Technologyquarterly March 7Th 2015
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How to back up Hacking your Space hoppers a country brain in orbit TechnologyQuarterly March 7th 2015 Green food from Silicon Valley Tech firms start cooking up sustainable produce 20150307_TQ_MARCH.indd 1 23/02/2015 11:21 The Economist Technology Quarterly March 7th 2015 Monitor 1 Contents On the cover Silicon Valley-funded startups are moving into the sustainable food business. Their idea is to disrupt the industry by using plant protein to mimic meat and dairy products—and provide a taste which is as good, if not better than, animal-derived produce, page 11 How to back up a country Monitor 1 How to back up a country in case of a cyber-attack, DIY mobile networks, medical Internet security: To protect itself from attack, Estonia is finding ways to diagnostics by smartphone, back up its data rounding up oil slicks, protecting health-care workers IPING a country offthe map is one sions and propaganda attacks are a con- against infection from Ebola, Wthing. Wiping its data is another. stant headache. speech-recognition technology Estonians know what the former is like. Estonia’s first dry run ofdigital continu- and self-cleaning surfaces They are determined to avoid the latter. ity, carried out in September last year in Just as computer users backup their lap- conjunction with Microsoft, had several Difference engine tops in case they breakor are lost, Estonia elements. One was to maintain e-govern- 7 The little engine that could is working out how to backup the country, ment services by using back-up computers Downsizing cars with the latest in case it is attacked by Russia. within Estonia. Ifthat became impossible, turbochargers Estonia has already shown notable the services migrated abroad. prowess in putting government services One part ofthe experiment involved Space rovers online. It has pioneered the use ofstrong the website ofthe president, Toomas digital identities forevery resident, en- HendrikIlves. A digital-savvy, American- 8 A lightness of being Low-gravity vehicles that will hop abling them to sign and encrypt docu- educated advocate for e-government—and around asteroids and comets ments, access government services, and a hate figure for the Kremlin—his website conduct e-commerce. is a likely target forRussian attack. During But the latest project, termed “digital the war in Georgia in 2008, unknown New food continuity”, is the most ambitious yet. It hackers defaced the website ofthat coun- ¡ ¥ £¤ 11 S ¢alley’s taste for food aims to ensure that even ifEstonia’s gov- try’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili. Mr Tech startups move into ernment is sabotaged it will continue to Ilves’s website was moved fairly smoothly sustainable produce function over the internet, providing to the “cloud”—networks ofthird-party services and enabling payments. The computers—in this case Microsoft data lessons will be valuable to any organisa- centres in Dublin and Amsterdam. Neurostimulation tion concerned about disaster recovery. 14 Hacking your brain Estonia, which regained independence The load and the stress Using electricity to stimulate in 1991after being occupied by the Soviet A more complicated effort involved the your grey matter Union, was the target ofwhat many regard State Gazette—the official repository ofall as the first instance ofcyber-warfare. In Estonian laws. These do not exist in paper 2007 its main websites were over- form. As well as backing up the data, the Brain scan whelmed with traffic from multiple experiment tried to see how accessible it 17 Medicine by numbers sources in a distributed denial ofservice would be in an emergency. It applied two Susan Ellenberg on avoiding attackduring a row with Russia over a war tests: one ofload (ifan unusually large mistakes in an era of Big Data memorial. The episode crippled the coun- number ofpeople were trying to access try’s online banking system and came the sites); and the other ofstress (if outsid- within a whisker ofdisabling emergency ers were, for instance, swamping the sys- services. Lately Russian airspace intru- tem with bogus requests forinformation). 1 2 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly March 7th 2015 2 The result was broadly a success—the ing someone in the United States might experimenters even succeeded, for a brief actually be cheaper. This is thanks to a planned period, to run services from series ofrepeater antennae scattered outside Estonia. But it also highlighted DIY telecoms through the mountains and providing a numerous obstacles. “It became clear that connection to Oaxaca city, the state capi- no matter how ready you thinkyou are, tal. It allows voice-over-internet calls. you are never ready enough,” notes a draft The cost ofmobile equipment is falling report jointly compiled by the Estonian thanks to open-source systems and a new authorities and Microsoft. Mobile networks: Fed up with the generation ofbase stations that make use One set ofissues is legal. Laws on failings of the big operators, remote ofa process called software-defined radio. personal data, and public expectations of Mexican communities are acting for As its name suggests, this uses software to privacy, are strict in European countries; manage the networkinstead oflots of just as with back-up services forcomput- themselves dedicated hardware. Such kit is now avail- ers, users need to be sure that their data N THE cloud forests ofthe Sierra de able to groups such as Rhizomatica, a will be properly safeguarded ifthey are IJuárez mountains in southern Mexico, a non-profit operating from the state capital. sent abroad. Storing such personal infor- new kind oftree is springing up: the mo- Peter Bloom, its founder, has been in- mation in “digital embassies”—computers bile telephone mast. Unlike most phone stalling the equipment aided by a bevy of in Estonian diplomatic missions abroad— masts in the world these are installed, Italian, Spanish and other engineers. helps as they are Estonian sovereign terri- owned and operated by small, mostly They have been able to do this because tory. But internet law is still unclear. indigenous communities. Providing a Mexico’s constitution gives indigenous Technical problems included the way mobile service in these villages was not community radio stations the right to use the internet deals with addresses—the profitable enough for big telecoms compa- radio spectrum in places neglected by Domain Name System (DNS). How would nies to bother with, unless the locals national concession-holders. Rhizomatica the Estonian authorities ensure that peo- stumped up $50,000. But improvements teamed up with a lawyer to persuade ple trying to reach president.ee, for ex- in software and the falling price ofhard- regulators that the principle also applies to ample, would actually get there in an ware has made it possible to build a local wireless telephony. “Communication is emergency—particularly ifa massive mobile-phone base station for around an essential human right,” says Mr Bloom. cyber-attackwere under way? Sorting this $7,500, which non-profit operators and In the spring of2014 the national telecom out required “extensive manual oper- small communities can muster. regulator awarded Rhizomatica a two- ations”, the report notes dryly. Sixteen communities in this remote year experimental, non-profit licence to Digital continuity would become even corner ofMexico now count on local operate in the region. It also helps that this trickier ifthe back-up operation were to mobile services which cost much less than area ofOaxaca has long governed itself include more complex services. Estonia’s that ofMexico’s dominant operator, under Mexico’s so-called indigenous public and private databases exchange América Móvil, or its nearest rival, Movi- customary practices, which include com- information over a peer-to-peer network star. Eliel López, a motorcycle-taxi driver, munal land and labour-sharing. called the X-Road, a kind ofinformation says the business he gets using the com- Now that Rhizomatica’s networkis ¢ federation. Users give their digital consent, munity-owned network ¡illa Talea de sprouting new nodes, the communities by using their ID card and PIN, to allow Castro in the state ofOaxaca more than are encountering some ofthe same diffi- one database to get information from pays his monthly fee of40 pesos ($2.71), culties faced by larger operations, such as another (forexample, ifa hospital needs to which covers local calls, and per-minute people from one local networkwanting to checka patient’s status with a health call costs of0.82 pesos to mobiles on other use their mobiles in another area. The insurer). So it is not just the data, but also networks in Mexico. The big networks local networks do not use SIM cards to the software that deals with them, that charge around 3 pesos a minute. identify users, who must register their would need to be exported. Calls to mobiles on other networks can phones with the local network’s adminis- The experiment’s designers soon spot- be dialled using pre-paid credit. But ring- trator. When someone registered in one ted several snags. One was that Estonia’s community visits another they can auto- system uses lots ofdifferent software, in matically use the networkthere, too. At multiple versions, some ofthem out of present they are not charged, but roaming date. That works fine when they just need fees could be introduced. to exchange data, but makes it hard to In December Mexico’s regulator issued replicate the system in the cloud. a plan to reserve some ofthe radio spec- Another was that the architecture of trum for indigenous and community use Estonia’s system is poorly documented, under15-year non-profit licences. This and that rules forclassification ofdata as could encourage more communities to set sensitive, personal, secret or public were up their own mobile services. But the not suitable for digital continuity: “fre- non-profit requirement might dissuade quently only a small number ofexperts outside investors from putting money into understand the workings ofthe system,” such schemes, making it difficult for them the report notes.