The Fourth Industrial Revolution

I just went to the Singularity University summit and here are the key learnings.

In 1998, Kodak had 170,000 employees and sold 85% of all photo paper worldwide.
Within just a few years, their business model disappeared and they got bankrupt.
What happened to Kodak will happen in a lot of industries in the next 10 year - and most people don't see it coming. Did you think in 1998 that 3 years later you would never take pictures on paper film again?
Yet digital cameras were invented in 1975. The first ones only had 10,000 pixels, but followed Moore's law. So as with all exponential technologies, it was a disappointment for a long time, before it became way superiour and got mainstream in only a few short years. It will now happen with Artificial Intelligence, health, autonomous and electric cars, education, 3D printing, agriculture and jobs. Welcome to the 4th Industrial Revolution.
Welcome to the Exponential Age.

Software will disrupt most traditional industries in the next 5-10 years.
Uber is just a software tool, they don't own any cars, and are now the biggest taxi company in the world. Airbnb is now the biggest hotel company in the world, although they don't own any properties.

Artificial Intelligence: Computers become exponentially better in understanding the world. This year, a computer beat the best Go player in the world, 10 years earlier than expected. In the US, young lawyers already don't get jobs. Because of IBM Watson, you can get legal advice (so far for more or less basic stuff) within seconds, with 90% accuracy compared with 70% accuracy when done by humans. So if you study law, stop immediately. There will be 90% less laywyers in the future, only specialists will remain.
Watson already helps nurses diagnosing cancer, 4 time more accurate than human nurses. Facebook now has a pattern recognition software that can recognize faces better than humans. In 2030, computers will become more intelligent than humans.

Autonomous cars: In 2018 the first self driving cars will appear for the public. Around 2020, the complete industry will start to be disrupted. You don't want to own a car anymore. You will call a car with your phone, it will show up at your location and drive you to your destination. You will not need to park it, you only pay for the driven distance and can be productive while driving. Our kids will never get a driver's licence and will never own a car. It will change the cities, because we will need 90-95% less cars for that. We can transform former parking space into parks. 1,2 million people die each year in car accidents worldwide. We now have one accident every 100,000km, with autonomous driving that will drop to one accident in 10 million km. That will save a million lifes each year.

Most car companies might become bankrupt. Traditional car companies try the evolutionary approach and just build a better car, while tech companies (Tesla, Apple, Google) will do the revolutionary approach and build a computer on wheels. I spoke to a lot of engineers from Volkswagen and Audi; they are completely terrified of Tesla.

Insurance companies will have massive trouble because without accidents, the insurance will become 100x cheaper. Their car insurance business model will disappear.
Real estate will change. Because if you can work while you commute, people will move further away to live in a more beautiful neighborhood.
Electric cars will become mainstream until 2020. Cities will be less noisy because all cars will run on electric. Electricity will become incredibly cheap and clean: Solar production has been on an exponential curve for 30 years, but you can only now see the impact. Last year, more solar energy was installed worldwide than fossil. The price for solar will drop so much that all coal companies will be out of business by 2025.
With cheap electricity comes cheap and abundant water. Desalination now only needs 2kWh per cubic meter. We don't have scarce water in most places, we only have scarce drinking water. Imagine what will be possible if anyone can have as much clean water as he wants, for nearly no cost.

Health: The Tricorder X price will be announced this year. There will be companies who will build a medical device (called the "Tricorder" from Star Trek) that works with you phone, which takes your retina scan, you blood sample and you breath into it. It then analyses 54 biomarkers that will identify nearly any disease. It will be cheap, so in a few years everyone on this planet will have access to world class medicine, nearly for free.

3D printing: The price of the cheapest 3D printer came down from 18,000$ to 400$ within 10 years. In the same time, it became 100 times faster. All major shoe companies started 3D printing shoes. Spare airplane parts are already 3D printed in remote airports. The space station now has a printer that eliminates the need for the large amout of spare parts they used to have in the past.
At the end of this year, new smartphones will have 3D scanning possibilities. You can then 3D scan your feet and print your perfect shoe at home. In China, they already 3D printed a complete 6-storey office building. By 2027, 10% of everything that's being produced will be 3D printed.

Business opportunities: If you think of a niche you want to go in, ask yourself: "in the future, do you think we will have that?" and if the answer is yes, how can you make that happen sooner? If it doesn't work with your phone, forget the idea. And any idea designed for success in the 20th century is doomed in to failure in the 21st century.

Work: 70-80% of jobs will disappear in the next 20 years. There will be a lot of new jobs, but it is not clear if there will be enough new jobs in such a small time.

Agriculture: There will be a 100$ agricultural robot in the future. Farmers in 3rd world countried can then become managers of their field instead of working all days on their fields. Aeroponics will need much less water. The first petri dish produced veal is now available and will be cheaper than cow produced veal in 2018. Right now, 30% of all agricultural surfaces is used for cows. Imagine if we don't need that space anymore. There are several startups who will bring insect protein to the market shortly. It contains more protein than meat. It will be labeled as "alternative protein source" (because most people still reject the idea of eating insects).

There is an app called "moodies" which can already tell in which mood you are. Until 2020 there will be apps that can tell by your facial expressions if you are lying. Imagine a political debate where it's being displayed when they are telling the truth and when not.

Bitcoin will become mainstream this year and might even become the default reserve currency.

Longevity: Right now, the average life span increases by 3 months per year. Four years ago, the life span used to be 79 years, now it's 80 years. The increase itself is increasing and by 2036, there will be more that one year increase per year. So we all might live for a long long time, probably way more than 100.

Education: The cheapest smartphones are already at 10$ in Africa and Asia. Until 2020, 70% of all humans will own a smartphone. That means, everyone has the same access to world class education. Every child can use Khan academy for everything a child learns at school in First World countries. We have already released our software in Indonesia and will release it in Arabic, Suaheli and Chinese this Summer, because I see an enormous potential. We will give the English app for free, so that children in Africa can become fluent in English within half a year.

Udo Gollub

Signs of Digital Apocalypse

It seems that my prophecies of a digital apocalypse is coming true each passing day. Every few months incidents are happening around the globe that is not only bringing down the trans connected networks and systems but also endangering the lives of people connected to these systems as lately seen in ransom ware attack on UK National Health Services.

This week the world saw another ransom-ware virus named 'Petya' that created havoc across 65 countries and asked users to pay crypto money to free their data. The known source for Petya was a massive infection in government mandated tax preparation software in Ukraine   and not so surprisingly the attack happened on the eve of a Ukrainian national holiday pointing all fingers in the Russian direction as the likely originator. 

Like WannaCry, Petya acts via "EternalBlue," a Microsoft vulnerability that was exploited for years by the National Security Agency before being stolen and then revealed by the Shadow Brokers hacking group in April this year. Russia may have launched the attack, but the underlying technology was made in America, by the NSA. Security experts now see this wave of attacks as a sign that “the agency’s own weaponry could be used to destroy critical infrastructure in allied nations or in the United States”.

What killing Net Neutrality means for Internet in Pakistan

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai on Tuesday unveiled his plan for rolling back net neutrality rules in the US.

His proposal would let internet service providers voluntarily promise to uphold net neutrality principles by including them in their terms of service with customers. The FCC would also hand oversight of those companies to another agency: the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

Undoing net neutrality would mean big changes for how customers access the internet not just only in the US but globally as well. The undoing of net neutrality rules in the US is set to again restart the debate over global Internet regulations as some major world powers near fork-in-the-road decisions about how they'll govern their own stretch of cyberspace.

The undoing on net neutrality rules in the US will have serious repressions for internet development globally and in Pakistan as well said, Founder Internet Policy Observatory Pakistan. Local startups in Pakistan that have the potential to become the next Facebook or Google may not be able to reach customers in the US, if an ISP decides to block them or charge them extra.

One of the more worrying scenarios in the post net neutrality arena is the desire for paid prioritization by broadband service providers. Broadband companies will have the legalized advantage to ask IOT service providers to pay big bucks to ensure that their content reaches customers without any interferences.

Life will be becoming tougher for smaller internet service providers and internet startups as abolishing FCC plans to roll back net neutrality rules in the US.

Experts believe the lack of net neutrality in the U.S. will set examples for other countries to follow that have primarily looked at US for internet regulation and digital freedoms. This will decrease internet freedoms and promote censorship of internet. US has been a role model for internet policy and it should try to remain the same and impede models proposed by Russia and China to the developing world.

The Modern Copier

A modern photocopier is basically a computer with a scanner and printer attached. This computer has a hard drive, and scans of images are regularly stored on that drive. This means that when a photocopier is thrown away, that hard drive is filled with pages that the machine copied over its lifetime. As you might expect, some of those pages will contain sensitive information. Always make sure that you physically destory the storage device to ensure it does not end up in wrong hands.

FBI Fusion of Law and Hacking

In an interesting development in the US Department of Justice is dropping all charges in a child porn case to keep TOR hack code secret. According to DOJ "disclosure is not an option".

To catch the culprits of child pornography FBI took control of the server that was used for hosting porn material and deployed a TOR exploit to ascertain the IP addresses of its users. The use of TOR allows users to obscure and anonymoise their identities on the internet and connect to the dark web. With the exploit created by the FBI they were easily able to identify the end users. Experts believe the Network Investigative Technique as the DOJ calls it was basically a malware.

Now lets see how the NIT worked and gathered the information on TOR network.

The website suspected of hosting contraband child porn was known as Playpen, and operated as a darknet website only reachable through TOR. Hidden services on the darknet by default, attempt to hide the locations of both servers and the computers being used to visit the site using a series of intermediary nodes such that visitors location cannot be determined at the website. In an ongoing investigation The FBI learned, through one of its foreign partner, that a website dedicated to the distribution of child sexual abuse materials was determined to be located within the United States jurisdiction. While the FBI was able to locate the server, and bring the site under its control, it was still unable to determine the physical location of individuals who were accessing and posting child pornography on the site.

The FBI using a court authorization to hack the circumvention method was successful in determining the IP address of the website users. It operated the website for 13 days under its control and managed to obtain valuable information of its users using NIT.  As Susan Hennessey and Nicholas Weaver have discussed in detail how NIT was operated by the FBI it will be worth sharing a brief description of the exploit and its basic components.

The Network Investigative Technique (NIT consists of a number of components typical of a malware.

1. A “generator” which runs on the hidden service.
2. An “exploit” which, when transmitted from the hidden service to the visitor’s computer, enables running the FBI’s code on the visitor’s system.
3. The “payload” which the exploit fetches, runs on the visitor’s system, and conducts the actual search, transmitting the information discovered to an FBI server.
4. A “logging server”, a system run by the FBI that records the information transmitted by the payload.

The primary role of the generator is to generate a unique and random ID number  associate the ID with a logged-in user of the site, and then transmit the exploit, the ID, and the payload to the user’s computer.

The exploit takes control over the Tor browser used by the visitor, control it uses to load and execute the payload. Knowledge of how the exploit works is the most sensitive part of an NIT public disclosure not only risks losing the opportunity to use the technique against other offenders but would also permit criminals or authoritarian governments to use it for illicit purposes until a patch is developed and deployed. This is the component the government refuses to disclose in the instant cases.

The payload is the program which searches and gathers information such as computer name, user name, mac address and than transmit it alongwith the unique ID over an unencrypted channel on the internet exposing victims computer public IP address from which he can be tracked back.

The logging service, running on a separate computer, receives the NIT response. The important component in this activity is packet capturing and storing it in a pcap file which records all network traffic transmitted over the unencrypted channel. 

In the current case 137 defendants are facing serious charges over data obtained primarily from NIT and seizure of computers. Interestingly from a defense point of view defendants are asserting that the code involved in the NIT are material to their defense which needs to be shared with them for a fair trial and raise following important questions which are befitting for cyber crime trials in Pakistan as well.

1. Defendants should be given an opportunity to perform a detailed evaluation of the functionality of the expolit in this case NIT, to determine what it searched for in the victims computer, how the search was conducted and what data was seized, and the chain of custody.

2. Critical question is how the key ID was generated and whether every computer was given a unqiue ID. To analyze this from a defendants point of view he would need the source code to ascertain that process and cross match it with the logging activity.

3. The pcap file transmitted over an unencrypted channel was manipulated by any third party.

4. Allowing defense to examine the complete source code including the exploit may result in exposing sensitive classified information to a vast array of actors that can be detrimental to national security operations.

Privacy is Dead

When I started working in internet development I saw it as a great tool of liberation for the global South. 18 years down the road I see it as a great facilitator of absolute control. It is not now but may become a threat to human civilization in coming years.

We live in an age of corporate surveillance architectured by neoliberal global capitalists where Governments and corporate interests have united under the umbrella of metadata surveillance. Given the developments in the surveillance industry in recent years I have taken a different stance on the issue of privacy perhaps, from what most of you would expect me to have taken. I for sometime now have been very vocal about the National Security Agency and massive mass surveillance  programs and I think that we should understand that the game for privacy is gone.  The mass surveillance is here to stay.

Mass surveillance has had a trickle-down effect, whereby not only large and mid-sized states are engaging in this unethical act of spying on the innocent, but even small countries like ours are now spying on their own citizens after the de facto approval by the world’s most powerful.

We can talk about all the laws that we want, and what policies should be and how society should behave and how it should work, but we should realize the fact that privacy is gone and it will not come back short of a very regressive economic collapse which reduces the technological capacity of civilization.

As the price of cutting edge technology continues to decline, states will employ more  surveillance technologies at an increasing rate.

The reason it will not come back is that the cost of engaging in mass surveillance is decreasing by about 50 per cent every 12 months, the underlying cost of telecommunications, moving surveillance intercepts, computerization and storage – all those costs are decreasing much faster at a geometric rate than the human population is increasing.

If you look at societal behavior with reduced social spaces like Sweden, South Korea, Okinawa in Japan and North Korea then you’ll see that society adapts. Everyone becomes incredibly timid, they start to use code words; use a lot of subtext to try and sneak out your controversial views. Like baat tu ap samaj gaye hon gay etc and so on.

Privacy is one of many values “that simply are unsustainabe in the face of the reality of technological change; the reality of the deep state with a military-industrial complex and the reality of Islamic terrorism,  and national security is legitimizing that sector in a way that it’s behaving.

Its time to innovate and strategies and comeup with tools like bitcoin, tor and few others in a growing list as a societal reaction to growing state control. Telecos needs to become more transparent.

Transcript of a talk on Privacy

Looking for Leadership

I have always wondered why modern IT  organizations tolerate dysfunctional leaders? The only justification can be thats its prevalent everywhere and organizations are more happy to accept mediocrity. The problem with this approach is that it leads to growing employees frustration and lack of trust in the ambigious work enviornment.

Most IT organizations cripple or bust not due to lacking human resource or technology but primarily due to lack of leadership. Innovation in the digital age comes from sharing of  ideas and giving an opportunity to your workforce to be heard or share their ideas. Organizations with poor leaders usually have a homogenous team of people with similar way of thinking and liking. This can create cognitive gaps in strategy and its execution. Furthermore, such leaders prefer surrounding themselves with people who are biased and have little interest in seeing the organization grow.

In any successful organization leadership is the key element. The work enviornment is stress free and employees have a sense of direction in achieving business goals. Usually such businesses perform better in satisfying its customer base. In comparision if your organization has  poor leadership at various levels than you are bound to suffer from the following;

1. Low employee engagement and ownership of tasks.
2. Lack of communication within departments.
3. Poor moral forcing to accept culture of mediocrity.
4. Declining business performances and unhappy customers.
5. Thrusting own agendas on the employees.
6. Growing culture of negativity and biased decision making.

When poor leadership is in the hot seat of driving an organization it impacts all areas of business. The first sign is anergy in departments leading to low moral among the work force and forcing good employees either to pick up the slack or switch to a work enviornment where they can grow to achieve their goals. Once the top performers leave the organization those who stay behind get frustrated and eventually lose the energy to stay on top of things.

Written from Khanozai to Quetta on the N50.