Connection Problem S03E23: The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Sitrep: Summer is upon us, at least temporarily. I'm pondering travel plans, trying to balance my 2018 resolution to cut down on non-essential travel and spend more time in Berlin with opportunities to go places and meet people. Also, I'm slowly but surely homing on a bit of a format for this newsletter that might (or not?) save you from my ramblings become too excessive. Thanks for following along!

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As always, a shout out to tinyletter.com/pbihr or a forward is appreciated!

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DEPT OF PERSONAL UPDATES

(1) Offscreen

So I got word that the new Offscreen Mag is out and will be shipped after the weekend, but of course I haven't seen it. This is, however, what it looks like apparently:

I got a piece in there about responsible tech and a trustmark for IoT, and I really hope it held up well since I wrote it a few months ago.

Also, I'm always happy to support an indie mag, and this is as indie as it gets, so go order a copy online or even subscribe?

(2) The Bag X

I got to meet up with the brilliant An Xiao Mina who besides her work with Berkman Center and others on fake news and hardware memes also has a side project called The Bag X (Instagram) which is right up my alley. This is for bags what Zephyr Berlin is for pants: A super versatile and highly functional piece of design created to solve the (admittedly somewhat privileged) travel-related problems of their makers, and a passion project to boot. It's not available yet but I'll go ahead and vouch for it after seeing it come together over the last year or so.

(3) Trustmark ruminations

As the trustmark concept goes through lots of incremental iterations and I have more and more conversations with experts and potential partners, one conversation stood out to me. Talking to the ever-helpful and extremely well-informed JP Kleinhans about IT and IoT security certification I'm on the way to being convinced that there aren't that many promising and ambitious security certifications that solve the specific problems that IoT things face. He recommended a different route that I had shied away from initially: To also focus on transparency through vendors' documentation rather than blindly relying on external, third party audited certifications because those are also too weak. Oh boy, do I have conflicting feelings about this.

(4) Travel: Let's meet

Also, I'm planning to be in Scotland around Dundee Design Festival, and in NYC and Toronto in June. If you're around and would like to meet up, ping me!

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DEPT OF DEEPER DIVES

Gizmodo has a [fun/sad/contemporary] look at the state of smart homes: The House That Spied On Me. Allow me to start with a quote about the UX realities:

"I had to download 14 different apps to my phone to control everything, which meant creating an account for each one of those apps. (Yes, my coffeemaker has a log-in and a very long terms of service agreement.) After setting them up, I thought I’d be able to control all the devices by issuing voice commands to Alexa via the Echo—the smart speaker that we’ve been using for the last year as a glorified timer and music player—but this did not go as well as I had hoped.

But that's not half of it. We know about the risks of security issues, hackability, back doors, and simply poor data practices of smart home devices. (Did I just hear someone whisper "vizio smart tv"?)

So we have a bad user experience, which seems solvable. We have security and privacy issues, which is solvable but there's a lot less political will there because privacy does not equal profit in the same way that frictionless interactions do. (Also, cough cough, trustmarks.) But there's a third aspect here about the way our lives in the home can change through smart devices:

I thought the house would take care of me but instead everything in it now had the power to ask me to do things."

And so we're right back to the Sorcerer's Apprentice.

And that's really a good point, and one we may not be talking about quite enough: Smart devices take a lot of effort to maintain. But unlike a good knife or a good pair of shoes that also require maintenance, smart devices don't get better with use (even if they run machine learning and analytics on their users). They don't acquire a nice patina. There's no wabi sabi there: All you can do is try to slow down the decline, and hope you can keep these things working and maybe, just maybe, a little bit secure, for now.

There has to be a better way to design the modular bits that add up to a smart home so that the emerging system is secure, respectful of its users and its users' privacy, and that still is usable and empowering. We can all dream, right?

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DEPT OF INTERESTING READS

... about tech and trust. Or rather, tech and trustworthiness.

(1) Surprise, Echo Owners, You're Now Part of Amazon's Random Social Network (Gizmodo):

"In May, Amazon pushed a software update that added features called “Drop in” and “Alexa calling and messaging,” which let you connect to other people’s Echos. The communal device, used by all members of a given household, suddenly became a telephone and answering machine, much like an old-school landline shared by a family, except this one emits a pulsing yellow light when you have a message. This is a unique aspect to being a consumer of the Internet of Things: The things stay connected to the company you bought them from, which means the company can push down an update from afar and change them into, well, other things. Overnight, the Echo went from being a voice-activated Google search to a device that could be networked to a bunch of other devices."

Well, what could possibly go wrong.

(2) Facebook to put 1.5 billion users out of reach of new EU privacy law (Reuters). Remember the congressional hearings where Zuckerberg said "We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility (...) and I'm sorry," Zuck said. "I'm committed to getting this right"? Yeah that's so last week. Here's Reuters report on FB taking measures to limit the data protection of their users:

If a new European law restricting what companies can do with people's online data went into effect tomorrow, almost 1.9 billion Facebook Inc users around the world would be protected by it. The online social network is making changes that ensure the number will be much smaller.

This is a move so weasely it's kind of like exactly the kind of move you'd expect from Facebook.

(3) OLPC's $100 Laptop Was Going To Change The World—Then It All Went Wrong (The Verge). Interesting write-up of what happened to the good old (incorrectly) so-called $100 laptop. On Twitter, An Xiao Mina points out:

"The lost opportunity about this piece is that it seems pretty dismissive of the hardware revolution that has happened across the developing world — mobile phones, tablets, netbooks — without meaningfully looking into why those worked and OLPC hasn't."

I agree, and would like to add for the protocol that I still have one of those laptops at home, and it broke almost instantly even though we never used it in any even remotely rough way or context.

(4) 12 Things Everyone Should Understand About Tech. Just to end on a more positive note, Anil Dash's ruminations on tech, culture, politics and society.

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I wish you an excellent weekend.

Yours truly,
Peter

PS. Please feel free to forward this to friends & colleagues, or send them to tinyletter.com/pbihr

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Who writes here? Peter Bihr explores the impact of emerging technologies — like Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence. He is the founder of The Waving Cat, a boutique research, strategy & foresight company. He co-founded ThingsCon, a non-profit that fosters the creation of a responsible Internet of Things. In 2018, Peter is a Mozilla Fellow. He tweets at @peterbihr. Interested in working together? Let’s have a chat.
 

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This image and the world map at the top are from the beautiful Public Domain Review.