RENTAL HYGIENE

Dick Pountain /Idealog 353/ 06 Dec 2023 12:02

My ideas for this column often come from newspaper stories, and this one was about Meta (The Corporation That Used To Be Called Facebook, or MTCTUTBCF for short) which has just launched ad-free, subscription-only versions of Facebook and Instagram to comply with a new EU privacy law. That law, first deployed in Norway, prohibits tech companies from forcing users to agree to targeted advertising to use their products: the user must be free “to individually refuse consent to certain data processing operations … without being forced to completely waive the use of the service.” 

Charging money for the product instead of monetising users’ data through advertising is one way to comply, hence Meta responded by offering paid subscription versions of Instagram and Facebook as “a valid form of consent for an ads-funded service”. This means all the major online platforms now offer a choice between a ‘free’ ad-funded and a subscription or rental version: Amazon has Prime, Google has YouTube Premium, while content-providers like Netflix and Disney+ offer no other model. 

Economists of both left and right persuasion tend to frown upon ‘rent-seeking’ – that is, making money from what you merely own rather than what you make or what you do – as it’s reputed to stifle innovation and competition and is often a symptom of monopoly. That’s as may be, but there are obvious cases (for example water, electricity and communications utilities) where renting their service is the only sensible route – Margaret Thatcher’s attempt to get us to own a slice of them fizzled within months as people sold their windfall shares to buy wide-screen tellies.

Personally I have very few software services, like Spotify, that I use often enough that subscription makes sense, but I do rent 100Gb of extra cloud storage from Google for a very reasonable £20 per annum. What has me seriously irritated though is the recent wave of small and far-from-essential vendors rushing into the rental-only model, presumably as a survival tactic in the face of dwindling revenues. 

I recently went shopping for several music-related Android apps, including a guitar chord guide, a DAW (Digital Audio Workstations) and a video editor, and was astonished to find that so many of the competent ones now employ the same come-on, a ‘free’ 7-day trial but give us your credit card number now (tantamount to inertia selling, the weapon of encyclopaedia salesmen through the ages). I did eventually find one of each that was good enough and offered an old-fashioned “give us £XX to remove the ads and own it” deal with which I’m perfectly happy.  

A similar Gadarene rush into rent-seeking appears to have infected many of the content sources I’ve seen relying on for years, who have recently started teasing with the first few paras of an article before greying-out the rest and demanding my wallet. I’d often be prepared to pay a reasonable sum for a single article (though many academic sites want far-from-reasonable bucks, assuming your institution is paying) but I really don’t need yet another monthly subscription.

I’ll confess that over the years I’d cultivated an Artful-Dodger-like skill in getting over, around or under paywalls: once it was enough just to Google the article title outside the site (they got wise to that), then more exotic tricks like reading the Pocket-saved version (they got wise to that too). Now I just don’t bother with them as I have too much to read anyway, and I suspect many others feel the same way. 

This is not a traditional kind of rent seeking which exploits monopoly over an essential service, but instead vendors manipulating the sheer ease of the buy-now, one-button-press billing/payment process to convert customers to ‘subscriptions’ that they neither want nor need. It’s always been a problem for software vendors that their products are expensive to develop, cheap to copy and become out-of-date quickly and rental can look like a solution to all those problems, but it really does diminish the incentive to innovate or improve features: shrink to a skeleton team of maintenance developers, move to a subscription model, hey presto all revenue becomes almost pure profit, which keeps investors happy and pressures your competitors toward a rent-seeking model too.

Because people can be persuaded that digital goods aren’t quite like physical goods, renting them may weaken ownership rights over a purchase that can be turned off if you don’t pay up. This is what has the EU worried, not just about the services themselves but about the users’ private data – invalidating ownership rights without the explicit consent of the owner is tantamount to theft. Call me old-fashioned but I prefer to own the tools of my trade. I carry out pretty frequent audits of my subscriptions, of how much I use them, and dump without mercy. 

[Dick Pountain finds the ads on Facebook more hilarious than most of the content]

 

MY OTHER COMPUTER IS A LENOVO?

Dick Pountain /Idealog 352/ 06 Nov 2023 12:56

I’ve had a vague intuition that Android might become the number one OS in the world – simply because of its ubiquity on smartphones – but I wasn’t prepared for the actual market shares recently announced: Android 42%, Windows 28%, iOS 17%, macOS 7%, ChromeOS 1.3% and desktop Linux 1.2% (as of April 2023). 

This being so I wasn’t too surprised to read last week that Lenovo is teaming up with Android specialist Esper to revamp its ThinkCentre M70 line into an all-in-one desktop Android PC, using Intel Core processors all the way from an entry-level i3 up to i9s. I’ve made no secret in this column that nowadays I use a Chromebook rather than a Windows PC, but what I’ve not emphasised is that in effect it’s an Android laptop. ChromeOS offers a pleasant enough basic cloud file system, but ChromeOS apps are largely rubbish and its Web Store is a joke. Apart from Google Docs, in which I’m writing this, everything I do is done via Android apps. Strictly speaking of course Android runs inside ChromeOS on top of Linux, but I rarely go there, so let’s not.

It all works remarkably well and the common fallacy that there aren’t any grown-up Android apps is just not true (though admittedly it’s taken me a while to find them). Apart from Docs I now have an excellent photo-editor, draw/paint apps, MIDI editor and DAW that serve very well in place of Office, Photoshop and Ableton. Freedom from Windows upgrades and malware horrors is delightful, and backup ceases to be a nightmare, except…Except, I’m so paranoid by temperament that although everything is ‘safe’ in Google’s cloud, I want it local too. Hence I keep a tiny 128Gb USB stickette permanently occupying one port and write all my data – not apps – to that. (A couple of times a year I also copy this stick to a separate hard-drive for archive). Google wouldn’t approve, but it keeps me happy. This does somewhat restrict my choice of Android apps to only those grown-up enough to recognise external drives, and it complicates my mental image too because now there are three separate memory spaces to consider: the Cloud, the Chromebook’s internal memory and the USB. Such triplicity turned around to bite my hand, albeit mildly, recently. I’d started getting messages that the computer was running low on space, and the Files app did indeed show that only around 30Mb of the 24Gb internal memory were free. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that most of the space was being eaten up by Android apps, which appear under a tree called Play Files (named after the Android Play Store). Within that tree 6.5Gb of the space was being consumed by the subfolder Android/data, and when I peeked in there I felt a familiar creeping spine-shiver – familiar because it reminded me of years of trauma in the dank, dripping Windows Registry. It seems that most Android apps you install create their own subtree there, but few remove it fully, or indeed at all, when you uninstall them. And it was then that I discovered you can’t delete folders in Play Files using the Files app, because you lack the Linux permissions.  

After an exciting couple of days where I saw ChromeOS naked, not a pretty sight, an alternative file manager called Cx File Explorer told me that Play Files is really called system/storage/emulated/0/ and the USB drive is called system/storage/7875C92D409CB3B4F21633193CC4E1DFSAE2FAB7 (system programmers are a curious breed, a bit like that bloke in The Hurt Locker). It also let me delete most of the cruft, with much pondering over which might still be important. One alone, DCIM, the digital camera folder, still resisted deletion and reported its size as 635Gb, clearly absurd. Eventually I nuked that one from orbit using the Linux console and nothing broke: photos now arrive in Downloads just fine and I can keep a workable 6Gb of free internal memory.

The moral of this story? I still like Android a lot, it’s an excellent cushion-cover for the prickly horror that is Linux, and I’ve even acquired the ability to write GUI apps in Python for it. What’s more I’m not ashamed of my belt-and-braces affection for local storage and hope that perhaps Lenovo’s partnership with Esper might prod Google into completing the proper integration of ChromeOS with Android that it promised back in 2015 but never delivered. Given Microsoft’s never-ending nightmares with post-10 Windows versions, and given a whole generation reared on Android phones, Lenovo could be onto a winner if it dares go beyond its stated targets of the retail, hospitality and healthcare industries and tests whether keenly-priced Android PCs could become giant killers. 

 [Dick Pountain sometimes feels his own internal memory is down to 30Mb]

FAKING FRIENDSHIP

Dick Pountain /Idealog 351/ 07 Oct 2023 02:08

“Man told to kill the Queen by his AI girlfriend!” History may some day recognise that as the most perfectly-formed tabloid headline ever, but right now it’s merely a symptom.To put it another way, it’s an answer to the question ”what do you get if you cross a moral panic with a feeding frenzy?” I’ll have to admit that I hesitated before embarking on yet another column on AI, which I’ve been covering for over 40 years, right from the days of Lisp, Eliza and ‘expert systems’ up to creating pictures of yucky seafood dishes with Stable Diffusion. A couple of events forced my hand though, convincing me that evading the topic isn’t an option this month.   

The first of those events was the CogX Festival 2023. I first covered this event back in 2019 when it was held near where I live, at the newly-opened King’s Cross Granary Square site. Around 10,000 people attended some 500+ sessions given by leading AI techies from the UK and USA. The audience was overwhelmingly young, 20-somethings wearing backpacks and plaid shirts and either already working as AI developers, or wanting to. I was given a press pass and heard genuinely revelatory talks about deep-learning convolutions and IPU (Intelligence Processing Unit) architectures. 

During the Covid years CogX continued via Zoom and was inevitably far less exciting, but I still ‘attended’ perhaps a dozen sessions. CogX 2023 has just been held in the 02 stadium and attended by around 90,000, hearing over 1000 speakers on 10 stages, including celebrities like Stephen Fry and the Queen of Jordan. I didn’t even bother applying for a press pass and the ticketing structure was quite byzantine - you could get a free pass to get in, but then had to purchase ‘add-ons’ to actually hear anything, which could amount to anywhere from £500 to over £1000. I’d guess that’s simply because the emphasis is now on attracting investors rather than recruiting plaid shirts: AI has arrived, applications and commercialisation take precedence over research and development. 

The other significant event took place at home where, among several old friends we had to dinner were a director of an important science picture library and a professional photographer for a large media corporation. Both were apprehensive about the effects of AI on their businesses. The main AI large-language models have already ‘scraped’ the entire contents of R’s picture library, and there’s currently nothing they can do to prevent this. J travels the world photographing hard-to-capture events: a picture of his that once went viral was of a huge wave hitting a lighthouse in which the face of Poseidon appeared among the foam. He pointed out that nowadays anyone can replicate such a picture in Midjourney in five minutes without leaving their sofa. 

CogX to its credit still records the festival sessions and releases the videos for free on YouTube after it’s finished, so I went through the list of videos looking for in-depth technical ones that might spark a  future column. I found very few of those, but did find one that was highly relevant to that question I posed above – Gillian Tett of the Financial Times interviewed Yuval Noah Harari, author of the best-selling popular philosophy/anthropology book ‘Sapiens’.

Harari’s take on our current situation is that the first wave of social media sought to capture our attention by using clicks and likes, and sold these on to advertisers at colossal profit. But this will soon be displaced by a coming second wave of AI-driven media that instead solicit our affection by mimicking human feelings. AI agents will in effect give back attention to the alienated, isolated millions who believe that no-one is listening to them. This is a far more dangerous matter – instead of encouraging passive scrolling and shopping, it may recruit people to perform actions (like killing the Queen). Harari argues that AI needs to be regulated, sensibly but avoiding a total ban that would throw away all the potential benefits, and to this end he suggested to Tett three concrete policy proposals:

 1) To gain public trust, AI regulation will require international institutions that will have to be financed by a 20% levy on tech companies profits.         

 2) There should be an absolute ban on passing off AI agents as human beings (with jail penalties like those for counterfeiting or fraud).

 3) Bots must not be granted freedom of speech, and their owners should remain legally responsible for all their utterances.

I’d probably add to these that royalties be paid for content scraped from existing sources, similar to those from music streaming services (which themselves urgently need reforming). And perhaps some kind of vetting of AI girlfriends for homicidal impulses might be a good idea too.   

[Dick Pountain was disturbed to find that ChatGPT has better musical taste than many of his friends]