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Panopticon

Some links

By: Dan
17-01-2007
1984, Apple, Architecture, Architecture & urbanism, Blogosphere, Business model, Cell phones, Circumvention, Consumer rights, Control, Creeping erosion of norms, Crime, Design, Design philosophy, Design with Intent, Digital rights, Do artifacts have politics?, DRM, Entropy, Foucault, Freedom to tinker, Future, Gadgets, Interaction design, Intrusive technology, iPhone, Mobile phones, Monopoly, Music, Music industry, Open source, Orwellian, Panopticon, Political design, Punishment, Rent-seeking, RIAA, Software, Specious arguments, Stallman, Stifling innovation, Surveillance, Techniques of persuasion, Treacherous computing, Trusted Computing, User experience

Some links. Guess what vehicle this is.

First, an apology for anyone who’s had problems with the RSS/Atom feeds over the last month or so. I think they’re fixed now (certainly Bloglines has started picking them up again) but please let me know if you don’t read this. Oops, that won’t work… anyway:

  • ‘Gadgets as Tyrants’ by Xeni Jardin, looks at digital architectures of control in the context of the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas :

    Many of the tens of thousands of products displayed last week on the Vegas expo floor, as attractive and innovative as they are, are designed to restrict our use… Even children are bothered by the increasing restrictions. One electronics show attendee told me his 12-year-old recently asked him, “Why do I have to buy my favorite game five times?” Because the company that made the game wants to profit from each device the user plays it on: Wii, Xbox, PlayStation, Game Boy or phone.

    At this year’s show, the president of the Consumer Electronics Association, Gary Shapiro, spoke up for “digital freedom,” arguing that tech companies shouldn’t need Hollywood’s permission when they design a new product.

  • The Consumerist – showing a 1981 Walmart advert for a twin cassette deck – comments that “Copying music wasn’t always so taboo”.

    I’m not sure it is now, either.

  • George Preston very kindly reminds me of the excellent Trusted Computing FAQ by Ross Anderson, a fantastic exposition of the arguments. For more on Vista’s ‘trusted’ computing issues, Peter Guttmann has some very clear explanations of how shocking far we are from anything sensible. See also Richard Stallman’s ‘Right to Read’.
  • David Rickerson equally kindly sends me details of a modern Panopticon prison recently built in Colorado – quite impressive in a way:

    Image from Correctional News

    …Architects hit a snag when they realized too much visibility could create problems.

    “We’ve got lots of windows looking in, but the drawback is that inmates can look from one unit to another through the windows at the central core area of the ward,” Gulliksen says. “That’s a big deal. You don’t want inmates to see other inmates across the hall with gang affiliations and things like that.”

    To minimize unwanted visibility, the design team applied a reflective film to all the windows facing the wards. Deputies can see out, but inmates cannot see in. Much like the 18th-century Panopticon, the El Paso County jail design keeps inmates from seeing who is watching them.

    Image from Correctional News website

  • Should the iPhone be more open?

    As Jason Devitt says, stopping users installing non-Apple (or Apple-approved) software means that the cost of sending messages goes from (potentially) zero, to $5,000 per megabyte:

    Steve typed “Sounds great. See you there.” 28 characters, 28 bytes. Call it 30. What does it cost to transmit 30 bytes?

    * iChat on my Macbook: zero.
    * iChat running on an iPhone using WiFi: zero.
    * iChat running on an iPhone using Cingular’s GPRS/EDGE data network: 6 hundredths of a penny.
    * Steve’s ‘cool new text messaging app’ on an iPhone: 15c.

    A nickel and a dime.

    15c for 30 bytes = $0.15 X 1,000,000 / 30 = $5,000 per megabyte.

    “Yes, but it isn’t really $5,000,” you say. It is if you are Cingular, and you handle a few billion messages like this each quarter.

    … [I] assumed that I would be able to install iChat myself. Or better still Adium, which supports AIM, MSN, ICQ, and Jabber. But I will not be able to do that because … it will not be possible to install applications on the iPhone without the approval of Cingular and Apple… But as a consumer, I have a choice. And for now the ability to install any application that I want leaves phones powered by Windows Mobile, Symbian, Linux, RIM, and Palm OS with some major advantages over the iPhone.

    Aside from the price discrimination (and business model) issue (see also Control & Networks), one thing that strikes me about a phone with a flat touch screen is simply how much less haptic feedback the user gets.

    I know people who can text competently without looking at the screen, or indeed the phone at all. They rely on the feel of the buttons, the pattern of raised and lowered areas and the sensation as the button is pressed, to know whether or not the character has actually been entered, and which character it was (based on how many times the button is pressed). I would imagine they would be rather slow with the iPhone.

    • Read More

    Coincidence?

    By: Dan
    10-01-2007
    advertising, Business model, Consumer rights, Creeping erosion of norms, Distasteful corollary, Fulminate, Google, Greasing palms, Hidden persuaders, Interaction design, Internet economics, Intrusive technology, Music, Panopticon, Privacy, Sneaky, Software, Surveillance, User experience

    Gmail ads related to mp3 being played?

    A few minutes ago I was playing a track in Winamp, with Gmail open in an Opera window, and on refreshing Gmail, the Google ‘web clip’ at the top of the inbox display contained the same phrase, ‘jet stream’, as the track.

    Is that merely a coincidence, or does Gmail monitor what music is being played by a user? I don’t have Google Desktop or Toolbar or any of that installed.

    Read More

    A vein attempt?

    By: Dan
    28-10-2006
    Architecture, Architecture & urbanism, Britain, Cargo cult, Civil rights, Control, Deleuze, Design, Design engineering, Design philosophy, Design with Intent, Designed to be unpleasant, Designed to injure, Discriminatory Architecture, Distasteful corollary, Do artifacts have politics?, Dystopia, Embedding code, Engineering design, Erosion of liberty, Forcing functions, Foucault, Health and safety, Hidden persuaders, Indoctrination, Interaction design, Intrusive technology, Killjoy technology, Law, Legislation, Liberty, Oppression, Orwellian, Panopticon, Political design, Propaganda, Public money, Regulation, Site Announcements, Sneaky, Social engineering, Spatial, Specious arguments, Surveillance, Techniques of persuasion, Technology policy, Technology underclass, Teenagers, Underclass, Urban, User experience, User Psychology, Vague rhetoric, Worldwide

    Blue lighting makes it more difficult to see veins
    Blue lighting makes it more difficult to see veins

    Blue lighting is sometimes used in public toilets (restrooms) to make it more difficult for drug users to inject themselves (veins are harder to see). The above implementation is in Edinburgh, next to the Tron Kirk.

    It was more difficult to see my veins through my skin, but there was normal-coloured lighting in the street outside, and one would assume that the users would thus just go outside instead, though the risk of detection is greater. (An additional result of the blue lighting is that, on going outside after spending more than a few seconds in the toilets, the daytime world appears much brighter and more optimistic, even on an overcast day: could retail designers or others make use of this effect? Do they already?)

    So the blue lighting ‘works’, but is it really a good idea to increase the risk that an injection will be done wrongly – maybe multiple times? This is perhaps a similar argument to that surrounding delibrately reducing visibility at junctions: the architecture of control makes it more dangerous for the few users (and those their actions affect) who ignore or bypass the control. This seems to be an architecture of control with the potential to endanger life, although the actual stated intention behind it probably includes ‘saving lives’.

    Without knowing more about addiction, however, I can’t say whether making it difficult for people to inject will really help stop them doing it; it would seem more likely that (as in the linked Argus story), the aim of the blue lighting is to move the ‘problem’ somewhere else rather than actually ‘solve’ it – as with the anti-homeless benches, in fact.

    Another example in this kind of area is the use of smoke alarms specifically to prevent people smoking in toilets, e.g. on aeroplanes (the noise, and embarrassment, is a sufficient deterrent). There’s even been the suggestion of using the Mosquito high-pitched alarm coupled to a smoke detector to ‘prevent’ children smoking in school toilets (I’d expect that quite a few would deliberately try to set them off; I know I would have as a kid). A friend mentioned the practice of siting smoking shelters a long way from office buildings so that smokers are discouraged from going so often; this backfired for the company concerned, as smokers just took increasingly long breaks to make it ‘worth their while’ to walk the extra distance.

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    Bruce Schneier : Architecture & Security

    By: Dan
    20-10-2006
    1984, Architecture, Architecture & urbanism, Bad design, Civil rights, Control, Creeping erosion of norms, Deleuze, Design, Design philosophy, Design with Intent, Designed to be unpleasant, Do artifacts have politics?, Embedding code, Engineering design, Erosion of liberty, Exclusion, Foucault, Future, Health and safety, Interaction design, Intrusive technology, Law, Legislation, Liberty, London, Oppression, Orwellian, Panopticon, Philosophy of control, Political design, Privacy, Protest, Public money, Security, Site Announcements, Sneaky, Social engineering, Spatial, Surveillance, Techniques of persuasion, University, Urban, US

    The criminology students at Cambridge have an excellent view of dystopian architecture

    Bruce Schneier talks about ‘Architecture and Security’: architectural decisions based on the immediate fear of certain threats (e.g. car bombs, rioters) continuing to affect users of the buildings long afterwards. And he makes the connexion to architectures of control outside of the built environment, too:

    “The same thing can be seen in cyberspace as well. In his book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Lawrence Lessig describes how decisions about technological infrastructure — the architecture of the internet — become embedded and then impracticable to change. Whether it’s technologies to prevent file copying, limit anonymity, record our digital habits for later investigation or reduce interoperability and strengthen monopoly positions, once technologies based on these security concerns become standard it will take decades to undo them.

    It’s dangerously shortsighted to make architectural decisions based on the threat of the moment without regard to the long-term consequences of those decisions.”

    Indeed.

    The commenters detail a fantastic array of ‘disciplinary architecture‘ examples, including:

  • Pierce Hall, University of Chicago, “built to be “riotproof” by elevating the residence part of the dorm on large concrete pillars and developing chokepoints in the entranceways so that rioting mobs couldn’t force their way through.” (There must be lots of university buildings like this)
  • “The Atlanta Fed building has a beautiful lawn which surrounds the building, and is raised 4 or 5 feet from the surrounding street, with a granite restraining wall. It’s a very effective protection against truck bombs.”
  • The wide boulevards of Baron Haussmann’s Paris, intended to prevent barricading (a frequently invoked example on this blog)
  • The UK Ministry of Defence’s Defence Procurement Agency site at Abbey Wood, Bristol, “is split into car-side and buildings; all parking is as far away from the buildings (car bomb defence), especially the visitor section. you have to walk over a narrow footbridge to get in.

    Between the buildings and the (no parking enforced by armed police) road is ‘lake’. This stops suicide bomber raids without the ugliness of the concrete barriers.

    What we effectively have is a modern variant of an old castle. The lake supplants the moat, but it and the narrow choke point/drawbridge.”

  • SUNY Binghamton’s “College in the Woods, a dorm community… features concrete “quads” with steps breaking them into multiple levels to prevent charges; extremely steep, but very wide, stairs, to make it difficult to defend the central quad”
  • University of Texas at Austin: “The west mall (next to the Union) used to be open and grassy. They paved it over with pebble-y pavement to make it painful for hippies to walk barefoot and installed giant planters to break up the space. They also installed those concrete walls along Guadalupe (the drag) to create a barrier between town and gown, and many other “improvements.”"

    • I’m especially amused by the “making it painful for hippies to walk barefoot” comment! This is not too far from the anti-skateboarding corrugation sometimes used (e.g. the third photo here), though it seems that in our current era, there is a more obvious disconnect between ‘security’ architecture (which may also involve vast surveillance or everyware networks, such as the City of London’s Ring of Steel) and that aimed at stopping ‘anti-social’ behaviour, such as homeless people sleeping, skateboarders, or just young people congregating.

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    The Tell-Tale Part

    By: Dan
    17-10-2006
    Bad design, Business model, Cargo cult, Cell phones, Consumer rights, Design, Design engineering, Design philosophy, Design with Intent, Designed to be unpleasant, Designers, Do artifacts have politics?, Embedding code, Engineering, Engineering design, Fightback Devices, Freedom to tinker, Good design, Interaction design, Intrusive technology, Mistake-proofing, Mobile phones, Panopticon, Philosophy of control, Poka-yoke, Product design, Rent-seeking, Site Announcements, Sneaky, User experience, Worldwide, Your property

    Open the case of your mobile (cell) phone. Do you see a round white sticker, similar to that in the first photo below?

    Water damage sticker

    This is a water damage sticker, which changes colour if moisture gets into this bit of the phone, and will be used to void your warranty if your phone stops working for any reason.

    A single droplet of water placed on the sticker turns it bright red (in the case of my phone, anyway):

    Water damage sticker

    WikiHow’s ‘How to save a wet cell phone’ (found via Consumerist) recommends that you:

    “Place a piece of satin finish scotch tape over your water damage sticker before you drop your cell phone in the water to prevent the water damage sticker from voiding your warranty… Remove the tape if you ever have to return your phone for repairs or warranty.”

    Now, it’s a clever idea on the part of the phone companies, and presumably water-damaged phones being returned under warranty were enough of a problem to make such stickers ‘necessary’.

    However, we all know that in practice, any non-working phone where the sticker has changed colour will be immediately classified as ‘water-damaged’ and the customer’s rights voided, even if the actual phone was independently defective.

    As a designer, I would much prefer to look at the problem as “How can we improve the sealing of phones so that water ingress is no longer a major problem?” than “How can we design something to cover our backs and shift all the blame onto the user for our design fault?”

    But maybe I’m naïve.

    P.S. My Motorola, shown above, began to work intermittently just a month after the warranty expired, completely unrelated to any water issues, hence I don’t mind getting the sticker wet.

    P.S. Hi, visitors from Nokia. Please note, my intention wasn’t to have a go at phone designers (or the engineering teams); and your phones seem superior on the water-protection front anyway. It’s just a commentary on the mindset which says “it’s easier/cheaper to catch users out than it is to solve the problem.”

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    BBC: Surveillance drones in Merseyside

    By: Dan
    17-10-2006
    1984, Architecture & urbanism, Bad design, Britain, Bureaucracy, Cargo cult, Civil rights, Control, Creeping erosion of norms, Crime, Deleuze, Design philosophy, Design with Intent, Designed to be unpleasant, Designed to injure, Discrimination, Distasteful corollary, Do artifacts have politics?, Dystopia, Embedding code, Entropy, Erosion of liberty, External Control, Foucault, Future, Greasing palms, Health and safety, Hidden persuaders, Indoctrination, Intrusive technology, Law, Legislation, Liberty, Norms, Oppression, Orwellian, Panopticon, Philosophy of control, Political design, Privacy, Prophecy, Public money, Site Announcements, Social engineering, Techniques of persuasion, Technology, Technology underclass, Teenagers, Underclass, Urban, Vague rhetoric, Worldwide

    From the BBC: ‘Police play down spy planes idea’:

    “Merseyside Police’s new anti-social behaviour (ASB) task force is exploring a number of technology-driven ideas.

    But while the use of surveillance drones is among them, they would be a “long way off”, police said.
    …

    “The idea of the drone is a long way off, but it is about exploring all technological possibilities to support our war on crime and anti-social behaviour.”

    Note that “anti-social behaviour” is mentioned separately to “crime.” Why? Also, nice appropriation of the “war on xxx” phrasing.

    “It plans to utilise the latest law enforcement technology, including automatic number plate recognition (ANPR), CCTV “head-cams” and metal-detecting gloves.”

    This country’s had it.

    We’ve got Avon & Somerset Police using helicopters with high-intensity floodlights to “blind groups of teenagers temporarily” and councils using tax-payers’ money to install devices to cause deliberate auditory pain to a percentage of the population, again, whether or not they have committed a crime. Anyone would think that those in power despised their public. Perhaps they do.

    Has it ever occurred to the police that tackling the causes of the problem might be a better solution than attacking the symptoms with a ridiculous battery of ‘technology’?

    Read More

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