with the invention was that his version was more popular and used almost everywhere in place of the Swan light bulb. It just became an assumption that since it was the only player in the market it had to be the first.

Apple has also played this card before. When they released the iPod, the device that revolutionised the mp3 players of the time, there already existed another device that did pretty much the exact same thing – The Zen Creative. Again, this is another thing where history only remembered the victor of that war with most people attributing the technology to Apple and the iPod.

Visual comparison between the original Zen and iPod

It is the turnabout of this matter that Apple now fears, as the Android looks like it may very well overtake the iPhone in terms of people using it. Jobs stated that it wasn’t about the money and in part he’s right, it’s about making sure that Apple got the footnote as being the revolutionary smartphone. That this would have allowed them to leverage their market presence as the leaders in innovation for the next i-whatever wouldn’t have hurt the bottom line either, but I suspect it was mostly a battle of egos to be remembered as the creative genius behind the smart phone.

RFID Implants

Imagine a world in which you no longer needed a set of keys to open your door, but instead all you had to do was wave your arm. Turning on your car, your TV and anything else with a simple gesture of your hand are all things that are possible thanks to the idea of RFID implants.

These implants are nothing more than devices that send out little pieces of data on radio waves that contain enough information to identify things, usually as a stream of numbers and letters. The data can be used to track packages or even contain information about the owner of an animal (pet microchipping) and is something that is gradually moving towards humans.

There are immediate easily identifiable uses. The idea I gave at the beginning is something that has been achieved by multiple individuals as early as 1998 (I’d recommend looking up Kevin Warwick and Amal Grafstraa on Google if you have the time). Some clubs in Europe at the moment use these as VIP passes, if you don’t have one you can’t get into the club. Other uses include the aforementioned things in the first paragraph, the setting up any piece of technology in your home that currently requires a switch to be activated with the wave of a hand. Like everything else though – it is impossible to have only positives.

One of the greatest concerns that I personally feel about RFID implants come from the security risks that this presents. The first one may not seem that concerning but I’ll go through it – The idea of cloning RFID tags. To put it as simply as possible, the code that is sent from an RFID tag is what identifies an individual so anyone who happens to pick up this code and put it on a separate RFID tag will effectively have stolen your identity. You wouldn’t even be aware as the scanning distance can easily be over a few meters (significantly larger in other cases). If the RFID has access to your banking details then the thieves have easy access to your account.

The second fear is that of uberveillance, the process of constantly being monitored by use of people tracking your implants. Starting small, if a business makes it mandatory to implant RFID tags in its workers then by simply establishing a set of scanners at various locations in the office they will be constantly able to monitor your position, knowing how much time you spend at your desk, on coffee breaks, what time you started to a second and when you left.

As for the big stuff, how many people remember the Australia card (do they still cover that topic in history the school certificate?). A replacement of Medicare, passport and drivers license, it was to be an identifying card that had every piece of information on you in a single location, providing governments with the ability to effectively monitor everything you did. While at the moment I have nothing but contempt for the Australian Government and its ability to implement technological solutions to anything, there is still a fear one day that RFID tags could potentially be used as a means of tracking individuals everywhere in the country.

It is for these reasons that I am cautious about RFID tags, however I intend to see where the technology develops before I make any final decisions.

Government integrity has sprung a couple of wikileaks (Week 9 Blog)

I suspect I'm going to get a lot of grief about the title for this one, but it's the best I can do at 2am.

Last month Wikileaks released the cables that it was holding, giving everyone access to the content provided that they could download it. Most of these are fairly innocent in nature or contain nothing of any any interest. However others are the exact opposite, containing information that is damning and has great political and economic implications.

There has been some speculation however as to whether this is the best method of delivering the information to the public. The matter is complex and requires some unpacking before it can be properly addressed.

First and foremost to be considered is that the information had no other avenue of being released for the public. Previous cases such as the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike involving the deaths of Reuters journalists,  have demonstrated that freedom of information acts do not always get the desired details and that without Wikileaks this would most likely have remained buried. The main avenues that people use for dissemination of news as well, such as media organizations like Al-Jazeera have been shown within these cables to be complicit with US government requests to filter their coverage of events.

So in this sense it can be stated that there is some information that will not be distributed to the public unless Wikileaks steps in and so it can be described as performing an important social function, the fourth estate.

The second common idea on the topic and one against Wikileaks is that the information puts people in danger when they are undercover and also in the middle of military operations.

This is a very interesting point that some people make, in that if we try to research corruption we may instead be endangering the lives of others. But if this is the case, we have to ask what type of situation are we dealing with? To me it appears to be nothing more than a hostage situation in that a corrupt government can hide their deeds in such a way that uncovering them may endanger innocent lives.

But to argue the ethics of hostage situations is not the point of this blog and would serve as nothing more than a distraction from the topic at hand. These two points are for me the crux of the issue and for many others as well. But here’s the interesting thing – neither of these states that corruption isn’t occurring, isn’t in itself endangering lives or other things that we value but is an argument about whether the public should know about it.

Overall I would state that some people are going to be worse off because of Wikileaks – mainly company directors, politicians and other world figures. There will of course be some individuals at risk but mostly it will be the criminals and others that are revealed and in this sense I would like to think that the risks are worth it and that Wikileaks serves a vital social function.

Government hacking

I'll be honest and say that not all of the things in this blog apply to Australia as the cases come from Germany (although I'm lead to believe Australia also purchased the same DVD's as Germany). There’s probably hundreds of other cases like them but these are the two that stick out the most in my mind.

One of the articles I found today on Reddit stated that the German government had recently purchased a few DVD’s containing personal information stolen from banks in Luxemburg in Switzerland. Unsurprisingly (we all know the cliché of Swiss tax havens) the information contained evidence that citizens within Germany were evading paying taxes, and the government is using this information to prosecute people. It has been approved by the High Court in Germany.

The reason this stuck out is that in the past it was also discovered that the German government  commissioned theproduction and release of malware that installs itself on computers and provides them with the ability to observe all actions taken on the computer and even remotely control the PC’s.

Is this legal?

Well one of the key benefits of being a government is that you get to decide whats legal, so the question doesn’t really apply here.

Is this ethical?

It’s a complex matter. Part of this is that government endorsed hacking at the moment is only being obtained to prosecute criminals. If the bank details didn’t contain any illegal information transaction history then no one would have been arrested or convicted, so it was merely the government going through illegal material.

The second part states that this is effectively the government giving approval to hackers. Regardless of the reasoning behind the hackers original motives, be they black, grey or white hat, they hacked into a financial institution and rather than being reprimanded by governments have been given fabulous payments of cash for the data. I can see no way that this could be interpreted as anything other than an incentive to keep doing this sort of thing.

There is a counter argument that can be made that this is preventing the hackers from using the data in immoral ways, such as identity fraud or other operations and is instead being only used to combat crime. This does not preclude the option of the data being used for identity fraud and it could very well also encourage hackers to start collecting as much private information as possible on citizens to sell to the governments, creating a surveillance state.

Further still, this gives no consideration to the other impacts that endorsed hacking or malware may cause to society. One of the key concerns with the governments malware was that it allowed control over the pc it infected, which should lead to two immediate problems. The first is the fear of corruption, in that with access to your computer they can have the pc download illegal content and state that it was you who did so. The second fear is similar in that we do not know the people who will have access to this malware.

The reason this is a separate concern from corruption is that the code that was used in the Malware was poorly created and had a lot of security flaws, to the point that anyone with technical knowledge would have access to it. In fact, one group has now reverse engineered the code and made a simple user interface so even the technical knowledge is unnecessary which means anyone can access your computer, the information on it and also take control over the computer.

In light of these concerns I feel that I could state that these actions are unethical.

However this isn’t something that can be merely concluded by stating that the actions are unethical or not. We are coming to a point where the internet is involved in our lives in progressively complex ways. We do not live out our lives in person as much, but rely on the internet to conduct a large portion of it. With these developments can we should not be surprised that governments are using the internet in ways to solve problems, but rather that they have taken so long to do so. Caution is advised, as although these are mostly isolated incidents in poor decision making it is imperative that the space is watched for further developments as to whether they were merely steps on a learning curve or instead an ominous foreshadowing of government surveillance in the future.