What price privacy?

I recently started considering what had happened with the upgrade to IOS 5 and the encouragement to move to iCloud. I had been a long standing me.com user and willingly paid my family membership of 70 quid(-ish) per annum - this because I believed (perhaps erroneously), that unlike gmail, Apple was not trawling through my personal email and extracting value from it in mysterious ways. I transfered to iCloud and then observed that my me.com account (which had some number of months to run before renewal) had moved to a 10Gb paid for service, but come the end of my subscription it would revert to 5Gb and become free.

Sorry, Heinlein had it right, TANSTAAFL.

It's not free to provide so somewhere along the line Apple is making money and it's not transparent where. And I've been talking to too many "privacy fundamentalist" lawyers recently. So back to the future - I dusted off the trusty DELL SC440 installed Ubuntu, grabbed Dovecote, poked the firewall and hey presto I'm back to self hosting.

So the Dell cost £110 a few years back - let's depreciate the capital over 5 years; it consumes about 35 watts (£35 per annum running costs) - cost of privacy, about £57 per annum for the whole family and 750Gb of space.

Of course my tech friends will tell me there's much lower power cheaper solutions for self hosting (where are those Raspberry Pi's?), to which my ripost - in 5 years it'll be doing it in the home router and we won't even notice the extra cost.

Cloudlets - here we come.

The Challenges of Regulating the Internet

So a very interesting talk from Simon Hampton of Google; followed by good discussions and a fine dinner at St. Johns to boot - well done the Connections team.

Simon made a great point on scale and illustrated it with YouTube statistics amusement - simply put "it's huge". Or to quote a great man and the guide (chapter 8):

"Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space, listen..."

Most folks, including regulators, just don't get how big it is - and headline message from Simon "Regulate for abundance over scarcity" - I liked that.

Simon used the image above (and ancient tale from this blog) to illustrate his point  - he reckons we are at square 32 on the chess board and there's 32 more doublings to come; hmm - more faith in Moore's law than I can summon but I'd maybe begrudge him 16; at current rates that's still another 25 years...

Fund raising the Digital Economy way

Like the approach of Raspberry Pi foundation - auctioning off their first 10 boards on ebay. Board 10 is leading the race with £2050 bid so far, not bad for a £25 retail ARM box and 4 days to go :-)

Someone surely is thinking these will be collectors items...

Postscript 10/1/2012: BBC now on the case - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16424990

Gas and tea tariffs

Simple lessons for the energy industry and us researchers - simply put, if customers don't get it, you've got a problem; and you'll be eating humble pie.

At a time when we looking ahead to the smart meters and smart grids, time of day metering and demand side management, perhaps British Gas' acknowledgement (see BBC article) that they "had not made it easy for customers" in their pricing is a salutory lesson - we had better put the people at the centre of the problem and work back to the engineering.

What we need is more pricing plan information presented like this gem from confused.com:

Why Johnny Can’t Opt Out...

Why Johnny Can’t Opt Out: A Usability Evaluation of  Tools to Limit Online Behavioral Advertising.

A great tech report from CMU CyLabs on issues in self-regulation and opt-out mechanisms in online advertising. Conclusion - "fundamentally flawed".

No browser should be without it!

Yup - even as a technologist with Ghostery, AdBlocker Plus, rather obsessive browser settings and as of a few minutes ago having opted out of the 52 companies that target ads at Chrome according the Digital Advertising Alliance (curiously hard to find online!) - I still find it all disconcerting.

I have for years been registered with the Telephone and Mail Preference Services in the UK - this is not self regulation, this is legislation, and it works pretty well and cuts out most of the junk - the remaining junk in the McAuley household is blow-ins through magazine subscriptions - New Scientist can I sign out of this please? However,  I still get telephone direct marketing from folks outside the UK; interestingly when I ask which UK company they are working on behalf of, the phone goes dead. Unfortunately I can't report them because the caller-id is always blocked, but companies (and you know who you are) are clearly trying to bypass the legislation. So would you now trust them to self-regulate online?

Thanks to Gilad for pointing me at the original article.

P.S. At 14:38 today, just as I finalised this, I had an international telesales call in broken english asking for Mr Needham or Mrs Needham (previous residents at this address from 14 years ago!). Good friends, long may they be remembered, the operator received some ripe anglo-saxon they may have difficulty translating.