The Future Home: A Smart, Green, Machine for Living In

I've been working with Hive on a project looking at the future of the smart home with particular regard to sustainability. This post forms part of that (paid) project. Almost 100 years ago, Le Corbusier wrote about the house as a “machine for living in”. It sounds a little cold compared to the cosy visions we have of home. But his ideas of form separated from function continue to shape modern architecture. I wonder whether he would approve of the modern smart home? After all, here we are adding function to a long-established form. We are improving the machine for living in, in many ways.

Every home is getting smarter

The smart home concept has been around a long time. By adding sensors, switches, and computing power, we can make the home more efficient, luxurious, secure, and comfortable. It is only in the last decade though that the smart home has become truly accessible to most people. Before then, it was what I call ‘footballer tech’: only available to those with the disposable income to buy the hardware and pay an expert to do the installation. Today your plumber or electrician can install systems, and many items you can simply pick up and plug in. If you can use a smartphone, you can create a smart home.The result is that adoption has rocketed. Hive alone has hardware in more than 1.9 million homes across the UK, whether that's a smart thermostat, smart lights, alarm, or a collection of those devices all controlled by the same app. Over 70% of our survey respondents said they already have some form of smart home tech, and are controlling their homes remotely to give themselves warmth, light and security when they need them, and to ensure they’re not wasting energy when they don’t. But where do we go from here?

Smaller, cheaper, more accessible

My seven predictions for the future smart home are predicated on two simple ideas. First, that digital technology will continue to get smaller, cheaper, and more accessible. This is a safe bet since this pattern has been consistent for the last 60 years Even if we reach the limits of physics in improving our current range of technologies – and we are hitting the limits for silicon chips – there are other technologies on the horizon. As long as manufacturing can keep up with demand, prices will continue to fall.Every time we make our computers more powerful, we tend to use a good chunk of that power to make them easier to use. Just look at how we communicate with computers today versus sixty years ago. We’ve gone from punched tape, to graphical interfaces, to touchscreens, and now voice control. What next? I suspect we will add even more intelligence into our homes to help them work on our behalf. Why use a voice command when your home just knows what you want?

Removing friction

The second principle behind my predictions is that we as humans love anything that strips the friction from our lives. Rewind three million years and our distant ancestors were already making tools, sharpening stones to make food preparation easier. Throughout human history we have defined each era by its technology - Stone Age, Bronze Age, Steam Age – because technology is so important to us. Because it makes our lives easier.We will adopt more smart home technology if and when it makes life easier. That it also helps us fulfil our goals for more sustainable living is a huge bonus, and that is something 88% of us are striving for . But that alone is probably not enough. We want easier living so that we can focus our time, energy, and critically, money, on the people and things that are most important to us.

Communes and robots

The way we live, and work is changing, so any smart home must work in that context. We tend to be single until later in life now, sharing homes with friends or family, or increasingly living on build-to-rent campuses. These modern blocks offer smaller apartments with shared facilities for everything you might need: gym, cinema room, café, gardens, workspace. They’re one of the fastest growing types of home in the UK and around the world . And they are all built with integrated smart home technologies.More and more of us are working remotely, or for ourselves, so workspace is becoming increasingly important. Either some space carved out in our home or shared and sustainable office space nearby. How do we carve out space in homes that are shrinking? The average living room has shrunk by a third since the 70s, so we’re not exactly spoiled for space. One idea is transformers: robotic furniture that can change function at the touch of a button. Kitchen tables become standing desks, shelves swing out into dividers, sofas roll away to free up floor space.Robotic furniture will also take on more of the chores. We still spend over an hour a day washing and cleaning. Wardrobes that iron and fold are on the fringes right now, but I’m certainly ready for them to go mainstream and I don’t think I’m alone. We might see robots helping with the food too. Maybe not a robot chef just yet, but perhaps an automated hydroponics system to keep you in fresh salad veg.

EVs and virtual power plants

Powering all these robots in a sustainable fashion will fall to a combination of solar cells on the roof and battery storage in the basement - or in your car. With the deadline for the end of petrol and diesel sales approaching in 2030, I estimate perhaps a third of us will be driving electric vehicles by the end of the decade. Nearly two thirds of us have space for home charging . When they’re not on the move, EVs make great energy stores, turning your home into a ‘virtual power plant’, part of a new networked energy grid that can share power with the homes around you or with the rest of the nation.Underpinned by this sustainable generation and storage, tomorrow’s smart home becomes a greener place to live. But also, an easier place to live, where the machine takes more of the strain.##My full set of predictions are as follows:1. Smart tech will be the norm: “It’s not that long since smart homes were what I call “footballer tech”, confined to the elite. But in just a small space of time, this has entirely changed. Technology advances at an incredible pace, getting more powerful, cheaper, and most importantly, easier to use. As we continue to innovate, smart home products geared towards sustainability will become the norm in the home. The smart meter rollout continues. Every time people replace their thermostats, lightbulbs, or other home tech, they will find that the obvious options will increasingly be smart ones. By 2030, almost every UK home will have some form of smart tech.”2. Semi-communal living will become increasingly popular: “As we look to prioritise sustainability, and people continue to live in shared accommodation well into their 30s, there will be a rise in semi-communal living: smaller private homes with a lot of shared spaces. With homes shrinking and more of us working remotely, this is a good model for a more sustainable future: modern, well-insulated and sustainably heated homes with access to amenities – including remote working spaces – all within walking distance.* Smart tech will play a key role in helping us to make the most of shared spaces, managing access, setting heat and lighting to our preferences, and ensuring security. As well as people sharing more spaces, we’ll also see a rise in micro grids, especially in new builds, where you can share energy within the community. This means energy can easily be transferred to different homes, instead of wasted.”3. The home will take part in the future energy system: “More homes in the future will generate and store energy and will be rewarded for making their homes part of the energy grid. Around a million homes in the UK have solar photovoltaics today – and that number is growing. Though the percentage of individual households adding small (sub 4kw) solar installations is only increasing at about 3.6% per year, the next class of installation (4-10kw) seems to be growing much faster.** But it’s not just solar power that is set to increase, we’re also likely to see more and more people using other technology and taking part in the future energy system, be it smart water tanks, heat pumps, EV chargers and home batteries.”4. 15-20% of the UK will continue to work from home: “Over 40% of the UK worked remotely in lockdown. This is likely to drop back to around 15-20% as we exit this period, but then start to climb again towards 2030. Our homes are poorly insulated compared to modern offices, so those choosing to remain at home, may look to make savings from commuting on retrofitting their home, better insulation, ventilation, and sound-proofing – all of which have added green benefits. Using one centralised app, such as the Hive app, we’ll see more people linking their devices together in one eco-system to better manage their heating and electricity bills. For example, ensuring lights only turn on when someone is in the room, or linking their smart thermostat such as Hive Active Heating to Hive radiator valves to have greater control over the heating in individual rooms.”***5. Suburban office shares to take the load off the home: “With more of us working remotely, and a lot more freelance workers, suburban office shares will be in demand. Lockdown has seen couples and flatmates arguing over who gets the kitchen table and the biggest share of the broadband. With our smaller homes, people will be seeking out extra space – especially the 20% of the workforce I estimate might be self-employed by 2030. Users of these spaces will be looking for somewhere warm and light, but also somewhere with good sustainable characteristics.”6. The electric vehicle revolution will be driven into force: “As we edge closer to new legislation banning diesel and petrol cars coming into play, the number of electric vehicles on the road is set to grow fast. Based on the typical replacement rate for cars in the UK, and the rapid growth of EV sales, I estimate around a third of all UK cars will be electric by 2030. Electric vehicle prices will continue to fall, and the technology will continue to improve. More brands will open up charging at home as part of a wider eco-system of smart tech, including Hive, adding convenience, and integrating energy storage into your smart home.” ****7. One giant computer: robot furniture and cleaners “Computers are making their way into everything, turning the home into one giant computer – a true ‘machine designed for living’, as Corbusier would have called it. We’ll see more robot furniture that can transform at the touch of a button to make the best use of your living space. Robot wardrobes that press and fold your clothes. And smaller, sleeker, and cheaper robot mops and vacuums. Smart hydroponics systems, to give you a constant supply of salad veg will be more mainstream.”##To hear more about Hive’s eco-system of smart products visit: https://www.hivehome.com/

Long read: 5G and Mixed Reality

I am taking part in two roundtable discussions this week, each focused on a specific technology or set of technologies that stands to have a major impact on our world over the next few years. Though I now spend more time talking about business and culture than I do technology, I remain convinced that it has been one of the biggest drivers of change in our world over recent years and will continue to play a primary role in shifting our future. Understanding the potential impact of these technologies – positive and negative – is therefore critical.Here then – in part as an exercise to organise my own thoughts in advance of these discussions – are my thoughts on two questions:

• What is the role of 5G in the future economic success (or otherwise) of the UK?
• What is the potential of AR and VR technologies, particularly in the property realm, and how/when will this potential be realised?

5G: poor marketing

I doubt I am the first to make this analogy, but 5G is a lot like HS2. OK, no-one mistakenly believes that 5G is responsible for causing pandemics. But each is a large-scale infrastructure project, the motivations for which are widely misunderstood.The naming of HS2 is one of the worst marketing decisions ever. Because HS2 is not about speed. It is about capacity. We just do not have the tracks available to move enough trains up and down the country – or across it for that matter. HS2 does not greatly accelerate the journey from London to Manchester (the most pertinent route to me). But it does put high speed trains on a separate track from local stopping services, allowing more of those to operate at a more consistent rhythm. It adds capacity.Most of the headlines about 5G have been about speed of one form or another. How fast you can download a film. The low latency connections that will apparently be critical to self-driving cars (something about which I am a little sceptical). It is understandable that this has been the message as this is what might sell it to individual users keen to be ahead of the curve. But really, 5G is also about capacity of one kind or another.

Increasing efficiency

The first kind of efficiency that matters, is spectral efficiency. There are only so many frequencies on which you can usefully carry information from point A to point B. A subset of these are suitable for mobile devices. With demand for connectivity growing constantly((OpenReach recorded 10 PetaBytes per hour flowing over its network in May, a large leap in a constantly growing figure driven by lockdown - https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2020/05/openreach-records-10-petabyte-peak-in-uk-internet-traffic.html)), the challenge is on to carry more and more data over the available spectrum. 5G uses new spectrum but it also makes much better use of it, topping out at 30 bits per second (bps) per Hertz (Hz) according to the CTIA ((https://www.telecompetitor.com/ctia-5g-will-provide-big-spectral-efficiency-gains/#:~:text=5G%20networks%20will%20provide%20major,%2DAdvanced%20technology%2C%20CTIA%20said.)) versus the 15 bps/Hz limit of 4G.This is closely connected to the second kind of efficiency: simultaneous connections. We keep adding more and more devices to the network. The compound annual growth rate of the number of smartphones averaged 93% from the early 80s through 2017. There are now an estimated 22bn connected devices – predicted to be 50bn by 2030. 4G is seriously limited in the number of devices it can connect in a given area, its so-called connection density. While 4G networks can connect around 2000 devices per square kilometre, 5G devices can theoretically connect up to a million. If we want to add more smart devices to the network (and some examples of where we might are below), then we need a more efficient network.Of course, all this data must go somewhere once it reaches the base station from your devices. This is called backhaul. As part of the 5G rollout, operators will be looking at how they deal with your data, introducing more computing at the edge of networks for example, and caching copies of popular content so your request doesn’t need to flow across the network.

Too much juice

Then there is the issue of energy efficiency. 4G networks consume a *lot* of juice. Speaking to LightReading((https://www.lightreading.com/asia-pacific/operators-starting-to-face-up-to-5g-power-cost-/d/d-id/755255)), Jake Saunders, the managing director at ABI Research, said a typical 4G cell might draw six kilowatts in power, rising to perhaps nine kilowatts at peak periods. Multiply that by the roughly 23,000 base stations in the UK((https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_towers_in_the_United_Kingdom)) and you get a draw on the grid somewhere between 138 and 207 megawatts.Huawei estimates a 5G base station might consume 300% to 350% of a 4G base station, once operating across all the available frequencies. This sounds bad, until you consider the alternative. Even if 4G could support the continuing growth in demand, its power consumption would be orders of magnitude greater than 5G. According to Orange((https://hellofuture.orange.com/en/5g-energy-efficiency-by-design/)), more efficient 5G technologies are expected to divide the energy consumption per gigabit transported by a factor of 10 compared to 4G once they reach maturity by 2025, and then by a factor of 20 by 2030 .So, if we want to keep expanding the number of devices on the network, and the richness of the media we consume, we need to move to 5G.

Slowing progress

The obvious rejoinder from some will be: do we really need these increases? Or should we stick with 4G? While I think there are technological avenues we ought to avoid (for example, some geo-engineering responses to climate change, certain weapons technologies), I don’t think there is a very strong argument for suppressing the development of general purpose technologies like networks. Just like roads and rail before them, networks are not without their risks and challenges. But they are the platform for other forms of progress: scientific, economic, medical and social. Stopping our move to 5G would not only undermine these efforts, it would place us at a global disadvantage.

Delays on the line

Which leads neatly to one of the issues under discussion at the roundtable event: the delay in our 5G rollout caused by the UK government’s decision to prevent Huawei supplying new equipment, and forcing operators to remove what they had already deployed.Personally, I have always been deeply sceptical about the specific threat presented by Huawei’s technology. The telecoms equipment industry, like all high-tech industries, has long and complex supply chains. There are many opportunities for hostile entities to try to interfere with the equipment before or when it is in place. And it is so complex that maintaining security is a constant battle. Do I believe that Chinese government agencies would try to access UK networks through Huawei’s technology? It seems likely. That’s what spies do. But is there any greater risk from us using Huawei’s technology to anyone else’s? That, I find hard to believe.I have been saying this publicly for a couple of years now, though until the last few months have had no actual relationship with Huawei aside from going to a phone launch about five years ago where I walked away with a free device (as did everyone else in the room). Huawei are paying me to be part of this roundtable event, as any other company would have to. But my opinions are fairly well documented long before this point and haven’t changed at all.

GDP impact

Whether or not you believe Huawei’s equipment presents a material risk to our network security, we now have another issue to contend with. Back in 2017, the UK government predicted that once rolled out, 5G would play a key role in 5-6% of UK GDP((https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/582640/FCCG_Interim_Report.pdf)). If its rollout is delayed, what effect will that have on the economy?Research commissioned by Huawei from Assembly Research has attempted to quantify that effect. It suggests the economic hit will be around £18.2bn. The delay could also “jeopardise £108bn of economic benefit to the UK and the creation of 350,000 jobs in regions outside London and the South-East over the next decade, putting at risk the Government's 'levelling up' agenda.”If you want to understand where those figures come from, then I recommend reading the research (not available to link to as I write this). But I have my own take on this, particularly with regards to where the economic benefits of 5G come from. For me there are two distinct drivers to look at, one of productivity, one of growth.

Hello? Can you hear me?

While our broadband providers have coped admirably through lockdown, I think most people would acknowledge now that our connectivity problems are far from solved. How many calls have you been on over the last few months where people’s video and audio were disrupted, or they dropped in and out of the conversation because of poor connectivity? People are still wandering around their houses trying to get a better signal or working from strange locations because their Wi-Fi or 4G just does not give them a reliable connection elsewhere.Lots of people have tried to quantify the cost of this poor connectivity. In January, Zen Internet suggested SMEs could be losing 72 minutes per day((https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252476441/Poor-UK-internet-connectivity-and-technology-cited-as-hampering-UK-SME-productivity)). Clearly, Zen has something to gain from such statements. But I do not think they are probably that far out. Even if Zen’s estimate is out by a factor of ten, that is half an hour of lost productivity each week, for each employee. That adds up.We need connectivity that stops being a question. You should never, ever, need to think about whether you are connected, only about the application.

Tech-driven growth

The question of growth is more interesting perhaps, but also more speculative. What future applications does 5G support that we do not have today? The simplest answer is just more: as noted above there are hard limits on the number of things we can connect via 4G. But the more fun answer comes from thinking about how you might use the specific characteristics of 5G: ubiquity, latency, bandwidth as required.The first obvious answer is things. Right now, connecting things to the network – particularly remote or mobile things – is still a bit fiddly. Imagine if you could take a thing out of its box and it just worked, with no configuration, for maybe five years before it needed recharging. Think of the applications in manufacturing, fitness, care, logistics, security, entertainment, toys. 5G combined with new battery technologies, passive energy harvesting, and low energy computing should finally open up the potential of the so-called Internet of Things market by stripping away the hassle and fuss and making it easier to deploy connected stuff in the field((Note, early 5G devices have been very power hungry because they are maintaining simultaneous connections to 3 and 4G networks to sustain coverage. This situation will improve dramatically with future generations of the technology and improved 5G coverage.)).The second answer is mixed reality. I have long argued that it is likely we will make a shift from smart phones to smart glasses or headsets. These devices will need ubiquitous rich connectivity, and low latency. Which makes for a neat segue to the second part of this very long blog post.

Living in mixed reality

Right now, we live in two discrete worlds: physical and digital. They touch in various places, like crossing points between dimensions. But they are fundamentally separate. We interact in different ways with these two worlds, one directly and the other indirectly, mediated by a mouse, keyboard, games controller or touchscreen. Or perhaps a voice assistant. We behave differently, communicating online sentiments and in styles we would not dream of replicating in the physical world.These two worlds are separate and distinct, but they are moving closer together. Sixty years ago, the digital world was alien, unintuitive, and required deep expertise to navigate. Those who visited the digital realm were like astronauts exploring an alien space. Today, we can feel our way through the digital world, a space that is more and more familiar. Tomorrow, I think the two worlds begin to truly merge.

Alternatives to dystopia

There are many dystopian visions for this future. Of humans separated from each other by screens spread across their field of vision. Of flashing pop-ups and garish neon interruptions to our field of vision. Notifications pinging endlessly in our ears. But while I think this is a risk in the interim stage, ultimately I can see a much more positive vision for our future cyborg selves.Human senses are incredibly plastic. We can learn to process all sorts of data coming through as sound, touch, taste, sight and smell. You can see this in the work on sensory substitution of the celebrity neuroscientist David Eagleman((https://www.eagleman.com/www/www/research/sensory-substitution)). Or you can see it in the way we learn not just to drive cars, but to sense them. After a while driving a car you stop being conscious of most of your actions. They become automatic. But for them to become automatic, your brain must be unconsciously processing sensory inputs: it’s the tone of the engine and the change in acceleration that tells you when to change up a gear, not the numbers on the rev counter.As we start to live in a permanent mixed reality environment, I think the same thing will happen. We’ll start to ignore the dashboard analogue: the pop-ups, notifications and formal interfaces, and start to rely on more subtle signals. I think the future of mixed reality is like having super powers, or what the original Book of the Future called ‘Extra Sensory Perception’.Imagine all the rich information to which a smart headset might have access translated into streams of sensory information that your brain can interpret subconsciously. Subtle hues of colour, vibrations, sounds, temperatures, electrical stimulation perhaps. A sixth sense for what is happening in your social circle or the stock market. Subtle indicators to point out bargains, risks, or potential dates.The digital world in this scenario becomes translucent: something that colours our interactions with the physical world but does not block them. I think it has the potential to make us more human, not less.There is a huge amount of technological development and interaction design to be done here. But I see this as a more likely outcome than the dystopian futures so often presented.VR, by contrast, will always be an escape from reality. Or at the least, a vehicle into other realities: someone else’s or perhaps our own future. In lockdown, all of those options sound more appealing than ever. But as an escape, they are only somewhere we could, or should, spend a small amount of time. Most of the time we have to face reality, however moderated.So, bringing this back to today and the topic of the roundtable event: how will these technologies, VR and AR, affect the property sector.Right now, I still think the advantage conferred by VR in exploring a property is marginal. It is a very solitary experience, which buying a property rarely is. That is not to say it cannot add value – particularly when the property is not yet built. But the core of the decision making is still likely to be made based on data, photographs, discussion, and a good measure of gut feel.AR has a much greater role to play, though perhaps less immediately. AR will be a critical tool for everyone in the property value chain. It will be used to capture images and plans of land, overlay existing properties with virtual remodels, highlight critical information from utilities to crime, inform contractors etc. We are just not there yet with the hardware, the interaction design, or frankly, the network.It is perhaps fitting that it is in a property industry context – a business that deals specifically with the built environment – that we have this conversation. But tomorrow’s world is one where physical and digital are largely indistinguishable.

Securing the Extended Human: Script & Slide Deck

Five years ago I gave a brief talk at a security conference at the Centre for Security at Lancaster University. It was early in my speaking career and I confess I was a little nervous. I don't think it was my greatest performance. But I'm still a huge believer in the content I shared that day. As I start to prepare a new talk on future security for an event in Paris in a couple of weeks' time, I went back to this slide deck and script and figured it would be a good time to share it.Below you will find my original script, and a link to the slide deck in PDF format (this was before I started to write slides in HTML using the Impress framework).The presentation starts with a reading from the 2005 novel by Charles Stross, Accelerando. This remains one of my favourite pieces of science fiction and I would strongly urge you to read the  - now free - eBook, available for download here: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.htmlDownload the slide deck in PDF format here.###Securing the Extended Human"Ah can take it," Jack mumbles, as a torrent of images crashes down on his eyeballs and jackhammers its way in through his ears like the superego of a disembodied giant.  Which is actually what he's stolen: The glasses and waist pouch he grabbed from the tourist are stuffed with enough hardware to run the entire Internet, circa the turn of the millennium. They've got bandwidth coming out the wazoo, distributed engines running a bazillion inscrutable search tasks, and a whole slew of high-level agents that collectively form a large chunk of the society of mind that is their owner's personality.  Their owner is a posthuman genius loci of the net, an agalmic entrepreneur turned policy wonk, specializing in the politics of AI emancipation. When he was in the biz he was the kind of guy who catalysed value wherever he went, leaving money trees growing in his footprints. Now he's the kind of political backroom hitter who builds coalitions where nobody else could see common ground. And Jack has stolen his memories. There are microcams built into the frame of the glasses, pickups in the earpieces; everything is spooled into the holographic cache in the belt pack, before being distributed for remote storage. At four months per terabyte, memory storage is cheap. What makes this bunch so unusual is that their owner – Manfred – has cross-indexed them with his agents. Mind uploading may not be a practical technology yet, but Manfred has made an end run on it already.In a very real sense, the glasses are Manfred, regardless of the identity of the soft machine with its eyeballs behind the lenses. And it is a very puzzled Manfred who picks himself up and, with a curious vacancy in his head – except for a hesitant request for information about accessories for Russian army boots – dusts himself off and heads for his meeting on the other side of town.##This is an excerpt from Accelerando by Charles Stross, for my money one of the finest pieces of science fiction writing and certainly one of the most coherent visions of a technology-driven future ever written.It highlights a challenge that we will be facing in the near future. How we secure the aspects of our humanity that are increasingly being handed off to, and enhanced by, machines.##We are already bionic. I have a terrible memory and a hopeless sense of direction. My smartphone and the cloud behind it ensure that I don't forget my wife's birthday and I can find the shop where I want to buy her present. Because of the constant access to these capabilities I no longer try to remember things I can store, and I no longer worry about finding directions or reading a map. These pieces of technology are functionally part of my make-up and while I am not incapable without them I am certainly impaired.##As the lines between technology and humanity are further blurred with the next generation of wearables, this issue will become more acute. Much has been made of the privacy and performance issues surrounding always-on, camera equipped human beings. But what about the challenges that the removal of this technology will present. Challenges that will concern not just individuals but employers, law enforcers, health professionals and the state.I want to suggest just a few examples today.##“I can't come in today. My customer service co-processor has been hacked.”Imagine a salesman equipped with a real-time deal calculator that enabled him to juggle margins in order to close. Imagine a call centre full of enhanced humans guided through customer service enquiries not by a script on the screen but a dynamic set of suggestions whispered in their ears. Imagine a surgeon guided by enhanced sight and overlaid MRI data.These scenarios present a number of issues. Who supplies the hardware? Is it a BYOD environment or will corporates compete to offer the best upgrades? If they use learning software and the software learns alongside the human, who owns that data? Is it part of the human's skills? Do they take it with them to their next job, list it on their CVs?What happens when it fails? This could be the sick note of the future.##“A man today was sentenced to life imprisonment for the memory-murder of pensioner”My wife has an incredible memory. Not just for the birthdays and anniversaries but for the memories created on those occasions. I have a terrible memory. For all these things. I write letters to my children every few months as a way of storing some memories. I am reliant on our photo collection to fill in the blanks.If someone deleted all these things I would be distraught.Imagine I had been wearing a life logging camera for half my life and capturing thoughts on an audio diary. These things were with me constantly, archived, searchable and retrievable in microseconds like an extension of my mind.Now imagine someone deleted those records. That's more of a crime than simple vandalism. That's excising part of someone's humanity. How would the law and society treat that situation?##“MPs today introduced emergency legislation to place high profile court cases under a complete media blackout. The move follows a spate of collapsed trials costing the taxpayer millions.”I was up at the BBC last week talking about Peaches Geldof's Twitter gaffe. She is under investigation for contempt of court after she named the mothers of the children involved in the Ian Watkins trial.In order to commit this crime Peaches Geldof had to read a foreign website, copy the names into a few tweets and hit send. The whole process probably took less than a couple of minutes but there were multiple opportunities to stop and think 'Hang on, would my editor at the Telegraph let me submit something like this?'Imagine if the names had been thrown up by a dynamic search agent, auto-composed into a tweet and sent with the raise of an eyebrow or a word. How much damage could she do then?When judges, jurors, solicitors, witnesses and defendants are used to being permanently connected, we are going to need some serious revisions to the law.##These are just a few of the many issues that we will face as a society and as a security community in the coming years.It's now roughly ten years since the advent of mainstream social media in its current form – Friendster, LinkedIn and MySpace, then Facebook, Twitter and the myriad other networks now gaining popularity. We are still working out the etiquette of social media and it will be ten years before the law catches up.This year technology came one step closer to melting into the background, changing from being visible, discrete devices to being an invisible piece of the fabric of reality. It is going to take at least a decade for society to get its head around this, and likewise a decade beyond that for the law to catch up.Maybe at conferences like this we can begin to tackle these challenges ahead of time.

Future identity theft: balancing exposure and security

Identity theft made the news again today. Will future identity controls enable us to better protect ourselves? Without limiting expression?

Blame the Victim

Crime prevention is often a matter of telling potential victims to limit their exposure. The message is similar, whether the threat is mugging, rape, or identity theft. This doesn’t sit right with me. Should we force the majority to change their behaviour because a few people may take advantage?This advice seems based on the assumption that the recommended steps are zero cost. They are not, in many cases.To limit the utility of a gadget for fear of using it is one thing, though we should not underestimate the effect of that fear. To propose that women change how they dress and act, and where they go and when is quite another.On these grounds, it is always with some hesitation that I sit in radio studios handing out advice when the latest reports appear about growing online security threats. Like this morning. The latest report from Cifas, showing dramatic rises in identity theft, fuelled in part by the range of information we now share online.Should I tell people to lock down their privacy settings? To view every email as a potential phishing attack? I’m worried about reinforcing the view, held particularly in some demographics, that the Internet is an inherently dangerous place. That by venturing there, they are inviting attack.Where I try to settle is on some form of balance. As I put it this morning, it’s about locking your front door, not putting bars across all your windows. Put your privacy settings to a sensible minimum, but don’t retreat from all the wonder that online interactions can bring.

Future Identity

Part of the problem is that the definition and validation of identity is such a tricky thing. For the most part it is defined by the jigsaw of personal information. Information that we all — still — find ourselves entering into forms on a frequent basis. Name, address, date of birth etc. Because we still define identity this way, assemble enough pieces of the jigsaw and someone can pretend to be you.Could our future identity be better protected and controlled?Certainly some start-ups are doing interesting things with encryption and blockchain. Controlling access to different services with digital keys, sometimes combined with hardware factors or biometrics. But the setup of these identities still seems to come down to a jigsaw of pieces. Validating that you have control of social networks in your name, for example.Perhaps we cannot get away from this. Identity is a complex thing. Perhaps the only way to define it reliably is to assemble a unique jigsaw for each person. The trick is not then how we identify each other but how we protect that identity and prevent it being misused.

Challenges to Success

The challenge here is one of fragmentation. What if every service now tries to hold a super-validated identity for its users. Already there are many different people tackling this problem. Can any one service — or even a small group — build up the levels of trust and oversight by users needed to ensure that fake identities cannot exist in parallel with real, just on different platforms?There’s also an issue of access. Imagine if instead of a credit score, you have a trust score predicated on how many different ways you can validate your identity — access to social networks, banking, credit, bills, location etc. Imagine this trust score becomes an integral part of accessing finance products or — and this doesn’t seem too far fetched in the current political climate — government services.Before we even get into the evolving definitions of gender and the mass diversification of culture, the very mechanisms by which we hold and control our identities are going to go through rapid change in the next few years. Will we get greater protection against theft and impersonation from future identity controls? Will they enable us to balance access and security?Right now it is unclear. Historically criminals have usually found a way. Block one vector and they find another. But perhaps with these new technologies we can improve the balance between defence and expression of our future identity. 

Four Fears for the Future of Drones

I’m talking to Sky News later today about the future of drones — the domestic variety rather than the military ones. I think there are four areas we really need to consider: safety, security, privacy and pollution.

Safety

Put simply, what goes up, must come down. Let’s do some very rough maths. The highest you can legally fly a drone in the UK is 400ft or about 122 metres. A drone like a DJI Phantom 3 weighs around 1.2kg. I don’t have one to measure but I’m guessing it’s cross sectional area when flat is around 0.2sqm — though it would likely tumble as it fell.I’m going to suggest it’s like to be travelling around 110mph or 50m/s at the point it lands on someone’s head, delivering 14KN of force, assuming their head moves by about 0.1m as the drone comes to rest on it. Or rather in it: that’s plenty to crack your skull. At least I think it is: there’s a reason I never became an engineer.Drones have all sorts of safety measures built in to stop this happening. Like returning to base when their battery is low. But people tinker and tamper all the time. And go way beyond the technical and legal limits. Drones don’t need to fall to cause damage. They could interfere with a driver’s concentration, or get sucked through the engine of an aircraft. And that’s all before...

Security

...people choose to use them to cause harm. The payload of a drone is more than enough to carry explosives. Explosives are fairly easy to make. And even if you can’t, you might only need a naked flame to cause some serious harm. As our military has shown, drones can be used as weapons and consumer grade drones almost certainly will be re-purposed as such at some point in this country.Even if they’re not blowing things up, many drones have high-grade cameras built in as standard. More than high enough resolution to capture secrets, though they are noisy enough that it might be hard to do stealthily (see below).

Privacy

It’s not just state secrets that we will need to be concerned about. We are already the most photographed age in history by many orders of magnitude. Drones allow people to put cameras where maybe we don’t want them: over fences and up to first floor windows. Frankly even in the high street: we all have a right to privacy and drones are a spectacular way to breach that right. I doubt your average user flying a drone over a park is collecting consent forms from everyone.

Pollution

Though drones are yet another disposable collection of heavy metals and oil-based plastics, my concern here is not primarily about thousands of drones filling up landfill. It’s about noise.Drones make one hell of an irritating noise. This is good in some ways: it makes it harder to use them to breach security and privacy. But when drones become a fact of every day life it is going to be seriously problematic.There are moves to address this with clever changes to the rotor design and the number and performance of engines.But for now, drones? They drone.