These Are My Shoes

Not Shoes. Not Even Close.

I know, they don’t look like shoes, but work with me here.

The Internet has always been kind of an Electronic Wild, Wild West.

The Coronavirus Pandemic, however, has taken things to an entirely new level.

Cybercrime is not a lazy man’s way of making a living.

However, given the toxic combination of a lack of other legitimate ways of earning one’s keep, some technical talent, and a total lack of any moral values, cybercrime can allow the generation of significant amounts of revenue with a minimum of actual underlying cost.

Traditionally, parts of the world with systemic structural economic issues have had thriving Internet fraud industries. You can probably create much of the list without exerting yourself too hard – Nigerian Princes, Unclaimed Estate Fund and National Lottery Scams from a whole slew of African nations, Russian Erectile Dysfunction Drug Operations, and the Macedonian Fake News machine that helped to swing public opinion during the US’s last presidential election cycle.

Everything changes, though, when a global disease pandemic creates a global economic implosion that has no parallel in modern, connected times.

Multiple Information Security Threat Intelligence services and specialty journalists have provided evidence for an explosion of Internet Fraud Activity – growing by several levels of magnitude – across the past six months of the coronavirus epidemic. This makes a certain twisted sense in that the rise of illegitimate businesses correlates directly to a corresponding decline in the prospects of legitimate businesses.

What does this look like on a practical, tactical level, though?

I’ll freely admit to being a geek. My favorite footwear are waterproof, elastic sandals made by Keen. Being a geek means I am not afraid to wear mine with socks. This combo provides fantastic comfort, great traction, marvelous breathability, good support, and pretty reasonable service life. I have no commercial relationship with the company other than being a satisfied customer.

Two months or so ago, my wife asked me if I needed another pair of sandals. She had seen an ad on Facebook. Facebook – a major American media company who, theoretically anyway, shouldn’t be a conduit directly to Internet criminals. Everything about the ads looked completely legit – there was a complete and accurate web site, with a complete and accurate product catalog, right down to colors and astute sizing guidance – “sandals run small” – and use of copyrighted trademarks. They’d even hit the sweet spot on pricing where it was low enough to be really compelling but not so low as to be completely unbelievable.

With some tiny feelings of concern, she placed the order.

My cel phone went off almost immediately – first text, then voice. Not a good sign.

It was my credit card provider – wanting to know if we had placed this order because their fraud detection AI had flagged it.  I indicated to the Rep on the phone that we had indeed placed this order, but wanted to know if they believed that the merchant in question would not provide the product. The Rep would not share any information on context, and I agreed to allow them a chance to fulfill the order.

That, of course, was another mistake.

I recently had someone direct me to a gag from the Television show, Portlandia, called ‘Instant Garbage’, about a purveyor of cut rate products who had figured out the ‘Perfect Intersection of Price and Hassle’ – just enough to be worth ripping you off for, and not so much that you’d work to get your money back. My new nemesis — Amcor Promuove Yunnan Chn – had taken this concept to the next level. Everything about the next two months was designed to push things just as far as they could go – but no further – in the hope that time and hassle would eventually result in getting to keep my money for nothing (or close to nothing) in return.

Four days after placing the online order, my wife got a fairly standard-looking order acceptance e-mail. Standard looking, but with no contact information or way to respond. The e-mail indicated that a shipping notice could be expected to follow in 5 to 7 business days.

On the seventh business day, a text message was received indicating that the order had been fulfilled, and providing a China Post international shipping tracking number. The text message indicated that it would take several days before the shipment would start to update to indicate movement within the shipping system, and that receipt could be expected to take between 15 to 21 business days.  On the surface, this communication looked legit, but really, all it was doing was laying out the structure for a series of stalls – add up all the delays and the whole scam was now scheduled at close to 2 months for an online order.

I joked with my wife that I fully expected, upon the remote possibility that we actually received a shipment, that our two pairs of Keen sandals would be in sizes which were appropriate for a Barbie doll.

Surprisingly, as I actively tracked the progress of the shipment, every time I got to the point where I was ready to abandon hope – remember the ‘Instant Garbage Principle’ – I’d get an update indicating that it was in motion again. For example, there is a central ingest point for foreign mail adjacent to Kennedy Airport in New York City. Our shipment sat there for close to 20 days with no status change.

Then, it was in motion again – Newark, NJ – Newark DE – Baltimore, MD – Laurel, MD – Frederick, MD – Back to Baltimore (huh?) and finally ‘Out for Delivery’. I was at my desk when the mailman placed the day’s mail into my mailbox.

I walked down the driveway to the mailbox, and removed that day’s delivery, holding it easily in my right hand.

This wasn’t trending well.

Once inside, I took my kitchen shears to the small padded envelope with the ‘China Post’ markings. Inside was a perfectly wonderful looking, but perfectly awful working set of ‘Ray-Ban Wayfarer’ sunglasses. They were in a lovely case whose material seemed… a little ‘off’. They had the required little optical cloth with the Trademark reproduced …strangely badly.  The shades were in a bag printed ‘Made In Italy’, which was strange, for a product that had just arrived via China Post. I wrestled the Shades out of the bag and managed to get the clearly cheap hinges to eventually open to reveal very visible ‘Made in USA’ stampings, which was strange, as the products had just arrived in the USA…via China Post. I pulled the glasses on – and the world disappeared. It wasn’t because these lenses were dark … it’s because they weren’t lenses. The things that sat where lenses would normally be was a piece of translucent plastic … one could see through it, but couldn’t focus on anything. Nothing.

In short, what I had was a set of prop sunglasses – great if you wanted selfies of yourself channeling John Belushi’s Jake Blues, less great if you actually needed to see anything.

Estimated retail value, $1.79, tops. Likely less.

Cheap sunglasses. Nothing at all like 2 pairs of sandals. And worth nothing like the $50 that my mind’s eye saw cheerfully waving me ‘Bye Bye!’.

The fact that something ‘of value’ had exchanged hands meant the scammers could claim they had made ‘a fulfillment mistake’, rather than outright theft. The scammers now also had a known good credit card and address combination – they had traceability on the shades to prove they had gotten there. If they were just gathering accounts for a bigger score later, this was a pretty good way of gathering the data.

I got right on the phone to my credit card provider’s fraud department.

I told them the entire story of the massacree accompanied by 8 by 10 glossy color photographs with a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was (Thanks, Arlo!).  We concluded by identifying the account that billed my card as a known fraud operation as their AI had predicted, and that it should be flagged to alert again if it ever tried to hit my account.  I suspect that many people will not go through the hassle and aggravation of blocking these guys, so some percentage of accounts will be left unprotected, and any percentage they can tap next time is better than none.

My beloved spouse was predictably incensed. She got right back on her computer and went to Facebook to flag the seller’s page, since Facebook apparently didn’t and doesn’t care if its property was used in the commission of crimes. She searched up a “SCAM! SCAM! SCAM!” meme, complete with video of a spinning red emergency light and audio of the standard nuclear reactor meltdown klaxon.

You know, subtle stuff.

A millisecond after she pressed ‘Post’, the AI at the electronic heart of Facebook detected that she was ‘Engaged’ – she had posted something to a site about discount sandals.

And if she liked that one, she’d probably like another one just like it.

Whereupon her feed instantly produced ANOTHER ad post for another, completely legit looking but subtly different seller of discount Keen sandals.

“Ooooooooh no”. She posted the ‘Scam’ meme a second time.

Really, really engaged. Another Keen Deal.

Meme. Another. Meme. Another. Meme. Another.

The cadence and level of interkeyboard violence kept increasing.

After about the 23^rd subtly different discount seller of Keen Sandals was dispatched, I reached over to my wife and took her hand.

“Perhaps you shouldn’t post any more of those.”

We turned the laptop off.

My mind was blown. The scope and scale of these scam e-commerce sites was massive. We’d seen more than 20 different ‘nodes’ in less than 2 minutes – all of them with a full e-commerce catalog and credit card processing facilities — if we’d kept clicking, we’d have seen more until our fingers had cramped. How many credit card/address pairs could such an operation gather? How many $50 pops had they already pocketed? How much funds might they be able to steal if they ran $100 or $500 or $1000 against every account they gathered that way all at once?

Facebook, it seems, rather than being a trusted source, has been weaponized by some unknown and toxic gumbo of criminals and/or hostile state actors.

And I don’t think this is by any means the only such operation, and I don’t think that China is the only country in the world setting up for financial crimes on a heretofore unimagined scale.  There has to be a similar explanation for the ‘mystery seed packages’ that are arriving unbidden in all 50 states. Federal authorities have investigations into operations across several former Soviet republics in eastern Europe.

The more pressing our economic collapse becomes, the more compelling this kind of e-crime will become – as a lucrative illegitimate business when legitimate opportunities are diminishing. Our e-commerce infrastructure is apparently easily converted to an e-theft infrastructure.

Be careful out there in the ether – especially with methods of payment. Do business with card providers that have mature and robust fraud prevention capabilities. Your gut is usually right – if something seems off in any way in an online transaction, bail.

Oh, and try and buy your shoes from people you know.

VVP

The first version of any new technology is very rarely fully successful.

It always takes a few ‘oops moments’, a few rethinks, and a couple of runs at it before the thing really begins to work like we thought it would.

Take this Internet thing, for example.

It clearly hasn’t helped us – the thing is obviously broken.

It should be the easiest thing in the world to allow people to communicate. What fundamental truth about how human communication works must we have completely overlooked?

 

***

 

Many of the great thinking and well-spoken men of history have, at one time or other, been reported to have said “That a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.”

Sadly, if one researches this assertion, you will find that none of the aforementioned great men actually said this.

And therein lies precisely the problem.

In the age before industry and technology, when fast was a horse, and man communicated by smushing inky marks on cheap paper, maybe a lie could only get half a planet’s worth of a lead before the truth was out of bed.

But give a lie a few million miles of fiber optic cables, allow it to propagate at just a snick under the theoretical speed of light, and something wholly unanticipated and completely appalling happens.

If the lie is out there first, it can go everywhere, be everywhere, be repeated 11 million times, and seem just as true as the actual truth.

When the Internet was created, the guiding principle was that it would allow all mankind to communicate as equals with each other, and that this unfettered access to and exchange of the truth would set people free. As a tool, allowing the truth to roam free at the speed of light would transform humanity.

What the technology’s creators didn’t consider was the possibility that the truth might not be the only type of information out on their network. The ur-geeks overlooked the ability of a lie to use the same power of the technology to be repeated, to be amplified, to become referenceable, institutionalized.

What was supposed to be the great democratization of truth backfired. The lie had been given exactly the same tools as the truth. People with reasons to lie were arguably more skilled at using those tools. And the tools actually allowed truth to be shouted down, drowned out.

Instead of setting people free, the technology became to new way to enslave them.

 

***

 

So that’s why this Internet thing just doesn’t work.

And like anything that doesn’t work, it’s time to go back to the design phase, then take tools in hand and fix what’s broken.

And what the second version of the Internet needs is VVP.

The Veracity Validation Protocol.

I recognize that this will represent a complete overhaul of the Internet’s architecture, but I don’t see how we can do anything else.

We’ll need to completely redesign the headers of the Internet Protocol, of course. VVP headers and status information will need to be accounted for.

Then, we’ll need to implement the back end infrastructure.

Think about them as if they were the DNS Servers of Truth.

We’ll need to design a schema for the validation – we’ll need some form of graduated whitelist which can compute reputation values for the original data source, and then also for the sources and speed of the repeaters of the original data. This service architecture is going to be required if you want to be able to distinguish between, two things that operate is disturbingly similar ways, like Botnets controlled by Russian Intelligence Operatives and say, the Democratic Socialist supporters of ‘Our Revolution’.

The tricky bit is that somebody needs to administer the entire structure – at root an organization of people with a dedication to the cause of truth and that cannot be corrupted – no easy thing. It is clearly not advisable for this administrator to be part of any government. Objective Facts need their own ICANN, their own Network Solutions, to manage the root Truth Servers. The same forces that today attempt to drown the truth with lies will attempt to subvert the operation of the VVP to game the system – to obtain false VVP values to allow their lies to be propagated.

Once successfully implemented, information with VVP values below a defined threshold can be flagged as suspect data. Data with still lower VVP values will be discarded, just like data packets are today with TTL values of 0.

Consider what such a technology can accomplish.

Consider the damage that lies and twisted truths have done to our country, our world and our civilization in the last few years.

“The government of Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction.”

“Immigrants are coming to assault your women and take your jobs.”

“Great Britain is stronger outside of the European Union.”

“Millions of people voted illegally in the last election.”

“Climate change is not real, it is a hoax.”

“The Russian Government did not try to influence the United States’ election, and we had nothing to do with them.”

Now imagine that any one of these false statements – and all of the amplification of those statements – had, when someone tried to use the Internet to communicate them, automatically received very low VVP values, and the network had sent all the packets comprising them to /dev/null.

What a different world that would be.

Imagine, then, that all of these falsehoods had just disappeared.

And those are just a small, representative sample of a much, much larger population of lies and misinformation. Objectively false information that causes adverse impacts on international relations, public policy, economy and health.

A world where objectively verifiable facts — the truth –are undermined, is a world where all human rights, where freedom, is impossible.

Internet V1.0 made the mistake of assuming that people were at root honorable, and that social norms would favor the truth and allow it to always prevail. The unanticipated result was that lies were able to share space with, and in the worst case, drown out the truth.

Internet v2.0 learns from this fundamental mistake. It has objective, technological mechanisms to identify information which is intended to deceive, and discards it.

Anybody know how to help me write a new Internet Request for Comment (RFC)?

VMs — Virtual Machines

I got my pickup truck back from the dealer Tuesday afternoon.

It had gone in for the correction of two recalls involving control harness shorts and an air curtain control unit that had been firing off the air curtain system at random and hence, distressing, times.

Oh yeah, and an oil change.

As I covered the work on the work order with the dealer’s Service Writer, she slipped the following in at the end where maybe the hope was people wouldn’t notice it.

“Oh, yeah, we checked your ECU software, and it was way out of date, so we updated it.”

So.

They flashed my pickup.

Now I’ve run a gazillion updates on my computer.

I’ve updated wireless routers, smart phones and tablets.

And although I’ve had one such update done by replacing a memory card inside an older Engine Control Unit, this the first time I can remember somebody flashing my pickup truck.

And the truth was, not only was I not concerned about that description, but I greeted it with a sense of enthusiasm and barely contained anticipatory glee.

‘Cause frankly, my pickup truck had been kind of a disappointment.

It had exhibited all sorts of poorly implemented digital controls problems starting with god-awful throttle response to anything short of full throttle — it hated tentative or trailing throttle — surged on reopening — crappy shift points — lagging response to any inputs on the driver displays — it went on and on. What the service techs lump under ‘drivability’ — the whole human interface, was a thrown together, laggy, lumpy mess.

The transmission also had a 1-2 shift under light throttle than could only charitably be described as ‘crunchy’. If you had shifted the manual gearbox in your Dad’s car and it sounded like this, he’d have taken the keys away.

The impression you may rightly take from this is that in the matter of my pickup truck, there was a LOT of room for improvement.

Now it shall be stated for the record that I am a nerd.

I know, that when you install an update, there are no guarantees that it will be better than what had been there before.

There are even the statistical corner case updates that will render a device hopelessly inoperable, as in “Ah crap, ya bricked it.”

But in the case of this pickup truck, there were so many areas where there was room for improvement, it was hard to greet an update with anything thing other than hope.

So I went to the parking lot, plugged in my key, and flipped the starter.

“Wa-ROOOOM…”

Not Bricked.

Check.

I buckled my belt, and dropped it in gear.

I applied mild throttle — the truck has a small block overhead cam V8 — and I got pressed back in my seat and could hear the rear tires getting profoundly stressed against the pavement.

This was not how the truck I had dropped off behaved.

I ended up taking a scenic route — twisty technical roads culled from my motorcycling rides — home. The route was designed to answer the question if this update had done anything significant.

It way had.

The truck now had almost analog throttle response — 2 degrees of extra pedal travel were producing detectable change in motor response. 2 degrees more than that got more still. No off-then-on-herky-jerky stuff. Shifts of the automatic transmission were crisp and in the right place. Downshifts were easy to produce when wanted with the throttle.

Even the box of spare gears soundtrack seemed to be gone.

Now in my mind, anyway, I reach for any understanding I can come by.

Its possible that my truck had a corrupted ECU software load, but two things seem far more likely.

The first is that the truck had to be shipped before its software was ready.

The more insidious is that this is another form of VW-like mucking with the inspection system.

What if the software the vehicle is shipped with is engineered specifically to pass the EPA noise and emissions testing, but Government regulators have no structure or requirement to inspect subsequent updates to the tested software.

What you have then is one USB port loaded Get Out Of Jail Free card.

An engine that has to have its map unnaturally lean with retarded spark –reduced output — to pass noise tests can then have that map replaced with whatever is required to make the engine run its best. Pre-update, my V8 was weak off the bottom, with on-off throttle. Post update strong low end torque with near ideal linear throttle response.

Night. Day.

The entire behavior of the final complex system was almost entirely a product of software.

 

***

 

If you live in the United States, and you watch — even occasionally — the infernal televising machine, you’ve been saturated with this —

“There’s no one road out there. No one surface. No one speed. No one way of driving on each and every road. But there is one car than can conquer them all…”

And the nice folks at Mercedes Benz would like it very much if you would buy “that one car”.

Except that its a lie.

Because that one car is five cars.

Or maybe twenty five cars.

All of which are a result of choices made in software.

The commercial shows the console mounted diving mode selector button: Eco, Comfort, Sport, Sport+, Individual.

The Benz’ driving mode selector moves between defined ‘personalities’ that make changes to the suspension’s spring rates and valving, the engine’s throttle response, aggressiveness of the transmission’s shift points, and the degree of assist and ratios for the power steering.

The range of adjustment allows performance that varies between riding like a Lincoln Town Car and the characteristics of a Nissan GT-R, with a few intermediate stops in between. If the predefined options are not sufficient, you can brew up a custom gumbo of your own preferences — soft ride, slow steering and full power for your next entry into the Gumball Rally — and save them as “Individual”.

But the entire behavior of the final complex system is almost entirely a product of software.

 

***

 

When this kind of behavior crosses into the Motorcycle realm, then my interest goes from the theoretical to the practical.

And it seems that, at least with the motorcycle manufacturers that are working in partnership with Bosch, that barrier has not just been crossed, but obliterated.

Motorcycles like the KTM Superduke GT and SuperAdventure, and BMW’s new S1000XR now have all of the functionality of the aforementioned C Class Mercedes, and, frankly, more.

Much more.

The KTMs have active suspension which adjust springing and damping within user selected ranges — brake hard over a bumpy service and the suspension will adjust itself for anti-dive and to track the irregularities as the sensors perceive them. Lift the front wheel and compression damping will drop to ensure a controlled landing from the wheelie.

All of that pales in comparison to the safety systems that are unique to two wheeled machinery.

Traction controls and Anti-lock brakes now consult inertial management units (IMUs) to make different forms of correction to motorcycles that are accelerating, decelerating or leaning.  The aforementioned wheelie — one of the core joys of proficient motorcycling — can be completely dialed out by the IMU and traction control systems. ABS that would still make enough braking force to wash a front wheel while cornering is a thing of the past.

One Moto-magazine article was filled with nearly uncontrolled and uncontrollable mirth after a team of testers set out, on the Bosch test range, to prove that they were able crash the system-equipped bikes.

The best they were able to do was to come to a complete stop while leaned over in a corner — otherwise impossible, I might note — and then falling over, which had them all giggling like schoolgirls.

Motorcycle electronics have taken the next quantum leap.

Formerly, if you wanted a race bike, you needed stiff suspension, lumpy camshafts and large tuned intakes and exhausts. Tourers needed small intakes and soft suspension. People cycling off pavement needed suspension and power designed to control the machine while the drive wheel was spinning.

All of these things required divergent designs – designs that resulted in vastly different structures in metal.

Now any and all of those things are available at the touch of a button.

In a recent Cycle World review of the SuperAdventure, Blake Connor described the adjustability of the machine this way – “..the Super Adventure can be anything you want it to be. Mile-eating tourer? No problem. Roost-chucking adventurer? Yup. Wheelie-crazed hooligan? Yeah, that too. ”

Motorcycle enthusiasts like me had garages full of different motorcycles for their different moods.

Now the entire behavior of a motorcycle is almost entirely a product of software.

I’ve gone through a difficult period of adjustment where I had philosophical objections about human beings losing the skill to operate motorcycles unassisted by technology.

But the game has moved on.

We’re no longer talking about simple rider assistance.

The entire character and physics of the machine has moved from metal to software code.

What once was the most demonstrably physical of man’s inventions is now a virtual machine.

Autonomy

If there’s one thing I love to do, its drive.

If there’s two things I get to love to do, its ride motorcycles.

I bring a skilled, engaged, activist perspective to both related activities. I like my cars and bikes analog, with manual gearshifts, torquey engines, firm suspensions, powerful brakes.

These machines are complex systems whose sole mission is to translate my will and skill as a driver and rider into a precise path down the road of my choosing. They are machines that amplify and multiply the speed and force of the human that controls them into a ballet of physics: acceleration, friction, g-forces.

I’ve just been on a ride through Northern Virginia’s Silicon Valley of the East, and I can tell you that I am all but alone in seeing any value in this.

***

I consider myself expert on a small range of topics. Information Technology and Internal Combustion transportation just happen to be two of them.

Where the two overlap is something that fascinates me.

In recent years, the trend has been to drive increasing amounts of automation into the management of moving vehicles.

Initially, AntiLock Braking systems were the first automation to find its way onto cars and motorcycles. The theory and practice are both simple. Use the increased processing power of sensors and computers to modulate braking far faster and more consistently than it is possible for a human to do so.

The theory is excellent.

Initially, though, the practice was awful.

The first ABS computers were simply not adequate for the task at hand. Their ability to recognize a locked wheel was simply not fast enough, and the number of cycles per second at which these systems could operate meant that, for example, at 60 miles per hour, if the system took a quarter second to release and reapply the brakes, the vehicle could cover between 80 and 100 feet with no effective braking occurring.

On a motorcycle, the cycle times of those early systems was sufficient to make sure you would likely hit something you were panic braking to avoid.

The marginal performance of those early systems was short lived, though.

Bosch’s most recent motorcycle ABS system is so proficient that – in a documented head-to-head test – it was able to consistently outbrake the Racer who won last year’s Baja 1000 offroad rally on a loose dirt surface – the worst case scenario for measuring the effectiveness of release and repressurize ABS cycle times.

***

ABS, though, was just the first salvo in what was to become an all-out e-war for control of the motor vehicle.

Traction Control – essentially ABS in reverse – was next. Control spinning tires under power – using the same sensors required for ABS — and one ‘assists’ the driver in maintaining directional control.

This notion of driver ‘assist’ started out as a passive thing – modulate some driver control inputs where necessary to maintain vehicle control.

But the notion of passive diver or rider aides very quickly changed, and in a very fundamental way. As the available processing horsepower and bandwidth of microprocessors exploded, the ‘assists’ crossed a line of demarcation where they first became active – doing things a driver didn’t or couldn’t do – and then became autonomous – in that they did things on their own while disregarding completely and input from the ‘driver’.

The first time I threw one of my family cars — a 2009 Nissan Cube – into an exit ramp in a way that made the vehicle’s dynamic stability control ‘uncomfortable’ – and the car’s systems differential braked just the two outside wheels, I knew a line had been passed.

Look at the automobile commercials you see everyday on television. SUVs that stop themselves when something crosses behind the vehicle while reversing. Automobiles that stop themselves when forward facing radars detect an imminent collision. The Mercedes-Benz commercials that depict their top of the line sedan threading its way through a gauntlet of delivery trucks hurtling simultaneously from both sides of the roadway.

The endpoint of that process is easy to divine – at a certain point, the available ‘assists’ become completely autonomous, and the ‘driver’ becomes completely superfluous.

***

I’ll make no bones about disclosing that, at least on motorcycles, I was profoundly un-enthusiastic about many of these developments.

Motorcycles adopted ‘ride-by-wire’ technologies from aviation practice where the throttle grip was no longer connected to butterflies in the intake tracts of the engine – instead it was connected to the Engine Control Unit (ECU), whose software was in charge of translating your requests to what was happening at the contact patch of the rear tire.

The fine line between a motorcycle rider and a master motorcyclist had been – pre-rider-aides – the ability to control the vehicle once one or both of the wheels started to slide. From Gary Nixon through Kenny Roberts to Valentino Rossi – the great champions of the sport were all demarked by their uncanny abilities to modulate and control a dynamic system where drift at the tire contact patches was what made them faster.

Personally, that mastery had taken me years to develop, and was much of what appealed to me in the sport. I told everyone who would listen that I was personally not prepared to simply cede that control to some outsourced software engineer in South Asia. I’ve worked with software my entire career. Errors in software fueled much of my professional life. Errors in software in this environment was something I had no desire to debug.

Following that, widespread ridicule rained on my head. I was called a Luddite. People mocked me for hypocrisy – working in technology but refusing the inevitable progress it provided. I was told that the advance of technology in motorcycling was designed to ‘free me to concentrate on more strategic decision making’. My response to this was that these technologies would essentially ensure that new riders would never have the opportunity to develop the skills to truly understand how their vehicles worked.

The technology has continued to advance – today’s Yamaha YZF-R1 street motorcycle has an Inertial Measuring Unit (IMU) – featuring gyroscopes, accelerometers and GPS – that can tell how far the motorcycle is leaned over, whether it is speeding up or slowing down, and whether the rate of acceleration or deceleration is lifting the front or rear wheel. The IMU outputs can control engine output, braking, and make fine adjustments in both the valving and springing of the suspension in real-time. This unit, which is sold as part of vehicle that retails for $16,000, is several levels of magnitude more capable than IMUs which are still deployed as part of America’s Nuclear Weapons Arsenal.

4 of the top 5 riders competing in MotoGP racing today are riders that are too young to have ever ridden a motorcycle that did not have such electronic aides. They are successful because they never developed the reflexes of self-preservation that tell one that it is not survivable to open the throttle wide open when the bike is leaned over to its limits. These guys just take the bike to its limits, roll the throttle wide open, and let the sensors and Management Units do their jobs.

That war is over, and unsurprisingly, I am vanquished.

***

So, it is more than a little surprising when I tell you today that I think that a car that drives itself is not a bad thing. ™

Automation, regardless of the area of endeavor, has always been a natural technological development for tasks that humans no longer wanted to perform.

On a commuting run today on my motorcycle, the number of people that I saw in traffic that were doing anything and everything other than driving was nothing short of staggering.

In Maryland, where I live, use of any handheld electronic device while driving is now a primary moving violation offence, for which any police officer can pull a driver over with no other violation in evidence. Compliance and enforcement are not yet at the point where I – as an unprotected road user – would like to see them, but the new law has reduced the most egregious abuses.

Unfortunately, most of my route is in Virginia, which has no such regulations.

I’ve seen people in Northern Virginia traffic with holding fixtures for their iPads mounted on their steering wheels. One such individual was – when I pulled alongside – bingewatching episodes of Breaking Bad.

I’m fortunate that a much older and very skilled and experienced motorcyclist taught me, when I was young, to actively observe the visual focus of the driver of every vehicle I approach by looking in their rearview mirrors. In 1985 it wasn’t a problem, but today, a cocked head means a phone in use and heads and eyes that are directed down inevitably mean smart phones or tablets being used to surf or send messages.

The motor vehicles of the distracted are far worse than dealing with drunks. Their lines on the road are irregular – weaving and failing to maintain lane or following distance discipline. They tend to cause traffic flows which speed up and slow down unpredictably due to their utter lack of situational awareness. They tend to hit other vehicles – either in rear end impacts or in intersections – at high closing rates without having ever braked before impact. They tend to change lanes abruptly without warning. Use of turn signals is almost unheard of.

For these people, a combination of distraction and congestion has made driving simply a dull, uninteresting chore that is to be avoided at all costs.

And for those people, the autonomous cars currently being developed by Google, Tesla and Apple are a compelling technology that will keep them, and by inference, the rest of us who are forced to share pavement with them, safer.

A surprised or inattentive human, armed with a 2 ton SUV or crossover, is the most unpredictable, and hence dangerous thing imaginable.

I have to think, understanding software and automation the way I do, that automated cars will be, if nothing else, entirely predictable in how they approach standard conditions on public highways. Their sensor arrays will make them more aware of their surroundings than the average human.

After considering the possibility for quite some time, I’ve come to the conclusion that having the robot cars as my travel companions has to compare favorably with Breaking Bad guy.

It just can’t be worse.

Just don’t be surprised if I keep a 50 year old motorcycle hidden under a tarp somewhere where the robots can’t find it.

Pardon Me, But I Believe You May Have The Wrong Disruption

Technology and economics are inexorably linked.

Understanding one, it seems, can greatly clarify one’s understanding of the other.

When a new technology works – as a business proposition – it does so because it disrupts an economy. It either dramatically changes existing flows of money within the economy or, in the optimum case, creates entirely new flows as a result of its existence.

And there have been some technologies – flashes of genius – that transform the entire economies they inhabit. Ones that have changed the way in which we do business – changed the way we live.

So trying to understand technology – which I try to do – means sometimes starting by trying to understand the underlying economics.

Which is a really roundabout way of talking about Elon Musk and Tesla Motors.

A car company, you ask?

The American Landscape is littered with ‘Visionaries’ – we almost spit when we say it – who wanted to change the automobile business.

The car business is a cute little business – we Americans buy about 20 Billion Dollars’ worth of automobiles every year. A company that was successful in taking 10% of that market would be a $2 billion dollar a year company.

One might be successful in the car business, but it wouldn’t make you Apple, for example, a company with a nearly 750 Billion Dollar market capitalization.

And it is the mention of Apple, who didn’t create a simple product, but an entire ecosystem that could grow and expand in unpredictable ways, to the point where Apple makes consumer electronics – sure – but they also make incredible revenues from entertainment, publishing and media, and now – with ApplePay – Financial Services.

People who thought Apple was a company that just wanted to make computers were wrong.

What if those people –  what if you –  are wrong about Tesla, too?

Public information about Tesla’s current projects and issued patents really tell the tale, if you can see what they’re telling us.

The Tesla Nevada Battery ‘Gigafactory’ has the capacity to produce a quantity of Lithium Ion batteries that far exceed the needs of Tesla Automobile’s most optimistic sales and production unit projections.

Why do that?

If Tesla isn’t a car company, it starts to make sense.

Tesla has already been issued patents for a series of hybrid Solar Power and Battery Storage power units, some designed for residential use, others for industrial scale. These units make use of solar panel technology from Solar City – a company whose Chairman is Elon Musk. These battery units are designed not just to charge a Tesla car, but to provide enough power to run the entire residence or business to which they are attached. A technology which not only frees its users from the gas pump, but also potentially from the public electric grid, as well.

Americans spend more than $350 billion dollars every year on gasoline.  10% of that market would be a healthier $35 billion in annual sales.

We also spend a similar amount on electric power in the US. Think another $35 billion.

Start showing some upside on that $70 odd billion of US sales, factor in the rest of the world, and it takes very little to make Tesla one of the primary movers of wealth in the whole world economy.

Nikola Tesla was a genuine visionary who thought the power of electricity moved the entire universe.

Allow me to suggest that the Tesla Motors was never about the automobile. The car’s purpose was to create a new demand – an entry point for a whole ecosystem of a different kind of energy – energy that was a personal commodity, made and used by you as you see fit.

Tesla, the company, doesn’t want to beat Ford, they’re after the Royal Dutch Shell/BPs, the Constellation energies of the world. Not a car company, but a disruptor of the world’s energy markets.

A Californian company designing some tree-hugger’s dream impractical green electric car?

Hardly.

The vision is one completely in line with that of Nicola Tesla himself – limitless electric power that is not part of some pay by the drink model where Oil Companies and Electric utilities profit endlessly from a global addiction to the energy they provide at monopoly prices.

The Tesla automobile – as impressive a technical achievement as it is, and as good a car as it is – is really just small potatoes.

Don’t say nobody told you.

To Serve Man

 

 
There is so much technology woven into our modern lives that some things appear almost indistinguishable from magic.

Wave your hand at your TV or game system, and it recognizes you, greets you by name, and brings up the content and applications that are part of your personal profile.

After a recent software upgrade for my phone, I turned it on in the next morning.

“Good morning, Greg!” it said. “Is this where you live?”

I’ll admit that, like it or not, I have become an information systems-augmented mind. In the middle of conversations, or when engaged by other media – like movies, news or sports – I’ll turn to Google, or to the aforementioned creepily inquisitive phone, and either find information to give me context or fact check what I’m hearing.

With all this magic swirling in our air, I find myself wondering if anyone has devoted any thought, during the years upon years of strategizing, designing and building it, to whether all this technology is beneficial for us, the human beings.

I think about this a lot, and more and more frequently, I find myself concluding that we are collectively just not that concerned about it.

We have tech for tech’s sake. We do these things – create these technical miracles – because we can, not because we have examined their effects on us.

It recalls the old ’Twilight Zone’ episode about a race of Aliens that come to Earth, with what we assume are friendly, altruistic motives. And we continue thinking this until we discover their ‘bible’ – “To Serve Man” – is not a spiritual guide, but rather, a cookbook.

I see only parallels – our technology is assumed to be benign, but may be hiding deeper, darker outcomes.

There are lots of subtle examples. I could write a book on the adverse cognitive effects of ubiquitous text, e-mail and social messages interrupting activities that formerly required absolute intellectual focus. Reduced analytical horsepower and declining worker productivity are subtle, borderline subjective impacts, but one recent area of concentrated technological growth provides a perfect example of capability ignoring the potential insights of psychology and cognitive science.

A recent Washington Post story reported on the automotive industry’s drive to fit cars with Heads-up Displays (HUDs) to complement the in-car telematics and navigation systems.

The manufacturers claim that these systems, which project information and images into the driver’s field of view, will increase vehicular safety by reducing distractions. Cognitive science and experience seem to point to exactly the opposite. I will give massive credit to the authors of this Post piece — Drew Harwell and Hayley Tsukayama – for failing to accept this message without highlighting the significant evidence pointing to the contrary.

“Our military fighter pilots use it – it must be safe…” Actually, the military has documented something they call ‘attention capture’ – a cousin to the phenomenon known as ‘target fixation’, where a vehicle operator stops seeing anything outside the most colorful visual input – and then the vehicle goes in the direction where the operator is looking. As a result of these findings – information on the pilot’s visual field reduces pilot focus and performance – the military is rapidly de-emphasizing use of these systems.

Simple instrument displays are just the beginning – one vendor wants to project a ‘virtual car’ into the visual field so you can follow it, rather than the customary GPS arrows. Another, the Skully motorcycle helmet, wants to project this kind of information on the inside of a motorcycle helmet visor.

I consider myself expert in the area of performance motorcycling – anything which introduces even a millisecond of cognitive delay – “…is that ‘object’ real or projected?” – will adversely affect rider (or driver) performance.

Too many inbound information sources like texts and tweets want to distract you from getting tasks accomplished. In vehicle HUDs and telematics systems want distract you and get your vehicle crashed, and you, by inference, killed.

Technology is a wondrous thing, but only when its products are guided by wisdom of designers that understand what human beings really need. That quality of what I’ll call informed design has been all too absent in the last dozen or so years. We continue to do things – to push the boundaries of technology — because we can, not because we’ve done deep thinking to see if it’s really a good idea.

So the next time you pick up some new, shiny electronic thing, detach yourself for a minute and consider.

“Is this thing here to help me, or to eat me?”

Nothing

The field of IT Security rests on the conception that Information on a network can be secured.

What if that’s wrong, though?

What if, in point of fact, nothing can be secured?

What if saving information on any device means that anyone with a strong enough interest in knowing it probably does?

What if nothing is secure?

Well, then, that changes things.

Imagine, for a second, what it means if every piece of digital information in and describing your existence – banking records, digital photos, government records, social networks, e-commerce and location data – is easily available to anyone motivated enough to obtain it.

In the current state of information technology, that statement likely describes the actual state of information security.

It’s a broad brush, game-changing statement – what kind of evidence could one point to to possibly support such a claim?

All one needs to do is stay current with the news. One can start with all of the revelations that were provided by Edward Snowden — http://www.wired.com/2014/08/edward-snowden/ — including that all of the world’s major cellular, wireline, internet service and web organizations were systematically compromised by US Intelligence and that all of their content was siphoned off for later analysis.

Consider that for a second – A government agency that was able to build such a large security breach apparatus that it is able to suck up the entire Internet every day and save it all for later, just in case there turns out to be anything interesting in there. The extent of the lack of security was driven home by the fact that the cryptographers that the US government had graciously ‘lent’ to the organizations that constructed all of the current encryption tools were engaged for the sole purpose of implementing tools that were compromised before they were built.

The Snowden revelations are only the tip of the iceberg, though. Consider ‘Regin’ – another massive espionage toolset whose sole purpose is to systematically compromise whole networks using multiple attack and compromise modalities.   http://www.wired.com/2014/11/mysteries-of-the-malware-regin/

The large scale compromise of the Sony Pictures network in the past week raised the game and the stakes to a new level. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/business/sony-pictures-and-fbi-investigating-attack-by-hackers.html?_r=0  In what was clearly a long-term, sophisticated attack, outsiders were able to compromise systems to such a significant extent that they were able to steal substantial amounts of digital property – completed but unreleased HD feature films, scripts  — and to place agents on the network that had the potential to destroy other digital property stored on the network. IT Security experts have long feared the day when being ‘owned’ by the hackers would turn from a public relations embarrassment with secondary economic consequences to the next stage – where the primary intent was to do damage and cause direct economic harm to the target.

Today is that day.

The threat landscape to your information is so diverse that even things that seem utterly benign – charging a USB device off an available port on your computer, for example, is now a critical attack vector — https://www.yahoo.com/tech/e-cigarette-from-china-infected-mans-computer-with-103466334849.html .

If this sounds to you like a narrative of a technology in crisis, that’s because that’s exactly what it is.

So if you’re an IT guy with a network and a business to protect, what steps can be taken to at least give you a fighting chance?

Folks that I know in the intelligence business have told me that Russian Intelligence – the heirs of the old Soviet KGB – assessed this threat and went back to entirely analog communications methods. Pencil and paper. Postal Mail. Carrier pigeons. One can’t hack what isn’t stored or transmitted.

That may seem an extreme solution, but in certain cases, the principle might have applications.

In the short term, user education and the traditional defense-in-depth are the transitional solutions. Well educated users, who understand and can recognize social engineering, spear phishing and other first level compromise vectors, are the best way to keep things under lock and key. An in-house security team, or a skilled security services provider, who has an array of tools to detect and contain breaches in their early stages before the spiral out of control, is the second weapon.

In the longer term, though, some very fundamental technologies need to be completely rethought and reengineered before any acceptable level of security can be retaken from ill-intentioned Nation-State actors and cyber criminals. The IT industry as a whole needs a new architecture and new component technologies that are designed from the ground up to be secured, which the current toolset absolutely was not. Think of it as a roadmap for secure computing, and a roadmap which requires an overhaul of much of the networking and computing landscape.

Access and identity management – who are you and what can you see – needs to be completely rethought. Whether the solution is biometrics, two factor authentication or something we haven’t thought of yet, the notion that a text username and a password can get one access to any system or network resource is a concept whose fundamental failure is well understood.

Another fundamental technology – encryption – needs to be completely reengineered without any involvement from experts currently employed by the military or intelligence industries. Encryption tech needs to be secure in ways that the current protocols are not.

The Domain Name System (DNS) – is the roadmap of the internet. DNS was built from the ground up to be open and to support realtime updates. Many sustained hack attacks rely, not on compromising a target system, but on hacking DNS to redirect users to another compromised system without users being aware of it. Information that one would comfortably store on one’s own server becomes very uncomfortable if the server turns out to be someone else’s.

Operating systems – notably Windows, but Unix and Linux based OSs as well – need to be completely re-architected starting with kernel, privilege models and buffer structures which use security concerns as their foundational requirement. The very notion of a buffer overflow – enter enough crap and you’ll crash the command processor and be able to do whatever you want — that breaks overall system is a notion we’d like our children and grandchildren to be able to laugh at someday. To make that happen we need to ditch everything and start coding today.

Finally, security tools need to take a quantum leap forward in capability and accuracy. Current tools generate so many false positives that a dedicated team is needed to triage the alerts and determine which ones are genuine threats. A recent lab test of an intrusion detection tool – one I cannot name as my current employer is a partner – detected 93% of the attacks that were set loose on the control hardware. In an environment where 1 hacker success is all it takes to lose your company, 93% — while an extraordinary achievement, on one level, is completely, pitifully ineffective when viewed in terms of what these tools must really be able to do. Security Tools need to make quantum leaps to be able to analyze traffic and behaviors to reliably identify access, information theft and management privilege use by unauthorized individuals.

There was a time when I believed that all information stored on IT systems was secure unless something extraordinary occurred.

Today, I believe that nothing stored on any Information System is secure in any way.

The future belongs to those companies that understand that this is an existential threat to our civilization, and are willing to abandon everything that has gone before, and create the second revolution in Information Technology.

This time around, we need to get it right.

Until then, take good care of those carrier pigeons.

Change of Focus

I’ve spent my entire working life supporting Information Technology.

And if you slow way down, back up and re-read that sentence, and then genuinely and deeply think about it, it only takes a second or two to realize just how utterly wrong and totally backwards that idea really is.

And that fundamental inversion of purpose and perspective is at the root of what is the next revolution in how we look at Information Technology and its support for businesses.

The reality is that I haven’t been supporting technology – I’ve been supporting people that make use of technology.

But the fixation on the technology itself – rather than the technology’s underlying purpose – is such an ingrained notion in the Technology and Technology Support businesses that it goes unquestioned, with virtually no one realizing that they’ve been focusing on the wrong things.

Look at any Company’s Request for Proposal document, and one sees lists of equipment – PCs, Laptops, Routers, Switches, Servers, and Security Appliances. What seems to get lost in these sales, service and outsourcing engagements are the poor humans and the work that they need to accomplish.

And that’s why this entire industry needs to completely change their focus. We’ve been focusing on the Personal Computer as the atomic unit of support.  We may occasionally shift focus to some of the back-end Infrastructure required to support those PCs, but it’s really been all about the PCs.

Organizations that want to lead in the Technology Services business need to embrace something that focuses on the human beings and the work they needs to get done. The work that people need to accomplish, after all, is what pays everyone’s bills, and locating oneself in relation to the money has never been a bad business practice. Buzzwords have never been my thing, but let’s think of it as User Centered Computing.

What are the characteristics of User Centered Computing?

Changes in the technology landscape are what enable this radical change of focus. Computing power, the solving of problems and the completion of work have moved away from the Intel processors and Windows Operating Systems that drove the personal computing revolution.  Networks have gone from drinking straw width piddlely little pipes to ubiquitous massive bandwidth – heck, 3G Wireless, which is trailing edge technology, has more speed than some of the Enterprise and Public Sector site networks I implemented early in my career.

The PC, which was formally the only place where work got done, has just become one of a number of ways that one can access the power of cloud-based, distributed computing, and viewed as a percentage of total work, is a declining portion of that access.

The work, in the simplest terms, has migrated to the network and to the cloud, and the PC has become just another screen, with tablets, smart phones and other emerging and hybrid devices all able to provide access to infrastructure based analytics and remote processing power. User Centered applications run in datacenters which have nearly infinite amounts of bandwidth with which to communicate to the user, who is now free to be almost anywhere.

So what does this mean for organizations that want to provide Information Technology Services to customers?

It is the infrastructure itself that has now become the central service – e-mail, unified messaging, voice/presence/video, collaborative and meeting applications, and web collaboration tools like Microsoft Sharepoint – all provide essential services to the workforce that is neither tied to nor is processed on a single class of computing or communications device.  The workspace has become an ecosystem of highly integrated and machine independent services.

How those services are delivered – defined in terms of the work that individuals have to do – has becomes a series of bundled services based on the type and value of tasks that those users can be expected to perform. Classes of service then become defined in terms of personas that carry with them a set of collaboration, communication and processing applications and access methods that are appropriate to those business roles.

The economics of this are where it gets genuinely compelling. With capital intensive infrastructure now borne by the service provider, one can procure these services on a purely operating expense basis.  Each persona can be delivered at a different price point, giving businesses granular control over workplace technology costs – one only pays for functions strictly where they are needed, instead of across the business. Clients also get flexibility to increase and decrease headcount without being constrained by IT investments, and get longer term predictability of their expenditures.

Access to the workspace can then be provided from any supported device. Today, even high end televisions have sufficient internet browser support to run some of these applications. In-car telematics systems currently being deployed are likely the next class of applications to be able to provide access.

The long road that started with the first barely viable versions of Microsoft Windows has created an information technology universe where one’s personal computer is far less important than one’s virtual computing environment which can be accessed with almost anything from almost anywhere. Leaders in the user centered computing space will provide clients with tightly integrated, machine independent, highly resilient and reliable services that focus on the user and what they need to achieve. The days when technology support meant worrying about keeping a fleet of PCs humming is about as cutting edge as your rangefinder film camera.

Rights in Data

Today, we live in an almost entirely digital universe.

In that digital universe, we frequently buy digital ‘products’ which are assumed to be as immutable and permanent as any other material good which we might exchange for currency.

That assumption, based on a recent experience I had, would be completely and woefully incorrect.

I’m an unrepentant, unreformed musician.

My teenage band played CBGB during the second wave of do-it-yourself rock and roll. I’ve jammed with George Thorogood and John Mellencamp when their tours took them through Baltimore, and I’ve purchased a bottle of Hennessey Cognac – required by a contract rider – that I personally placed in the hands of Muddy Waters.

My house is filled with basses and guitars and more music than Doan’s has little back pills.

In the last 10 years, much of that music has been purchased through Amazon.

As a guy that really needed to keep his day job, the Systems Engineer portion of my personality has provided file server platforms in my house to keep digital forms of that music where the entire household can get to it. Of the shared directories on that 4TB file server, the largest one, by far, is the music share.

A few weeks ago, I did what I frequently do on payday, which is that I purchased a few CDs from Amazon.

(A tribute album for the late Tulsa Composer JJ Cale and a new Richard Thompson compilation, for those that wonder)

Amazon provides a MP3 version of physical recordings that one purchases, which saves me a few minutes in ripping new music to the server, and allows me to have immediate access to digital copies of new music that I’ve purchased.

Theoretically, it’s a nice value add.

Theoretically.

Because what happened next is one of the most extraordinary violations of customer rights I have seen in nearly 30 years in the Information Technology universe.

After I completed the purchase, I went to download the digital copies of my new ‘records’.

And that, as my British friends are wont to say, is where everything began to go horribly pear-shaped.

Formerly, when one wanted to download a new album, it was possible to execute the new download inside one’s Internet browser.

This time, I got a pop-up indicating the ‘the best experience’ was going to be obtained using Amazon’s Music Player application.

I should point out that it wasn’t ‘the best experience’, but rather the only experience, as the browser downloads were no longer functional.

“What could possibly go wrong?”, I thought, and I upgraded my existing copy of Amazon’s music player with the new player.

I launched the player and downloaded my new albums. As I would expect, the Amazon player identified all of my prior purchases and displayed them in the Amazon music player, including the library on my file server, which was visible on my PC as a persistently mapped network drive.

Then I closed the player, as I am accustomed to using Windows built-in media player to play all of my music, including MP3s obtained from other online sources and ripped from analog sources such as records and cassettes.

And that’s when something truly strange happened.

My new music would not play in Windows Media Player.

For a control, I checked a title that I listen to a lot. It wouldn’t play either.

Every single MP3 I’d ever obtained from Amazon – whether they had digitized them or I had – would no longer play in Windows Media Player.

Turning to the Internet, it was instantly clear that I was not alone.

The Amazon support forums made it pretty clear what was going on. The updated player had parsed the ID3 tags of every single recording I’d ever purchased from them, and written a format that the Microsoft player couldn’t read.

I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether this was sloppy system engineering and testing, or a deliberate act.

Think for a second about what I’m describing here.

A piece of software that I didn’t buy traversed my network, accessed a file server using my credentials, and overwrote the metadata of digital products I did buy, in some cases as much as ten years ago. In doing so, it made them useless for the purpose for which they were originally purchased.

When you put it like that, it sounds like a crime.

That’s because it is a crime.

I’ve never seem any software license that gives a publisher a right to access and alter or destroy data that the application can access. And if I’d seen one, nobody would sign it. This is illegal access to an information system, pure and simple. People are in federal prison for exactly this right now, today.

The users of the product and the support forum have even been able to diagnose exactly what the nature of the problem is for Amazon. They’ve made use of ID3 tag editors to confirm that the Album art that the player wrote into the ID3 tags does not fully conform to the ID3 format specification. Delete the one field, and the track plays. Write the information back with an editor that does conform to the specification, and the track plays.

Trying to make Amazon fix this has not yet been successful.

After much effort, I’ve been able to speak to the Product Manager for the Amazon media player product. He admits fault while denying ill intent.

This is in no way surprising.

He offered to refund all the money I’ve ever spent on Amazon music, in order to make it up to me. His minions then refunded only the money I’ve spent on Amazon digital music – which is only about 2 percent of my total expenditure – and then refunded the money to a credit card that is closed.

That really made me feel better.

I remain hopeful that the Amazon team will really fix this, but the 8 months’ worth of customer narratives on the support forums tell a different story.

So what I am faced with is a company that I’ve done really substantial business with over many years that has willfully accessed products I’ve purchased and altered them without my permission so that I can no longer use them. Whether they’ve done this to force customers to use their products or to injure their competitors doesn’t really matter.

Until they make good on this, it bespeaks an organization with an extraordinarily shocking lack of ethics and integrity, and a sheer ruthlessness of a magnitude that I’ve never seen before in my many years in the Information Technology Business.

And although Amazon is a huge company, it really gives on pause as to whether it’s really smart to run business applications or store critical information on their cloud infrastructure. If they will willingly run roughshod and trespass on my digital property on my network, I can’t imagine they would have more scruples in the case of their infrastructure.

Yeah, there’s an app for that….

Ok, I’d be the first to admit that my sense of irony may be too highly developed.

But I’m pretty sure that this time, it’s not me.

The legendary, foundational bluesman Howling Wolf, when speaking of his equally legendary and humble 1951 Pontiac station wagon, once said, “I own my car. It don’t own me.”

Wolf’s manifold wisdom could find applications for a number of different types of possessions today – possessions that may not be entirely clear on just who belong to who.

I have noticed a trend in the Smart Phone software development lately. It isn’t isolated, and it isn’t some sort of fluke one-off.

One of the fastest growing categories of smartphone applications are applications that are designed to manage how much time we are spending using our smartphone applications.

You may elect to read that again if you believe your brain just encountered some sort of Dr. Whovian temporal discontinuity.

That’s right. Apps that control overuse of apps.

I told you my overactive sense of irony was not responsible.

The first such application that caught my eye was in the Washington Post’s tech section:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/technology/wp/2014/08/21/this-app-tells-you-how-much-time-you-are-spending-or-wasting-on-your-smartphone/

This application, Moment, monitors how much time you are spending using your phone. It can set limits and ‘remind’ you if you exceed the limits you previously set.

Thinking that something like Moment had to be a fluke, I started doing a few searches, and discovered that Moment was far from alone.  

http://gigaom.com/2011/06/09/19-apps-to-boost-concentration/

In this group of Software Applications one can find applications to shut down or silence input from other applications. There are applications that block all social media updates. There are applications that time one’s ability to focus and then grant you a rest break after a certain number of ‘focused’ minutes.

All of which begs a question – a question which will have far greater impact if you try to imagine all six-foot-three-275-pounds of Howling Wolf looking down at you to ask it:  “Do you own your phone or does your phone own you?”

Right now, the answer, for most people, is that the phone is in charge.

The mobile phone, when it was first deployed, was supposed to be the be-all-and-end-all of business productivity tools. The pitch was that it could allow you to be reached by your customers no matter where you were, so that you were always able to conduct more business without the limitations imposed by having to be located in one’s office.

Instead, what we now have is such a ‘compelling user experience’ that a substantial number of smart phone users display the same behavioral dynamics as street junkies – compulsive inability to do anything but keep going back for another little fix. The smartphone has become the lever marked “Cheese” in the rat cage of the biggest psychology experiment ever conducted on human beings.

Today, I enjoyed my lunch outside in a large public plaza – replete with fountains, waterfalls and aquatic plants – on an eleven out of ten point scale beautiful summer day in Reston, Virginia. During that half hour, I was the only person I saw – whether seated or walking – that wasn’t completely zoned in to the screen of a smartphone or tablet.

A well-engineered smartphone is the consummate business tool. The Nokia Lumia I carry allows me to work with my corporate e-mail system, and review and comment on design, proposal and financial documents that have been generated in Microsoft’s Office software suite applications.

What most users have allowed their smartphones to become, however, is the consummate source of interruptions, distractions, and a host of stimuli that are all completely antithetical to focus and to productivity.

Your phone is supposed to work for you. If your phone or its installed software aren’t helping you work, then you are the one that needs to do a little downsizing – to make some changes in your personal organization. If you haven’t got the discipline to recognize the difference between a tool and a time wasting toy, another app is not going to help.