Smart Meters, Dumb Headlines

Elsewhere - more in sorrow than in anger (of course) - I've critiqued claims about the inevitable and imminent supremacy of broadband over powerline (BPL), aka powerline communication (PLC), as a mechanism for providing broadband to rural/urban consumers using plain old powerlines ... in other words the 'grid' that connects businesses, households and other entities to the power stations.

Those claims have on occasion been driven by commercial opportunism (nothing like good news to pump up a flaccid share price or buff a stodgy corporate profile), incomprehension or indifference on the part of the mass media and the tendency of 'citizen journalists' to drink the digital koolade. The reality is - and will remain - that although broadband (however defined) can be delivered via the conventional electricity grid, such delivery is fraught with difficulty and is not commercially competitive once steps are taken to deal with radio interference and other problems. (I've noted that is also possible to deliver the net via carrier pigeon or bongo drum ... both mechanisms are technically feasible but, how very strange, have not supplanted wireless, fibre or conventional copper.)

I can thus empathise with the following response to reports that a 'smart meter' trial in Liverpool (UK) will lead to householders enjoying broadband over the grid -

Will this minion of the undead ever get a stake in its heart. Please ... silver bullets, garlic, wooden stakes, holy water something! anything!!!

Small scale Australian trials, under the auspices of ACMA, of BPL have gone nowhere - typically distinguished by deliriously upbeat media releases (and equally uncritical reporting) followed by an embarrassing silence as implementation does not eventuate. Across the world BPL solution vendors have packed their kit and slunk away; urban and rural showpiece projects have fizzled (eg here).

BPL continues to be "the technology of the future ... and always will be" - bright forecasts, dim reality.

Trust

Recent posts (here and here) have pointed to claims - unsubstantiated, exaggerated or otherwise - of unauthorised access to Vodafone customer data.

As some readers of those posts have inferred, alongside perceived security inadequacies at Vodafone - and arguably at some of its competitors, given that most telcos rely on similar dealer networks that are often staffed by apparently bored, inexperienced 18-somethings - there are grounds for criticism of the way that the organisation has responded to consumer (and broader public) concern.

Ongoing unhappiness with Vodafone coincides with release by the Brookings Institute of a 17 page paper by Allan Friedman, Patrick Crowley & Darrell West on Online Identity and Consumer Trust: Assessing Online Risk [PDF]. That document is not radical or scintillating and is arguably less incisive than the discussion in recent IPTF and FTC documents noted here.

However, it is a useful reminder - although one I suspect will escape the notice of both Vodafone and the Australian Privacy Commissioner - of the importance of trust in online environments.

Data loss may well be an unpleasant, inevitable fact of life for both consumers and data custodians (we should conceptualise public/private sector organisations as data custodians rather than data owners). However, the relationship between consumers, organisations and third parties needs to be founded on trust. For maintenance of that trust is is imperative that organisations demonstrate that they are aware of sensitivities, are committed to a meaningful response and are committed to proactive effective action that will substantially inhibit future losses.

Luhmann meets Facebook

Jesper Tække's 'Facebook: Networking the Community of Society' Conference Paper for the 11th Annual International and Interdisciplinary Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR)) [PDF] -

The article examines the significance of new "social media" like Facebook for the way we socialize, develop social identity, and shape society. Based on the work of Luhmann, the article proposes that community communication is fundamental to the selfregulation of our society and that this type of communication also provides the basis for the formation and maintenance of people’s social identity, so that they and society are in harmony. In contrast to community communication, the article explores the notion of network communication, which is classified as communication that may have some positive effects but that also may pose certain risks for modern society and for the development and maintenance of social identity. The article argues that communication through and about status updates on Facebook may be categorized as network communication, and finally it discusses whether and to what extent this kind of communication leads to the aforementioned risks.

In a comment on the metrics of cool Tække goes on to comment that -

Facebook consists of thousands of synchronously existing parallel networks and all users are isolated in the centre of their own unique networks.

Since Facebook is a medium for online contact between people who know each other offline, there must be a limit to how many friends a user can have before seeming unserious, or becoming a microcelebrity, as Danah Boyd called this phenomenon when I discussed it with her. It is my feeling that it seems cool to have at least 200 friends, but, conversely, not very cool to have many more than the 400. Users with so many friends seem to be collecting all sorts of unknown people in order to become a micro-celebrity, which someone with around 700 friends may be described as. The fact that many comedians and politicians (and also some of my colleagues) now have thousands of friends means that they have gone from using Facebook as do other mortals ― to network with friends, colleagues and family ― to using it as a quasi-mass medium facing their crowds of fans. ...

I have defined communities as a special kind of communication system whose main principle is that everyone has access to communication. Networking is also an expression of communication, but with a much smaller degree of community; networks are not organized and can only be poorly described as systems because their social differentiation is weak. Even though Facebook is not as cartel‐like as LinkedIn, the medium still plays a role in increasing the diffusion of networks. Theoretically, this could perturb the balance between society's primary functional
differentiation based on organizations and the secondary network coding.

He concludes - oh mirabile dictu - that

The societal risk is that network friends might not be sincere in their contributions to organizations. So rather than base their contributions on objective criteria and rules that apply equally to all, people will choose to further their network friends’ special interests. The parasite may kill the host. From a theoretical perspective, the problem is that networks cut across the closure of functional systems in the fact dimension and the closure of organizations in the social dimension. This problem is more complex in the case of Facebook: Exchanging services in the Facebook network may well be limited in the fact dimension but not in the social dimension because Facebook does not require membership in a strict sense. In addition, Facebook allows messages to be forwarded. It may be argued that the friendship system for the individual bounds the system in the social dimension, while no closure is evident in the fact dimension (everything can be communicated).

The fact of the matter is, however, that within Facebook's communicative structure many parallel networks are actualized in which no one has the same circle of friends, which means that the relationship structure is poly‐centred in the social dimension and thus open and impossible to limit. As a result, the only unique feature of the system is that communication occurs in it, and that this communication is decoupled from other communication by the very technology that enables and quasi‐duplicates it. If Facebook is considered a quasi‐mass medium it might actually contribute to the community of society. For example, Facebook can also be used critically to address the corruption of networks that worries Luhmann, and it can be used to focus the debate, as foreseen by Habermas, by processing societal reflection within all the functional systems.

There is a similar perspective in 'Clicking for friendship: social network sites and the medium of personhood' [PDF] by Daniel Lee, Jessica Goede & Rebecca Shryock in 49 MedieKultur: Journal of media and communication research (2010) -

Social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook depend on familiar social resources, including language, reading/writing and established semantic constructs such as personhood, privacy and friends. However, the use of computers, the Web 2.0 platform, and the latest networking software are revolutionising how "personhood" and "friendship" are produced by communication. We refer to the media theory of Niklas Luhmann to identify specific differences in how communication is organised and reproduced on networking sites. The electronic medium appears to be changing the way participants selectively construct and bind expectations of personhood and communicative ties to themselves and others. Using software available on the Web, users confront each other as digital bodies, as participants in communication, available for friendship within a new "ether of interactivity".

the business of judging

From 'The work of the Australian judiciary: Public and judicial attitudes' by
Sharyn Anleu & Kathy Mack in 20(1) Journal of Judicial Administration (2010) 3-17, drawing on the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes [AuSSA] -

a very large proportion of Australians regard the work of courts as important to their community, a view which is shared by the judiciary. A desire to undertake work of value to the community was an important factor for many in the judiciary to undertake that role, and most are satisfied with the importance to society of their work.

However, experience with the courts is very limited among the Australian public, and the lack of direct knowledge may contribute to low levels of confidence, especially if the primary source of information is media reports. It is important to recognise that general questions about confidence tend to produce overall negative responses. Specific questions generate a more complex picture: Australians are almost equally split regarding their confidence in the criminal courts to deal with matters fairly – 52% express a great deal or quite a lot of confidence while 48% express not very much or no confidence. Over two-thirds of respondents express confidence in criminal courts to have regard for defendants' rights compared with less than half who think courts have regard for victims’ rights. Four-fifths (78%) express not very much or no confidence in the criminal courts to deal with matters quickly, and there is widespread agreement among the AuSSA respondents.

Public confidence in the courts (or lack thereof) may be derived, in part, from an assessment about whether the courts and judicial personnel are performing their roles appropriately and whether they possess the relevant skills for judging. One important judicial role is sentencing persons convicted of crime. A large majority of Australians agree that people who break the law should be given stiffer sentences and a clear majority believe that judges should reflect the (presumably more punitive) views of the public when sentencing. Australian attitudes are ambivalent about whether "courts should emphasize solving social problems more than punishing offenders". Nearly four in 10 Australians agree the court should emphasise solving social problems more than punishing offenders, while one-third disagree. Other research finds that public views are more nuanced about the role of sentencing work and that informed publics share judicial views regarding appropriate sentences.

Moving away from areas where there is a high degree of media attention, such as sentencing, other areas of similarity between the attitudes of the judiciary and the public emerge, particularly in relation to the important skills and qualities for judicial office. In general, similar proportions of the judiciary and the Australian public regard general life experience, diligence/hard work and compassion as essential or very important for the judiciary, while higher proportions of the public regard legal knowledge as essential, compared with the judiciary.

The most striking difference is with impartiality, regarded as essential by over 90% of the judiciary contrasting with two-thirds of the Australian public. These findings may suggest that some, though not most, Australians may have a somewhat different understanding of a core attribute of the judiciary and judicial decision-making compared with judicial views. Nonetheless, well over half of the AuSSA and the judicial respondents agree that legal knowledge and impartiality are integral to judicial work.

The findings about impartiality and sentencing may be linked: when imposing sentence, the law requires judges and magistrates to give impartial consideration to a much wider range of factors than simply punishment, which may result in sentences which appear lenient to the large proportions of Australians who indicate they want stiffer sentences. The legal view which emphasises the paramount importance of impartial application of law to judicial decision-making may be an aspect of the judicial role which some members of the public either do not fully appreciate or do not accept.

While responses to concrete, specific questions about judicial work demonstrate more congruence between the general public and the judiciary, especially in relation to the necessary skills for judicial work, there are still significant areas where public and judicial attitudes differ, which can be factors in reducing public confidence in the courts.

Griefing

Having reread Julian Dibbell's 'Mutilated Furries, Flying Phalluses: Put the Blame on Griefers, the Sociopaths of the Virtual World' (in Wired in 2008, now in Steven Johnson [ed] The Best Technological Writing 2009 (Yale University Press, 2009)) and Burcu Bakioglu's less engaging 'Spectacular Interventions of Second Life: Goon Culture, Griefing, and Disruption in Virtual Spaces' in 1(3) Journal of Virtual Worlds Research (2009) 3-21 over lunch I am struck by a BBC item today reporting that YouTube has removed hundreds of explicit videos that were tagged with the names of teenage celebrities such as Hannah Montana and that commenced with images suitable for minors before featuring groups of adults engaged in various intimacies. The uploading, supposedly in response to restrictions on music copyright infringement, was claimed as demonstrating the ease with which adult content can be disseminated via YouTube.

The BBC claims that one user (or briefer) believed to have uploaded some of the videos is -

Flonty, whose profile states that he is 21 and from Germany.

He told the BBC: "I did it because YouTube keeps deleting music. It was part of a 4Chan raid."

4Chan [being a culture where] "Anything and everything can, and usually does, happen here. We have our very own unique culture, and there is no group quite like us anywhere out there".

When asked if he was concerned that children can freely watch such inappropriate material on YouTube, Flonty replied: "Children will find inappropriate material around the internet anyway.

"This kind of raid showed how easy it is to upload porn to a website that millions of people browse on a daily basis".

One response to that was

Flonty - you may have shown how easy it is to upload this material. It's also easy to hit people with a car, but that doesn't mean you do it. The anonymity of the internet helps cowards.

Another is

The problem is that the hackers intentionally tagged the videos under misleading names. So it seems to me that their intent was to get children to look at pornographic materials. The issue is more than just porn on YouTube. I'm all for freedom of expression and allowing people to upload whatever they want, but I'm not for dishonesty. And in this overtly sexual world, it gets hard for parents to trust the internet even though its becoming close to impossible to live without it.

True, there's porn on millions of sites which children could easily have access to, but there is a significant difference between that and interest groups purposely tricking and delivering porn to children in a Hannah Montana package on YouTube.

away from magical thinking

Reading Ideology, Evidence and Competing Principles in Australian Indigenous Affairs: From Brough to Rudd via Pearson and the NTER (CAEPR Discussion Paper 289) (2009) [PDF] by William Sanders and the thoughtful 2011 Parliamentary Library paper by Matthew Thomas & Luke Buckmaster on Paternalism in social policy: when is it justifiable? [PDF].

The 31 page Sanders paper -

tracks the recent rise of ideology and evidence discourse as a way of describing good and bad Indigenous affairs policy. Expressing dissatisfaction with this discourse, it suggests a slightly more complex analytic way of thinking about Indigenous affairs involving three competing principles; equality, choice and guardianship. The paper suggests that dominant debates in Indigenous affairs balance these principles and move between them over time. Using a fourfold categorisation of ideological tendencies, it also suggests that different tendencies of thought about settler society and its relations with Indigenous societies occupy different positions in relation to the three competing principles. Finally, using the work of the Northern Territory Emergency Response Review Board as an example, the paper examines the role of evidence in Indigenous affairs. Evidence, it argues, always needs to be contextualised and is always a part of arguments or debates. The role of evidence in Indigenous affairs needs to be understood in relation to the much larger issue of balancing competing principles.

Thomas & Buckmaster comment in their 30 page paper that -

Governments are increasingly called upon to introduce paternalist policies — that is, policies that restrict the choices of individual citizens in their own interests and without their consent. Paternalist policies are often controversial, not least because they infringe a key principle of liberal societies; namely, that citizens are best placed to know their own interests.

While paternalist policies are often contentious, they are nevertheless ubiquitous. This suggests that the main issue is not whether or not paternalism itself is justifiable, but rather the conditions under which particular paternalist policies may be said to be justifiable.

This paper argues that paternalist policies may be considered justifiable under circumstances where high stakes decisions are involved, the decisions being made by individuals are irreversible and it is possible to identify failures in people's reasoning. It is further argued that if paternalist interventions are able to be justified in terms of people's own values and preferences, then this adds weight to their acceptability given that they do not undermine people's autonomy.

Relatively little scholarly attention has been devoted to the questions of what particular forms of paternalism may be deemed to be appropriate. This paper suggests that the principles of discrimination, proportionality, accountability and efficacy provide a framework with which to consider the appropriateness or otherwise of various forms of paternalist intervention.

The emphasis on making sense of evidence is continued in a GeoCurrents post on 'The Failure of the Failed State Index'.

The author of that post comments that -

If the Failed State Index is a promising but problematic analytical tool, the map that accompanies it on the Foreign Policy website is something else altogether. At first glance, it appears the cartographers have mapped sovereign states from red to green, while using white as an unmarked category to include both dependent territories, such as Greenland and Puerto Rico, and key disputed lands, such Western Sahara and the Hala'ib Triangle (claimed by Sudan, administered by Egypt). Closer inspection, however, reveals a stunning lack of consistency. The regions depicted in white turn out to have nothing in common. Some are dependencies and a few are disputed territories, but others range from autonomous areas, to insular portions of sovereign states, to fully independent countries. Meanwhile, the world's hottest territorial dispute, Kashmir, is essentially invisible: the area controlled by India is mapped as part of India, the area controlled by Pakistan is mapped as part of Pakistan, and the area controlled by China (Aksai Chin) is mapped as if it were a lake (or perhaps desiccated lake, given that it is portrayed exactly like the Aral Sea!).

A few of the oddities on the map deserve special mention. The cartographer's most glaring gaffe is the excision of the island of Newfoundland from Canada. France too is shorn of most of its islands; the map implicitly refutes French sovereignty over all of its overseas departments (Guiana, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Réunion), even though they are as much parts of France as Hawaii and Alaska are parts of the United States. In the Caribbean, several independent island countries (Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, St. Lucia, Dominica, and more) are denied sovereignty, mapped instead as white splotches. Further south, Chile has been divested of its half of Tierra del Fuego. Some autonomous island groups, such as Portugal's Azores and Finland's Åland Archipelago, are mapped in white, but not Denmark's autonomous Faroe Islands. Taiwan, a de facto sovereign state not recognized by most other independent countries, is shown in white, but Kosovo, which fits the same category, is colored. A too-large West Bank is mapped in white, but in the accompanying tables it is aggregated with Israel. Elsewhere the mapmaker takes islands belonging to one country and assigns them to another. The coloration scheme shows Socotra as part of Somalia rather than Yemen, Rhodes as part of Turkey rather than Greece, and the Florida Keys as part of the Bahamas rather than the United States. Similar errors abound. Have the editors of Foreign Policy and the creators of the Failed State Index never checked their own map?

We take it very seriously

Over the weekend I pointed to reports of unauthorised access and use of Vodafone customer data, with claims that data had been exploited by gangs.

The story continues, with Vodafone chief executive Nigel Dews reported as commenting that he does not believe there is a widespread problem and that "It appears to have been a one-off incident". Customer reassurance aside, it is likely that Vodafone is not in a position to determine whether the problem is a "a one-off" or otherwise.

Mr Dews is reported as stating that -

We take this data security issue very seriously.

It's very important that we uphold the highest standards of data integrity for our customers. ...

I'm not concerned about the brand at the moment, I'm mostly concerned about making sure our customers' records are safe.

That stance is traditional, with similar statements by other organisations over the past two decades after revelation that information has been exposed. A more proactive approach to data protection (thereby upholding "the highest standards of data integrity") is appropriate and is indeed achievable.

In an ABC report today Vodafone is described as indicating that a dealer or employee is probably responsible for sharing a password that allowed personal information to become available on the internet. The reality is that probably numerous dealers and employees, rather than an isolated individual, have been sharing. The statement does not lessen the gravity of the situation; it merely indicates that Vodafone has experienced social engineering rather than falling victim to the master hacker - black tshirt, inked, bad attitude, accommodation in Vladivostok courtesy of the cyber mafiya - featured in popular tales about data loss.

Vodafone is reportedly "resetting passwords every day to make sure the system is secure". we might ask whether that is effective and why such a regime wasn't in place prior to 2011. Are Vodafone's competitors (inc the plethora of Telstra, Optus and Virgin dealers) using the same arrangements?

Dews is reported as stating that Vodafone will refer anyone caught to the Australian Federal Police, explaining that "It could be someone who works in our stores or one of our dealers. If that's the case, we will come down with the full force of the law."

A sceptic might wonder about the statement that -

People know and understand and are well trained in our procedures and protocols and it's very important they aren't breached.

Without excessive disrespect for Mr Dews, it would appear that the procedures, training and understanding are inadequate if there has been large-scale (especially recurrent) exposure of data and if Vodafone is not in a position to readily determine what is going on.

Mr Dews is reported as saying "I do want to reassure our customers that we are investigating quickly and thoroughly". Quite so. He went on to promise that "If there are things that we can do to make our data safer, we will implement those with the highest priority". Such reassurance would be strengthened if action had been taken in the past, rather than on a reactive basis.