The magic numbers

Chris Norton, May 26th 2006, 10:45AM

The rise of the machines continues apace, and it behoves us, puny mortals that we are, to race into a mechanistic state to avoid being crushed under their metallic robo-feet. On a rare trip into the dragon's den of R&D, June, our head of accounts, was talking to me of this syndrome of robotisation - namely how we all have to memorise vast chunks of numerical data. Credit cards, alarm codes, PIN and mobile numbers rattle around our heads until we're practically thinking in binary.

Which is all well and good for those of us who have Derren Brown style mental powers - but as June pointed out, what happens when you've got a less-than-perfect memory? I think I can dredge up quite a few important numbers purely from memory, but I also remember fraught times at cashpoints when all the digits got mixed up and I ended up freezing my card, or setting off house alarms. Numbers - they're just so abstract and hard to remember.

Of course there is an alternative, which we see all the time using computers - passwords. Every so often you hear statistics about the majority of passwords being 'secret' or 'password'. As is often the case with this blog, I'm starting to wonder what people's passwords say about them. Sadly I can't really conduct a poll of the office, all I can analyse are my own passwords. My policy is to go for phrases, words and collections of numbers completely unrelated in anything but the most tenuous way to myself and my interests...

... which kind of makes them abstract and hard to remember. Perhaps I should swallow my Orwellian terror of ID cards and biometric scanning and just relax in the knowledge that soon my fingerprints will get me into my house OK. Unless, of course, a Terminator turns up and steals my fingers.

Tags: bigbrother, passwords, privacy, security
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TV Times

Chris Norton, May 23rd 2006, 12:38PM

This year Big Brother rolled out its uber-trashy all-seeing televisual eyes amidst a welter of warnings - 'kiss goodbye to your summer' cried everyone from Heat magazine to BB's own increasingly cartoonish Davina McCall. There's a grain of truth in that, at least for those of us who can't be bothered putting up an impenetrable, culturally cool acceptable front... in fact half of us round these parts of the office are already discussing Shahbaz every morning, like the bunch of gossiping old fishwives we really are.

The real-time nature of BB, and the fact that it generates those 'water-cooler' conversations (you know, the sort all the media journalists were going on about a few years ago), well it makes me think. There's all this buzz online about iTunes selling episodes of Lost (another of our favourites, especially now the plot seems to revolve around people sitting in a room doing inexplicable things with computers) and the new plan to sell 24 (yeah, we love Bauer too) on myspace.

But this narrowcasting approach, treating TV shows like music, seems a little foolish - TV is completely different, and nowhere near the solitary experience the naysayers wibble on about. In fact, I think it's the most social of modern media. Discussion of last night's crop of big shows is a vital office bonding experience... Daz got quite annoyed with me because I missed Lost the other week, and fair enough, I was a bit miffed myself. Not because I missed it, but because we all need a bit of fuel for talking outside of the world of SQL queries and web form design. OK, and because I missed it.

Hey, if you can't gossip openly about your colleagues, at least you can gossip openly about the people on TV - and to do that you need to be tuning in as it happens, in synch. Now where's my copy of Heat?

Tags: bigbrother, conversations, media, myspace, office, tv, video
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Thought Police here we come

Chris Norton, April 27th 2006, 10:36AM

Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time.

Fair play to Mr Orwell, he was pretty much spot on with the old telescreen concept. Good job he wrote 1984 - whilst there's precious little reason for me to quote his other books about pot plants and being a tramp, it's de rigeur for every person writing about tech to mention the original Big Bro at some point.

So telescreens are one step closer - and it's Apple, who have famously flirted with a bit of 1984 imagery, who are developing it. The screen that watches you as you watch it - it'll make video chats a lot more natural, and it's undoubtedly exciting tech - but whereas you can turn off a webcam or even cover it up to make sure nobody catches you picking your nose or plotting the downfall of the government, how will we ever be sure that our screen isn't sneaking a peek at us?

Tags: apple, bigbrother, privacy, video
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