2009 Predictions

2009 Technology Predictions

Predictions being what they are (once they are predicted, we tend to pay attention to them), I thought I would let rip about my major technological gripes to see whether somebody could pay attention to them and make the problems go away:


Closed source crippled products


Failure to do what the box says it should will drive consumers to become more discerning. Take universal Plug and Play. In principle a nice idea. However, have you tried to plug a proprietary hardware UPnP device [enter Kodak EX 811 picture frame] into your network and then view your photos/movies/songs from [enter some open source media player such as mediatomb, uShare, mythtv etc.]? It doesn't work. Why not? Because between what Kodak expects the media player to implement and what the media player produces, seems to be a misunderstanding. So, the standards suck? Maybe, but the reality is that short of opening the Kodak device and re-implementing its operating system, there is no practical way to debug this problem. This problem cuts to the core of the OSS (Open Source Software) philosophy and COTS/H (Commercial Off the Shelve Software/Hardware). Kodak is doing a terrible job of making their frame talk to many backends and there is nothing the consumer can do about it (short of *not* buying Kodak products). Sadly Kodak is a big company and like so many large companies, have idiotically big pockets. They will survive, even though they should not.

Network Attached Storage is another cool idea. Just plug a drive into your network and it is available for storage. Well, that is until you try to back a Unix file system up to it and realize that the vendor only implemented some ancient backward windows file system on the NAS device that cannot store UNIX file attribute bits [read FAT32 etc.]. You can always format the device but then you loose the Network ability of it. Again, the box is sealed and we cannot get to the OS which means we cannot ad support for our favorite [ext3] file system. It is like buying a half dead horse.

I imagine that we will see more websites rating stuff and people paying attention to those ratings (even though the megalithing companies that make these products probably won't pay any attention to these sites).

Automation

There is more and more evidence that improved performance is tied to improved understanding. I imagine that the future of automation lies in machines understanding better what we are trying to say. This basically means improving the way we program computers. How to do this? Not sure considering that many people have been trying for years to improve programming languages and we are still far away from understanding natural language. The trick is maybe to compromise Natural Language and move towards a more precise language that is easier for computers to understand (thinking esperanto). Considering how bad humans are at learning new languages, clearly something else will have to happen before this move can be made. So, how about improving the way we learn languages? I am not thinking Muzzy here, but a complete structural U-turn on focus of learning languages. This will require not only the theoretical work to be completed first but also the political system to be convinced of this to implement it. Maybe OLPC could implement Esperanto as a hidden language?

Open Source DRM (Digital Rights Management)

Yes, Jon also said this sounds like a paradox. However, the problem is not with the concept of protecting the rights of the copyright holder, but rather the implementation of technology to achieve that. Combine the current implementations with ignorance of the technocrats/legal system, and you have something open to abuse.

So, what would good principles of Digital Rights Management be?

1. It should allow for backups in any format to any appropriate medium.
   
2. The data that you obtained the rights to, should in no way be "locked" and you should be able to view it on any platform of your choice (including an insecure platform where you take the legal risk of compromise of the data).
3. You should agree to some legal restrictions and be held accountable to your agreement through the legal process or if you want to use a technological system, it should conform to only the legal requirements and nothing more.
4. You should be able to read your copy of the data unhindered at any time in the future.
5. Your data should be anonymously assigned to you (so nobody should be able without the appropriate legal warrant, to extract your identity from your data).
   

So here is a concept design that might be interesting from an Open Source point of view.

1. Hide an anonymous signature spread across a document (in pictures and or text).
2. The user agrees to not circulate the document other than for personal use (very much like the books we buy in shops today). However, we do not stop the user from making a copy of the book or backing it up.
   
3. The user agrees to be liable for any damages from his actions (I am not sure how you prove that a book was downloaded X number of times).
4. Make the scheme resistant to statistical attack. If a number of users get together and compare books in order to identify the signature, ensure that it is resistant to attack (this is a standard Steganography problem).

The benefits of this scheme are:

1. It does not assume the user to be a criminal ;-)
2. It allows the user to read/access the document/media using any viewer of his choosing on any platform (including Open Source).
3. It reduces the incentive of the user to share content because he can now be held liable (and agreed to that effect).