Strange Aeons

Until the police and government deploy a proper cure for kettling we will have to make do with defences. It requires a lot of police to seal an area, especially given the size of crowds that we have seen at recent protests. This means that there are a limited number of locations where kettles can be imposed. In an area as geographically complicated as a major city the best defence against the kettle is avoiding it in the first place and there is now an app for that. Whilst there are questions about whether a technological solution is appropriate, in the short term Sukey is going to help protestors know which way direction to head in to avoid the kettles.

The objectives laid out in the Sukey executive summary are as follows:

To keep peaceful protesters informed with live protest information that will assist them in avoiding injury, in keeping clear of trouble spots and in avoiding unnecessary detention. The application suite gives maximum information to those participating in a demonstration so that they can make informed decisions, as well as to those following externally who may be concerned about friends and family. It should make full use of the crowd in gathering information which is then analysed and handed back to the crowd.

From the security perspective it looks as though the developers have at least sought advice and thought about defending both themselves and the crowds supplying data. Without details though and a thorough code review it is hard to be certain. Whilst generally the advice has been that open systems can be more secure, the developers of Sukey are taking a hybrid approach. Source code will be released after each protest at which point the current codebase can be worked on by third parties and the developers will fork and work on the next version. This will maintain the longer term openness of the project whilst attempting to minimise the equivalent of a zero-day exploit that could be used by the police during a protest.

So, given that any protestors who are kettled are likely to be identified anyway, what are the defenses against Sukey? I can't imagine that the police will be shutting down mobile phone networks during protests or jamming wifi for that matter. One potential weaknesses is in the source of input data. Amongst the crowds providing data will doubtless be police acting as saboteurs or provocateurs so input data could be spoofed. Perhaps there will be a sufficient density of non police sourced data that police-originated spoofing will be lost in the genuine data. An alternative weakness may lie in the reliance on web services and non-distributed nature of the system. If there is a single, or sufficiently critical, point of failure then the police could target that on protest day. My last, and admittedly most far-fetched initial thought is of infiltration, if the police are able to take control of the system on protest day, rather than just breaking or shutting it down, then they could direct protestors towards kettles rather than away. Which would be bad.

To be honest I think it is sad that protestors have to come up with a solution like this to defend themselves against those whose sworn duty is to protect them and maintain safety. That said it is a really cool piece of code and an exemplar of what smart-phones (iPhone), crowd-sourcing (the protestors and interested by standers), and mash-ups (swiftly, Google Maps) can achieve.

I have posted before about gamification and the use of persuasive techniques to improve the efficiency of drivers. For example, the Ford Fusion prototype dashboard and the use of simple lights and meters to encourage drivers to accelerate smoothly without aggression. Here is another take on the same idea that doesn't require buying a new car just an iPhone. The glass of water app displays a glass of water and the aim is to not spill any of the water as you drive. I am assuming that the app is correlated to the movement of the iPhone so that if you drive smoothly then you won't spill the water, and hence will improve your driving efficiency.

This seems like a great way to improve fuel consumption. Link it to an online leaderboard, possibly with prizes for the best drivers, or best improvement, and you can make a broader multiplayer game out of it. Link the leaderboard to each individual drivers social network and you might actually begin to get real improvements in average drivers fuel consumption. Of course there is also a corresponding race-to-the-bottom game that could conceivably develop as well and the rules should take this into account. If the GPS could also be used to log journeys then, suitably anonymised, it would be interesting to visualise whether there are particular roads, areas, or times that lead to increased fuel-consumption or bad driving. I also wonder how much penetration would require before we could use a system like this to monito traffic flow. Whilst many autonomous-traffic management systems rely on transponders attached to individual cars or cameras watching all vehicles, perhaps there is a lower bound to the number of vehicles we track that can still give meaningful statistics about traffic conditions?

I do wonder about how traffic police in the UK would see this though. In one sense it is only an add-on version of what could be built into the car dashboard, and is not that different to a tom-tom, especially if there were an audible cue that could be used so that the driver wasn't watching their glass rather than the road. That said, an iPhone has a screen and could be used to display video and hence should not be within the drivers line-of-sight as far as I am aware.

Now we just need an android version, and cheap mass produced widget that sits on your dashboard and does the same thing for the non-smart phoners amongst us.

The thing is, there are a LOT of people out there who are just confused and want to know more and don't realize that the common critiques have been addressed by scientists...they're just not experts, or even wanna-be experts and they're a bit lost on things. This could help them

Sometimes people just take a side in an argument that fits with what they know, which might not be much. Once that position is taken it can be very difficult for them to change, especially if it might suggest some ignorance on their part. Tools like this app will at least provide one more way for people to be exposed to the common arguments against climate change and see that those arguments have generally already been thoroughly addressed.

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The thing is, there are a LOT of people out there who are just confused and want to know more and don't realize that the common critiques have been addressed by scientists...they're just not experts, or even wanna-be experts and they're a bit lost on things. This could help them

Sometimes people just take a side in an argument that fits with what they know, which might not be much. Once that position is taken it can be very difficult for them to change, especially if it might suggest some ignorance on their part. Tools like this app will at least provide one more way for people to be exposed to the common arguments against climate change and see that those arguments have generally already been thoroughly addressed.