The Mosquito anti-teenager sound device, which we’ve covered on this site a few times, was yesterday heavily criticised by the Children’s Commissioner for England, Sir Albert Aynsley-Green, launching the BUZZ OFF campaign in conjunction with Liberty and the National Youth Agency:

Makers and users of ultra-sonic dispersal devices are being told to “Buzz Off” today by campaigners who say the device, which emits a high-pitched sound that targets under 25 year olds, is not a fair or reasonable solution for tackling anti-social behaviour. The campaign… is calling for the end to the use of ultra-sonic dispersal device. There are estimated to be 3,500 used across the country.

The BUZZ OFF campaign will be driven by young people who have been affected by the device and will aim to provoke debate and thought amongst parents, government, businesses, the police and others about the increasingly negative way society views and deals with children and young people.

The government has said it has no plans to ban the Mosquito.

The main point here is of course that the use of the Mosquito is in effect discriminatory architecture, designed to punish/annoy/prevent/target one particular group of people, whether or not those individuals have actually done anything wrong – as Sir Albert told the BBC:

These devices are indiscriminate and target all children and young people, including babies, regardless of whether they are behaving or misbehaving.

It’s the same mentality as removing benches because you don’t like the sort of people who use benches (or demonstrated by other techniques in this area). Many different points of view on the subject have been expressed by commenters here over the last couple of years, from kids fed up with being assumed guilty, to members of the public fed up with kids hanging around and intimidating people.

As with blue lighting in public toilets, the Mosquito is unlikely to solve the ‘problem’ at hand: it will simply move it elsewhere. It’s displacing the symptom rather than curing the illness, and – as has been pointed out in numerous recent news stories – it exemplifies a pervasive antipathy towards young people which is rather disturbing (I mentioned this before in reference to the “device to stop young people congregating” search query which led someone to this site.) Liberty’s Shami Chakrabarti – while I don’t always agree with everything she says – puts it very concisely:

What type of society uses a low-level sonic weapon on its children?
Imagine the outcry if a device was introduced that caused blanket discomfort to people of one race or gender, rather than to our kids.

The Mosquito has no place in a country that values its children and seeks to instill them with dignity and respect.

Incidentally, the 15 kHz, 17.5 kHz and 20 kHz wave files which I put on this site a couple of years ago before coming across the Mosquito-inspired Teen Buzz ringtone still bring more search engine traffic than any other article (the mobile phone moisture-detection stickers are a close second). If you’re interested in testing your hearing, the Free Mosquito Ringtones site has since done a better job with a wide range of frequencies.

Top image from Compound Security’s website; Buzz Off logo from Children’s Commissioner press release [Word document].

“…the sound is being used in a dance track, Buzzin’, with secret melodies only young ears can hear.

…

Simon Morris from Compound Security said: “Following the success of the ringtone, a lot of people were asking us to do a bit more, so we got together with the producers Melodi and they came up with a full-length track.

“It has two harmonies – one that everyone can hear and one that only young people can hear.

“But it works well together or separate,” he added.”

There’s a clip linked from the BBC story, or here directly (WMV format). Can’t say the “secret melodies” are especially exciting (and yes, I can hear it!) but I suppose it’s a clever idea. There could be some interesting steganographic possibilities, and indeed it could be used for ‘cheating in tests’ as Jason Thomas puts it here.

This is the same Simon Morris who’s quoted in an earlier BBC story as saying that teenagers (in general) don’t have a right “to congregate for no specific purpose”, so it’s interesting to see him getting involved with young peoples’ music. Nevertheless, I can see the dilemma that Compound Security are in: they’ve created something designed to be unpleasant for teenagers, but are also capitalising on its potential appeal to teenagers. It’s clever, if rather inconsistent branding practice.

Maybe an OGG version will be available for the next in the series?

Update: OK, they’ve now added the mp3 link to the post! Good on them!

“This is the paradox of social media that has been bothering me lately: an ‘empowering’ media that provides increased opportunities for communication, education and online participation, but which at the same time further isolates individuals and aggregates them into masses —more prone to control, and by extension more prone to discipline.”

Slashdot on ‘A working economy without DRM?’ – same debate as ever, but some very insightful comments

Slashdot on ‘Explaining DRM to a less-experienced PC user’ – I particularly like SmallFurryCreature’s ‘Sugar cube’ analogy

‘The Promise of a Post-Copyright World’ by Karl Fogel – extremely clear analysis of the history of copyright and, especially, the way it has been presented to the public over the centuries

(Via BoingBoing) The Entertrainer – a heart monitor-linked TV controller: your TV stays on with the volume at a usable level only while you keep exercising at the required rate. Similar concept to Gillian Swan’s Square-Eyes

Josie Appleton, at the always-interesting Spiked, takes a look at the increasing systemic hostility towards ‘young people in public places’ in the UK: ‘When did ‘hanging around’ become a social problem?’

As well as the Mosquito, much covered on this site (all posts; try out high frequency sounds for yourself), the article mentions the use of certain music publicly broadcast for the same ‘dispersal’ purpose:

“The Local Government Association (LGA) has compiled a list of naff songs for councils to play in trouble spots in order to keep youths at bay – including Lionel Richie’s ‘Hello’ and St Winifred’s School Choir’s ‘There’s No One Quite Like Grandma’. Apparently the Home Office is monitoring the scheme carefully. This policy has been copied from Sydney, where it is known as the ‘Manilow Method’ (after the king of naff, Barry Manilow), and has precursors in what we might call the ‘Mozart Method’, which was first deployed in Canadian train stations and from 2004 onwards was adopted by British shops (such as Co-op) and train stations (such as Tyne and Wear Metro).”

(I do hope each public broadcast of the music is correctly licensed in accordance with PPL terms and conditions, if only because I don’t want my council tax going to fund a legal battle with PPL. Remember, playing music in public is exactly equivalent to nicking it from a shop, and, after all, that’s the sort of thing that those awful young people do, isn’t it?

I also wonder why there is a difference between a council playing loud music in public, and a member of the public choosing to do so. If kids took along a stereo and played loud music in a shopping centre or any other public place, they’d get arrested or at the very least get moved on.

What would the legal situation be if kids were playing exactly the same music as was also being pumped out of the council-approved/operated speakers, at the same time? It can hardly be described as a public nuisance if it’s no different to what’s happening anyway.

What if kids started playing the same music as was on the speakers, but out-of-synch so that it sounded awful to every passer-by? Maybe shift the pitch a little (couple of semitones down?) so the two tracks overlayed cause a nice ‘drive-away-all-the-customers’ effect? What would happen then? What if kids build a little RF device which pulses repeatedly with sufficient power to superimpose a nice buzz on the council’s speaker output?)

Anyway, Ms Appleton goes on to note a new tactic perhaps even more extreme than the Mosquito, and a sure candidate for my ‘designed to injure‘ category (perhaps not actually endangering life, but close):

“Police in Weston-super-Mare have been shining bright halogen lights from helicopters on to youths gathered in parks and other public places. The light temporarily blinds them, and is intended to ‘move them on’, in the words of one Weston police officer.”

Wow! Roll on the lawsuits. (Nice to know that the local air ambulance relies on charitable donations to stay in the air, while the police apparently have plenty of helicopters available)

The article quotes what increasingly appears to be the official attitude:

“…this isn’t just about teenagers committing crimes: it’s also about them just being there. Before he was diverted into dealing with terror alerts, home secretary John Reid was calling on councils to tackle the national problem of ‘teenagers hanging around street corners’. Apparently unsupervised young people are in themselves a social problem.”

As we know from examining the Mosquito, this same opinion isn’t restricted to Dr Reid. It was the Mosquito manufacturer Compound Security’s marketing director, Simon Morris, who apparently told the BBC that:

“People have a right to assemble with others in a peaceful way… We do not consider that this right includes the right of teenagers to congregate for no specific purpose.”

So there you have it. As Brendan O’Neill puts it in a New Statesman piece referenced in the Spiked article:

“…Fear and loathing… is driving policy on young people. We seem scared of our own youth, imagining that “hoodies” and “chavs” are dragging society down. We’re so scared, in fact, that we use impersonal methods to police them: we use scanners to monitor their behaviour, we blind them from a distance, and now employ machines to screech at them in the hope they will just go away. With no idea of what to say to them – how to inspire or socialise them – we seek to disperse, disperse, disperse. It will only heighten their sense of being outsiders.”

Via Dave Farber’s Interesting People, a brief New Scientist article outlines Sony’s continuing obsession with restricting and controlling its customers (the last one didn’t go too well):

“A patent filed by Sony last week suggests it may once again be considering preventing consumers making “too many” back-up copies of its CDs…

Sony’s latest idea is to place a piece of monitoring hardware inside the CD. Its patent suggests embedding a radio-frequency ID chip that could be interrogated wirelessly by a PC or CD player. The chip would record the number of times the disc was copied and prevent further recordings once it reached the limit. The device could also be fitted to DVDs. Whether Sony will turn the patent idea into reality remains to be seen.”

Of course this will require new CD players and CD-ROM drives with the ability to read, write to and act on the signal from the RFID chip – which means its impact may not be very significant.

It’s not clear whether the “permitted” copies have to be made onto “chipped” Sony-authorised discs (otherwise the technology seems rather pointless, as people will just make copies of the un-protected copies instead of repeated copies of the original) – if this is the case, then is this not just a sly “razor blade model” or “PRM” (in Ed Felten’s phrase) attempt to make Sony CD-writers require the purchase of Sony chipped blank CDs in order to copy music?

And would this break the Orange Book standard for CD-Rs?

The BBC is reporting that the All Party Internet Group (APIG), a cross-party group of MPs, has made some intelligent – and interesting – recommendations about explaining DRM more fully to consumers:

“The MPs’ report made several recommendations and called on the Office of Fair Trading hasten the introduction of labelling regulations that would let people know what they can do with music and movies they buy online or offline.

This would ensure that it was “crystal clear” to consumers what freedom they have to use the content they are purchasing and what would happen if they do something outlawed by the protection system.

The same labelling systems would also spell out what happened in the event of a maker of DRM technology going bust, if a protection system became obsolete or if gadgets to play the content are replaced.

…

The report also called for the makers of DRM systems to be made aware of the consequences of using aggressive copy protection systems [e.g. the Sony-BMG nightmare].”

I wonder what the proposed labelling system will entail? Will it be very simple, or will it need to spell out to consumers the rights the law gives them in order to them point out how this particular DRM’d CD or download is restricting them?

In short, do we need a programme of educating consumers about their rights before a labelling system will be useful?

The Open Rights Group‘s Suw Charman is quoted in the BBC story:

“”The technologies are extending beyond the law they are supposed to uphold.”

…

She said that DRM was less about protecting copyright and more about creating a system in which people rent rather than own the media they spend money on.

“We think people rightly feel that once they buy something, it stays bought,” she said.”

APIG’s group secretary is the Earl of Erroll, an insightful quote of whose I blogged about a few months ago. It’s worth repeating in this context, as APIG’s work here goes some way to remedying the problem he highlights:

“If no members of either house know anything about IT, then bureaucrats will take control of our lives, or pretend they can do things they can’t.”

Hopefully APIG can continue their work in educating politicians, as well as the public, about the implications of restrictive technology.

*Not owning any DRM’d music, I used a recent CD purchase, the excellent Great Days of Sail (now Yo Zushi) album, for the mockup image. An alternative style of label might be those distributed by Downhill Battle and RIAA Radar:

Image from Downhill Battle.

“Most people don’t realize how much they’re giving up when they consciously or sub-consciously use solutions that depend on [DRM]. I get a lot of email that accuses me of being a Chicken Little that overblows the situation by saying the sky is falling. Well, the sky is falling and if those folks want to live in denial, that’s their problem.”

Some of the examples are more straightforward cases of sloppily designed DRM implementations leading to security problems, such as the Sony Rootkit case; examples of ‘DRM switcheroo’ (what I’ve previously called feature deletion or external control on this blog) also abound.

Real-life anecdotes of users who have lost all their (legally acquired) music due to DRM errors or licensing changes – as I discussed in ‘Consumers’ reactions to DRM‘ – are perhaps one of the best ways of driving the message home to consumers (for example the examples discussed here).

The ‘DRM train wreck’ tag is a great initiative. I guess in time it would be good if DRM’d content acquired a stigma from consumers’ point of view, clearly seen as undesirable and worse than second-best, a format to avoid.

A lot of people find this site through searching for something along the lines of ‘Mosquito high frequency anti-teenager ringtone’, and are presumably disappointed when they find that there is no such ringtone to download, even if just because they’d like to test it on friends and family. (More on the Mosquito device) There’s also the more possibility of course of using the ringtone as a kind of ‘secret ringtone’ that, supposedly, only younger people can hear, so you can receive text messages, etc, e.g. while in class, without adults noticing, though I’d have thought that was partially the point of the vibrate mode.

Anyway, I thought I might as well give those searching what they’re looking for, sort of.

EDIT (31.v.2006) : I’ve got rid of the mp3s, because even encoded with the LAME ‘insane’ (320kbps) preset, the sound was too different from the purer tone of the wave files. The whole point about mp3 as a lossy compression format is that it reduces the percentage of high frequencies that are (normally) less audible to humans: i.e., the high frequencies which are the whole point of this exercise are given much lower weighting.

30 second, 2.6 Mb wave files (produced using Audacity) are now available again, hosted at the Internet Archive (thanks for the tip, Andreas):

The above three files are hereby placed in the public domain.

Here too is a link to a BBC page where you can hear (and download) a 256kbps mp3 of the actual Mosquito sound – www.bbc.co.uk/wiltshire/…shtml.

I suppose MIDI files of the tones would be better: if anyone can supply these, this would be great.

Equally, I don’t know if the speakers in a typical mobile phone are set up to respond to frequencies in this range properly, so it may be that even the wave files will be useless when played using a phone.

Note: I’m only 23, but none of the above sound files sounds especially irritating to me (though my sound card and speakers may not be giving me the full effect that the Mosquito device itself would. I can hear the 20 kHz fine and it certainly wouldn’t drive me away: it’s similar to the hum an older TV or CRT might make.

EDIT (15.vi.2006 am) : This post is now fifth result in Google (UK) for ringtone download – wow! If only a few people would click on some of the ads, I might actually make a few quid…

EDIT (15.vi.2006 pm) : Wow, that dropped out quickly! By this afternoon the site wasn’t even in the first 10 pages of results…

Now, he or she might simply have been looking for a ringtone that sounded like a mosquito. Or, more interestingly, a 15kHz+ ringtone specifically designed to drive away teenagers along the lines of the Mosquito device itself.

What would the effects be? I guess you wouldn’t know your phone was ringing unless you were in the age group that can hear that frequency range. But if you were to use it to drive away young people (for whatever reason), you could do it very discreetly. You could even keep the phone in your pocket, continuously playing the high frequency sound, to produce an exclusion zone around you. Like a portable hand-held sonic mole repellent, but for a particular age group of people against whom you want to discriminate.

Such an application has probably already been patented but if it hasn’t, it’s in the public domain now!

“Soccer hooligans could be silenced by a new sound system that neutralises chanting with a carefully timed echo.

Stadiums could use the technique to defuse abusive or racist chants, say the Dutch researchers behind it. The echoes trip up efforts to synchronise a chant, neutralising an unwelcome message without drowning out the overall roar of a crowd.

Sander van Wijngaarden, who researches human acoustics at the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research in Delft, began working on the technique in 2004 after several Dutch soccer matches were blighted by abusive chanting.

“We knew that people become confused if you feed their speech back with a delay,” he told New Scientist. “So we wanted to try and apply it in a group context.”
…
Volunteers were surrounded by loudspeakers that simulated the sound of a chanting crowd and were asked join in. However one speaker replayed the crowd’s chant with a short delay.

When the delay was greater than 200 milliseconds the volunteers found it too difficult to chant coherently. Increasing the delay, up to about 1 second, was even more effective. “It was very confusing,” van Wijngaarden says.”

Yes, this could be used to disrupt racist chanting. It could also be used to disrupt chanting of anything the management (or sponsors) of the match (or state visit, perhaps) don’t want to be heard. As ‘Kim’ points out in a comment at We Make Money Not Art, “it really means that it can disrupt any crowds”.

Remember, if aiming to introduce a new control measure, always publicly target it at the most extreme or undesirable behaviour first of all, and you will win more supporters, who will only slowly fall away, conflicted by their beliefs. Isn’t that what Martin Niemöller taught us?

Anyway, here’s another couple of issues –
If a speaker system is used to broadcast back the crowd’s chanting (which may be offensive), then:

a) It’s illegally publicly re-broadcasting copyright material without the consent of crowd members
b) It’s illegally publicly broadcasting offensive material

Oh dear.