Using Data to Keep Us Safe; Systems You Can't Sell in CA; Basketball Robot
Composed while realizing all the good Olympic competitions happen while I sleep
I bought some trains. Discuss among yourselves
Knowledge is power and safety
Almost twenty years ago, in the still-fresh aftermath of 9/11, I spoke to Steve I. Cooper, then CIO for the U.S. Office of Homeland Security. He described more than a dozen data stovepipes and 50 databases he wanted to break down and integrate to create a virtual single watchlist for terrorist activity. As Cooper explained in 2002:
There are 14 major lists that are maintained by 14 agencies that have key roles to play involving the identification of individuals that we consider bad guys. There are over 50 databases that feed those 14 watch-out lists. And that’s too many. In this case, you can consider each watch-out list a stovepipe. It’s very important [to realize] this is not a situation where people did something incorrect or did something wrong. Those different watch-out lists were developed over various stages of time to meet the mission and the charter of the appropriate agencies. So nobody did anything wrong, but we haven’t connected those working watch lists.
Now, in the aftermath of the January 6 domestic terror attack on the U.S. Capitol, tech giants are applying those same lessons to spotting domestic terrorist activities (manifestos, extremist content).
The counter-terrorism group, which includes Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Twitter Reddit, and others, isn’t new. They’ve been looking for and sharing information based on a list provided by the United Nations. Now it’s expanding what they look for and share to include manifestos often shared by U.S.-based white nationalist groups.
For me, this action is a reminder of the power of data sharing. After 9/11, officials realized that a number of federal watchdog groups had noticed terrorist chatter, but their systems were not automatically sharing the info–in fact, the systems were not even able to. Cooper’s task was to break down those tech barriers so such activity could be spotted by a cohesive group long before anything could happen.
The big difference now is that these groups are often communicating on publicly accessible platforms (also, sometimes, on less, accessible encrypted ones) and that we can’t track their activities without the help of these large, private tech companies. I’m glad to hear they’re all working together.
Toyota Basketball Robots
What with drones recreating the earth and the greatest gymnast of all time pulling herself from key competitions, it’s been a wild and unpredictable Olympics. The strangest moment thus far may have been Toyota’s Robot Basketball Player.
Okay, “player” is a bit generous. The bot, which made its Olympic debut during one game’s halftime, can’t run the court (or walk it, for that matter–they should replace its static legs with this) and someone has to hand it the ball. Still, it is a virtually perfect shooter.
Toyota engineers trained it how to shoot the ball through 200,000 shots. A high-level pro player might take one-to-three million shots over the course of their career and is never a perfect shot. No matter where they place the robot (from half-court on in) the Toyota bot never misses.
Wonder how much training the robot will need to learn how to trash talk.
More power
Computer users, especially those running gaming rigs, crave power, which is usually delivered to them via dedicated graphic cards. But if you live in California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont, or Washington, there are certain power-consuming PCs that companies like Dell will not ship to you because they break the energy-consumption rules recently adopted in those states.
I’m torn between applauding states that are trying to address very real energy-consumption/climate-saving concerns and feeling sorry for the users who can’t get their game on. I do wonder, though, if these rules are also related to concerns about the exorbitant power needs of Bitcoin mining, which is raising significant environmental concerns.
The answer is not for these (and other states that might adopt similar policies) places to change their rules, it’s for the computer industry to figure out how to deliver sufficient processing and graphics power without also drawing huge amounts of energy. They need to follow the path of Apple, which has consistently built energy-efficient mobile CPUs capable of desktop-level power, so much so, that they’re now in desktops.
That’s the direction the entire processor industry is heading but how long will it take for us to get there and can they satisfy the gamers, miners, and environmentalists?
Old Idea New Again
As I was wrapping up this newsletter, I saw the news that Jack Dorsey (yes, the Twitter guy but this is for his Square payment company ) is plunking down $29B for Afterpay. The Australian company specializes in digital installment payments. That’s right, installment payments, the old-school idea of buying big items not exactly on credit, but on a kind of loan with a schedule of larger monthly or quarterly payments.
Apparently, millennials and Gen-Z are into the style of payment perfected by their parents and grandparents. The digital twist is, naturally, the key here. Having Afterpay integrated with Square mobile payments system and the company’s Cash money transfer app could be a big benefit though, greasing the wheels between initial payment and then, handling the monthly after payments perhaps with help from someone who can transfer money to you via the Cash app.
One outstanding equation might be if this purchase can clear regulatory antitrust hurdles. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
Stay safe
See you soon