Category: politics

OpenTech 2013

Another year - another OpenTech! See blog posts from 2010 and 2011.
It feels like every year the event gets bigger and better. It's still the same crowd of politically aware techies, and it still costs a ridiculously cheap fiver to come along, and the talks were of an abnormally high quality.

Here are my thoughts from the day.

Farmification Of Factories

Fascinating talk from Lisa Ma about living and working with workers in a Chinese joystick factory.

Raises interesting questions about how we treat workers in terms of resources, and whether urbanisation is seen as a universally good thing by young people.
It got me to thinking about how we treat factory workers compared to how we treat animals. It's now a badge of pride for cosmetics to carry a label reading "Not Tested On Animals." Following the recent disasters in Bangaladesh, should clothes carry a "No Sweatshop Labour" tag?
Or, perhaps as Rob Manuel suggested, shops should publicly display how much tax they pay.


@ and a x% of purchase price will be paid as tax to HMRC label?
18/05/2013 10:57 via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@robmanuel
Rob Manuel

Or even


@ print the CEO to employee salary ratio on the tags.
18/05/2013 17:29 via Twitter for AndroidReplyRetweetFavorite
@alexstapleton
Alex Stapleton

There's a great interview with Lisa at VisionOnTV

Putting Your House on GitHub

What if you put all your niggling household issues on a bug tracker? Superficially, a very entertaining talk by Francis Irving - but raised a serious point about how we communicate with tradespeople.
Why can't I put a big list of jobs out to tender and let plumbers and electricians compete for my work?
I asked him about the security aspect of the project. In open source software, it's usually considered polite to raise a security bug in private before disclosing it to the wider world. You wouldn't want to raise a public bug which read "Burglar Alarm Broken", would you?

Constitutional Excerpts Project

Another great "what if" made real. What if you were to gather all the versions of countries' constitutions up in one place? What would a searchable database be like? What lessons can we learn?
Given that most countries constitutions change over time, and most changes are done by non experts in the field, this could be a very valuable resource.


This taxonomy of constitutional issues is anthropologically problematic. Relies on eurocentric assumptions. But totally fixable. #opentech
18/05/2013 11:26 via Twitter for AndroidReplyRetweetFavorite
@blangry
Alex

It also touched on the limits of crowd sourcing from the general population. When very dense legal language is involved, it is usually best to get experts to decide what it means. Of course, that's also an argument for having laws written in plain and unambiguous language.

GOV.UK

The GOV.UK team have gone from a twinkle in the eye of some techies - to a fully fledged team kicking arse in the heart of the Civil Service.
Of particular interest to me was how they managed a complex redirection project as they closed various sites. Certainly not for the faint hearted.

Also interesting was the tales of some of the internal difficulties they faced. Including some "interesting" thoughts on Open Source.


CESG tech dir: "If anyone in UK government says CESG has banned open source send their name to me and I'll have them killed" #opensource13
18/04/2013 11:54 via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@NickJHeath
Nick Heath

I asked an awkward question about their priorities. The DWP site only works on IE6! That means trying to claim benefits if you have a modern computer or browser (or even an old Mac or Linux box) is impossible.
The problem, as I understand it, is that contracts have been signed which mean making even simple changes comes with a high cost. As we've seen with PFI contracts in hospitals, the initial cost can seem attractive but outsourced companies with a strong profit motive will screw you over without providing any real benefit.

Another interesting question was asked about the "dumbing down" of content. Firstly, the pages link to the relevant legislation if you really want the nitty gritty detail. Secondly, nerds aren't average users. Average users tend to skim pages rather than reading them comprehensively. Given the average reading age in the UK is 12 (that's a hugely problematic statement, BTW) it's important that the information on the pages is as clear as possible.

I can't begin to describe how incredbly proud UK citizens should be at having such an amazing team reshaping the Government's digital portfolio.

The Bill and Gavin Show

Oh, look, just read Bill's talk and be enlightened.
Given that the punk music revolution is now being used to sell cars and butter, how do we stop the digital revolution from being hijacked in such a way? One suggestion is to "weaponize" openness. Can we have a "Creative Commons MAX" licence which promises extreme legal retribution for violators? Can we create Open Source licences which prevent evil being done in our name? I suppose GPLv3 is an attempt at that.

Gavin Stark's talk on Open Data gave me a thought about the ongoing issues with privatizing the PAF (that's the data which makes up the UK's PostCode system). Several years ago, I suggested that mutual ownership would be preferable to privatisation of the Post Office - could the same be true of PAF? Would enough techno-utopians be able to club together to run PAF in an open and sustainable way?

Bribing MPs

I've been thinking a lot about political donations and "political donations". It seems that some people are able to influence the legislative process by donataing modest sums of money, and giving favours to politicians. Other people would call for a database of lobbyists, or some form of push notification service for whenever your MP receives a bribe donation. Not me. I want to make a crowd sourcing site to help you influence your MP.

(Many thanks to Alex Blandford for the name suggestion.)
Yes, this talk is (mostly) humorous satire. I haven't really built "KickbackStarter" - although the mood in the room seemed of the opinion that it would be a viable idea. More than a few people came up to me afterwards and asked if they could help get it started. I think they're all crazy...

Permit me to indulge in some vanity over the feedback and photos I received.


@ is giving a great talk proposing KickbackStarter to donate to MPs 'when they vote the right way' #OpenTech http://t.co/mJzCIdpDby
18/05/2013 15:05 via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite
@kevglobal
Mr Anderson


"Clicktivism doesn't work. Bribe MPs instead" #opentech http://t.co/JGdtRo1zME
18/05/2013 15:06 via Twitter for AndroidReplyRetweetFavorite
@RDBinns
Reuben Binns


KickBackStarter - GLORIOUS. Let's stop funding failed campaigns and just 'gift basket' our representatives. #opentech http://t.co/HBqqUiGhLR
18/05/2013 15:08 via Photos on iOSReplyRetweetFavorite
@nuttyxander
Alex Ingram


@ 's potentially libellous, audience-compromising talk about crowd sourcing political lobbying ( /bribery) Kickbackstarter! #opentech
18/05/2013 15:02 via Twitter for AndroidReplyRetweetFavorite
@RDBinns
Reuben Binns


@ makes a fab point abt the nonsense of MPs and who runs the country. Now this is a question .. do MPs take Bitcoin #opentech #A5
18/05/2013 15:09 via webReplyRetweetFavorite


.@ have you seen http://t.co/HPHQ33s4d6 for a related concept and proposed fix in the USA? #opentech
18/05/2013 15:14 via Twitter for AndroidReplyRetweetFavorite
@DRMacIver
David R. MacIver


Delighted2c n hear Valued Patron of the Library @ 's awesome #opentech talk ... with this satire u r really spoiling us Sir!
18/05/2013 15:20 via Plume for AndroidReplyRetweetFavorite
@Librarian
Librarian


@ Your Kickbackstarter talk at #opentech yesterday was amusing educational and inspirational. Bravo sire. Bravo.
about 12 hours ago via Tweetbot for iOSReplyRetweetFavorite
@faintdreams
Faintdreams

Essentially, clicking on petitions doesn't work. Emailing doesn't work. Protesting doesn't work. Cash and gifts work reliably.
Kickbackstarter - let's club together to influence MPs directly!

Thanks to VisionOnTV for conducting this interview with me.

Inclusive Issues In Technology - A Practical Guide

Only 17% of the STEM workforce is female. 2/3rds of female STEM graduates don't enter the profession. 50% of technology customers are female. See the problem?

Three very different speakers talked about how they were helping encourage more diversity in technology.

Firstly Stemettes is showing young women positive role models of women in science and technology. They're showing parents that their daughters can find a rewarding and useful career in computing.

Flossie is a project to get more women involved in the open source movement. They have a conference coming up in November. If you're a woman and want to present - give them a shout. Men are welcome at the event, but not as speakers. Given the aims of the project, I think that's fair enough.

Finally, Meri Williams gave perhaps the most informative talk of the event. Practical Diversity.

We hear a lot about how being a straight white male is like playing life on the easy setting, but this was the first time I'd seen someone talk through practical steps to include more people.

I especially loved her remark about tolerance. No one wants to be tolerated - you only tolerate things you hate. If you're talking tolerance, you're essentially saying "I dislike you and have to put up with you." No one wants that.

I highly recommend having a quick read of her deck.

Odds and Sods

One of the great things about OpenTech is that all the talks are audio recorded. I think, if possible, they should be videoed as well.

There were lots of people I knew - albeit some only digitally


Thirty seconds after arriving: "You're Jonty, I recognise your name from twitter!". I had forgotten #opentech is essentially internet LARP.
18/05/2013 11:24 via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite
@jonty
Jonty Wareing

I wonder what the "newb" diversity is like. Are we just preaching to the choir?

Gender diversity of participants seemed much higher than a "normal" conference. Why is that? 10 speakers out of ~40 were female - perhaps that encourages more attendees. Or, is it the fact that the conference is cheap and held on a weekend?

Scheduling against both finales of Doctor Who and Eurovision was a tactical mistake ;-)

Huge thanks to Sam Smith and his merry band for organising. For all the speakers and attendees for putting such wonderful thoughts into my head, and to everyone who chuckled along at my jokes.

Same time next year? You bet!

The Gun That Fits On A Floppy Disk

Magnet Flag

The 3D printed gun is now a reality. I don't have access to a 3D printer - but I've downloaded the plans out of morbid curiosity.

While downloading the blueprints may not be illegal, any UK citizen who made and owned such a handgun could face arrest, according to the UK's Metropolitan Police.
BBC News

It may not the best weapon in the world - it has reliability and accuracy issues - and it may not be the cheapest - around £5,000 for a 3D printer to fabricate the thing. But it's certainly the most portable.

The total file size for the 3D models to build the weapon? 1,084,069 Bytes. Small enough to fit on a floppy disk.

Most of us send emails with larger attachments every day. Never mind that this gun evades metal detectors - spotting these scant few bytes in the gigabit flow of everyday life is nearly impossible.

There has been an attempt to pull the plans from the Internet. That can't work. Ever.

The way modern file distribution is done is decentralised. As long as you know the hash (the unique code calculated from the file's contents) you can download a file from a Peer-to-Peer network.

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:
6C4089AC6C134F1B2DFF18499658B228D9EB2657

That's short enough to memorise, turn into a song, print on a t-shirt, tattoo onto your flesh, or simply send in an SMS.

You can even split the hash up and represent it as a flag of many colours.

My neighbour has an HP LaserJet with an open WiFi connection. I can print anything I want through it. There's a limit to the amount of malicious damage one could do with paper and ink. But what happens when HP release a consumer grade 3D printer with their typically poor security defaults?

Anyone with a phone could walk down the street, upload to those printers a short alphanumeric string, and all of a sudden every house has an (unwanted) AK-47.

We can't wipe this knowledge off the Internet. We can't force every 3D printer to recognise every potentially malicious shape - nor convince it only to print from an "approved" list. We can't stop people of lax moral character from acquiring and using guns.

Do we accept a world where it is trivial to access powerful weaponry? Do we engineer a change in attitudes so that gun ownership is undesirable? Or do we use ham-fisted legislation to try to censor knowledge in a futile attempt to be seen to be "doing something"?

I think I know which one our rulers will choose - but is there a better solution?

Why Aren't Terrorists Bombing Queues?

In 2010 I wrote a blog post called "Why Aren't Terrorists Bombing the Queues?" - but I chickened out of publishing it.

Bombing a plane is hard, you have to buy a ticket, get past airport security, detonate it at just the right time, etc. By comparison, anyone can walk into a busy airport - say during the school holidays - wait for the shear number of people to build up, and then...

But it doesn't happen. Why not?

My conclusion, such as it was, is that either terrorists are particularly stupid, or bombs are too hard to build, or that the Government frequently foils such attacks, or - perhaps - there just aren't that many people interested in causing indiscriminate carnage.

There are so many large gatherings of people every day, and explosives are relatively easy to build, and there are so few (public) convictions for terror related offences, that the only real conclusion must be that people - in the main - are good.

Wanton destruction, untargeted menace, and psychopathic levels of violence are so uncommon that, when they do happen, their significance is artificially raised within our society to a level which is unwarranted.

As Bruce Schneier says in his book Liars and Outliers

The Virginia Tech massacre is precisely the sort of event we humans tend to overreact to. Our brains aren't very good at probability and risk analysis, especially when it comes to rare occurrences. We tend to exaggerate spectacular, strange and rare events, and downplay ordinary, familiar and common ones. There's a lot of research in the psychological community about how the brain responds to risk -- some of it I have already written about -- but the gist is this: Our brains are much better at processing the simple risks we've had to deal with throughout most of our species' existence, and much poorer at evaluating the complex risks society forces us to face today.

Novelty plus dread equals overreaction.

If you want to do something that makes security sense, figure out what's common among a bunch of rare events, and concentrate your countermeasures there. Focus on the general risk of terrorism, and not the specific threat of airplane bombings using liquid explosives. Focus on the general risk of troubled young adults, and not the specific threat of a lone gunman wandering around a college campus. Ignore the movie-plot threats, and concentrate on the real risks.

We don't know yet the cause of the Boston Marathon bombings, but we owe it to the victims and to ourselves not to over-react. A disproportionate response to rare events could end up being far worse than the terror it is trying to prevent.

Surrey Police and the Case of The Misleading Pie Charts

Surrey County Council have sent every household in the county a booklet explaining how our council tax is being spent. Within it is a highly political comment from Kevin Hurley, the newly elected Police and Crime Commissioner.

He presents a pie chart showing how the police force spend its money. Take a look at it and ask yourself this question: what percentage is spent on "Employees".

Surrey Police Pie Chart

Please use this poll to record your guess - answers at the end of this blog.

Pie charts have a long and noble history. They were popularised by Florence Nightingale and were hugely effective in helping politicians understand the causes of death among soldiers during the Crimean War.
Nightingale-mortality

As we understand more about the human brain and how we perceive shapes, it is becoming clear that pie charts are ineffective for representing complex information.

2D pie charts can still serve a useful purpose in limited circumstances. The real problem is with 3D pie charts. As far as I can tell, these abominations were popularised by Microsoft's Excel charting software.

3D charts distort the view of the data in such a way that it becomes increasingly hard to understand the information being presented. A picture being worth 1000 words, allow me to demonstrate:
GraphJam3d

So, just how bad is Surrey Police's Pie Chart? In an extremely scientific study of asking half a dozen people, they all guessed between 75% and 85%. That's quite a wide range considering it's a multi-million pound difference.

On the opposite page to the pie chart is this summary of spending.
Police Spending

In slightly more readable format, it is:

Category £ %
Employees £181.70 81.9%
Premises £8.00 3.6%
Supplies £27.20 12.3%
Transport £5.00 2.3%
Total £216.90 97.7%

A few interesting things to note here.

Firstly, how do we calculate the percentages? The total spend isn't mentioned in the report (£216.90). If we use that, "Employees" accounts for 81.9% of spending.

If we take into account the gross expenditure (£207.70) the figure jumps to 87.5%.

Secondly, if we do assume that we're using the unreported total spend - there is at least 2% missing. Some of which can be explained by rounding - but I wonder what the rest of the money is spent on.

Given the above, I don't think the provided pie chart allows Surrey residents to see an accurate view of how their hard earned money is being spent.

Hopefully, this side-by-side - of the above data - will show you how 3D pie charts distort data and end up misleading their audience.
3d 2d pie chart side by side

With this overlay, we can see the distortion much more clearly. The smaller sections of the chart look disproportionately larger.
Pie Charts Overlayed
It's time to announce a zero tolerance crackdown on dodgy data representation.

Solar Update

Another in my occasional series of blog posts about our solar panels.

We used both the Energy Saving Trust Solar Power calculator and the Europa Solar Calculator to estimate a generation capacity of between 2,500 and 2,700 kWh per year.

Solar Estimate

We've just done a reading for 21 November to 21 February. Right in line with expectations, we generated 205kWh - netting us ~£96 from the Feed In Tariff.

Over 15 months we've generated a total of 3376kWh. Again, totally in line with the top end of expectations. Which gives me happy feelings whenever I see the sun shine.

burns excellent sunshine

So why aren't more people doing this? The prices of solar panels have fallen so much that a regular 4kWh installation costs around £7,000. Granted, that's a chunk of money - but it's nothing compared to the price of a house. Why isn't every new-build house kitted out with one?

The point of solar power (in the UK at least) is not to go "off grid" or be completely energy independent. The point is to reduce the load on the existing grid and to give us more time to construct extra, greener energy generating capacity.

Our personal electricity usage is about 13kWh per day. Call it 5,000kWh per year. At the moment, we generate roughly half of that through solar power. Sure, a large part of our usage happens at night when the sun isn't shining - but it's easily enough to drop the load required for powering the fridge, washing machine, broadband and wifi, and all the other devices left on during the day.

Better local storage of energy would be nice, but given we can export it to people who are using electricity - it's not vital.

Just imagine if we could cut the cost of our electricity bills in half - permanently!

As Professor Sue Roaf pointed out in a comment on The Guardian, the UK is proposing a £240 Billion subsidy for new nuclear plants. That's £10,000 for each household - enough to pay for solar panels, insulation, smart meters, and more efficient heating equipment.

Surely that's the sensible way to go? Give every household a £10k subsidy which they can spend on reducing energy usage and generating their own power. This is cheap and reliable technology which - crucially - has no chance of melting down and causing a nuclear winter. Getting installers working would boost employment all over the country, would lift thousands of families out of fuel poverty, and provide the country with energy security for the future.

That can never happen; it's far too sensible.