Decoding the new economy

Greetings from the scammers

While the online scams evolve, the venal stupidity of victims doesn’t

The notorious “419 scams” have been around since the early days of the consumer internet.

419 scams are the elaborate internet frauds that try to convince people they unexpectedly come into money. Once a gullible victim takes the bait, they are duped into paying a range of ‘facilitation fees’ and costs that drains their saving.

The term 419 scam comes from the Nigerian criminal code that covers this crime, which was appropriate as most — although not all — of these emails originated from the country.

For a while in the early 2000s, internet users became used to receiving a few 419 scam emails every day but by the middle of the decade they largely dried up as the even the most gullible and greedy idiots became wise to the schemes.

That’s not to say they have completely vanished, this morning quite a distasteful one landed in my inbox.

Greetings,
I wish to seek your assistance to execute a business deal. I am Paul Williams a Contract Agent based in London. I require your consent to present you as next of kin to a client of mine, who died along with his wife and Two kids in the Asian Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines leaving behind a large sum of money without a next of kin. With your co-operation and information available to me you can make a claim on the funds as the next of kin to my deceased client. After release of the funds to you by the financial institution where it is lodged, we can share according to a percentage we agree upon. If you may be of assistance, please reply for further co-operation.
Best Regards,

Paul Williams.

It’s unlikely that Paul Williams exists and even if he did it’s unlikely he’d have anything to do with this unsavory scam that most people would immediate bin when they receive it.

Binning the message was my reaction as well, but as I was about to, it occurred to me that there are enough venal, stupid people in the world who would agree to be involved in such a deal.

No doubt if you asked them they’d say defrauding the deceased family’s estate is a victimless crime as the money would only end up with the government anyway, these people would swear blind they are honest, honourable folk and no doubt they would think they are rather clever.

It’s worth reflecting that dishonest, venal and somewhat dim people do occasionally get their come-uppance in today’s world.

Will the internet’s insecurities damage economic growth?

Online security problems are chronic and costing our economies billions claim researchers.

“No country is cyber-ready” warns Melissa Hathaway, author the Cyber-Readiness Report.

Hathaway’s warning is that the economic benefits of the internet are being lost to the various vulnerabilities in our information infrastructure.

Dutch research company TNO claims that the Netherlands lost up to 2% of their GDP to cybercrime in 2010 and Hathaway claims similar losses are being incurred in other developed countries.

Supporting Hathaway’s views at a function in Sydney today, Cisco System’s Senior Vice President and Chief Security Officer, John Stewart, made a frightening observation about corporate networks.

“Every single customer we have checked with, and these are the Fortune 2000, has high threat malware operating in their environment – every single one of them.”

So the bad guys are in our networks and causing real economic damage. The question for businesses and governments is how do we manage this threat and mitigate any losses?

On our more intimate level, how do we manage our own systems and online behaviour to limit our personal or business losses?

Hathaway makes the point that the internet was never intended to do the job we now expect it to do and as consequence security was never built into the net’s design.

Today, we rely upon the internet regardless of its lack of inbuilt security. With everyone from governments through to organised crime and petty scammers wanting to peek at our data, we have to start taking security far more seriously.

The Digital Fallacy

Businesses don’t need a Chief Digital Officer, it’s one of many fallacies about the digital economy

Earlier this week Telstra held their 2013 Digital Summit in Melbourne, a curious event featuring a bunch of US based experts to tell the locals what they should have already known about the changing business landscape.

The reversion of Australian business to a 1950s colonial cringe is worth a blog post in itself, however more interesting was the assertion that every organisation should appoint a Chief Digital Officer.

A Chief Digital Officer is an idea based on the flawed fallacy that digital technologies are unique and separate from other business functions.

The Chief Electricity Officer

Digital is simply the way business is done these days and has been since the electronic calculator appeared in the 1970s – having a Chief Digital Officer is akin to appointing a Chief Electricity Officer.

The role of a Chief Digital Officer is an idea usually pushed by social media experts and other fringe digerati that perversely undermines the very roles they are trying to promote.

By putting “digital” into its own organisational silo, the proponents of a Chief Digital Officer are actually advocating marginalising their own fields. It’s also counterproductive for a business that follows this advice.

The real challenge for those pushing digital technologies is putting the business case for their particular field and in most cases, such as social media or cloud computing, the argument for adopting them is usually compelling in some part of every organisation, but it shouldn’t be overplayed.

More than just marketing

An aspect heavily overplayed in the commentary around the Telstra Digital Summit was the role of social media with most people focusing on branding and marketing.

If you believe this is the extant of ‘digital business’, then you’re in for a nasty shock as supply chains become increasingly automated, Big Data makes companies smarter and the internet of machines accelerates the business cycle even more. Social media is only a small part of the ‘digital business’ story.

Over-stating the role of individual technologies is something that’s common when people have books or seminars to spruik – which, funny enough, is exactly what Telstra’s international speakers were doing.

It’s understandable that an author or speaker will overstate the benefits of their project, but it doesn’t mean that you should fall for the fallacies in their arguments.

ABC Nightlife Computers – explaining the internet of things

For the November 2013 Nightlife, we look at the Internet of things and smart cities

Paul Wallbank joins Tony Delroy to discuss how technology affects your business and life. For the November 2013 Nightlife spot we’ll be looking at the internet of everything.

If you missed the show, you can listen to the recording at the Nightlife website.

The internet of everything is the next big thing in the tech industry, but what how is it any different from the web we know today that’s given us cute pictures of cats, Twitter and the end of newspapers? Some of the questions we’ll cover include;

what exactly is the internet of things?
how is it different from today’s internet?
is this just another tech industry slogan like big data or social media?
things like aircraft have been connected to the net for years, why is this suddenly news?
what sort of machines are we talking about connecting?
some industry pundits are saying this business could be worth $14 trillion dollars, where do they get this number from?
how are governments looking at using these technologies?
During the week it was reported Google have patented a tattoo with an embedded microphone.
so what happens when viruses get into our wearable technologies and connected fridge?

Part of the show will cover the geek’s tour of Barcelona and the interview with Antoni Vires, Deputy Mayor of the city on how the Spanish industrial centre sees it’s role as a connected city.

We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on the night on 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.

Tune in on your local ABC radio station from 10pm Eastern Summer time or listen online at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

You can SMS Nightlife’s talkback on 19922702, or through twitter to @paulwallbank using the #abcnightlife hashtag or visit the Nightlife Facebook page.

Malware writing becomes bigtime crime.

The online bad guys are now professionals and we have to start taking them very seriously

“Fifteen years ago we saw a thousand types a malware a month, now we see a three thousand a day,” states Richard Cohen, Threat Operations Manager of Sophos Lab during a tour of the company’s head office outside Oxford in England last week.

That one statistic alone describes the scale of online security risks facing every computer user. Making matters worse is that the attackers have moved from enthusiastic amateurs to committed professionals.

A particularly notable change for home and small businesses has been the risk of ‘ransomware’ where a computer’s data is held hostage by the bad guys until an unlock code is paid for.

Like many things in the computer world, ransomware isn’t new however the latest breed uses the latest cryptographic tools.

“Now there’s money involved, there’s serious effort,” says Sophos Labs’ Vice President Simon Reed. “The quality of malware has gone up.”

The early versions of ransomware were a joke, usually just being a scary opening screen warning people of the FBI or a similar agency had detected illegal downloads on their computer. Today – according to Sophos’ researchers – the new breed of malware features high level encryption that locks away data fairly comprehensively.

While the researchers at Sophos were briefing me on the online risks they see, on the other side of the world Eugene Kasperski, founder of Russia’s most successful computer security company, was addressing an Australian National Press Club lunch on the state of the anti-virus market.

“Traditional criminals are stupid,” Kasperski told the lunch. “Computer criminals are different. They are geeks; geeks with broken minds.”

The message to homes and small business from both Kasperski and Sophos is quite clear – you have to take online security seriously. Start doing so now.

Building a protocol for smart cities

Can cities standardise the way they connect to the internet of things?

One of the challenges for governments with smart city technologies is that most administrations don’t know the questions to ask about them, the City Protocol initiative aims to address this problem.

During the recent Internet of Things conference in Barcelona, Barcelona Deputy Mayor Antoni Vives discussed the objectives of the City Protocol Initiative.

“The solutions for our problems are more or less the same,” Vives says. “The problems cities have is they are too weak to talk to big corporations to ask for the solutions we need.”

“So the idea is to set up standard solutions in the way the internet protocol did through agreements between cities around the world and then through these agreements we set up standards that can be developed anywhere around the world in a very cheap way in a physical way that can improve people’s lives.”

The cities protocol already has fifty cities signed up to the protocol and partnerships with corporations ranging from Cisco to Schneider and Microsoft along with universities such as the MIT, the London School of Economics and the University of Chicago

Barcelona’s city government was instrumental in setting up the protocol following a visit to Cisco’s head office in 2012.

“We went to San Francisco and we explained to these guys, ‘we have a plan for our city, why don’t you join us?’ Provided that we convert this plan for Barcelona into something applicable and scalable for any city in the world.”

“What you have in Barcelona is something we want to scale and replicate anywhere in the world,” Vires proudly states. “The technology you see in Barcelona is something you’re going to see in ten years time in Addis Ababa, Quito, Johannesburg or Moscow. That’s the real revolution.”

Vires sees the smart city technologies changing the way councils and governments work with citizens, “we have discovered that rather than going from the administration to the citizens, going from the citizens to the people improves our own models. We never forget these guys are the people who pay our wages.”

“If you put a device in the city that can talk to them, then people are going to interact with the city in a way they have never done.”

As well as seeing it changing the way governments communicate with people, Vires is enthusiastic about what technology can do for his council delivering services to residents

“I have to have the best tools in my hands to deliver a better quality of life for my people.”

There are some risks though with the smart city technologies, particularly that of inclusion with less advantaged, immigrant or older age groups. Vires tells a story to illustrate how this is a priority for the city.

“We installed the smart bus stop,” says Vires. “There was an old woman and this bus stop has slots to charge mobiles and that old woman went to the slot, took a penny from her pocket and tried to put the penny into the slot as she thought she had to put a coin into the slot to make it work.”

“We have to make sure that that old woman understands that device is there to serve her, not to put coins into but to give her a better service.”

The old lady’s story illustrates the challenge facing all governments in implementing new technologies in making sure that everyone has access to the new services. Addressing the problem of equal access will probably be one of the greatest tasks facing the Cities Protocol team.

Into the ruins of Bedlam – visiting the industrial revolution’s birthplace

A quick tour of the Industrial Revolution’s birthplace.

Nestled in a quiet wooded valley near the modern town of Telford in the English Midlands is the birthplace of the industrial revolution.

Today the three quiet villages — Coalbrookdale, Coalport and Ironbridge are quaint little communities but two hundred years ago they were the powerhouse of the Industrial revolution.

ironbridge-wooded-valley — The hills around Ironbridge

Coal and ironstone mining in the district started in medieval times with the locals having a wide range of words to describe different types of coal — Lancashire Ladies, Randle and Clod being just a few terms.

Iron had been smelted at Coalbrookdale from the late 16th Century however the arrival of potmaker Abraham Darby in 1709 that catalysed the industry with his method to reliably use coke for the blast furnaces.

coalbrookdale-by-night — Coalbrookdale by night – the Bedlam furnaces at their peak

Further downstream, the Madeley Wood smelter became infamous as the bedlam furnaces, named after the noise and confusion of London’s notorious asylum.

With the new reliable way to smelt iron and a string of blast furnaces along the valley, production skyrocketed and the valley’s natural advantages of accessible coal, iron and water meant it became the centre of the industrial revolution.

Increased production meant more workers and people flocked in from the surrounding agricultural communities — not in a dissimilar way to today’s experience in China.

That increased population meant more slums, what is today’s cute village was once sqaulid poverty, albeit an improvement on the life of an agricultural worker. Epidemics were common with 32,000 lives lost in cholera in 1831-2.

Despite the squalor of the workers’ quarters, the ironmasters were proud men and Coalbrookdale’s new bridge could only be build of one material — iron.

ironbridge-cast-iron-coalbrookdale — “This Bridge was cast at Coalbrookdale”

Ironmasters like John Wilkinson and Abraham Derby III were also ferocious promotors of their product and the bridge stands as a proud, strong advert for the strength of Coalbrookdale’s iron. Wilkinson himself built the first cast iron barge a few years later and was eventually buried in a cast iron coffin.

boy-and-black-swan — Boy and Black Swan cast iron statue

Eventually though the smelters of Coalbrookdale began to lose their competitive edge as mining and blast furnace technology improved, the ironmasters responded with moving into decorative and intricate cast iron features like the Boy and Swan statue that now graces the gardens of the Coalbrookdale Iron Museum.

ruins-of-bedlam-at-ironbridge — The ruins of the bedlam blast furnaces at Coalbrookdale

Despite their successes, Coalbrookdale’s slide continued, with coal production peaking in 1871 and a steady decline over the following century.

Today, there’s not a lot of industry in Coalbrookdale except for one plant that keeps the area’s engineering tradition running.

For Britain, the question is how the nation’s economy continues it’s engineering traditions, 45 minutes drive away is a relic of Twentieth Century industry — the Austin motor works at Longbridge.

Today an assembly plant fills a small corner of the formerly sprawling factory site and over it flies the flag of it’s new owners. The People’s Republic of China.

We live in interesting times.

Month: November 2013

Greetings from the scammers

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