You Wouldn't Download A Car...

Remember those anti-piracy adverts that tell you that "you wouldn't download a car"? Turns out that soon you could. Although it would cost about £1000 for the printer, as well as the cost of the materials. Oh, and it would be made of plastic. Still pretty cool right? I am of course talking about 3D printing. It's on the up recently and becoming far more accessible. Mainly due to its versatility. So long as it can be made of plastic you can pretty much 3D print anything you want. Need some new cups for a house party? Just download a 3D model and print. Bikes, hooks, even chairs can be 3D printed.

Unfortunately with all of the interesting possibilities for convenience that 3D printing brings, it also brings a lot of problems and controversy. You could easily 3D print stuff from its 3D model rather than actually buying it from the shops. This means that piracy of physical objects could actually become a problem in the near future. People could start downloading Ikea furniture designs, for example, and just start printing them. No need to go to the shop or pay any money to Ikea, even though they own the design. The only way that currently seems viable is a DRM system for 3D model files similar to the DRM on music, games, and video files. It would prevent users from printing certain 3D models if they did not have the rights to them. That being said I personally doubt that it would take a determined individual any more than a few minutes to get around this DRM. After all it's not like it stopped people from pirating music, games, and videos.

The more serious problem with 3D printing will fortunately not be a problem for a while given the current limited availability of 3D printers, as well as the even more limited availability of sturdy enough 3D printing materials. The problem is that it is possible that some time soon it may be possible to 3D print guns. In fact it is actually possible to 3D print guns now, but if they were made of the currently publicly available materials they would almost certainly explode immediately upon their first use. In fact the world's first 3D printed gun was tested by ATF agents some time last year and it blew up in their faces. Unfortunately they managed to later create a second gun using the same design that was made of sturdier plastics and was able to fire at least 8 rounds.

Personally I'm not really that worried for the time being about  3D printed firearms as bullets still need to be acquired or made in order to use them, which can be very difficult. On top of that there's the fact that anyone using them is fairly likely to have the gun explode in their hands, so I doubt they'll become popular any time soon. As for the 3D printing DRM I highly doubt that it will ever completely prevent 3D printing piracy, but to be quite honest there's nothing quite like the genuine product and at least you're guaranteed a certain level of quality if you do buy from the store. I don't think it will kill off buying most products from the store, but it certainly creates many new opportunities like selling 3D models for things to consumers to print and it definitely would be convenient to not have to go down to the shops when your door's coat hanger snaps.

Sources and related links:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19928502
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2507654/The-worlds-fully-3-D-printed-gun-tested-Feds-blows-faces.html

Civic Hacking - Be Not Afraid

Hacking, it's a scary word these days. It's often associated with illegal activity like shutting down websites by force, stealing personal data, or stealing accounts from various online services. However hacking can, in fact, have a very different definition. Civic hacking is when "hackers" come together to create a solution to a problem by "thinking outside of the box". In just the same way as some hackers use their skills to figure out a way to use unconventional or never before thought of means to get around the "problem" of the barriers that prevent them from getting into a system, civic hackers use the same skills to figure a way around other problems in order to benefit society by creating open-source software that solves that problem or helps to solve that problem. A great example of this would be the app Ask Dory! that, to quote the opengovdata.io source below, "helps patients find information about clinical trials for cancer and other diseases, integrating data from ClinicalTrials.gov and making use of an entropy-based, decision-tree algorithm".

Plug-in Media | Creative JavaScript and HTML 5 Hack Day

Personally my favourite thing about civic hacking is the hack days (AKA hackathons). Some organisations that have a problem to solve or want to help civic hackers to solve their own problems so they organise events called hack days. At these events civic hackers gather in groups in order to spend a large amount of time (usually a whole day or more) working pretty much flat out on a civic hack project. They are a great place to meet interesting and talented people, as well as get involved with something creative. It is often surprising how much can be done in such a relatively short amount of time by a small group of individuals; many of the projects created during these hackathons are quite impressive and often many will go on to become fully-fledged projects. If you are looking to get into the creative programming or independent app making community/industry then hack days are a great place to start.

Here at Goldsmiths University a few students, including myself, are trying to see if we can get a hack society set up for people who want to organise small-scale hackathons, meet up for civic hack projects, or just plain have a place to regularly meet in groups to get stuff done. If you have an interest in civic hacking or like the sound of a nice place to meet diverse groups from different departments to get some collaborative projects going then please check out the Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/311892885615125/?fref=ts. You need to be a Goldsmiths student with a Goldsmiths email in order to join as it will redirect you and ask you to register a Goldsmiths email with your Facebook account if you haven't already.

On the whole I really love the idea of civic hacking. It takes a term like hacking and completely turns it on its head. It takes skills that would normally be applied to breaking into systems and instead applies them to creating something new and solving real world problems.

Sources and related links:

http://opengovdata.io/2012-02/page/2/civic-hacking-example

http://thegovlab.org/improving-government-through-civic-hacking/

http://www.pluginmedia.net/2011/04/creative-hack-day-at-plug-in-hq/

http://www.meetup.com/UK-Hackathons-and-Jams/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/311892885615125/?fref=ts

#BlogTitle #TwitterHashtags

If you've ever used Twitter then you've probably heard of hashtags. If you haven't, they're basically tags preceded with a # that you put in a Tweet. There are all different kinds of hashtags, if you can think of it then it's probably a hashtag. As for their purpose they have several but one of the main ones is to allow easy following of subjects or events by going to a hashtag's page where it lists all of the posts that use the particular hashtag. Hashtags are also used to find trends in Twitter activity by checking the most used hashtags, and therefore the most common topics of conversation.

Hashtags are actually a surprisingly good way of spreading something fast. Once a hashtag catches on it tends to circulate surprisingly quickly. Many companies have made use of this before as a powerful marketing tool. For example #MakeItCount was a hashtag used by Nike to spread its viral add campaign that encouraged athletes to "make it count" in 2012. This was extremely effective and is known as one of the greatest hashtag marketing campaigns so far.

Unfortunately hashtags can also backfire and become a PR nightmare. One of the funniest accidental hashtag fails was the one created to promote Susan Boyle's album party: #susanalbumparty. That's susan-album-party. It's so bad that it's hard to tell if it was intentional or not. The person creating the hashtag was clearly either one of the best or one of the worst PR people ever. Regardless, it managed to draw an incredible amount of attention and ended up achieving the initial aim of the hashtag by creating a lot of publicity for Susan's album party, even if the attention was not generated in the way originally intended. Another similar example of this kind of hashtag backfire is when the company Research in Motion posted job advertising tweets with the hashtag #RIMjobs.

Hashtags can also backfire in a different way. McDonald's seemed to think it would be a good idea to ask people to share fond memories of their fast food using the hashtag #mcdstories. Unfortunately they mostly ended up getting horror stories of bad service like old food and hair in burgers. Hashtags that backfire in this way are commonly known as bashtags and are almost always the product of a company with bad customer service attempting to get good PR from their (unfortunately unsatisfied) customers.

I suppose hashtags are like any powerful PR tool, they have great potential but also carry great risks. They have great versatility and can be used to spread both the important and the mundane, unfortunately it's usually the mundane. Such is the mentality of Twitter.


Sources and related links:
http://www.shinyshiny.tv/2012/11/5_twitter_hashtag_fails_susanalbumparty_waitrosereasons_childrenslaughterhouse.html
http://geniastevens.tumblr.com/post/49300855808/4-successful-hashtag-campaigns-marketers-should-read

Big Data, Big Controversy

Big Data, what is it, why is it useful, and how can it be controversial? Let's start with the "what". Big Data is a very large amount of formatted or unformatted data, usually collected by an automated system, although not always. It is usually such a large amount of data that it is almost impossible to store or process in one location or on one server. The processing of Big Data is usually handled by methods such as data mining to extrapolate information or statistics from the data; in other cases it can be processed in parallel using multiple privately owned servers, although this is very expensive and is usually only done if reliability of response speed or privacy of data is a priority.

Next comes the "why"; why is Big Data useful? Big Data is often used by large organisations to extrapolate information that is of great importance to their purpose, service, or product. For example Big Data is collected by mobile companies about their customers' phone calls, from which they can extrapolate usage statistics and information like the most frequently used areas. Form this they can find out which areas need to be upgraded to handle a higher call bandwidth and how best to manage their network traffic. Search engines also use Big Data to calculate their search results from databases of URLs and tags, etc. although they usually use their own servers to store and process the data so that search times can be more reliable. Big data can even be used to figure out new cures and treatments for diseases and improve the quality of medical care as is being proposed by the NHS in the for of Care.Data, but we'll get to that later.

Finally we come to the "how"; how can Big Data be controversial? Big Data is often as anonymous as possible. However the problem is that there are so many sources of Big Data out there. Although each set of Big Data individually does not individually identify you, it does include a lot of data that can be cross-referenced with other Big Data to build a profile. This can then be used to narrow down who the data can belong to and eventually can even narrow it down to a single person. This could be used for beneficial purposes, but at the same time it could be used just as easily for malicious purposes like aggressive advertising or identity theft.

One of the most controversial cases of Big Data use is the proposed plan know as Care.Data. The NHS plans to sell anonymized medical records at £1 each. The idea behind this is that the Big Data from the combined medical records can be analysed to easily find ways to improve medical services, as well extrapolate correlations relating to conditions and illnesses that can be used to guide and improve development of new treatments. While it is true that the data could be incredibly beneficial to the medical world, it has also been pointed out that there is little that prevents almost anyone from walking up and buying this data to do with as they please. As mentioned before this could lead to people being matched back to their medical records using large-scale Big Data processing from multiple sources. The extrapolated information could then possibly be used to manipulate elderly and vulnerable people (for example those whose medical records show that they have learning difficulties or dementia) by focusing telemarketing or scams on them. It could also be used to increase insurance costs for people considered "high risk" due to medical conditions.

Personally I think that Care.Data could do a lot more good than harm. But I also believe that there need to be stricter regulations on who can buy the data and for what purpose. Care.Data is just a great idea that needs to be reworked to prevent it from being executed poorly, which is unfortunately a far too common occurrence these days.

Sources and related links:

http://www.nhs.uk/NHSEngland/thenhs/records/healthrecords/Pages/care-data.aspx

http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/business_technology/big_data_the_next_frontier_for_innovation

OpenStreetMap: The Wikipedia of Street Maps

A few weeks ago I blogged about crowdsourcing, giving possibly the best example: Wikipedia. Despite the fact that Wikipedia shouldn't work, at least in theory, due to the probability of errors and the likelihood of vandalism it has still managed to become incredibly successful as well as surprisingly accurate due to its moderation system that prevents errors and vandalism from becoming problems. Clearly heavy moderation of content is a very effective way of making crowd sourcing viable as there is another great crowdsourced project known as OpenStreetMap. It also seems to be succeeding much in the same way as Wikipedia by using similar methods of moderation.

OpenStreetMap uses crowdsourcing to map areas and uses an Open Database License, meaning that anyone is allowed to use the data in the OpenStreetMap database so long as they are not charging for it. It allows anyone to map areas, edit the information of roads and buildings, and add new buildings and roads. This has allowed the project's map of the world to grow very quickly and it has even received some data that is not on some of the bigger companies' maps like Google maps. This is due to the fact that local people can map an area in detail, even down to the extent of labelling different building sections individually with full descriptions. This has also made OpenStreetMap rather popular with small businesses as they don't have to pay to have their business specifically added to a map by the company that owns the map and they don't have to jump through hoops to get anything changed or any details added. Instead they can manually add it themselves.

An example of OpenStreetMap vandalism

Unfortunately this also means that other users can abuse the system and change whatever they want whenever they want and mess with the map. On one hand if the system is not abused then the users can easily contribute to the mapping project as originally intended, by adding  useful and relevant data about houses, roads, and shops. However the main problem with the system is that people may also purposely vandalise the map by deleting landmarks or roads, renaming things to completely different places, or adding non-existent roads and buildings all over the place to confuse people. They could also do something relatively harmless like change their house's name to "Magical Wizard Castle". Another problem with the system is that non-intentional mistakes can ruin the map as well like typing an address as "123 Johnson Road" when you meant to type "23 Johnson Road" which can lead to people being unable to find specific places, or accidentally adding a road out of sync with the map due to lag or clumsiness.

Fortunately the OpenStreetMap system is made to cope with all of the possible vandalism and accidental misinformation that appears. One thing that helps a lot against this is the fact that the majority of the OpenStreetMap community are actually fairly responsible and will often seek out and correct any mistakes or vandalism that they see without any moderator or administrator activity necessary. Sometimes however the vandalism or mistakes are not seen by the community. When this happens moderators step in by checking recent changes and looking for flags from vandalism auto detection algorithms (in other words it tells them if someone makes a lot of changes or names something a vulgar word); the moderators then correct the any wrong changes made either manually, or by backdating to an earlier backup of the area.

Overall this system is pretty effective at preventing vandalism from becoming a problem as even large scale vandalism that goes undetected by the automatic systems can be reported by users and is usually dealt with by a moderator within 48 hours. That being said it is still not always as accurate or as detailed in some cases as other maps like Google maps. Although in a few specific cases it does have more information for certain areas, so depending on what you are looking at it can vary in accuracy and information depth. Despite the risk of getting inaccurate or vandalised content that comes with using crowd sourcing I am quite interested to see what OpenStreetMap will evolve into with time. If 3D modes and street views can be implemented then it could become a great Open License alternative for companies that have to currently pay to use Google maps' data, and a little bit of healthy competition for the big companies is always good for the consumer, so with any luck OpenStreetMap will become a force to be reckoned with. Look out Google! Oh and there's Bing Maps... but no one cares about Bing.

Sources and related links:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Database_License
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Vandalism

Internet Speeds: ISPs Being Sneaky

So these days internet speeds are getting pretty big and people are willing to pay more and more to get better and faster speeds. ISPs (those guys that connect you to the internet) like Virgin Media or BT offer speeds these days that are more than enough for a full family to stream HD videos from the internet all at once, at least in theory. However unfortunately for us there are many ways that ISPs are misleading the majority of us into thinking that we are getting far more than than we actually are.

The first and probably the most recognisable of these ways that we can be mislead is the way that ISPs sell you bandwidth. They sell you bandwidth speed for your internet connection in megabits per second, otherwise known as Mbps or Mb/s. Nothing wrong with that right? Unless you consider that a very similar term is used is megabytes per second also known as MBps or MB/s (notice that the capital B is the only difference in the abbreviations). Those familiar with computers will know that there are eight bits in one byte, meaning that one Mb/s is only an eighth of the speed of one MB/s. So when you pay for an internet connection in Mb/s the ISPs make it easy to mistakenly think you are getting far more than you really are. It also doesn't help that some adverts show the connection as "50MB/s" when they really mean "50Mb/s", although this is mostly is due to the people who actually make the adverts not knowing the difference between them it is still unacceptable really.

Another thing about the speeds that they quote is that they use very careful wording when quoting speeds, like in the image above. They say "Up to 60Mb", meaning that they aren't legally obliged to actually provide 60Mb/s; in fact they don't even have to give you 30Mb/s even if you're on the 120Mb package! In reality most people get only about half of what is offered as the "Up to" speed on average, so if you're on the 30Mb/s package you can expect roughly 15Mb/s, if you're on the 60Mb/s package you can expect roughly 30Mb/s, etc.

Probably the least known about problem with internet speeds is that if you want to connect to a website or service, e.g. Netflix, and the website or video lags it may not actually be your connection or the website's connection that is actually the problem. You see your ISP connects all of the customers on its network to the internet via a much larger ISP which they purchase bandwidth from in bulk. The larger ISP then routes all of the traffic of the networks connected to it through connections to other larger ISP networks. The trouble is that the large ISPs have to pay each other to build better connections between them so that a customer whose traffic is routed through one ISP can get better bandwidth to a website whose traffic is routed through another ISP. This means that if your ISP doesn't pay the bigger ISPs to build a better connection then the traffic between the networks gets congested and you get a slow connection to websites and people on the other ISP's network but you still get a fast connection to those on your ISP's network.

Fortunately there is actually a work-around for this. You see if your ISP's ISP has a good connection to another bigger ISP that in turn has a good connection to the ISP of the website you want to get to then you can actually use a VPN (Virtual Private Network) to get around your slow route and use the faster one of the other bigger ISP instead. If you connect to the VPN you can ask the VPN to fetch the data that you want from the website using the non-congested and fast route of the VPN's ISP. Then the VPN can send you the data through the fast and uncongested route between you and them. The end result is that you bypass the slow and congested route that you would normally have to take (even if it is actually shorter) and instead can get a faster connection.

Personally I would like it if ISPs would just cut the crap and just give me some realistic figures for the speeds I'm likely to get. But somehow I don't think that'll happen any time soon and yelling at the poor people in the call centres isn't likely to do any good. So I suppose for now I suppose I'll have to settle for a look of general disapproval in the ISPs' direction and hope that one day some new company will come into the mix with decent customer service to slap them in the face with the metaphorical hand of healthy competition.

Also, apologies on the late posts, my internet went down for roughly 5 days last week so I couldn't do any research or fact-checking until recently. I guess Virgin Media must have some angry psychics that didn't want this post to get written and posted.

If you would like more information on this week's subject watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWn_BEZYpfA
Around 22:40 in the video they begin talking fairly in-depth about the ISP to ISP problem and I found it a really interesting resource for writing this post.

References and related links:
http://store.virginmedia.com/broadband/compare-broadband/50mb.html

Crowdsourcing: A Good Bad Idea?

The race for information on the internet is becoming more and more hectic as time progresses. This has led to crowdsourcing becoming one of the most used methods of data collection on the internet. The main reason for this is that it allows a lot of data to be collected very quickly. The trouble with this is that the data isn't always reliable.

A great example of this is Wikipedia. Wikipedia, if you somehow didn't know already, is an encyclopedia that uses crowdsourcing to get information for its articles. Anyone can write a Wikipedia article and anyone can edit it. This has allowed Wikipedia to quickly become one of the largest sources of information in the world as it has such a large number of people contributing towards it. However this has also compromised the reliability of Wikipedia's information. Due to the fact that anyone can provide or change the contents of Wikipedia's articles it has made it easy for people to vandalize the content, in some cases deleting it entirely. In other cases it has caused arguments between users which has lead to them editing articles back and fourth to be how they wanted it, leading to inconsistencies in the article and fluctuations from day to day.

So the main advantage of crowdsourcing is that it allows anyone to contribute. Unfortunately the main disadvantage of crowdsourcing is also that it allows anyone to contribute. How is this remedied? How has Wikipedia become so successful? The answer is a combination of moderation and data backups that results in the crowdsourced system being incredibly fault-tolerant. By using moderators to regulate what users can and cannot do, and by allowing the moderators to reverse changes made by users, the number of people that have to be trusted in order for the system to work is reduced greatly. The number of people that have to be trusted in order for the system to work is then reduced further by implementing a hierarchy of higher level moderators all the way up to an administrator.

Even with measures in place to prevent the chaos that is the internet from ruining a crowdsourced project some things still manage to slip through the metaphorical net of reports generated by users, and moderators. Although for the most part the system works and is generally far more efficient than any other system out there; some studies even show that Wikipedia is on-par in terms of accuracy with other encyclopedias like the Encyclopedia Britannica. That being said crowdsourcing still requires a lot of resources, like moderators and powerful servers to receive input from so many users at once.

Personally I think that crowdsourcing is the way forward. It allows large amounts of data to be collected quickly and at a relatively low cost compared to other methods of data collection. Admittedly some of that data may be rubbish provided by people who just want to watch the world burn, but so long as a responsible person filters the data at the end of the day, it's not half bad.

Sources:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4530930.stm
http://www.ibtimes.com/wikipedia-study-says-its-accurate-280135
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page