STEVE CASSIDY
As Steve explains, the trouble with many “smart” technologies is that they’re rather stupid. And that includes energy-guzzling cryptocurrencies
As Steve explains, the trouble with many “smart” technologies is that they’re rather stupid. And that includes energy-guzzling cryptocurrencies.
Schadenfreude – the German term for “pleasure at the discomfort of others” – seems to be an endlessly satisfying emotion. I certainly cheered up when I heard that, having moved $1.5 billion into Bitcoin, Elon Musk performed an almost literal volte-face. Anything related to Bitcoin produces a storm of commentary, and likewise Mr Musk, so I didn’t expect a clear representation of his thinking – but when it did emerge, I discovered that he’d understood something I’d figured out ages ago. Mr SpaceX withdrew from BTC because he’d realised that, unlike any other means of payment or retention of wealth at any time in history, cryptocurrencies burn electricity just by existing.
Musk decided that it’s not exactly green to require more electricity than the whole of Argentina, with only increases to look forward to, simply to allow people to buy things online. It would be more efficient and honest to use the underlying megawatts as the thing being traded. There’s even a precedent for this: silver is both valuable and useful, and the silver marketplace is dominated by organisations with uses for the material as well as value to be keeping. Agfa, in Germany, is still in the silver market, even though its main use (for camera films) has declined markedly. Electricity also has uses: most of those produce some kind kin of value, agreed upon by the consumer co of the resource and an recoupable by reselling re or making use us of the produced item. ite Even though an aluminium alu smelter uses us 15kWh to produce one on kilo of aluminium, that th kilo of refined metal me then stops consuming co anything until un it’s recycled.
Cryptocurrencies don’t do rest idle: transfers, tra storage and simply keeping them all burn power. Which begs the question: is Bitcoin and its ilk a smart currency or a stupid currency?
I was drawn to the latter point of view by a series of discoveries, prompted by another mobile phone company sending me a device. Its wrong assumption was that because I’d written about 5G from an infrastructure perspective, I’d like to sit through a heap of consumeroriented presentations, turning my brains to mush with screen resolutions, options for network customisation and bundled voicerecognition services. I’m the last person to care about most of that stuff. But two quite separate trends caught my attention while I was fondling the new shiny Nokia.
The first trend was my bank telling me that my 2FA calculator-style authentication device was being phased out in favour of a phone app. Quite soon, too. Within two-to-three months I’d have to make a decision about which phone I want to carry my bank access app on, and whether that’s the same as the one I use for emails, emergency hotel bookings and “come to Jesus”-style voice calls when all the more polite forms of communication haven’t worked.
“What we get in smartphone networks isn’t so much zero trust as zero disclosure”
The second trend is just very strange: Guest mode on websites. Everyone’s used to the idea of engaging in a “relationship” with someone you buy from over the web. No more simple transactions, now we must fill in our details on the supplier’s ecommerce site and be forever reminded of this week’s hot deal. That, however, is just the tip of the iceberg in this relationship. By agreeing to its terms and providing all your data, you’re agreeing that it can retain your information; isn’t that information the lifeblood of a consumer business? Weren’t all those salesmen in the excellent Glengarry Glen Ross with Al Pacino, chasing lists of customer contact information?
The problem is that we are supposed to be rationally wary about the firms we give our data to. There’s meant to be some way that you can tell from a company’s website whether the people you want to buy from can be trusted to withstand all possible security-related attacks for the remainder of its life, and yours. You’re meant to apply market pressure, you see, by refusing the untrustworthy and rewarding those with a good showing in the almostdaily battles against ransomware and hackers.
Guest mode acknowledges a loophole in this apparently logical situation: that you might not really want, or need, to enter into a long relationship when all you want is a pack of batteries. There’s no shortage of people on Amazon who will sell you the CR2032 format of battery, common in PC motherboards, but I have no interest in being mailed hot offers forever more by a tiny booth somewhere inside a labyrinthine shopping mall in Wan Chai, Hong Kong because I bought a cardboard plate of a dozen batteries once. My last set of batteries like that came from Poundland on Sutton High Street, and cost £1 for 12 varied cells; no massive website development effort, or indeed watt-sucking cryptocurrency, involved.
In a Guest mode transaction, the recipient of your money isn’t the recipient of your information. The normally indivisible pairing is broken apart, with the shipping company getting your postcode and so on, while the holder of the item in stock gets your cash. It doesn’t have to be a hostage to fortune forever in terms of guardianship of your data, because it’s not absolutely vital that it knows who or where you are. All it has to do is send you some stuff. The hard work here has been done by people who recognise that the burdens arising from a transaction are not solely for the customer to bear, and that the difficulty with data breaches and consequent actions by bigger players leaves the consumer considerably disadvantaged by having chosen the high technology route to getting their otherwise everyday purchase delivered.
So, here I see a clash of the titans developing. Retail is evolving away from the uber-tech solution as a survivable choice, preferring instead some appropriate-technology solutions that address the reality of the situation. Banking is moving in the other direction, believing the consumer marketplace hype that tells us we ought to be life-and-death dependent on our smartphones.
Bells and dog whistles
Incidentally, I discovered the other day that this assumption is one of the reasons for the black sheep status for Huawei in its 5G infrastructure bids. Nobody worries about security while phones just stream music or let you take pictures, but if it does your tax return, or shows your medical records (as the new, non-T&T NHS app does), suddenly the centralised secure nature of government controls for your relationship with your administration gets turned into a pervasive, massively distributed framework. In that situation, you really have to know every last fibre and router in the journey your data is making.
Let’s ask the question again: is the roadmap for 5G apps smart or stupid? Company networks have been thinking about the inverse model, in which each solitary PC is secured from every other device, with explicit access lists and data policies to precisely tie down what’s sent across the wires. A zero-trust approach. What we get in smartphone networks isn’t so much zero trust as zero disclosure.
How is the regular user supposed to make the informed decisions required by increasingly jumpy and proscriptive banks and retailers if its network is invisible to them and might pass through obscure, recondite devices that are regarded as safe right up to the moment the bad news story splashes across the news?
To be sure, the new Nokia range is very pleasant in presentation, use and price. Even though I’m looking at the X20 ( see issue 322, p71), billed as being the photo nerd’s best choice of the range, it comes in at under £400. Other, simpler models cost even less. Nokia’s plan is to transfer the sky-high reputation of its older models to the impressive – but, in 2021, unremarkable – devices that are hard to distinguish from any other Android smartphone from China.
The phone has a nice screen, a funky silicone cover, big cameras – and an Android customisation that makes it play an alert beep a few seconds after you’ve picked it up and put it back down again. Even if all you want to do is check the time, it beeps a bit later. It’s probably because I’ve left some alerts unread and, equally probably, the beep can be turned off somehow, but it’s like a dog-whistle effect. When I put the phone down, it’s because I want to concentrate on doing something else, not because I want to be “helped” to see messages I’ve already decided are low priority.
And this is an almost entirely empty phone. I haven’t added any apps yet because I don’t want to bind its identity to a network SIM that appears to like slipping into “Emergency calls only” mode when I’m sitting at home. Is this just Cassidy being grumpy? No. My partner has, in the time between the last issue of
PC Pro and this one, gone into and then back out of the
Instagram app because, for her at least, it dog-whistles incessantly.
You might ask if this matters when it’s a vapid social networking app full of dog pictures. Actually, for her, yes it does. There’s nothing worse than an inappropriate dogwhistle noise just when you’re trying to get that magic shot of Tommy Robinson in the middle of a protest march. Alerting is seen by the developers as a massive plus all round, boosting their app traffic and fitting in nicely with social economy investors’ expectations. But, while they are being very smart, treating the customer as little more than a bundle of reflexes, from the user perspective all that just comes out looking stupid.
I know, criticism is easy. If I was designing an unimpeachable security device for banking access, I would probably use laser scanning of retinal vein networks, done by a tiny Bluetooth device you look into when you want to log in. This could pass back to the authenticator through a phone, of course, but it could also talk to a hardwired machine with no phone company interference of any kind: ideal when there’s some hacker attack taking place that specifically targets phones. Not something we worry about at the moment, I grant you, but from what we’re told of plans for 5G, or for phone apps, that’s the way things are heading.
Liquid cooling kit
I’m in receipt of a slightly anticlimactic press release from Alphacool, a manufacturer that mostly has a following amongst machine builders, modders and gamers. “That’s very far from your natural territory,” you might say, but not with this announcement.
That’s because this watercooling kit isn’t the bubbling thing you find in the cases of overclockers. Oh no, this is a watercooling kit for a 19in hosting rack. Some of it is heatsinks and pads for connecting heat-makers to the plumbing; then there’s some rather visually underwhelming machine cases, combining the closed metal box familiar in rackmounts, with socking great gaps in the usual integrity for your water pipes to come in and out. Then there’s a very grown up load of pipes and junctions, which you have to mount in the rack to match where your servers are going to sit, and also deliver cold input water and remove hot output water to some kind of dissipation radiator.
I’ve seen a few watercooled installations in the past. Perhaps the most memorable was the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre in Lugano. This had 4.5MW to dissipate, which it achieved by sucking in lake water from 75m down, at a few degrees above freezing, releasing the warm exhaust water onto the lake surface to preserve the ecosystem. Another memorable solution came from the perfectly named Iceotope, which changed the rules by using a non-conducting coolant and simply immersing the whole of the electronics in a bath of the stuff within a leakproof casing.
The main surprise around most of this tech is that it isn’t more widespread. After all, heat damage is the main problem with hardworking servers, so more efficient ways of keeping their temperatures under control must be an appealing option, right?
The first counter-argument is that the people working entirely on the dry side of the tech have a lot of room in their specifications to reduce heat output. Whether it’s better chips, or paradigm shifts over to RISC, or smarter compilers, it’s much more beneficial to reward the averagely ignorant user with improvements across a whole class of CPU or storage than it is to only make things better at the very top end of the business for those with the luxury of time and money to perfectly specify their hosting centre.
The second and more persuasive point is that hosting and cloud data centre operators change their servers almost as often as their T-shirts; annual server suite re-provisioning is not at all unusual. If you can see the business rationale to a rapid cycle like that, you’re probably quite keen on not interrupting one customer in order to deliver an upgrade to another – and the temptation of the Alphacool cooling construction kit is to make your rack into a single, unified cooling system. Which is great, so long as you don’t need to de-unify it any time soon.
Making your own machines is a fine tradition in modern computing with a long and enthusiastic history. However, I still can’t see a liquidcooled cloud rack being especially quick to deploy, or straightforward to debug when a hydraulic problem presents itself.
“The main surprise around most of this tech is that it isn’t more widespread”