Human 2.0

Your digital trail may reveal more than you think

Alex Bowyer — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 16:45:58 +0000

At the HCI 2010 conference in Dundee, Scotland, researchers from Glasgow University announced preliminary results that show that a high number of re-sold mobile phones contain personal information left by previous owners. In some cases the data was highly sensitive or incriminating – and in some cases was believed deleted, but still recoverable.The researchers – Storer, Glisson and Grispos – obtained second-hand phones and mobile devices from eBay and pawn shops and used digital forensics techniques to carefully examine and recover data from the phones. This data was then analysed to see if it contained personal aspects (such as domestic arrangements or private correspondence) or sensitive aspects (information that the owner would likely not wish to share with others). Here are some of their results:

From just 45 phones, they recovered over 7,000 pieces of data including nearly 2,000 images and around 2,700 SMS messages. Over 1,000 pieces of data were personal in nature and over 200 were highly sensitive (including nudity, drug use, pornography, bank account details, health information and explicit material about other contacts on the phone).

Alarmingly, of these 7,000 items 1/7th were “deleted” – their users likely believed them safely destroyed. The team observed that mobile phone operating systems do not give users the ability to completely destroy the data (unlike hard drives which can be reformatted without third-party software). They found that 20% of detectable deleted data could be recovered, and also observed that older phones were considerably worse at securely deleting data, compared to smartphones.

The research, which is still ongoing, is described in this preliminary paper (PDF). In future work they plan to compare different digital forensic techniques and look at the effectiveness of “phone scrubbers”.

As we record and perform more and more of our lives digitally, data housekeeping is just one more skill we will need to learn if we want to maintain our privacy.

Are the dictionary’s days numbered?

Alex Bowyer — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:55:58 +0000

Nigel Portwood, the Chief Executive of Oxford University Press, which prints the Oxford English Dictionary, has observed that thanks to the ease of googling for dictionary definitions or searching online on oed.com, demand for printed dictionaries is falling rapidly, “by tens of percent each year”. He speculates there may be no printed dictionary market left by 2020.

Will the dictionary go the way of the phone book? Read more at ABC News.

Can computers fix our hidden biases?

Alistair Croll — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:43:53 +0000

Computers make better decisions than humans because they aren’t weighed down by biases, ego, and the need to rationalize decisions after the fact. An economically rational player would make more money on Deal Or No Deal than a stupid human. We can’t help it: it’s the way we evolved. Everything from shopping, to teamwork, to the way we elect our leaders is tainted with the stupidity of how we make decisions.

Just as external storage can become a form of prosthetic memory, so computers can become prosthetic decision-makers. If we were to make them understand the dilemmas before us, computer assistants could advise us on the economically rational thing to do.

Would we be able to deal with being told we’re wrong so much of the time?

Evolution isn’t the best designer. While the variety of life is astonishing–prompting many to invoke a creator–a study of biology reveals plenty of inefficient compromises. For example, the Laryngeal nerve runs from the brain, down to the heart, and back up to the vocal cords. This is a terrible, wasteful, error-prone design; but because it arose from an efficient model in fish (which didn’t have long necks), it’s what we’re stuck with.

Here’s a video of a dissection of a giraffe, showing just how inefficient the nerve’s routing is. It’s not for the squeamish.

Our brains, like our bodies, evolved from these kinds of evolutionary compromises. We think we’re smart beings, making rational decisions about things; in fact, we tend to rationalize after the fact, and go with what worked in the past. This made good sense for our ancestors: they shouldn’t sit around thinking about whether that tiger was going to eat them, they should just run. We reinforce patterns that work, because they’re the ones that keep us alive.

One of the side effects of reinforcing our past beliefs is that we’re reluctant to reconsider things, even on the basis of new information. We play all sorts of mental tricks on ourselves to help us stick to our beliefs in the face of evidence to the contrary: adaptive preference formation, cognitive bias, and so on. All of these are attempts to relieve the discomfort of cognitive dissonance, a disconnect between our belief systems and the real world.

So if you’re answering a questionnaire, your early answers may bias you against later answers. Psychologists love this kind of research–generally replacing self-interest with candies, under the assumption that everyone has a sweet tooth.

According to recent research, when you ask a test subject something to do with fairness, their answer will cause them to “dig in their heels”, reinforcing their later behavior. A classic demonstration of this process is the Monty Hall problem: you’re presented with three doors, and behind one of them is a prize. You choose one of the three–but then your host reveals one of the other two and asks if you’d like to switch. This New York Times piece explains the problem, and even provides an online game you can play — though the piece reveals that some of this can be explained by pre-existing biases, not just those acquired during the test.

Whether it’s prejudice, or a learned bias forcing us to reject new evidence, the reality is that humans make decisions badly. The Prisoners’ Dilemma and other experiments show that we often make poor decisions rather than economically or morally rational ones (check out the awesome SMBC explanation of this dilemma.)

Can machines help us overcome these inefficiencies? If a computer could help guide us in decision making, we might overcome these biases. At the very least, we’d make better decisions on TV gameshows. Proponents would point out the tremendous benefits of rational decision-making: a utopian world where we all solved for maximal utility and minimal suffering. Detractors would see this as a great levelling, turning us all into automatons, bland communists with little incentive to try something new or take a risk, stripping away the biases and preferences that make us individuals.

If computers helped us decide, we’d find out that Dan Ariely is right: we’re largely irrational. But can our self-reinforcing psyches cope with being told we’re fools? Or will we reject the rational correction, retreating into costly self-affirmation and embracing our bad decisions?

Google introduces AI-as-a-service

Alistair Croll — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 19:23:21 +0000

Google’s recently launched learning engine tries to predict the future. The prediction engine takes data and tries to guess at outcomes. It’s not quite that simple: you have to supply the engine with a set of training data, and it will then try to predict new data based on what it’s learned, using a supervised learning algorithm.

By offering this as a cloud service, Google has removed an obstacle for many startups. Learning engines can predict everything from future purchases to suspicious behavior, but growing them as the data set expands can be difficult. The prediction engine can be built into applications running in Google’s App Engine, for example, making it easy to experiment with machine learning at scale. While the data is anonymous, Google does benefit from improved algorithms as it learns what works and what doesn’t.

Following on the heels of Google’s investment in Recorded Future, it’s clear the company’s mission goes far beyond putting the world’s information at our disposal. But even if Google can show the world the future, will we change what we do?

Is voice control a reality?

Alex Bowyer — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 17:28:08 +0000

The new Android software from Google, Voice Actions lets you send a text, write an email, bring up information or call a business whose number you don’t have to hand using just your voice. The demonstration is impressive (though from real world tests it does not seem to be as speedy as the demo suggests).
If it works, this could be a great feature for hands-free drivers who want to access information on the move.. but will we use it in public? So far, voice technologies have not gained mainstream adoption – some people think it is because we feel silly talking to our electronics. Perhaps, as voice recognition technology improves, the biggest barrier is no longer technological but psychological…

Find out more at TechCrunch

Is photography a human right?

Alex Bowyer — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 16:20:49 +0000

Today we photograph more than ever before – and thanks to the negligible cost, we film situations that would never have been captured before. But police and other authority figures do not want to be recorded, and all over the world a battle is playing out between officials pushing current laws to extremes to prevent such recordings, and citizens who fight back with equal vigour to protect their freedom to photograph.

Should photography be criminalized and recording devices banished from any situation where that recording might be used for ill? Or should we assert our right to capture anything we experience as a fundamental right?

16 years in prison for recording a policeman?

In Maryland, USA, the State Police are currently prosecuting motorcyclist Anthony Graber, not for speeding – a charge which he readily admits – but for video recording the officer who arrested him, as shown above. He’s being charged under wiretap laws, the claim being that he illegally recorded a private conversation without consent. If found guilty, he could face 16 years in prison. The attorney defending Mr. Graber points out that “To charge Graber with violating the law, you would have to conclude that a police officer on a public road, pulling someone over, has a right to privacy when it comes to the conversation he has with the motorist. There’s more on the story here, here and here. Many are claiming this is an example of police intimidation.

Is photographing police a crime?

There have been many incidents over the last five years of citizens around the world being challenged for recording police. Here’s just a few examples:

A man photographed a police car in a London park and was questioned by police under anti-terror laws.
A press photographer was arrested in France – and allegedly assaulted – after photographing a recreation of a murder scene.
A 16 year old boy was harassed by police for photographing police cadets at a passing out parade in Romford, UK.
A freelance writer in Arizona had his camera seized and photos deleted when he tried to capture a skirmish that was taking place at a Mexican border crossing.
A photographer in Nottingham, UK was arrested for photographing a police armed response.
In Florida, a man was tackled to the ground and charged with nine misdemeanors after photographing police in a construction zone.
A journalist was handcuffed and arrested for photographing a road traffic accident near Milton Keynes, UK.

In all of these cases, there is ambiguity over precisely which law, if any was broken. The incidents appear to be more fuelled by individual police officers’ sentiments about being photographed.

Andy Handley, the journalist in the last example, observed when interviewed at the time, “This is a worrying development in the relationship between [the police] and the media.. It is the right of the media to operate unhindered that helps keep the liberty of all in this country.”

With this, he has hit the nail on the head. In both the USA and the UK, police are effectively an extension of the democratically-elected government – ultimately answerable to the people – and while they have authority to enforce the rule of law, they are subject to those same laws themselves.

To prosecute citizens that photograph them would break this equality, and could enable governments or law enforcement agencies to abuse their power. If citizens cannot scrutinize police and hold them to account, what is to prevent them breaking the very laws they are there to uphold? As one commenter on the Graber case said, “The [US] first amendment was specifically intended to allow for dissemination of information regarding improper use of authority”. Or as Plato first asked in The Republic, “Who watches the watchers?”.

A delicate balance

While individuals feel their liberties are being curtailed, clearly police feel threatened by photographers, sometimes even just by their presence. And it’s true that terrorists could gather information for planning attacks by taking photographs of police operations or public gatherings. It’s also true that there are many innocent, legal reasons to photograph those same scenes. It is impossible to criminalize the intent, only the behaviour.

The police are in a difficult situation. When the Olympic flame visited Montréal earlier this year, I personally witnessed riot police being harassed by protestors, who threw snowballs to provoke them, while other protestors stood, “armed” with video cameras ready to capture any police wrong-doing. It was the first time I’ve seen a camera used as a weapon.

What do you think the law should be? Were these police right to intervene, or were the citizens right to stand up for their right to photograph?

Join in with this important debate and add your comments below – or on Twitter with the hashtag #human20.

We’ll be exploring this topic more in future posts, looking at the sensitive issue of photographing children as well as recent grassroots efforts to protect photographers’ rights, so send us your thoughts and we may include them in those posts.

Augmented television concept interface

Alex Bowyer — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 14:34:09 +0000

More and more pop-outs, banners and information scrollers are starting to appear on our television sets, particularly during news and sports coverage. And many of us really don’t like that clutter on the screen – though the information is useful. A new concept software interface, MetaMirror, offers a solution – the use of an iPad or tablet to show the same view as your TV, but with all the statistics, scores and replays overlaid on top of it.

It will be interesting as iPads and tablets become more mainstream to see if we see this idea take off.

Could paying with plastic become a thing of the past?

Alex Bowyer — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 13:54:11 +0000

The two biggest mobile companies in the US, AT&T and Verizon Wireless, are teaming up to launch a new financial venture, which will allow consumers to pay for goods with a swipe of their smartphone – in effect forming a new banking entity and putting them in direct competition with the likes of Mastercard and Visa (who already have contactless payment methods called “payPass” and “payWave”).

What’s interesting about this development is that it uses something most of us already have – a smartphone – so the barrier to entry will be much lower. And as one expert put it, “The mobile carriers are the biggest recurring billers in every market. They are experts at processing payments.”

Perhaps in the future our banks won’t be banks, but phone companies.

Recorded Future predicts what you’ll think

Alistair Croll — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 12:25:17 +0000

In The Shockwave Rider, his 1970s vision of a future that’s arriving faster than we can deal with it, John Brunner talks about Delphi Pools. These public, crowdsourced lotteries let citizens bet on predictions. The government uses this data to decide what’s most important to the population.

Break out your tinfoil hats: now Google and the CIA may be up to the same thing, having invested in a “temporal analytics” startup called Recorded Future last year.

According to Wired:

The CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

Sentiment analysis is nothing new; what’s different here seems to be the visualization and extrapolation of past trends into the future.

Like Brunner’s Delphi, this helps guess what might happen, but rather than soliciting our input directly the way prediction markets do, this uses the trails we leave online — links, comments, retweets, and so on. The predictions can include competitive intelligence, brand monitoring, and personal investigation.

Incidentally, in Brunner’s novel, the government uses the Delphi pools to placate an otherwise implacable citizenry, and often alters the results before publishing them to sway public opinion.

Mapping the human brain

Alistair Croll — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 12:37:14 +0000

GigaOm has a great piece on IBM’s efforts to map the brain. It’s a long way from downloading ourselves into a computer, but this interview shows just how far we’ve come — and how much more there is to do.

Go visit GigaOm for Stacey’s take on the discussion. Mapping the brain has tremendous potential for both good and bad. We can tackle diseases and cure trauma; but we can also understand when someone is lying, or manipulate them below their conscious defenses. IBM’s efforts center around simulating the way brains work within computer systems, and mapping real brains is key to that effort.

(Hat tip to Duncan Hill for the pointer)

The web means the end of forgetting

Alistair Croll — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 10:01:53 +0000

Via @lennysan, this is a great piece on how public, prosthetic memories will change us forever. Humans forget things with good reason: forgetting lets us discard old ideas in favor of new ones, and pain recedes so we can try things like childbirth again. Not so digital memory.

There’s a growing movement to put a statute of limitations on public digital data, even as Google reveals that it’s stored every search since its launch and the Library of Congress is archiving every Tweet.

As this Ars Technica piece points out, “in an age of ever-cheaper storage, the data committed to machine memory requires an act of will to delete.”

Would you know if you were in the Matrix?

Alistair Croll — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 13:22:49 +0000

It’s one of the great philosophical debates of all time. Given enough computing horsepower, would we know the difference between the real world and a simulated one? With the cost of bandwidth, computing, and storage dropping precipitously, it’s harder and harder to tell the real from the simulated.

Check out the Lagoa Multiphysics plugin for Softimage. It’s pretty impressive. Tools like this do for interactive visualization what still-image tools like Photofuse do for traditional photographs.

You might argue that to really trick us into believing the world around us was a simulation, each particle the software represented could only consume one particle of computing infrastructure. But isn’t that what the universe looks like? And did I just blow your mind?

Apps without Programming

Alex Bowyer — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 17:11:07 +0000

The new App Inventor takes Google’s “do what you like with your gadgets” approach one step further, by enabling anyone – even those who have never programmed before – to create their own apps with drag and drop ease.

App Inventor is a simple user interface for creating applications for the Android mobile platform, working in a similar way to Visual Basic – you drag buttons onto your screen and attach actions to them.

It’s interesting because in an age where there is fierce debate over whether you have the right to reprogram your device and customize it for your own use (consider Apple’s iOS vs Google’s Android), this presents a third option – by equipping ordinary people to develop exactly the functionality they need, without having to go outside the bounds of a controlled environment. Might we see Apple offer something similar for iPhones soon?

It’s also interesting to consider that if MySpace, Facebook and blogs took the idea of people creating websites and web content into the mainstream, what could happen if the capability to create software became equally mainstream? It would be sure to spark a total revolution in the way we think about computers…

Visualizing big data

Alistair Croll — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 16:21:18 +0000

Making sense of the huge reams of data around us isn’t easy. Sometimes it takes new visualizations and dimensions, like the ones in this photo set on Flickr, prepared as part of Wired UK’s latest issue. The image at right shows how we can track human mobility from cellphone data.

As we drink from the firehose, we’ll get informational obesity — there’s a reason they call it a feed. New interfaces — from the immersive to the augmented — will be key to coping with it. This set has some tantalizing suggestions of what that might look like.

Teen computer use survey misses the point

Alex Bowyer — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 20:10:05 +0000

A new survey shows that teens in the Ontario average seven hours a day of “screen time”.

The study grouped together time spent watching TV and Internet use as “sedentary behaviour” and suggests a link to a decline in physical and mental health among the students.

What’s interesting here is the implicit suggestion that a person’s entire use of a computer could be considered as a bad thing. Grouping all computer time together with watching TV as “screen time” is, I think, somewhat irresponsible and fails to recognize the diverse roles computers play in our lives.

It’s true that computers can be used for consuming content (YouTube videos or internet TV channels for example) as well as for solitary activities like playing games. These things should perhaps be moderated as you might TV use.

But computers can be used for so many other things now – researching homework assignments, communicating with friends, collaborating with other students, planning trips or shopping. So to group all these activities together as if they are all self-indulgent activities that could be completely avoided is unrealistic at best.

The reality is that computers are now so integrated into our daily lives, and even more so with the younger generation, that to consider taking “screens” out of the equation wholly is simply not possible.

A more interesting piece of research would separate solitary entertainment activities from productive or communication activities, and also look at the differences between students doing such activities offline or online.

It’s also worth considering what the researchers might have found if they’d looked at adults. Most of the office-bound population has seven hours of sedentary time a day – it’s called doing their work at their desk! In this context, the researchers findings are nothing special.

AR meets 3D modeling

Alistair Croll — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 13:57:37 +0000

Techi has a piece on Leonar3Do, a new take on 3D modeling. It looks as far from traditional modeling tools as they were from pen and paper.

Years ago, I played around with 3D modeling (and narrowly avoided a career at Matrox and Softimage in the process.) Building models was tedious: manipulating 3D space with two-dimensional tools like a mouse and a screen is tough. Software relies on all sorts of controllers, UI conceits, and tricks: rotating the onscreen image; holding down shift to move along the third dimension, and so on.

Google acquired Sketchup to help crowdsource 3D content for Google Earth largely because it was comparatively easy to use. But so far, we can’t work with 3D content in three dimensions.

That’s about to change: using modeling tools and AR visualization, designers can actually manipulate in three dimensions. Which will go a long way to making 3D models mainstream, unlocking all kinds of use cases.

Who knows, maybe soon, we’ll have opt-in vandalism, where taggers add 3D objects to the real world for those who want to see them.

Visualization at two extremes

Alistair Croll — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 20:26:07 +0000

I’ve been spending a lot of time on interfaces and visualization lately, as part of a new conference that melds Big Data, Ubiquitous Computing, and New Interfaces. Along the way, I was struck by these two extremes of visualization.

At one extreme, there’s the Canadian filmmaker who’s implanted a camera in his eye socket. It’s a great example of embedded, ubiquitous data collection — something we’ll likely all take for granted very soon. This is visualization in the truest sense.

At the other end of the spectrum is the Allosphere, an immersive, three-storey-tall sphere used for visualizing and interacting with data.

These two spheres are very different. One collects a single person’s perspective; the other reveals huge amounts of data. One shows things at an intimate, human scale; the other zooms out to galazies or in to neurons.

What do your words say about you?

Alex Bowyer — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 14:48:08 +0000

Before email, blogging and e-books, words were confined to the printed page. You would read the physical book in order from start to finish. But now we can now pull apart bodies of text, cross-reference them, share extracts, edit them and even plagiarize them, with unprecedented ease. With the advent of digital publishing we can analyze a body of text to see what words are used and how, using freely available online tools.

They say a picture’s worth a thousand words. But what’s a picture of a thousand words worth? Tag clouds – visual clusters of words where size denotes importance – have been used for everything from navigating blogs to finding popular photographs. They’re a must-have in Web 2.0. But when Jonathan Feinberg of IBM Research created Wordle in 2008, researchers and curious readers gained a new tool. You can generate a tag cloud of any body of text – from news articles or PhD theses to blog posts or whole books; here is a tag cloud of the Bible. The two most popular generators are Wordle and Tagxedo, but there are many alternatives.

Tag clouds can be used to quickly summarize the language used. For example, I generated this tag cloud of the coalition agreement between the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties in the UK using Wordle:

You can digest some things right away – clearly this is a document about topics the two parties agree on. Also, the Liberal Democrats and their preferred topics (Europe, referendum, welfare) seem prominent – could this indicate they dominated the negotiations?

We must be careful. Tag clouds don’t take into account the context – positive or negative – in which a word was used. The prominence of words like work, tax, or referendum does not tell us anything at-a-glance about the authors’ attitude toward those topics.

However, during the lead up to the US Presidential election, the Boston Globe used Wordle to analyze the blogs of the two main candidates, and were able to draw some interesting conclusions:

Here is their tag cloud of Obama’s blog:

Here is the tag cloud of McCain’s blog:

We immediately see that McCain spent more words talking about Obama than any other topic – and that there are many more negative words in McCain’s cloud.

Tag clouds reveal a great deal about two sources when viewed side by side. A detailed analysis was published by the Globe, and a similar approach has been used to compare historical US presidential speeches.

Today, even people who don’t have a blog produce thousands of words digitally – in emails, on social networks and in text documents. Researchers can now make all sorts of interesting insights by analyzing people’s words in digital form. For example, Agatha Christie may have had Alzheimer’s. These tools are now available to everyone.

Here is a Tagxedo tag cloud generated from Stephen Fry’s blog:

Stephen writes a lot about the current events, such as the new UK government and the launch of the Apple iPad. Without ever meeting him or hearing him speak, you know that politics, technology and people are important to him. This is something employers in particular will find useful. With Wordle, you can even judge someone by the bookmarks they share on delicious - as my colleagues Roo Reynolds and Andy Piper have demonstrated.

Here’s a useful exercise: Find the longest document you’ve ever written, and paste it into Wordle. The results can be enlightening. I generated this tag cloud based on my “Zen of Productivity” post from 2008:

I can tell straight away that I over-use the word “things” and “something” and that I use simple words like “get”, “find”, “work” “want” and “make” heavily (which may or may not be a good thing). I can also tell that I favour analytical words like “think” and “system” over emotive words like “feel”, “love” and “creative”. As a writer, such information can be invaluable – it can help you tailor your language to your audience.

Some words appear more than once – “Happy” and “happy”, “get” and “getting”, etc. Plurals and capitalizations are thought to be different words. For a more accurate tag cloud, you often need to weed your text first by finding and replacing occurrences of similar words with a single form – for example finding all occurrences of “needs” and replace them with “need”.

These simple analyses are just the tip of the iceberg. Already, researchers are harnessing the outputs from this explosion of digital literacy to solve all manner of problems from automatically detecting plagiarism to understanding how children develop syntax. Entire fields of linguistic study are now automated. As computers understand more of our words and the semantic web grows, it’s only a matter of time until tools empower every one of us as linguistic forensic scientists.

“Future Day” mistake spreads like wildfire online

Alex Bowyer — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 14:33:12 +0000

The well known sci-fi movie trilogy Back to the Future got a lot of attention online yesterday when it was “revealed” that July 5th, 2010 was the date in the future that Marty and the Doc travel to at the start of the second movie. The only problem is, as the more astute fans will know, that this date never actually featured in the movies. The date in question is actually in 2015.

The mistake originated from Total Film magazine in the UK, and when they discovered their mistake, they jokingly “went back in time to fix it” (a.k.a. photoshopping a screen capture from the movie). Unfortunately, this image then spread around the Internet as “proof” that July 5th 2010 was really in the movie. Soon the Future day meme was trending on Twitter and receiving tens of thousands of searches on Google. There’s even a new variant of the image with July 6th as the date… and the meme continues.

This incident highlights both the speed at which information spreads online, and also how readily people will accept anything they read online, without taking the time to dig deeper or verify facts – something that will become more and more commonplace as we become more saturated with information from so many sources.

Read the full story at Total Film.

Finland makes broadband a legal right

Alex Bowyer — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:16:59 +0000

Finland becomes the first country in the world to make Internet access a legal right for its citizens, at a minimum speed of 1Mbps, when a new law comes into force today.

This means that ISPs cannot refuse to connect someone, no matter how costly or remote. It’s a technical and financial challenge for ISPs, but great for helping the world move towards an open, connected future and avoiding a divided society with “haves and have nots”.

Meanwhile, the UK is moving in the opposite direction, with the recently passed Digital Economy Act threatening to disconnect users who are accused of copyright infringement. A new government initiative called Your Freedom invites the public to reclaim lost freedoms by voting for laws to repeal. Perhaps we will see a course-correction soon.