Category: Digital Rights

Breaking the Mould

The Institute for Safe Autonomy and the School for Business and Society at the University of York are leading a pilot study into the use of internal environment monitoring systems that could help with the detection of damp and mould in homes. Led by Philip Garnett, a professor in the School for Business and Society and Ethics Pillar Lead in the Institute for Safe Autonomy, and in collaboration with North Star Housing Group, AwareTag, and Waterstons. We will be placing sensors into social housing for the purpose of monitoring temperature and humidity levels with the aim of detecting conditions that might result in damp and the growth of mould, conditions that might eventually pose a risk to the tenant’s health. The project will run throughout 2024, and is focused on engagement with social housing tenants around the use of autonomous sensor systems in homes for the use in this sort of predictive analytics.

There has been a lot of interest in the issue of damp and mould in housing due to a number of tragic incidents over recent years, including the death of a two-year old Rochdale boy in late 2020. Due to this and other similar incidents there has been increased scrutiny of damp and mould in social housing by the Government, regulators and the Ombudsman, including the Government proposing changes to the Social Housing (Regulation) Act. The result of this will be more regulatory oversight of the management of damp and mould in homes. To assist with the monitoring of housing some social housing landlords are deploying internet of things technology (IoT), and other AI or machine learning driven technologies, in the form of temperature, humidity, and sometimes carbon dioxide sensors, with the hope that such technology can detect issues before it becomes a serious problem, and allow the landlord to act accordingly.

Rather than to focus on the efficacy of the technology alone, the purpose of this pilot study is to engage directly with the tenants of social housing to understand how they feel about the deployment of such sensors in their homes. With North Star Housing Group we will be conducting focus groups with groups of tenants to discuss the use of sensors broadly, enabling an open discussion about the positive and negative aspects of their use. AwareTag will also be supporting the deployment of sensors in a small number of homes to research their use in practice, and get feedback on the technology from tenants. Waterstons are also providing advice on how the technology can be secured and the privacy of tenants protected. The views of the tenants are central to this issue, and their opinion on whether a technological solution is in fact a valid solution to this issue, and if it is how that technology should be used and deployed. It is expected that this pilot study will lead to future research projects at a larger scale.

“We are very excited to be working on this project, as it allows us to work with our customers to understand a landlords role in IoT devices and the data they produce. We are always looking for ways to innovative to provide an enhanced customer experience and offer but this work ensures we are doing so, consciously and keeping our customers involved”.

Sean Lawless – North Star Housing Group

This is a reposting of a blog posted on the Institute for Safe Autonmy’s LinkedIn page.

Crypto Wars Podcasts

My first attempts at podcasts for this site, produced sometime ago on YouTube, were two videos about the Crypto Wars. This is the story about the attempts to control the use of strong encryption in the late 1990s, and then again in more recent years. From about 2014 to 2018. This includes things like the Investigatory Powers Act in the UK, and other similar laws elsewhere. The two podcasts are linked below.

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Crypto Wars 2.0

I was invited to give a talk at Oxford University on Crypto Wars 2.0 for the Cyber Security DTC that is jointly ran by Oxford and Royal Holloway. I have given a talk on the Crypto Wars at Durham in the past but this talk was a combination of a revisiting the the Crypto Wars today, but also a look to the future. I have produced a podcast of the talk and the slides are available here.

33C3 – Proposed EU Copyright Law – Not Fit for Anything

Another highlight from 33C3 was Julia Reda’s talk about the proposed EU copyright law, Copywrongs 2.0. I say highlight, only because it was an interesting and compelling talk, the law itself is an absolute lowlight. To say that the proposed law is not fit for purpose is an understatement, and there is a question as to whether it is designed for purpose has less to do with protecting creators and more to do with protecting an industry struggling with an outdated business model.

The reform is a final parting shot by the outgoing EU commissioner Günther Oettinger. His proposed reform to EU copyright threatens freedom of expression by making simple things like linking to content (a central tenet of the the internet) a breach of copyright. This is obviously madness.

The proposals seems to be the product of some intensive lobbying by what are often referred to as ‘old media’. Some news publishers, mostly those who are struggling to adapt their business models to the 21st century, want to charge search engines and social networks for the links displayed in searches or embed in users posts. Essentially charging for the traffic sent their way. The other culprit is the music industry, struggling in the world of YouTube. Personally, I particularly don’t want to see the newspaper industrial disappear, especially in the world we live in today, but this isn’t the answer.

So what does the proposed law prohibit? As written sharing small sections of news articles e.g. on a blog or a personal website (such as this one) without a license from the publisher will be an infringement, for as long as 20 years after the article was originally published. This is crazy, the point of doing that is to drive traffic to the original story, the newspaper industry seems to be shooting itself in its foot.

As its stands the EU Commission has not proposed any exceptions based on the size of the snippet, or for individuals, or for non-commercial purposes, and providing a link to the source isn’t enough. This essentially means you have to have a license to reference or attribute a quote. What this means for newspapers quoting each other I don’t know, or for academic work.

Not only can you not link on social media, it would also seem that indexing the web in general would be impossible without licensing, and thus essentially impossible. In fact, any and every site in existence would have to ways of filtering out copyright infringements.

What about collaboration? The affect such a law would have on site that foster collaboration is also not clear, but likely to be bad. For example GitHub would have to put in place the filtering technology to search for source code that someone wants to keep of the site. Even if that code was written under some open source licenses. Also in trouble would be Wikipedia, and anyone using data from the web for training of AI or similar.

So what is Günther Oettinger trying to do? Does he just have no understanding of the internet, and it would seem copyright? He is known to be in favour of big business, and seems to be close to the publishing industry. At best its a misguided attempt at protecting an outmoded business model. What happens now is down to people doing a bit of lobby of our own. Is there any point in Brits getting involved? Yes, for one there is a chance that the UK will mirror some EU laws, at least initially and we don’t want this one. Also we can do our bit to help out our EU neighbours.

Podcast – quick history of encryption

I did a quick video of a very short history of encryption for a friend who was putting on a screening of Citizen Four. I tried to put the film into some context, including the crypto wars. Hard to do in ~10 minutes but I think I managed it.

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Investigatory Powers Bill

The video below is a recording of Teresa May answering questions on the draft Investigatory Powers Bill. some interesting highlights (or low lights) for me where the following:

  • She essentially didn’t answer the question on why it is unhelpful to compare the retention of web history with that of an itemised phone bill. The two things are not the same. An itemised phone bill doesn’t record a version of the conversation that took place. Now, although I believe that the retention is not include the exact pages visited, it does include the IP address of the website. So even though that is not exact pages visited, it does give some idea of the content that might have been viewed as they could go and retrospectively visit the site. Importantly, this doesn’t include whether the site has changed in the meantime. Also it is not clear to me whether the IP address and the site are recorded. Obviously this is important as you can host a large number of websites on a single server… In short this comparison is supposed to be there for clarification, it doesn’t clarify anything.
  • Some of the wording seems to be vague to say the least. This is of some concern as it could allow for a degree of ‘mission creep’. Where the legislation is used for things that it was not really intended for. We have already seen the government use terrorism laws for strange things, the most obvious of which was them being used to freeze Icelandic bank accounts during the financial crash.
  • No sunset clause. So the bill will not time out on its own, and realistically unless the attitude of a future government is very difference from today. We might well be stuck with it forever.
  • I will also point out that there seems to be some scope for the weakening of encryption in the bill. We haven’t seen this since the May 2000 Electronic Communications Act, in which the Home Office left in a vestigial power to create a registration regime for encryption services. Basically the capacity to weaken/back door encryption. This did have a sunset clause which expired.