As much as you may not like it, your predictive analytics job is not over when your model goes live. Successful deployment of the model in production is no time to relax. You’ll need to closely monitor its accuracy and performance over time. A model tends to degrade over time (some faster than others); and a new infusion of energy is required from time to time to keep that model up and running. To stay successful, a model must be revisited and re-evaluated in light of new data and changing circumstances.
If conditions change so they no longer fit the model’s original training, then you’ll __have to retrain the model to meet the new conditions. Such demanding new conditions include
An overall change in the business objective
The adoption of — and migration to — new and more powerful technology
The emergence of new trends in the marketplace
Evidence that the competition is catching up
Your strategic plan should include staying alert for any such emergent need to refresh your model and take it to the next level, but updating your model should be an ongoing process anyway. You’ll keep on tweaking inputs and outputs, incorporating new data streams, retraining the model for the new conditions and continuously refining its outputs. Keep these goals in mind:
Stay on top of changing conditions by retraining and testing the model regularly; enhance it whenever necessary.
Monitor your model’s accuracy to catch any degradation in its performance over time.
Automate the monitoring of your model by developing customized applications that report and track the model’s performance.
Automation of monitoring, or having other team members involved, would alleviate any concerns a data scientist may __have over the model’s performance and can improve the use of everyone’s time.
Automated monitoring saves time and helps you avoid errors in tracking the model’s performance.
To assemble your predictive analytics team, you’ll need to recruit business analysts, data scientists, and information technologists. Regardless of their particular areas of expertise, your team members should be curious, engaged, motivated, and excited to dig as deep as necessary to make the project — and the business — succeed.
Getting business expertise on board
Business analysts serve as your domain experts: They provide the business-based perspective on which problems to solve — and give valuable insight on all business-related questions. Their experience and domain knowledge give them an intuitive savvy about what approaches might or might not work, on where to start and what to look at to get something going.
A model is only as relevant as the questions you use it to answer. Solid knowledge of your specific business can start you off in the right direction; use your experts’ perspectives to determine:
Which are the right questions? (Which aspects of your business do you want predictive analytics to improve?)
Which is the right data to include in the analysis? (Should your focus be on the efficiency of your business processes? The demographics of your customers? Which body of data stands out as the most critical?)
Who are the business stakeholders and how can they benefit from the insights gained from your predictive analytics project?
Hiring analytical team members who understand your line of business will help you focus the building of your predictive analytics solutions on the desired business outcomes.
Firing up IT and math expertise
Data scientists can play an important role linking together the worlds of business and data to the technology and algorithms while following well-established methodologies that are proven to be successful. They __have a big say in developing the actual models and their views will affect the outcome of your whole project.
This role will require expertise in statistics such as knowledge of regression/non-regression analysis and cluster analysis. (Regression analysis is a statistical method that investigates the relationships between variables.) The role also requires the ability to correctly choose the right technical solutions for the business problem and the ability to articulate the business value of the outcome to the stakeholders.
Your data scientists should possess knowledge of advanced algorithms and techniques such as machine learning, data mining, and natural language processing.
Then you need IT experts to apply technical expertise to the implementation, monitoring, maintenance, and administration of the needed IT systems. Their job is to make sure the IT infrastructure and all IT strategic assets are stable, secure, and available to enable the business mission. An example of this is making sure the computer network and database work smoothly together.
When data scientists __have selected the appropriate techniques, then (together with IT experts) they can oversee the overall design of the system’s architecture, and improve its performance in response to different environments and different volumes of data.
In addition to the usual suspects — business experts, math and statistical modelers, and computer scientists — you may want to spice up your team with specialists from other disciplines such as physics, psychology, philosophy, or liberal arts to generate fresh ideas and new perspectives.
Predictive analytics begins with good data. More data doesn’t necessarily mean better data. A successful predictive analytics project requires, first and foremost, relevant and accurate data.
Keeping it simple isn’t stupid
If you’re trying to address a complex business decision, you may __have to develop equally complex models. Keep in mind, however, that an overly complex model may degrade the quality of those precious predictions you’re after, making them more ambiguous. The simpler you keep your model, the more control you __have over the quality of the model’s outputs.
Limiting the complexity of the model depends on knowing what variables to select before you even start building it — and that consideration leads right back to the people with domain knowledge. Your business experts are your best source for insights into what variables have direct impact on the business problem you’re trying to solve. Also, you can decide empirically on what variables to include or exclude.
Use those insights to ensure that your training dataset includes most (if not all) the possible data that you expect to use to build the model.
Data preparation puts the good stuff in
To ensure high data quality as a factor in the success of the model you’re building, data preparation and cleaning can be of enormous help. When you’re examining your data, pay special attention to
Data that was automatically collected (for example, from web forms)
Data that didn’t undergo thorough screening
Data collected via a controlled process
Data that may have out-of-range values, data-entry errors, and/or incorrect values
Common mistakes that lead to the dreaded “garbage in, garbage out” scenario include these classic goofs:
Including more data than necessary
Building more complex models than necessary
Selecting bad predictor variables or features in your analysis
Using data that lacks sufficient quality and relevance
The random forest model is an ensemble model that can be used in predictive analytics; it takes an ensemble (selection) of decision trees to create its model. The idea is to take a random sample of weak learners (a random subset of the training data) and __have them vote to select the strongest and best model. The random forest model can be used for either classification or regression. In the following example, the random forest model is used to classify the Iris species.
Loading your data
This code listing will load the iris dataset into your session:
>>> from sklearn.datasets import load_iris
>>> iris = load_iris()
Creating an instance of the classifier
The following two lines of code create an instance of the classifier. The first line imports the random forest library. The second line creates an instance of the random forest algorithm:
>>> from sklearn.ensemble import RandomForestClassifier
>>> rf = RandomForestClassifier(n_estimators=15,
random_state=111)
The n_estimators parameter in the constructor is a commonly used tuning parameter for the random forest model. The value is used to build the number of trees in the forest. It’s generally between 10 and 100 percent of the dataset, but it depends on the data you’re using. Here, the value is set at 15, which is 10 percent of the data. Later, you will see that changing the parameter value to 150 (100 percent) produces the same results.
The n_estimators is used to tune model performance and overfitting. The greater the value, the better the performance but at the cost of overfitting. The smaller the value, the higher the chances of not overfitting but at the cost of lower performance. Also, there is a point where increasing the number will generally degrade in accuracy improvement and may dramatically increase the computational power needed. The parameter defaults to 10 if it is omitted in the constructor.
Running the training data
You’ll need to split the dataset into training and test sets before you can create an instance of the random forest classifier. The following code will accomplish that task:
>>> from sklearn import cross_validation
>>> X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test =
cross_validation.train_test_split(iris.data,
iris.target, test_size=0.10, random_state=111)
>>> rf = rf.fit(X_train, y_train)
Line 1 imports the library that allows you to split the dataset into two parts.
Line 2 calls the function from the library that splits the dataset into two parts and assigns the now-divided datasets to two pairs of variables.
Line 3 takes the instance of the random forest classifier you just created,then calls the fit method to train the model with the training dataset.
Running the test data
In the following code, the first line feeds the test dataset to the model, then the third line displays the output:
You can cross-reference the output from the prediction against the y_test array. As a result, you can see that it predicted two test data points incorrectly. So the accuracy of the random forest model was 86.67 percent.
How does the random forest model perform if you change the n_estimators parameter to 150? It looks like it won’t make a difference for this small dataset. It produces the same result:
Big data has the potential to inspire businesses to make better decisions through predictive analytics. It’s important to be aware of the tools that can quickly help you create good visualization. You want to always keep your audience engaged and interested.
Here are some popular visualization tools for large scale enterprise analytics. Most of these tools don’t require any coding experience and they are easy to use. If your raw data is in Excel sheets or resides in databases, you can load your data into these tools to visualize it for data exploration and analytics purposes. Alternatively, you may __have the results from applying a predictive model on your data ready on spreadsheets, so (or and) you can also use these tools to visualize those results.
Tableau
Tableau is a visualization tool for enterprise analytics. With Tableau, you can load your data and visualize it in charts, maps, tree maps, histograms, and word clouds. You can run Tableau as a desktop application a server, or a cloud-based solution.
Tableau integrates with many big-data platforms, such as R, RapidMiner, and Hadoop. Tableau pulls data from major databases and supports many file formats. Tableau for enterprise isn’t free. For academic purposes, Tableau can provide free licenses.
Google Charts
Google chart tools are free, and easy to use. They include histograms, geo charts, column charts, scatter charts, timeline charts, and organizational charts. Google Charts are interactive, zoomable, and can run on HTML5 and SVG. Google charts can also visualize real-time data.
Plotly
Plotly is another visualization tool that your teams of developers can adopt using APIs. You can create charts and dashboard with Plotly.
Plotly is compatible with Python R and Matlab and its visualization can be embedded in web-based applications.
Infogram
Infogram helps you create visualizations in a three-step process: choosing a template, adding charts to visualize your data, and then sharing your visualizations. A monthly fee is required to use the tool for a professional version, a business version, or an enterprise. The tool can support multiple accounts for your team.
Shipments of discrete graphics processing units (GPUs) are traditionally high in the third quarter as PC makers and retailers gear up for the holiday season and build up stocks of components. Q3 2016 was particularly good for standalone GPUs because both AMD and NVIDIA introduced a number of new products for different market segments from May to August. Sales of discrete graphics cards for desktop PCs hit a two-year high in the third quarter, according to data released by Jon Peddie Research. What is important is that standalone GPUs performed very well despite a shrink of PC sales.
Q3 2016: Good for GPUs, Mediocre for PCs
In the third quarter of 2016, the industry sold from 68 million (a 3.9% year-over-year decline, according to IDC) to 68.9 million of PCs (a 5.7% YoY decline according to Gartner). The numbers are up from the second quarter of 2016, but are down from the same period a year ago. A good news is that sales of gaming desktop and notebook PCs are strong, which is why shipments of standalone graphics processors were strong as well. JPR believes that around 34.84% of PCs shipped in Q3 used discrete GPUs. Based on the numbers from IDC and Gartner, we can estimate that this should be between 23.7 and 24.0 million standalone graphics chips were shipped by AMD and NVIDIA in Q3 (assuming that PCs with discrete GPUs had only one discrete card, which is not far from truth as sales of multi-GPU systems are not high in terms of volumes). Nevertheless, keep in mind that data from JPR, IDC and Gartner reflects sold-in numbers - units from distributors rather than end-user sales - which means that not all GPUs ended up in systems already purchased by the end-user.
Fueled by the release of AMD’s Radeon RX family of discrete GPUs for desktops as well as NVIDIA’s launch of its GeForce GTX 10-series line, shipments of graphics cards for desktops increased 38.16% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) in Q3, according to Jon Peddie Research. JPR does not officially disclose how many graphics adapters for desktop PCs were sold in the third quarter, but based on the company’s previously released numbers, we can estimate that various makers of add-in boards (AIBs) sold approximately 13.04 million video cards, which is up from 11.97 million units in Q3 2015 (see notes below). It is hard to estimate how many standalone GPUs for notebooks were shipped, during the discussed period, but we may be talking about roughly 10 million units.
Desktop Discrete Graphics Cards Market in Q3 2016 Data calculated from Jon Peddie Research News Numbers are in percentage points or in millions. Numbers are approximate.
Q3 2016 (current)
Q2 2016 (previous Q)
Q3 2015 (previous Y)
Share
Shipments
Share
Shipments
Share
Shipments
AMD
29.1%
~3.80
29.9%
~2.82
18.8%
~2.25
NVIDIA
70.9%
~9.25
70%
~6.60
81.1%
~9.71
Other
0%
0
0.1%
~0.0094
0%
0
Total
100%
~13.04
100%
~9.44
100%
~11.97
It is evident that Q3 was a good year for desktop graphics cards in general. Moreover, the whole year to date has been positive for AIBs. Various manufacturers __have sold a total 34.40 million GPUs in the first three quarters, up 5.35% from a total of 32.65 million in Q1+Q2+Q3 of 2015. Analysts from Jon Peddie Research attribute increases of desktop GPU shipments to new gaming content as well as the promise of virtual reality. Since more new games are about to be released in Q4 and because VR remains a highly discussed topic in the gaming community, it is likely that shipments of desktop discrete GPUs are going to stay at high levels for a while. Nonetheless, it remains to be seen whether their sales in Q4 beat their sales in Q3 (which sometimes happens, especially in cases when supply does not meet demand in Q3).
click for higher resolution
One of the things to note is the consolidation of the PC market. The three largest PC vendors (Lenovo, HP, Dell) controlled over 58% of the worldwide market in Q3 2016, up from 55% a year ago and 51% in 2014. Such consolidation happens not only because they can negotiate better deals with their suppliers and thus offer better pricing, but also because they are gradually expanding their product families. On the one hand they add mini PCs to their lineups, and on the other they roll-out gaming PCs. For example, this year we observed HP’s return to the market of gaming desktops with the Omen X and ASUS’ release of the ROG GT51 for $4999. Moreover, as markets such as VR are gaining publicity, large PC vendors will try to capitalize on this and offer gaming systems with discrete GPUs. Unfortunately, we __have no idea whether this is going to be a long-lasting trend.
Here are some stories about the world we now inhabit…
• In February this year, Bangladesh Bank was hit by the biggest bank robbery in history when thieves got away with $101m. The heist was accomplished not by tunnels or explosives, but by acquiring the access codes for the Swift global messaging system, which is what banks use to securely pass payment orders to one another. The criminals used Swift to instruct the US Federal Reserve to transfer money to their accounts. Then they cunningly erased their digital fingerprints by modifying the bank’s software.
• In June 2015, the US Office of Personnel Management revealed that its computer systems had been hacked and that the hackers had stolen the social security numbers, names, dates and places of birth, and addresses of 21.5 million people, including some who had undergone background checks for sensitive government posts.
• In October 2015, nearly 157,000 customers of the UK telco TalkTalk had their personal data stolen in a massive intrusion into the company’s computer systems. Police later arrested six teenage boys in connection with this cyber attack.
• In the past two years, hospitals worldwide __have found themselves on the receiving end of a vicious type of cyber attack. Medical staff suddenly find that their hospital’s computer systems are locked and inaccessible to them because they __have been secretly infiltrated. They then receive a message telling them that their data will be unlocked on payment of a ransom in Bitcoins. The European police agency Europol now reckons that the threat from “ransomware” has eclipsed all other forms of online theft and extortion.
Over the past year, someone has been probing the defences of the companies that run critical pieces of the internet
• Two months ago, a young Italian woman killed herself because she was traumatised by online abuse after an intimate video that she had sent to a friend was widely “shared” across the web. As soon as the images went viral, she was subjected to jeering comments, Photoshopped screenshots and cruel parodies that, in the end, tipped her over the edge.
• In June, it was revealed that two agencies of the Russian government had hacked into the computer systems of the Democratic National Committee. Shortly before the Democratic convention that nominated Hillary Clinton, WikiLeaks released thousands of emails and attachments stolen during the breach, some of which were distinctly unhelpful to Clinton and useful to Donald Trump.
• On 21 October, a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks caused widespread disruption of internet activity in the US. The attacks involved directing huge amounts of bogus traffic at servers belonging to Dyn, a company that is a major provider of domain name services (DNS) to other companies. For a time this severely affected major websites – including Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, GitHub, Etsy, Tumblr, Spotify, PayPal, Verizon, Comcast and the PlayStation network. The attack was conducted using a huge botnet of unsecured “internet of things” devices such as home webcams and broadband routers.
• According to Bruce Schneier, a leading security expert, over the past year or so, someone has been probing the defences of the companies that run critical pieces of the internet. These probes, Schneier says, “take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down. We don’t know who is doing this, but it feels like a large nation state. China or Russia would be my first guesses.”
Welcome to cyberspace.
It didn’t used to be like this. In the first decade after the internet we use today was switched on, in January 1983, cyberspace was a brave new world – a glorious sandpit for geeks and computer science researchers. There was, in that magical virtual world, no crime, no spam, no commercial activity and little concern about security – largely because “netizens” (for that is what they were called) knew one another, or at least knew what their institutional affiliations were. Discussion groups (then called newsgroups) were formed around every conceivable topic, no matter how arcane. (Early on, there was a vigorous argument about whether there should be a discussion group on sex, and when one finally appeared, someone else insisted that logically there should therefore also be newsgroups on drugs and rock’n’roll. So those were set up too.) Codes of conduct, etiquette and social norms evolved to regulate – or at least moderate – online behaviour, reduce “flame wars”, and so on. It was, in a way, a kind of wonderland, and it gave rise to the techno-utopianism embodied in John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of the independence of cyberspace”, which began: “Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace, the new home of mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather...”
What it came down to was this: in the decade 1983-93, cyberspace and “meatspace” (Barlow’s term for the real, physical world) were effectively parallel universes. They existed side by side, and for the most part the inhabitants of meatspace knew nothing of the virtual world.
But from 1993 onwards, all that began to change. The main catalysts were the world wide web, the Mosaic browser and AOL. The web provided non-geeks with an answer to the question: what is this internet thing for? Mosaic, the first modern browser, showed them what the web could do and, more importantly, what it could become. Demand for access to the internet exploded. AOL met the demand by providing a reliable, easy-to-configure, dial-up service for millions of people, and so brought the “redneck hordes” – ie people unfamiliar with the mores and customs of the netizen era – on to the internet. Scenting profits, companies and pornographers scrambled for a piece of the action, closely followed by scammers and spammers and all kinds of other undesirables.
The result was that the parallel universes gradually merged, and we wound up with the composite networked world we now inhabit – a world that has the affordances of both cyberspace and meatspace. Which helps to explain why we are having such trouble coming to terms with it.
This blended universe is a strange place, simultaneously wonderful and terrifying. It provides its users – ordinary citizens – with services, delights and opportunities that were once the prerogative only of the rich and powerful. Wikipedia, the greatest store of knowledge the world has ever seen, is available at the click of a mouse. Google has become the memory prosthesis for humanity. Services such as Skype and FaceTime shrink intercontinental distances for families and lovers. And so on.
But at the same time, everything we do on the network is monitored and surveilled by both governments and the huge corporations that now dominate cyberspace. (If you want to see the commercial side of this in action, install Ghostery in your browser and see who’s snooping on you as you surf.) Internet users are assailed by spam, phishing, malware, fraud and identity theft. Corporate and government databases are routinely hacked and huge troves of personal data, credit card and bank account details are stolen and offered for sale in the shadows of the so-called “dark web”. Companies – and public institutions such as hospitals – are increasingly blackmailed by ransomware attacks, which make their essential IT systems unusable unless they pay a ransom. Cybercrime has already reached alarming levels and, because it largely goes unpunished, will continue to grow – which is why in some societies old-style physical crime is reducing as practitioners move to the much safer and more lucrative online variety.
“All human life is there” was once the advertising slogan for the now-defunct News of the World. It was never true of that particular organ, which specialised mostly in tales of randy vicars, celebrity love triangles, the foolishness of lottery winners and similar dross. But it is definitely true of the internet, which caters for every imaginable human interest, taste and obsession. One way of thinking about the net is as a mirror held up to human nature. Some of what appears in the mirror is inspiring and heart-warming. Much of what goes on online is enjoyable, harmless, frivolous, fun. But some of it is truly repellent: social media, in particular, facilitate firestorms of cruelty, racism, hatred and hypocrisy – as liberals who oppose the Trump campaign in the US have recently discovered. For a crash course in this darker side of human nature, read Jon Ronson’s book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and weep.
S o we find ourselves living in this paradoxical world, which is both wonderful and frightening. Social historians will say that there’s nothing new here: the world was always like this. The only difference is that we now experience it 24/7 and on a global scale. But as we thrash around looking for a way to understand it, our public discourse is depressingly Manichean: tech boosters and evangelists at one extreme; angry technophobes at the other; and most of us somewhere in between. Small wonder that Manuel Castells, the great scholar of cyberspace, once described our condition as that of “informed bewilderment”.
One way of combating this bewilderment is to look for metaphors. The idea of the net as a mirror held up to human nature is one. But recently people have been looking for others. Sean Gallagher, the IT editor of Ars Technica, for example, reaches for an urban reference. “In the New York City of the late 1970s,” he writes, “things looked bad. The city government was bankrupt, urban blight was rampant, and crime was high. But people still went to the city every day, because that was where everything was happening. And despite the foreboding feelings hanging over New York at the time, the vast majority of those people had at most minor brushes with crime.”
“Today,” he continues, “we all dabble in some place that looks a lot like 1970s New York City – the internet. (For those needing a more recent simile, think the Baltimore of The Wire.) Low-level crime remains rampant, while increasingly sophisticated crime syndicates go after big scores. There is a cacophony of hateful speech, vice of every kind... and policemen of various sorts trying to keep a lid on all of it – or at least trying to keep the chaos away from most law-abiding citizens. But people still use the internet every day, though the ones who consider themselves street smart do so with varying levels of defences installed. Things sort of work...”
They do. But the weakness of the NYC metaphor is that the city was eventually cleaned up and a kind of order restored. So in that sense, it’s an unrealistic, optimistic scenario for the net. Consequently, those who fear that humanity will struggle to get a grip on cyberspace reach for more alarming metaphors. Could it, for example, become some kind of “failed state” like contemporary Somalia, with, as Gallagher puts it, “warring factions destroying the most fundamental of services, ‘security zones’ reducing or eliminating free movement, and security costs making it prohibitive for anyone but the most well-funded operations to do business without becoming a ‘soft target’ for political or economic gain”?
Our dilemma is that while the future of cyberspace is unknowable, we need to think about it because it affects us all
The Fragile States Index, an annual report published by the US thinktank the Fund for Peace and the magazine Foreign Policy, defines a fragile state as one “whose central government is so weak or ineffective that it has little practical control over much of its territory; non-provision of public services; widespread corruption and criminality; refugees and involuntary movement of populations and sharp economic decline”.
Some, but not all, of this maps neatly on to cyberspace. There is, for example, no central government that has effective control over the network’s “territory” (though the US, for historical reasons, has had more influence over it than any other nation, much to the annoyance of the Russians and the Chinese). In fact, one of the central problems posed by the network is that it is a global system in a Westphalian world of sovereign states and local laws.
Our dilemma is that while the future of cyberspace is unknowable, we need to think about it because it affects us all. The standard method that large corporations and governments use for this purpose is by imagining a set of possible futures or scenarios and assessing the implications of each one. The aim is not to “predict” the future, but to try and sketch the range of possibilities that we might have to deal with.
As far as cyberspace is concerned, the most interesting set of scenarios I’ve seen come from a US thinktank, the Atlantic Council. Its analyst, Jason Healey, sets out five candidates:
• Status quo: a continuation of what we now have. “Cyberspace is generally a safe place in which to do business and to communicate with others, even though criminals continue to engage in multimillion-dollar heists and steal millions of people’s personal details; national foreign intelligence agencies poke and prod for military and industrial secrets.”
• Conflict domain: essentially an extrapolation of the militarisation of cyberspace that we are already seeing – a world in which cyberwarfare becomes common.
• Balkanisation: cyberspace has broken into national fiefdoms: there is no single internet, just a collection of national internets.
• Paradise: cyberspace becomes an overwhelmingly secure place where espionage, warfare and crime are rare.
• Cybergeddon: cyberspace degenerates into a virtual failed state with all that that implies. Think modern-day Mogadishu.
Some of these are more implausible than others. Healey’s “paradise” scenario is pure fantasy. And the power of internet corporations – plus the reach and dominance of national intelligence agencies such as the NSA – suggest that some kind of (possibly repressive) order would be restored long before “cybergeddon” would be reached.
So we’re left with two real possibilities – some blend of Balkanisation and inter-state conflict, both extrapolations of trends that we can already observe.
If this is indeed how things pan out, I know one scholar, a distinguished professor of international relations, who won’t be in the least surprised. Sixteen years ago, in a conversation about the internet, he asked me if I really believed that the internet represented a fundamental challenge to established power structures. I replied vehemently in the affirmative – because, in my techno-utopian fervour, I did believe. He smiled but said nothing, and so eventually I asked him what he thought. “We’ll see, dear boy,” he replied. “We’ll see.”
He’s still around, as wise as ever. And I am a recovering utopian.
John Naughton’s most recent book, From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: What You Really Need to Know About the Internet, is published by Quercus
It’s interesting how particular years acquire historical significance: 1789 (the French Revolution); 1914 (outbreak of the first world war); 1917 (the Russian revolution); 1929 (the Wall Street crash); 1983 (switching on of the internet); 1993 (the Mosaic Web browser, which started the metamorphosis of the internet from geek sandpit to the nervous system of the planet). And of course 2016, the year of Brexit and Trump, the implications of which are, as yet, unknown.
But what about 2007? That was the year when Slovenia adopted the euro, Bulgaria and Romania joined the EU, Kurt Vonnegut died, smoking in enclosed public places was banned in the UK, a student shot 32 people dead and wounded 17 others at Virginia Tech, Luciano Pavarotti died and Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. Oh – and it was also the year that Steve Jobs launched the Apple iPhone.
Tech innovations ratcheted up a pace of change that was already outrunning society’s ability to adapt
And that, I suspect, is the main – perhaps the only – reason that 2007 will be counted as a pivotal year, because it was the moment that determined how the internet would evolve. Not that many people appreciated it at the time. After all, Apple was an intruder into a mature and established global market, dominated by firms like Nokia, Motorola, Sony and BlackBerry. In that context, the iPhone looked weird – I mean, you couldn’t even change the battery! But it was a truly revolutionary device, because it embodied the seminal insight that phones were actually handheld networked computers – which could also make voice calls if necessary.
The iPhone was the first real smartphone and it changed the world because it changed the way people connected to the net. It began the inexorable drift away from desktop and laptop computers as our gateways to the internet. In the next 10 years or so, another 5 billion of our fellow citizens will get internet connectivity, and almost all of them will acquire it via a smartphone. Which means that – as network infrastructure improves – people will be online for most of their waking lives. For many this will be a great boon. But it also means – as Jonathan Zittrain pointed out eight years ago– that they will be connecting via closed, tightly controlled devices with no user-modifiable components. And this in turn implies consolidation of the power of the companies that make the devices and provide the connectivity.
The more you look at it, the more significant 2007 seems to be. The New York Times columnist Thomas L Friedman even uses it as the cornerstone of his new book, Thank You For Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations. He points out that 2007 was also the year Facebook and Twitter really took off; when Hadoop emerged as a software framework for processing very large data sets; when Airbnb was dreamed up, the Amazon Kindle was launched and IBM started work on building the Watson computer system, which was capable of answering questions put to it in natural language and went on to win the US quiz show Jeopardy! in 2011, defeating two former winners of the prize. And Google unveiled the Android mobile operating system, which made smartphones affordable for the masses.
Friedman feels strongly about 2007 because it was the year the final edition of his bestselling book The World Is Flat came out. “And then I stopped,” he says, “thinking that I had built a pretty solid framework that would last me as a columnist for a while.” In 2010, he sat down to write another book, and dug out the first edition of The World Is Flat just to familiarise himself with what he had been thinking back in 2004. “I cracked it open to the index,” he writes, “ran my finger down the page, and immediately discovered that Facebook wasn’t in it! That’s right – when I was running around in 2004 declaring that the world is flat, Facebook didn’t even exist yet, Twitter was still a sound, the cloud was still in the sky, 4G was a parking space, “applications” were what you sent to college, LinkedIn was barely known and most people thought it was a prison, Big Data was a good name for a rap star, and Skype, for most people, was a typographical error. All of those technologies blossomed after I wrote The World Is Flat – most of them around 2007.”
Friedman’s point is that those tech innovations ratcheted up a pace of change that was already outrunning society’s ability to adapt. When combined with globalisation and climate change, they __have created a perfect storm (Friedman calls it a “hurricane”) that people find destabilising and sometimes terrifying. Which brings us back to 2016. “Trump and the Brexiters”, he writes, “sensed the anxiety of many and promised to build a wall against these howling winds of change. I disagree. I think the challenge is to find the eye.” In order to find it, he maintains, politics, geopolitics, workplace, ethics and community all need to be “reimagined”. Correct: but you don’t __have to be a cynic to conclude that Friedman is spitting into the hurricane.
Britons are expected to embark on a record-breaking £1.3bn online spree as Black Friday kicks off the biggest shopping weekend of the year.
The US import has taken the UK by storm, with retailers launching discounts even earlier than usual this year as the battle for Christmas shoppers intensifies. Some of the high street’s biggest names, including Tesco, Argos, Currys PC World and Amazon __have upped the ante: offering more discounts, spread over more days, and, in Tesco’s case, opening its largest stores at 5am.
The pattern of spending on Black Friday has evolved since Amazon imported the event to the UK in 2010. In 2014 some stores witnessed violent scenes as bargain-hunting consumers fought in the aisles for cut-price widescreen televisions, but by last year the discount extravaganza had morphed into a predominantly online event.
The association for online retailers, IMRG, predicted £1.27bn would be spent online on Friday, up 16% on last year. It will be the busiest day in a week-long spending orgy that is expected to see retailers ring up online sales of £6.77bn in the seven days to Monday 28 November.
“Black Friday started out as a single day of discounting, which then became a weekend and now spans an entire week, during which time we anticipate that a high volume of pre-Christmas sales will be made,” said IMRG’s managing director, Justin Opie.
It has become increasingly hard for retailers to hold their prices in the face of rivals’ Black Friday discounts as industry sales data shows Britons are not spending more, they are just starting their Christmas shopping earlier.
Paul Martin, the UK head of retail at KPMG, said the traditional Christmas shopping period had been distorted by Black Friday.
“For retailers it has always been questionable whether Black Friday really benefits them in the long run, and in the current environment of rising costs and squeezed margins – perhaps it’s even more so,” he said. “This year some retailers __have decided not to partake, while others have spread their offers out over a longer period in order to ease pressure on logistics and IT infrastructure.”
The surge in orders stemming from Black Friday puts major strain on both retailers’ websites and the couriers that deliver parcels. Last year the websites of large retailers, including Argos, Tesco, John Lewis and Boots, crashed due to the volume of shoppers logging on. Now, with more consumers than ever choosing next-day delivery, industry experts think carriers may struggle to keep delivery promises.
“Some retailers have gone to great lengths to ensure they are ready and others less so, but even big e-retailers, such as Amazon, have experienced issues on busy days like Black Friday,” said Robert Castley, a senior performance engineer at the digital analytics firm Catchpoint.
John Lewis’s operations director, Dino Rocos, said that Black Friday week last year delivered the highest sales in the department store’s 150-year history, with its website experiencing a 300% increase in traffic during the early hours of Friday. “We are well prepared for the demand but it’s our customers who will decide the exact pattern of trading,” Rocos said.
Although many bargain hunters are expected to log on in their pyjamas rather than join early morning queues, Tesco is drafting in extra security at its largest stores, many of which are opening at 5am. The shopping centre firm Intu, which owns the Trafford Centre and Lakeside, said it was expecting an influx of shoppers after experiencing a 30% increase in visitors on Black Friday last year.
Gordon McKinnon, the operations director at Intu, said: “Early signs this year indicate that Black Friday is still evolving as retailers stretch out the sales period.”
In the post-Serial world, drama podcasts __have been upping their game and now Homecoming (iTunes, Gimlet Media) takes the format to another level.
It’s impossible not to become immersed in the opening episode of the psychological thriller. Catherine Keener stars as Heidi Bergman, a caseworker from an experimental facility who’s helping soldiers integrate back into the community. She’s focusing on Walter Cruz (Star Wars’ Oscar Isaac), who is trying to live a normal life and keep his inner darkness at bay. It’s not easy, as he reveals his thoughts about harming himself: “I saw the desk and I just imagine leaning way back and slamming my forehead into the corner as hard as I could, over and over, into my eye,” he tells her. “But that was an extreme. It’s not like that all the time.”
Bergman is keen to take a holistic approach, which is not good news for Colin Belfast, her take-no-prisoners boss, played by David Schwimmer. He is heard rushing through the airport, tripping over a little girl’s backpack as he instructs Bergman to “get really granular with all that shit”. He even provides a moment of light relief. “This is a walkway!” he rages, incredulously. “All right. Goodbye. Good talk.”
Homecoming is the first scripted series for Gimlet Media, producers of podcast hits such as Heavyweight, StartUp and Reply All. The quality of the acting draws you in, then stops you in your tracks. (Arrested Development’s David Cross and comedian Amy Sedaris are also on the cast list.) It nails the feeling that characters are doing what they’re supposed to do, rather than standing huddled around a microphone. Subtle sound effects, such as a fishtank bubbling away in the background, and not-so-subtle ones like the noise of a busy airport, make it more akin to a lavish TV production than a staged radio drama.
As the narrative flips back and forth from Heidi’s time as a caseworker to five years later, when she’s waitressing, mystery surrounds what brought her there.
Ending on a cliffhanger after only 19 minutes, Homecoming leaves you wanting more. Good job there’s another five episodes in the first season.
If you like this, try this: Limetown, a mysterious tale of a place where everyone disappeared.
Web users in the UK will be banned from accessing websites portraying a range of non-conventional sexual acts, under a little discussed clause to a government bill currently going through parliament.
The proposal, part of the digital economy bill, would force internet service providers to block sites hosting content that would not be certified for commercial DVD sale by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC).
It is contained within provisions of the bill designed to enforce strict age verification checks to stop children accessing adult websites. After pressure from MPs, the culture secretary, Karen Bradley, announced on Saturday that the government would amend the bill to include powers to block non-compliant websites.
In order to comply with the censorship rules, many mainstream adult websites would __have to render whole sections inaccessible to UK audiences. That is despite the acts shown being legal for consenting over-16s to perform and for adults in almost all other liberal countries to film, distribute and watch.
Free speech campaigners labelled the move a “prurient” invasion into people’s sexual lives. “It should not be the business of government to regulate what kinds of consensual adult sex can be viewed by adults,” said Jodie Ginsberg, chief executive of Index on Censorship.
Pictures and videos that show spanking, whipping or caning that leaves marks, and sex acts involving urination, female ejaculation or menstruation as well as sex in public are likely to be caught by the ban – in effect turning back the clock on Britain’s censorship regime to the pre-internet era.
The scale of the restrictions only became apparent after the BBFC, which has since 1984 been empowered to classify videos for commercial hire or sale, agreed to become the online age verification regulator last month. A spokeswoman for the BBFC said it would also check whether sites host “pornographic content that we would refuse to classify”.
“In making this assessment, we will apply the standards that we apply to pornography that is distributed offline,” she said. “If a website fails on either of these [age verification or obscene content] tests then a notification of non-compliance will be sent to the site.”
There is no definitive list of sexual acts proscribed by the BBFC, but many adult film producers who __have worked with the regulator have been forced to cut scenes, said Jerry Barnett, a free speech campaigner and author of Porn Panic!, which details the rise of a new pro-censorship movement in the UK.
“Although it is nominally designed to enforce the [Obscene Publications Act] guidelines of the Crown Prosecution Service, in practice it draws far tighter lines, many of them inexplicable. The ban on female ejaculation is a particularly strange example,” he said.
The censorship regime has led to bizarre understandings between the producers and regulators, Barnett said. One is the “four-finger rule”, which limits the number of digits that can be inserted into an orifice for sexual stimulation.
Even some who back age verification questioned such strict censorship. “It’s mad that we regulate such material that aren’t even criminal acts,” said Prof Clare McGlynn, an expert on pornography laws at Durham University and co-founder of the Centre for Gender Equal Media.
“If we are regulating things like menstrual blood or urination, that’s detracting from a focus on what I think is really the harmful material, and that would be material around child sexual abuse, but also around sexual violence,” she added.
There has been no discussion of the censorship provisions of the digital economy bill by MPs during its committee stage, where debate has largely focused on age verification rules. But sources within the adult industry seemed aware.
A spokeswoman for MindGeek, one of the world’s biggest pornographic website operators, said the company expected that structures would be created to “maintain the rights of adults to view adult content”. She said it was too early to say whether the same CPS guidance would be in place for the Obscene Publications Act by the time the bill becomes law.
“Many of the sexual activities prohibited from R18 [the BBFC’s most explicit certification] are normalised and accepted aspects of healthy sexuality, and are proudly celebrated by the feminist, queer and ethical porn movements internationally,” she said.
Neither the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, which drafted the bill, nor the BBFC would comment on suggestions that censorship could be relaxed. A spokesman for DCMS said the government’s aim is to ensure that the same “rules and safeguards” that exist in the physical world also apply online.
“DCMS has recently indicated that it intends to designate the BBFC as regulator and is considering the most effective way to implement these measures,” he added.
Pope Francis was probably not dwelling on the myriad uses and abuses of social media when he called for a “bruised, dirty and hurting” Roman Catholic church that would more closely resemble the flawed 21st-century world to which it ministers.
But, as far as one technologically engaged nun is concerned, the Twitter-sphere is equally deserving of the church’s presence.
Xiskya Valladares, a Nicaraguan who lives and works in Mallorca and has more than 32,000 Twitter followers, has just published a book on how the faithful can best use the medium to reach out to people both religious and secular.
“Pope Francis himself has invited us to build an outward-looking church that is in dialogue with the world,” she said. “Social networks make that easier: we shouldn’t be bombarding people with religious messages because that will mean we’re only talking to people who already think like us. What we need to do is enter into a dialogue with the world not to impose an idea but to find out what people need and what they’re worried about, and then to bear with them in their suffering.”
Although the guide was inspired by her doctoral thesis on the “not very positive” Twitter use of 16 of the biggest Catholic institutions, she insists it could prove useful to anyone on the microblogging site.
“The book is really as much for anyone who wants to navigate the web as it is for Catholics,” she said. “Everyone faces the same problems and you don’t __have to be Catholic to be interested in the book.”
The guide – Good Practices for Evangelising on Twitter – offers tips on how to build a digital community, foster initiatives and provide useful information. It recommends exploiting hashtags, using photos and videos, listening to the views of others and, above all, realising that Twitter is more than just a digital parish noticeboard or a self-referential echo chamber.
Helpfully, it also gives advice on dealing with the legions of trolls who increasingly bedevil the digital arena.
“Knowing how to respond to trolls is important: to create a community you need to watch out for people who are looking to make a big noise and distort the conversation,” she said. “First you need to figure out whether you’re dealing with a troll or not: sometimes they’re just negative critics who can help to build a conversation. If that’s the case, talk to them. But when you’re getting threats and insults, you’re dealing with a troll. The best thing to do is ignore them.”
Alternatively, she suggests, try waving them off with a blessing – though the strategy doesn’t always work: “Sometimes that makes them react and return to the dialogue. Sometimes it’s just winds them up more.”
Valladares, who has been asked to run a course for the Vatican’s community managers, concedes that Twitter is becoming a more hostile and violent place “under the banner of freedom of expression”. But she says that should not lead the quieter voices to abandon it.
“If there are more people who are radical, fanatical and violent, I think other kinds of people need to be around to balance the situation out a bit,” she said. “You can’t say, ‘Look at what these people __have done, let’s get out of here’. The world is like that. You can’t just hop off the train of life. Twitter isn’t a virtual reality, it’s a digital reality. It’s may be a digital means of expression rather than a physical one, but it’s still real.”
Google’s latest feature will tell you how busy a place is in real-time before you set off.
The new extension to the Popular Times feature added to Google Maps and search in July 2015 has been upgraded with a live feed of how busy a place is for certain venues.
With a new “Live” tag, Maps now displays a red overlay on top of the historic busy period data showing whether it really is busy or quiet as usual at the moment.
The feature uses anonymised location data from other Google users, as well as searches, to analyse how busy it is at that moment. While predicted busy times from historic data is generally useful, at sales times or when transport conditions are less than ideal, the flow of people might increase at normally quiet times.
The feature is being rolled out ahead of the busy Black Friday shopping period, but could equally be useful for checking out whether a particular bar or cinema is packed among other venues with variable busy times.
Google Maps, like others such as CityMapper, already displays live traffic and public transport congestion information pulled from both public data and other Google Maps and Waze users. The introduction of live data is one of the big differentiators for mapping apps along with indoor navigation and libraries of store and points of interests data.
Google has also expanded the extra information Maps displays, including data on how long people generally stay in the venue or location, as well as opening hours for concessions and departments within a larger store or business, which are set by the individual businesses.
Google reverses decision to ban Pixel phone resellers
In the wake of the US elections, with the rise of the “alt-right” blamed for the easy ride the far right __have had on social media, Twitter is eager to prove that it can police its own borders. Perhaps too eager.
Overnight, the social network suspended its own chief executive and co-founder, Jack Dorsey.
A couple of hours later, Dorsey was back, blaming an “internal mistake” for his account suspension, and attempting to make light of it with a call back to both his and the service’s very first tweet.
Hours later, there remain some odd effects around the suspension. Dorsey has lost almost 700,000 followers, if the public counts before and after his suspension are accurate.
Dorsey’s self-imposed ban follows a more deliberate crackdown of far-right accounts on the network. Last week, a number of American far right leaders found their accounts disabled for hate speech, including the white nationalist Richard Spencer, the self-styled “founder of the alt-right”, who led a conference a few days later at which supporters gave Nazi salutes.
John Carr asks why the Open Rights Group is worried about requirements for people to verify their age with pornographic websites (Letters, 22 November). Open Rights Group supports the many organisations calling for compulsory sex education that discusses pornography and relationships. We also welcome efforts by British internet service providers to help parents mediate their children’s internet access and keep them safe online.
However, the government’s proposals, outlined in the digital economy bill, could lead to the tracking of UK adults across the pornographic websites they visit. There are no specific privacy protections in the bill. In fact, the government wants a proliferation of age verification technologies. How will we know which are safe and which are putting us at risk of an Ashley Madison-style data leak? Some sites might ask for your credit card details. Again, how will we know if this is genuine, or in fact a scam to steal your payment details?
Most pornographic sites will ignore the age verification requirement. So the government wants to give the British Board of Film Classification the power to block sites that don’t comply. To make this work, the BBFC would __have to censor tens of thousands of legal websites. Censorship of this kind is an extreme step and should be reserved for illegal content. It is clear that the government has not thought any of this through. Jim Killock Executive director, Open Rights Group
• The debate about how to enforce age verification systems on pornographic websites is hugely important if we are going to keep young people safe online. But the debate has now strayed into questioning the efficacy of self-regulation of child sexual abuse content, which is illegal for anyone, regardless of age. The UK is one of the most hostile territories in the world for hosting child sexual abuse. In 1996, 18% of known content was hosted here, but since 2004 this has been less than 0.5% and in 2015 was 0.2%. If we find content in the UK, it’s typically removed in under two hours, which is a record unmatched anywhere else in the world.
In 2015, the IWF, working with the internet industry, removed a record 68,000 URLs of child sexual abuse webpages. A number of children were safeguarded and thousands of children’s images were removed, stopping their re-victimisation. All this happened because the IWF self-regulatory model works and is held up as a global model of good practice. Internet companies work voluntarily with the IWF to remove this content as quickly as they can. The IWF self-regulatory model needs to be protected and valued for what it is: the most effective way to tackle a hideous crime. Susie Hargreaves Internet Watch Foundation
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For many people 2016, which brought the planet Brexit, the Donald Trump election victory, the deaths of Prince, David Bowie and Leonard Cohen and the brief union that was Twiddleswift, has not been the greatest of years.
In fact, the year has become so maligned that Twitter is now awash with scores of posts listing the strange and terrible things that the last 11 months can be compared to.
Among the suggested metaphors for 2016 are a boy being knocked over by an uncooperative wheelie bin, two bald eagles stuck in a drain and the death of Courage, the Thanksgiving turkey pardoned by Barack Obama in 2009.
Here, we collate some of the most poignant:
In this one, a crab rips its own arm off.
And here, a polar bear pats a dog - and then eats it.
In more animal news, two moose were found frozen in a lake, locked in combat.
With more Muslims than any other nation in the world, you might imagine Indonesians would be fearful, or at least dismayed, about the victory of a man who has threatened to ban all Muslims from entering America.
Instead, as it was becoming clear on election night that Donald Trump would be the next US president, Jakartans had already started flooding social networks with satirical memes and comic relief.
One viral joke showed Trump planting a kiss on the cheek of Dimas Kanjeng, a cult leader who claims he can multiply banknotes with his mind and was recently arrested on suspicion of murder.
Others poked fun at Trump’s relationship with Indonesia’s political establishment, such as former house speaker Setya Novanto, who controversially met the Republican candidate at Trump Tower in New York last September. A meme circulating on Whatsapp, to which Indonesians are partial, showed Novanto shaking hands with various figures – President Joko Widodo, Jakarta governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (“Ahok”), and at the top, Trump.
“The joke was that anyone Setya Novanto shakes hands with will become somebody,” explains Desi Anwar, a senior Indonesian journalist and news anchor.
To Indonesians, the irony was clear: Novanto was forced to resign just months after he shook hands with Trump, for allegedly eliciting a roughly $4bn bribe from the country’s biggest mine.
In a developing country prone to natural and manmade disasters alike, where everything from roads to institutions are often broken and politicians rarely keep their promises, Indonesians __have adopted a pragmatic willingness to adapt – and, above all, to see the funny side of things.
“We always see the silver lining in the cloud,” Anwar says of the Indonesian sensibility. “If you __have an accident and break an arm you think, well at least I didn’t break both arms.”
The predilection for humour has led to an equally ubiquitous habit: an obsession with social media. There are about 80 million social media users in Indonesia, and the country is among the biggest users of Facebook and Twitter worldwide.
In 2012, Jakarta was named the most active Twitter city in the world by Semiocast, a Paris-based research company.
Regularly trapped in traffic for hours each day, many Jakartans turn to their phones to pass the time and to communicate with friends throughout this sprawling megacity.
Some Jakartans own several mobile phones, and Indonesians in general have taken mass communication to a whole new level.
“There is that village level of wanting to know what is going on even though Jakarta is a metropolis,” says Anwar of the capital, which is home to around 10 million people.
We always see the silver lining in the cloud
“Jakarta still has that village mentality of ‘Uh, what’s going on, uh, what’s happening’. That’s why things like weddings are so important. You can’t have a little quiet wedding for 10 people. That’s impossible. A small wedding is something less than 500 people.”
Indonesian film-maker Joko Anwar, who has more than one million Twitter followers, agrees. “Indonesians in general, and Jakartans in particular, liked to socialise, even before the era of social media. We like to talk to strangers, talk to each other about everything,” he says.
“So when social media arrived, it made the habit even more convenient. That is why we are very obsessive about social media.”
In situations that are anything but amusing, Jakartans can always rally behind a good joke. A few weeks ago, after a huge demonstration in the capital turned violent, with police cars torched and tear gas fired, President Widodo, known as Jokowi, gave a televised nationwide address.
The president, who is usually dressed in formal batik or long white shirts, this time donned a khaki bomber jacket.
His wardrobe choice ignited the imagination of netizens seizing a break from the seriousness of the day, sparking an online debate about the brand of the jacket and several trending hashtags, including #jaketjokowi.
When it was finally determined where the jacket was from, the item soon sold out in most Zara stores across the capital.
The obsession cuts both ways politically: social media was also used by Islamic hardliners to drum up support for the demonstration in the first place.
Yet humour still functions as a defence mechanism against misfortune. Under more than three decades of authoritarian rule, President Suharto strongly curtailed free speech. Since his fall, Indonesian media and self-expression have proliferated.
“For so many years we were repressed, we were not able to say whatever we wanted under the Suharto regime,” says Joko Anwar. “That’s why we developed this weird sense of humour: we respond with laughter or humour every time bad things happen, and that carries over to social media.”
After a fatal terrorist attack near the Sarinah mall in January, alongside the shock and horror, Jakartans also joked about polisi ganteng, one of the “handsome” police officers who was credited with keeping casualties to a minimum.
Other memes circulated showing the leader of Isis, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, shouting orders to one of the attackers over a bad telephone connection:
“Ke Suriah Goblok!! Su Ri Ah!!” (To Syria, stupid. Sy-ri-a!!)
His Indonesian follower responds: “Iya, Sarinah, Kaan?” (Yes, Sarinah, right?)
There are times, too, when social media and humour are wielded for more serious purposes. During the razor-tight presidential election of 2014, Indonesian netizens crowdsourced the election results, tabulating them online at kawalpemilu.org, to ensure there was no dubious counting.
Boundary-pushing satire, in the form of comics such as Gump n Hell, are also starting to emerge. This Indonesian-language comic, created in 2006 but published weekly on Facebook since March, has been taking aim at everything from censorship to the hypocrisy of Islamic hardliners and cold war-era laws that ban the promotion of communist material.
In response to rising paranoia around communism, the comic creators drew on the recent popularity of the Japanese viral sensation Piko Taro’s video Pen Pineapple Apple Pen, which has been viewed more than 16 million times.
Gump n Hell gave it an Indonesian spin, featuring Piko Taro using an apple and a banana to create the shape of the communist icon, the hammer and sickle.
Another comic shows the Indonesian national symbol, an eagle, with parts of its body blurred out – a playful stab at the Olympic coverage, where some local television stations overzealously interpreted censorship guidelines by blurring the bodies of female swimming champions.
“I want to confront people, but with humour,” says the comic’s creator, Errik Irwan, a 30-year-old architect from Semarang. “It’s useless if we try and fight with them through force, so we try and fight with them through humour.”
“There is a saying that laughing is the best form of medicine. When things are so bad, you just have to make fun of it, because otherwise you might as well just kill yourself,” says Desi Anwar. “In the tropics, it is always sunny the next day.”
If you live or work in Jakarta, we’d love to hear from you. Share your ideas, thoughts, stories and pictures here. You can also contribute on Twitter and Instagram using the hashtag #GuardianJakarta
People’s reliance on the internet in their everyday lives is such that good cybersecurity is not only about what individuals and organisations do to protect themselves, but what governments must do to ensure that national critical infrastructure is well protected.
Ben Gummer, the minister for the Cabinet Office, has highlighted the growing vulnerability of public services to cyber attack, and the chancellor, Philip Hammond, has committed £1.9bn over five years to bolster cybersecurity defences. The chancellor’s announcement, a re-announcement of the same figure by his predecessor George Osborne, is dwarfed by the amount of spending the US has earmarked – in 2017 along, it plans to spend 10 times the UK sum.
That said, Britain’s spend is almost twice the figure France has put aside over the next three years, and is slightly more than the European Commission’s €1.8bn investment in a new public-private partnership on cybersecurity.
But just how will this money tackle cyber-attacks and is it effective? Cath Goulding, head of IT Security at Nominet, the official registry for .uk domain names, says governments are looking to invest in capabilities that are required for potential cyberwars, but an offensive capability needs to be coordinated and consistent and a good defensive posture is paramount.
“The new NCSC [National Cyber Security Centre] has an agenda that details tangible outcomes,” says Goulding, who is a former security operations manager at Government Communications Headquarters. “Of course, there is no silver bullet but these should make a difference when it comes to analysis and defence.”
The NCSC, announced by then chancellor George Osborne in November last year, pools cyberexpertise to tackle cybersecurity issues in the UK.
The outcomes Goulding speaks about look to fix the underlying infrastructure that powers the internet but that can be subverted by cybercriminals to attack computers run by firms, governments and individuals.
Hackers normally infect systems with malicious software, known as malware, usually via an attachment on an email, which can then allow the criminals to take control of systems and steal information, such as bank details. In the case of countries, one country can steal intellectual property of industrial targets in order to gain economic advantages. A country with a lot of intellectual property will find itself a main target of such hackers.
Cybersecurity consultant Dr Jessica Barker, says cyberthreats are international by their nature, and so international cooperation is necessary, but often hard to achieve. “The problems and their origins cross borders and so solutions must, too,” she says.
International cooperation is possible. For example, the police service of Northern Ireland collaborated with Romanian police, the UK National Crime Agency and Europol to charge a man in Romania last month with producing and distributing indecent images of children and “webcam blackmail”. Cases like this show the importance of international collaboration in tackling cybercrime, says Barker.
But while money flows into central government efforts, are local authorities getting enough protection? Andrew Rogoyski, formerly an adviser to the UK government on cybersecurity issues and founder and chair of the cybersecurity group of TechUK, says with local government at the sharp end of austerity policies, cybersecurity spending is lower than it should be.
“However, many local government organisations are starting to implement digital transformation programmes, creating new efficiency savings and economies of scale, providing services to citizens in new and imaginative ways,” says Rogoyski. “In these cases, it is imperative to ensure that such changes are designed with security built in, rather than bolted on.”
Getting security wrong could mean a catastrophic loss of confidence in the new services, resulting in citizens reverting to old-style manual services that push costs up and responsiveness down, he warns.
Rogoyski says that if it still goes ahead, the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation, due to come into force in May 2018, would mean local government organisations could face punitive fines if they fail to demonstrate that processes __have been put in place to protect their citizens’ personal information. This is “a real minefield” in areas like health and social care, he adds.
In the US, federal government is trying to protect local authorities through a voluntary but heavily encouraged set of cybersecurity standards, developed in part by non-regulatory agency the National Institute of Standards and Technology, (NIST). The standards __have been widely adopted.
“Adoption and support for these standards is a start but like most compliance-driven security programs, it is often written and implemented with such lag, that it does not properly stay in sync with real-time attacks and techniques,” says Paul Calatayud, chief technology officer at IT security firm FireMon.
Rashmi Knowles, chief security architect for Europe, Middle East and Africa at security company RSA, says the very nature of local government, with its large quantities of sensitive data in constant transit across multiple bodies, makes it difficult to defend from cyber-attacks. She cites Lincolnshire county council and Dorset district council, which both fell victim to ransomware attacks earlier this year.
“It’s vital that authorities educate their employees and foster awareness on the safe movement of data,” says Knowles. “People are the weakest link, yet this element is often overlooked. It can eliminate many of the threats simply by ensuring that local authority staff have been trained to understand the dangers of phishing and social engineering.”
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When the novel I Hate the Internet came out in the US earlier this year, it had every likelihood of sinking without trace. It was self-published, it was by a young unknown – Jarett Kobek – and its main selling point was naked, gleeful contempt for the devices and technology platforms that are an essential part of all our daily lives. “Nothing says individuality like 500 million consumer electronics built by slaves,” he says at one point. “Welcome to hell.” Hell, for Kobek, a 38-year-old American of Turkish heritage, became daily life in San Francisco, where the novel is set. Along with many of the city’s artists and writers, he found himself driven out by the forces of gentrification, moved to Los Angeles, where he’s now based, set up his own small press, and wrote this book – a scorching satire of how a few hypercapitalist companies in Silicon Valley __have come to dominate everything. I Hate the Internet didn’t sink without trace. It found a readership thirsty for its funny, acerbic edge, got a rave review in the New York Times, went to the top of the bestseller charts in Germany and has now been published here by Serpent’s Tail.
So, do you actually hate the internet, Jarett? Not particularly. There’s part of it that I find really contemptible. The title is offered like the sneer of a 15-year-old into Twitter, after they’ve just seen a meme of someone having sex with a chicken or something. I hate parts of it. I certainly think it’s been enormously detrimental to society.
If there’s going to be an opposition, a response, it’s not going to come in the form of tweets
You seem particularly down on Twitter. It’s not Twitter per se. It’s the undue amount of importance that very serious people put on Twitter. That, to me, is what’s infuriating. It’s a social network that makes everyone sound like a 15-year-old and then very serious people take it way too seriously. And that’s not how to run a society. That’s not how to effect change.
You say: “One of the curious aspects of the 21st century was the great delusion… that freedom of speech and freedom of expression were best exercised on technological platforms owned by corporations dedicated to making as much money as possible.” And yet you’re not exempt from that: your novel is available as an ebook… Ah, yes. Ultimately, we live in a very dark moment where if you want to be part of any extended conversation beyond a handful of people, you do __have to sign on to some things that, ultimately, are very unpalatable. Every era has its unanswerable questions, so maybe the thing to do, which is what I did in the book, is to just acknowledge the inherent hypocrisy of all of it. Though maybe that’s an easy dodge.
One of the things that comes up time and again is the undercurrents of misogyny and racism that seem to have been enabled or unleashed by technology. Do you think there’s something fundamental about that? I do think it has to be acknowledged that this technology which seems to be really good at enabling misogyny and abuse of women was created in rooms where there were no women. The people who seem to be the recipients of the most abuse online look like the people who were simply not in the room when all of this stuff was being created. If the book does anything, it acknowledges that.
It seems like a particularly interesting moment to think about that in terms of where we’re at now. Would Trump have been possible without the internet? Of course not. Look who benefits from all the endless newspaper inches about how the oppressed peoples of the world are going to be liberated by technology. I’ve just been on book tour to a lot of battleground states where I spent a lot of time 10 years ago. And if you want to look what hypercapitalism looks like, do a before and after of the Midwest, with a 10-year-break in between. It’s so devastated. Was it always a wonderful place to live? Probably not, but was it sort of like a road of ruination and emptiness? No. And I think the internet has been really good at aiding that process, certainly in destroying jobs.
Reading your book made me think that we simply haven’t even had the language to criticise the internet until now. That there’s been no outside to the internet. No place to oppose it from… I think the outside is publishing, actually. I mean publishing in the most Platonic sense of the word, rather than the squalid industry that we have. I think that books actually can be anything. Publishing’s response to the internet has been completely pathetic, but God, if there’s going to be an opposition, a response, it’s not going to come in the form of tweets.
You claim writers have chosen to ignore the dominant story of the 21st century and have instead rolled over and embraced Twitter as a marketing device. Do you think there’s just been a complete dereliction of duty? Not from everyone, but yes, if you see the literary novels that have been coming out even in the last two or three years, very few of them have much of a connection to anything now. How many of the literary novels published by the four major companies in the US have much to do with a world after which Trump wins the presidency? have they published even a single working-class writer? I can’t think of one.
You’re pretty scathing about some of the technology companies. You say that the idea that Google and Twitter contributed to the Arab spring is like saying the Russian revolution was sponsored by Ford... I went to Egypt in 2011, about four weeks after Mubarak fell and no one mentioned Facebook or Twitter. What they were talking about was money, and how they didn’t have any. At the same time, I was living in San Francisco, where there were Facebook employees who seemed to believe they were bringing enlightenment and freedom to the oppressed masses of the world, evicting Latino families who’d lived in the same place for 60 years. It’s just absurdIt’s absurd to think that a complex, social thing, like a revolution, happening 7,000 or 8,000 miles away was being fuelled and generated by some stuff some nerds put out on a cellphone.
You had to make legal changes to the UK edition, which you’ve done with the device of writing [JIM’LL FIX IT] where you’ve redacted passages such as those about Google’s Larry Page and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. How did that come about? I didn’t want to delete the text per se, and I’d just read Dan Davies’s biography of Jimmy Savile and it really fascinated me, because in the US you’re constantly being told everything is a conspiracy and actually nothing ever is. Rich people tell you what they’re going to do and then they do it. Whereas here, there really was a conspiracy. It really did happen.
I Hate the Internet is published by Serpent’s Tail (£12.99). Click here to order a copy for £10.65
This column is about podcast creator Nick van der Kolk. He’s a thoughtful man. He pauses a lot when he speaks, considers what he’s saying as he says it, gives answers that you don’t quite expect.
We’re talking on the phone, about when he met a woman in a hotel, a long time ago. “It was clear we were never going to see each other again,” he says. “I commented on how travel gives you a bizarre anti-intimacy and intimacy simultaneously, and she was like, ‘Funny you should mention that, because I __have a secret that I’ve only told my two closest friends.’ So I got my recorder…”
This is what Van der Kolk does. He gets people to tell him their secret stories. And then he turns them into one of my favourite podcasts: the multi-award-winning Love + Radio.
Love + Radio is intimate and strange. Van der Kolk thinks it’s to do with how close the microphone is to the speaker’s mouth. If you listen on headphones, it can feel as though the speaker is talking inside your head. The show plays with that feeling by using unconventional editing techniques. Words are repeated, strange noises murmur beneath, a voice you’ve not heard before suddenly breaks in. It’s woozy, spooky.
Van der Kolk, 35, was always interested in audio. As a child growing up in Boston, Massachusetts, he listened to NPR and tapes of BBC dramas. He played The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy so often, he says, “that I knew it off by heart. Especially the first episode. I could download it when I needed it.” He used to run through it in his head while waiting for the bus.
His parents were therapists – “it all comes together now, huh?” – which meant that, at home, no topic was considered out of bounds. And this is true of Love + Radio. Van der Kolk’s interviews, and those of the other producers, go deep and honest on subjects most radio stations wouldn’t touch: blackmail, fetishes, paedophilia, crises, people who make an off-beat decision to live their life another way. Gradually, all is revealed, no matter how appalling or sad.
Van der Kolk can worry about this. He’s killed episodes before because he’s felt that they might lead to too much grief for the person speaking. He thinks about tone, a lot: L+R’s most recent episode opens with him wondering if the show should change, post-Trump, asking for listeners’ thoughts. And he works hard. He tends to interview the speaker three times, the final time after he’s edited the first two, to record phrases that tell the story more quickly where it’s needed. But the first two talks are long. “Oh yeah,” he says. “I can do eight-, nine-hour interviews easily.”
A fellow podcaster once joked to Van der Kolk that Love + Radio should be called “Wait For It”: there’s always a twist, a point where the story swerves in a way you don’t expect. Somehow, it’s always a surprise. The new series begins with a story called A Girl of Ivory. The shift halfway through made me laugh, it was such a shock. Like a rabbit out of the hat, pure entertainment. It makes the programmes stay in your mind. I think often of past episodes, like The Living Room or Points Unknown.
For the past couple of years, Love + Radio has been part of Radiotopia, Roman Mars’s hand-picked stable of excellent podcasts that includes Helen Zaltzman’s The Allusionist and Mars’s own 99% Invisible. The Radiotopians don’t hang out, says Van der Kolk, because they all live in different cities, but there is a definite camaraderie. (The podcasting world reminds me of indie music in its heyday: devoted fans, dedicated “label owners”, dogged creators doing their own thing until an audience is revealed.) The show is 11 years old now, and four episodes into its fifth season. It’s not a weekly podcast, and I’m always impatient for more. Should I be excited about episodes to come? Van der Kolk has a think.
“Oh there’s one I’m super-excited about,” he says. “It’s about a guy who decides early on in his life that he’s not going to pay any attention to news. And as a result of that, he ends up going to Iraq.”
That sounds great! I say. From such a mundane decision, too.
“Oh,” says Van der Kolk, “you can get a lot of good stories about mundane things. If you just dig deep enough.”
Amazon will almost certainly enjoy its biggest ever day on Black Friday next week.
The discount shopping event will help the American online retailer to continue its run of 22 years of unbroken and dramatic sales growth since it was founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos. It is now valued at more than $375bn (£304bn), making it one of the biggest companies in the world.
However, despite the predicted spending spree on Black Friday, the rise of Amazon and Bezos now face arguably their biggest challenge yet - Donald Trump.
Throughout the US presidential election campaign, Trump made disparaging comments about Amazon and Bezos, prompting a war of words that looks altogether more serious in the wake of the billionaire tycoon’s victory over Hillary Clinton.
The battle started last December with a series of seemingly unprompted tweets from Trump. “The Washington Post, which loses a fortune, is owned by Jeff Bezos for purposes of keeping taxes down at his no-profit company, Amazon,” Trump wrote. “If Amazon ever had to pay fair taxes, its stock would crash and it would crumble like a paper bag. The Washington Post scam is saving it!”
The Washington Post is owned through Bezos’s personal investment firm, rather than Amazon, and Trump did not provide any explanation for his allegation. Amazon’s tax policy is controversial and is already well-known around the world, including in Europe, where it agreed favourable tax arrangements with Luxembourg. Its profit margins are also notoriously thin. In 2015, Amazon recorded sales of $107bn but net profits of just $596m, a margin of barely 0.5%.
Bezos responded to Trump’s tweets in a light-hearted manner, threatening to send him to space with his Blue Origin rocket business. “Finally trashed by Donald Trump,” he said. “Will still reserve him a seat on the Blue Origin rocket #sendDonaldtospace.”
However, the battle took a more sinister turn for Amazon when Trump addressed a campaign rally in Texas two months later. “Believe me, if I become president, oh do they __have problems, they are going to __have such problems,” Trump said of Amazon and Bezos.
The Republican presidential candidate then told Fox News that Amazon is “getting away with murder tax-wise” and has a “huge antitrust problem because he’s [Bezos] controlling so much”.
Trump’s criticism of Bezos and Amazon appears to be at least partly connected to his frustration at the Washington Post conducting investigations into his business dealings and questioning his suitability to be president. At the Texas event where he criticised Amazon, Trump also referred to “purposely negative and horrible and false articles” about him.
Bezos eventually hit back, accusing Trump of comments that “aren’t appropriate” for a president and which “erodes our democracy around the edges”.
However, the Amazon boss was forced to change his tone when the result of the presidential election was confirmed. “Congratulations to Donald Trump,” he wrote on Twitter. “I for one give him my most open mind and wish him great success in his service to the country.”
Shares in Amazon dropped by almost 10% in the five days after Trump’s election, more than other technology companies such as Google and Apple.
It is unclear what action Trump could take against Amazon, with the president-elect not expanding upon his threats with specific policies.
Despite its size, Amazon still accounts for a relatively small proportion of the retail market, meaning Trump’s claims about a huge antitrust problem are dubious. Its global sales in 2015 of $107bn were dwarfed by Walmart’s $482bn. In the UK it accounts for roughly 1.8% of sales, although it is the market leader in physical entertainment, where it accounts for 20.4% of sales.
However, the new president could choose to examine Amazon’s control of its delivery drivers, its relationship with small businesses who sell products through its website, or Bezos’s ownership of the Washington Post.
Neil Saunders, a retail analyst in the US at Conlumino, said: “The main threats have been over tax and anti-trust. The antitrust point is something he could try and pursue, but it would not be in his power to pronounce Amazon guilty and it is very doubtful that any other government agency would do so.
“On the retail side there is no antitrust case to answer as Amazon does not exert dominant control over any one area of the market. On the point about Jeff Bezos’s ownership of the Washington Post, this isn’t an antitrust case as it is an entirely different business sector to the retail operation.
“The tax threats are largely hollow. Amazon does pay corporate tax, but its tax payments are limited because it is not the most profitable of companies. The same holds true for the Washington Post. Sales tax is not a matter for the federal government so Trump has no power over that area of taxation.”
However, Trump undoubtedly has the power to hurt Amazon. The company’s latest annual report, published before Trump’s victory, warns of the threat to its financial performance from “laws and policies of the US and other jurisdictions affecting trade, foreign investment, loans, and taxes”. If Trump pursues a protectionist trade policy with tariffs on imports and exports then Amazon’s business model – which relies on moving goods quickly from warehouses in one country to customers in another and selling them at a low price – will be under pressure.
Ultimately, becoming an enemy of the most powerful man in the world is unhelpful for the company. Reports in the US claim that Amazon has hired a veteran Washington lobbyist, Seth Bloom, to represent it on antitrust matters.
“Having an occupant of the White House who is unfriendly towards your business is not a comfortable position,” Saunders added. “Inevitably it means Amazon will need to keep looking over its shoulder, which is an annoying distraction from the day-to-day business.”
Trump v Bezos
The war of words between Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos, the boss of Amazon, has been fought across social media and at campaign events in the runup to the presidential election. Here are the key tweets and comments:
Jeff Bezos
Email to employee who had raised concerns about Trump’s election: “We’re a company of builders whose diverse backgrounds, ideas, and points of view are critical to helping us invent on behalf of all our customer. But it’s not only that diversity and inclusion are good for our business. It’s more fundamental than that — it’s simply right. These are enduring values for us and nothing will change that.”
Speaking at conference in October about criticism from Trump: “He’s not just going after the media, but threatening retribution to people who scrutinize him. He’s also saying he may not give a graceful concession speech if he loses the election. That erodes our democracy around the edges. He’s also saying he might lock up his opponent. These aren’t appropriate behaviors.”
Donald Trump
Interview to Fox News in May: “Amazon is getting away with murder tax-wise. He’s using the Washington Post for power so that the politicians in Washington don’t tax Amazon like they should be taxed. He thinks I’ll go after him for antitrust. Because he’s got a huge antitrust problem because he’s controlling so much, Amazon is controlling so much of what they are doing. The whole system is rigged, whether it’s Hillary [Clinton] or whether its Bezos.”
Campaign event in Texas in February: “I have respect for Jeff Bezos, but he uses the Washington Post to have political influence and I got to tell you, we have a different country than we used to have. He owns Amazon, he wants political influence so that Amazon will benefit from it. That’s not right. And believe me, if I become president, oh do they have problems, they are going to have such problems
