[25:21] If you’re sitting in any organisation, and let’s not forget this is not just going to be governments, it’s also companies. At some point, as I said earlier on, and it’s a glib line, but the only sure cure for leaks is transparency. At some point you’re gonna realise that you’re better off releasing more information. That the more you hold secret, the more risk you have of leaks, and anything that looks like a leak looks like an exposé. Now that’s going to be a very hard lesson to get across to controlling institutions, but I think if we’re looking at a long term impact here on the culture. I’m writing about this obviously, so it’s on the top of my brain. But I think that this default of publicness versus a default of privacy and secrecy is what we’re grappling with here, and we get to a point where there is no mediator.

[33:26] So what the fear was, that they put forward is someone would come and scan your garbage. So what, they find out I’m 33 now, not 32? Then what? What does that do? We don’t look at the implications, but technology yields change and change yields fright and fright yields protection. And that’s a very small example of what Jay just said. Whether you’re a big institution, or whether you’re a survivalist, or whoever you are, there’s two responses to this world coming up: to embrace the change, or to try to fear it.

And the killer…

[34:22] Yes, we need secrets. But first you have to have the trust to know that those who are holding secrets are holding them for a reason.

Face recognition. Finding faces that aren’t already tagged. Presenting them, ready-to-tag, to the owner. This is pure genius for getting people to participate.

These two years I’ve spent at the University of York have been absolutely fantastic, and it’s impossible to overstate how big a part the media societies have played in me having so much fun. I’m working away from university on a placement this year, but before I start in the big and scary world of “real work”, I wanted to write a little about the things I’ve done at York that have totally completed the experience.

Nouse Website, Spring 2009

This was the first time I got involved significantly in something society-based at university, in the second term of my first year. Working with Ali and Mike, under direction and with massive effort from Chris, we recreated and iterated on the theme for Nouse, the student newspaper (if you know what’s right for you). It meant a load of late nights in the office, fixing things up and getting them ready for launch; my favourite tweet of the early morning “office HTML cluster-fuck” (after one such launch) has to go to Henry.

YSTV Video Production & Website, October 2008 – Present

Looking back, over the last two years YSTV is the best thing I’ve done at York. I’ve met so many more people there than I would have anywhere else on campus and I couldn’t be more pleased that I decided to get involved. From being Matthew’s bitch in the very first term (filming footage for the York Sport Show) all the way up to last term, working on the website with more people than I’ll be able to mention. Mark and Simon somehow managed to get me in front of the camera, though I’m not sure how that even came close to happening. Hopefully I’ll be staying involved in the website this year, from about two hundred miles away.

York Students In Schools, January 2009 – May 2009

I’m not sure why I decided to join YSIS, but I’m so glad I did. In the second term I was helping one afternoon a week in a primary school (Dunnington Church of England), and this year I’ve been assisting with ICT at All Saints RC School. All the teaching has been valuable experience, but seeing the ICT curriculum being taught in a real school, to real kids, has made David’s somewhat different approach so much more important. The teaching quality that I saw at All Saints was amazing, but when the syllabus dictates that you need to teach pupils how to print from Microsoft Access and exactly what that obscure button in PowerPoint does, there’s only so far you can go.

Do More Stuff

If there’s one thing that it was important for me to take away from here, it is this: you might not get on with every single person you come across (can you ever?), but there is absolutely no reason you won’t get along with most of them. You might even have fun.

Personally, I’m so glad I held out. The computer I owned before this one was a January 2007 white plastic MacBook, and the difference is more than incredible.

The Obvious vs. the Subtle

This new notebook is obviously an improvement, you don’t need anybody to tell you that. The specification speaks for itself: 2.4GHz (up from 2.26), a solid state drive providing blisteringly fast boot times and application launches, and an NVIDIA GeForce 320M instead of the very tired Intel X3100.

It’s got an SD card slot, Firewire 800, a multitouch buttonless trackpad. The battery life lasts for a whole day of light use now, where it would have buckled by lunch before. I’ve had five hours of train journeys today where I’ve been watching movies and listening to music (brightness ~50%, no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth), and it’s still 40% remaining. The build-quality and how solid the machine feels is second-to-none.

This is all great. But where Apple really shines is taking the smallest things they could possibly change, and improving them to provide the best user experience they can. Here’s a few examples:

• This model has a backlit keyboard, and with it an ambient light sensor. Which means they dim the screen and activate the keyboard backlight whenever, for example, this train goes into a tunnel, and brighten it again when the clouds reappear.
• Speaking of the screen brightness, it now fades between different brightness levels instead of obvious, staccato changes. And the LED backlight allows for great flexibility; it can go even brighter than previously when needed, but also dimmer for stealthy night-time web browsing.
• The speakers sound significantly better. They’re still tinny, laptop speakers, but a vast improvement.
• The headphone/line-in jacks have been replaced with one for both audio in and out. This change brings with it support for iPhone microphones and in-line remote controls when using iTunes.
• The MagSafe connector has been changed to be more like the MacBook Air, so it’s now much harder to knock out accidentally.

Take the screen brightness fading up and down. It might seem like a trivial point, but together with everything else, it adds up to what I believe to be the best laptop experience you can buy today. Don’t get me wrong, they’re expensive. You can get something for £400 from Acer, or £600 from Dell. And while they might look the same when you’re comparing gigahertz and revolutions-per-minute, I can assure you that they’re vastly different.

Mine’s a Barclaycard PayPass that’s giving me a headache, though. Might get one of those small tube maps that are made out of metal to fix the problem. He’s right that this is going to become more common though, especially as banks start rolling out more cards like this.