Touchy Technology
As usual for recent times it has been another interesting month. The markets’ short term dive and recovery triggered by Japan’s poor economic results and subsequent election and tax policy change shows two things. One - the markets are behaving like a herd of twitchy wildebeest and ready to stampede at the next piece of bad news and two - that automated selling by computers amplifies that.
European Fingerpoken
As a broadcast engineer back when I was a young man, I used to put up signs that said 'nicht fur fingerpoken' (please don't touch).
As a huge europhile it saddens me to say I have spent part of the week trying to figure out whether the UK could “make it” without Europe. Time after time the EU machine shows it has little to no common sense when it comes to understanding the economics of new technologies. After the farce of having to put cookie notices on every website, instead of just asking the main browsers to make that process a bit easier, the EU parliament has now voted to break-up Google. Funnily enough Google a US company said ‘nein danke’ (no thank you). This summer the French government banned Amazon offering free delivery when discounting books, nice idea but it won’t work, time marches on. The idea of a combined European block voluntarily working together for better prosperity is one of the amazing concepts of modern history. The idea that the people at the wheel of the juggernaught are technophobic amateurs who don’t know what the buttons do, scares the hell out of me. The internet operates on a kind of ‘Highlander Effect’ evolution (there can be only one), where the best will often completely dominate their sectors (Google, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIN, Twitter, Amazon, Ebay …..)..In order to change that we need innovation and support for innovation rather than misjudged meddling.
(Side note regarding image)
(In posting the above picture I would like to just say that I have the utmost respect for Germany, its history of innovation and its very high work ethic - this just happened to be a funny picture often used by engineers to express the frustration of having to fix equipment after people decided to press buttons without knowing what they were doing)
The Syrian Electronic Army and the very real wars on the internet
Once upon a time there used to be a certain ‘dandy highwayman’ romanticism about being a hacker, especially if you spent your time as Hollywood would have us believe, using your powers to fight for good and help the poor. These days hacking comes under anti-terrorism law, which generally means any individual with half a brain will go and find something more productive to do. So if that is the case, then how come there is so much hacking going on. Two reasons, firstly governments now own this territory and secondly anywhere the rule of law is not effective, gangs and terrorists are operating freely. So back to the first point about twitchy technology, it is not hard to foresee some pretty big disasters looming on the horizon, with the huge amounts of money being poured into hacking centres around the globe. The “Syrian Electronic Army” hacking the press this week was just the tiniest of glimpses of a submerged iceberg that is very very well practised at keeping hidden.