Technology – Change Meme

17 October, 20179 February, 2018 Louise McGregor Technology, TV

Let’s watch TV

When I was a kid we didn’t have a TV. When we got one there were just two channels of TV available, I can still remember the excitement when two more were started, although my father stated that it just meant twice the amount of rubbish to watch.

And now? My TV provider offers 170 channels in 7 or 8 languages, and I can replay programmes up to 7 days later. In general these channels are funded by advertisers.

New platforms, such as Netflix, Amazon, Starz, Hulu, are changing how TV programmes are delivered to us. These platforms are working on a subscription model, which sounds great – no more ads – although companies pay big money for product placement and content tie-ins.

The companies are also creating content and publishing it in closed environment. For example;

Outlander, a programme about time travel in Scotland, is on Starz. Crown, a series about a young Queen Elizabeth II is on Netflix, The Handmaid’s Tale, based on Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, is on Hulu. And three hundred hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

There is so much content!

How we watch TV has changed;

We’re likely to watch on our laptops, PCs, tablets or phones, rather than TV screens
We tend to “binge watch”, because whole series are released at once we can watch the whole thing, rather than rationing ourselves to one episode per week.
We use the “second screen” to provide a commentary on social media of what we’re watching.

In my lifetime we’ve gone from single source for viewing content to more than we can possibly watch. Those “morning coffee” conversations on tv are gone, because we now binge watch and at watch at different times. I saw an interview of some of the cast members of the Brideshead Revisited , and they commented that it was an event to watch a series on the day of release as it was released in 1981 – before video was common.

There’s a service being developed, called “Movies Anywhere” that goes some way into helping consumers access content from multiple suppliers without acquiring multiple subscriptions. It doesn’t cover all platforms, and for now it’s US only, but it’s a service the market is waiting for.

In the meantime I’m selling my TV, and stopping my cable connection, I’ll be wifi only and the queen of YouTube and (maybe) Netflix.

Image: TV | AlexAntropov86 via pixabay | CC0 1.0

10 August, 2017 Louise McGregor Innovation, Technology

More than Reality; Augmented Reality

Remember when swarms of people were rushing through parks, causing traffic accidents, invading museums in a quest to capture invisible creatures? That was Pokemon Go, an augmented-reality game that used your mobile phone to superimpose a layer of visible monsters on your smart phone. If you were under 30 it was a fun way to get out side with a bunch of people, if you were over 30 it was an incredible waste of time, and if you were over 60 (hi Mum!) you couldn’t understand it at all. Pokemon Go turned 1 year old last month.

So far Augmented Reality, and it’s big sister Virtual Reality, seem to be technologies looking for a purpose. But what if you could find a good use for them?

Social Issues

The BBC radio programme Click report on the use of Virtual and Augmented reality in the world of art and social conscious raising, it’s worth listening to, although not all that easy to imagine the art under discussion – it’s challenging our knowledge of history, relationships and empathy. They talk about some of the technical challenges of making the experiences work for international audiences.

Clouds over Sidra, is a Virtual reality film that aims to transport you to the experience of a refugee camp, and it was created by the UN to highlight the plight of refugees, now more numerous than ever.

There’s a an old adage that history is written by the victors, as a result the statues of the good and the great tend to be of white men. There are no statues of real women in New York’s central park – but 26 of men, and it’s the same pattern across the world. It will take generations to change this. In the meantime Y&R is bringing women into the landscape in an augmented reality app called “The Whole Story“. It’s a great way to be more aware of who is missing from the landscape, this is focused on the missing women of history, but the same technology could be used for unrecognised men. It could also be used to update the history of those great men who, in current times, aren’t viewed in quite the same light.

Medical Uses of Augmented Reality

(1) Training doctors on anatomy, Microsoft has worked with their HoloLens product and medical experts to build a 3D interactive anatomically correct model to train students.

(2) Headsets using virtual reality could help visually-impaired people have independence, helping them navigate their way around cities even in low lighting.

(3) Using wearables to train surgeons in remote locations

(4) Performing surgery – remotely – already exists, but it’s only a matter of time before the surgeon’s experience becomes more virtual.

Advertising/Entertainment

There will be lots more experimentation with advertising and entertainment uses of virtual or augmented reality, my favourite so far is this, from Pepsi. How freaked out would you have been if this had happened at your bus stop.

The equipment for virtual reality is expensive and clunky which keeps it in the realms of specialists for now, but augmented reality via your phone represents a real opportunity beyond catching Charmeleons and Venusaurs.

4 May, 20178 February, 2018 Louise McGregor Technology

Happy World Password Day

Happy World Password Day! I know it’s more fun to celebrate May-the-Fourth in other ways, but this is important.

Passwords are how we keep our online accounts secure, and yet the most common passwords are horribly simple to guess. Every year password keeper releases a list of the most common passwords and every year “123456” and “qwerty” are on the list.

Passwords must be both memorable and hard to guess, the conflict between those two needs is the fundamental problem.

Many sites require you to use combinations of uppercase, lower case, numbers, and symbols in the name of making it harder to guess or crack a password.

However the resulting password is not easy to remember, and as humans use common substitutions, it remains vulnerable to cracking by computer.

To make a password hard to break you need to make it longer, use a range of characters, and avoid dictionary words. Something like this.

According to Kapersky labs it would take 33 centuries to crack this password by a single home computer. Most hackers have more computer power so could do it in fewer centuries.

There are two factors making it hard for computers to guess, the randomness of the characters used and the length of the password. As the wonderful XKCD explained we can use the length to make passwords more secure and memorable.

One of the challenges of managing online passwords is that we have so many of them. Often they can be saved on your device or in your browser, but this carries its own risks. If you lose your device or someone cracks your browser password (in the case of chrome) the person gains access to all your accounts. You can use a password manager, there are many on the market and PC Mag evaluated 12 of them.

There’s a lot of advice out there on changing your password, it’s often a mandatory practice on websites and within companies. But it’s usefulness as as security measure is dubious, in fact because people tend to then use a transformation on an old password the system might be less secure. One company requiring mandatory changes also prevented reuse of password elements for 20 changes. Luckily there are twenty regions of Italy. Of course if there is a password breach on any website you use you must change affected passwords.

To find a good memorable set of words look to poetry, quotes or song lyrics. Using the Kaspersky Labs password check Beyonce’s lyrics fare pretty well although the words are dictionary based and not particularly random.

Please take time today to celebrate World Password Day by making your passwords more secure

choose long secure passwords
use different passwords for each site
use two factor authentication when sites allow it
consider a password manager
if you write down your passwords anywhere don’t keep it with the device.

Image: mine, and no, that’s not a real password

14 February, 20179 February, 2018 Louise McGregor Digital, Technology

So it’s Valentine’s Day

So it’s Valentine’s Day, and I’m going to talk about sex. This post may be NSFW, and the same caveat goes for the links.

I was watching Grace and Frankie, one of the few TV (OK Netflix) shows to star post-menopausal women at the centre of the story. In the final episode of season two Grace finds that sex toys aren’t made for older women, they aggravate her arthritis. The two resolve to start a business making sex aids for older women.

Yep sextech has made it to tv.

Sextech is the attempts to bring the adult entertainment industry into modern life via technology. My first exposure to the sextech industry was a presentation at one of the WebSummits, where a startup had created an app that allowed separated couples to give each other intimate good vibrations. The presenters managed to explain exactly how it worked in PG-rated terms, quite a feat.

As you might guess it’s a male dominated industry. But there are some women working to change that, often by focusing new devices. In fact the sextech industry has focused on devices, from artificially intelligent vibrators, to men’s pleasure training tools, to an orgasm tracker – a fitbit for sex. And who knows what VR will bring to the bedroom.

There is one notable exception to the device trend; Cindy Gallop is addressing the impact of the pervasive story-line of porn. In this TED talk she explains how bad we are at discussing sex, and asks us to be better at it. (And the video is NSFW)

Cindy Gallop is driving a social sex revolution, where we become better at talking about sex, more honest about what does turn us on, less reliant on a single-story-line-porn version of sex. She’s gone from being annoyed at the limited view of sex offered by porn to inviting everyone to join the social sex revolution via a documentary.

I know Valentine’s day is supposed to be about romance rather than sex, but isn’t romance just foreplay to the foreplay?

To be honest I’m not really on board with the Valentine’s day thing. It’s true that I’m female and single so you can go ahead and label me as a bitter spinster for that but even when in a relationship I hated the forced feel of Valentine’s Day. One memorable Valentine’s Day the man-du-jour gave me a cactus. Not at all romantic; I appreciated the political commentary of the gift.

Images: Hearts | Suju via pixabay | CC0 1.0

Cactus | Sue Kellerman | CC BY-NC-ND 2.0