dunxd.com

Last week we took a brief journey through over 100,000 years of communication history – we travelled from the development of languages to their projection over long distances via shouting, writing, postal services and telegraph wires.

From beeps to print to voice

With Joseph Henry’s invention of the telegraph in 1831 developments took on a cheetah like speed – within thirty years wires were strung around and between many countries in the world. At first these were used to transmit simple signals in the form of short and long beeps – Morse code. Shortly after this, in 1843, Alexander Bain developed the chemical telegraph – a machine that enabled messages written on paper to be copied onto another machine a long distance away – the first Fax machine! Nearly twenty years later Alexander Graham Bell patented the electric telephone. This enabled people with no training to communicate in the most natural form – speaking – even when separated by hundreds of miles. The first telephone conversation was between Bell and his assistant, Watson – Mr Watson, come here, I want you! These words changed the world forever.

Over 45 years the limit of how fast people could communicate had gone from the speed of the fastest form of transport, to the speed that signals could travel down an electric wire – the speed of light! These developments made it possible to communicate efficiently over much larger distances, changing social lives, government, military operations, investments, agriculture, almost everything.

Time travel through storage

We saw how the storage of communication in the form of writing was a leap that permitted people to communicate through time as well as space. Shortly after the invention of the telephone, the storage of sound became possible. In 1877 Thomas Edison patented the phonograph, which used wax cylinders to record sound. Ten years later the invention of gramophone made it possible for sound recordings to last much longer – early recordings made over 100 years ago can still be listened to today.

Seeing as well as hearing

At the same time as these developments in sound, people were working hard on capturing images. For hundreds of years artists and scientists had known that a small hole in the wall of a darkened room would project an image of the outside world on the opposite wall. In 1814 Joseph Nic�phore Ni�pce used this principle to project an image of the world onto chemically treated paper in a box – the first photograph had been taken. Images from one part of the world could be brought to another. This allowed people in Tanzania to see what a London street looked like, and people in London to marvel at Maasai warriors dressed in their finery. In 1877, Eadweard Muybridge developed a camera which could take a series of photographs in rapid succession. He did this in order to win a bet on whether all a horses hooves left the ground when it ran. He lost the bet, but had invented the movie camera. By 1927 this had been combined with recorded sound, allowing people to share realistic (and not so realistic) experiences around the world.

Wireless communication

Communication was still physically shackled to the earth. Films and photographs had to be transported from place to place, and telephone calls could only be made between terminals joined by telegraph wires. In 1895 Guglielmo Marconi sent and received the first radio signals. By 1899 he had sent signals across the English Channel, and in 1902 sent the first radio signal across the Atlantic. The practical and economic limitations of audio communication were set to fall, along with the telegraph wires.

Images were shortly to follow, with the invention of television by John Logie Baird in 1925.

Moving into the hands of individuals

As these technologies have improved over time they have gradually worked their way into the lives of ordinary people the world over. Radios can be bought in markets in the most remote parts of the planet. Mobile phones are spreading throughout the world’s poorest countries. In the 20th century we went from being a world of strangers who couldn’t talk, to a world of people divided only by the cost of a phone call. In the coming century that cost is likely to fall.

Convergence

The technologies that I have discussed in these articles have all helped us store and transmit communication. All these technologies are joining together in the form of computers and the internet. A cheap computer connected to the internet gives a person access to storage and transmission of written words, sounds, and images both still and moving. The future will see this convergence grow, with mobile computers allowing us to take photographs and send them to our friends instantly, wherever they are. Eventually we may even combine ourselves with our mobile computers, and transmit our thoughts and experiences directly into the heads of other people.

Communication is after all about sharing experience.

Originally published in Arusha Times 326

It is with a mixture of techie glee and Orwellian paranoia that I present myself at the UK Passport Service offices to participate in the Biometrics Enrolment trial – part of preparations for the governments controversial National ID Cards scheme. I enrolled to find out more about the scheme as there has been little public debate about what will amount to the greatest intrusion of government into our lives since conscription ended in 1960.

Arriving at the UKPS office a queue snakes through the foyer leading to airport style metal detectors and x-ray machines. The people around me are mostly there to apply for passports – most look nervous. This is a watered down version of my experience at the Immigration and Nationality Directorate offices in Croyden, sorting out my wife’s visa – queuing, security, suspicion, fear of rejection.

Once inside I am queuing again. The lady from MORI has brought in someone from the street to make up numbers – the trial is several thousand people short and needs to make up numbers to be considered valid. The man doesn’t have all day – I offer him my place in the queue and he accepts. This gives me time to read the background material explaining the trial’s purpose -it discloses that all biometrics will be destroyed at the end of the trial. I had been warned by colleagues not to participate without confirmation of this.

After filling out the demographics section of the questionnaire comes the meat of the trial – being registered, counted, measured, numbered. This is done in a booth containing the hardware required for the biometricisation process. The operator checks my details and I am alarmed to see her enter the code from my questionnaire along with my name – I thought that was anonymous I say. It’s only for the card she says. I let it go.

First up is facial recognition. I look into the Panasonic BM-ET300, and a camera noise is played. Is this picture ok? the operator asks – it looks a little distorted, reminding me of web cam shots of red eyed computer programmers sitting at their machines long into the night. Yeah, fine.

Iris scanning comes next – I am to line up my eyes so they are central in the mirror on the BM-ET300. The machine bleats out instructions in a robotic female voice reminiscent of the computer in Alien – move back slightly, left, right slightly, forward slightly. I am a bit confused about what to do, but the operators defer to the machine – Just follow the machine’s instructions. Eventually I figure out that the circle in the centre of the mirror is a target – one eye should be centred on that. The snapshot sound plays, and I have been retina scanned. I am sure that only my left eye has been taken though, but the machine thinks otherwise, and we don’t argue with the machine. We sit and drum our fingers as communication is attempted between the UKPS and Atos Origin’s server in Andover. Thrice it fails, and the operator decides to skip the retina scan. I won’t be able to find out if my retina matches one of the others on the database, and I won’t have a complete biometrics card.

Fingerprints involve placing my fingerprints on a glass screen on an Identix TouchPrint 3100 – the computer screen shows a large image of my fingerprints. Each print is checked for quality, and then successfully checked against a dummy database in Andover. This time there is no network problem, and I have passed the test – there is no one else running around with my fingerprints as far as they know.

Finally they ask me to sign my name on LCD screen, which will also be stored on the card.

I am lead back into the queuing room and fill out the rest of the questionnaire – am I more or less concerned about biometrics now I have gone through the process? Do I think that ID cards will protect us from terrorism, illegal working, identity fraud?

Moments later my ID card is ready. The woman who is taking the questionnaire asks me which verification I would like to try – iris, facial recognition or fingerprints – I opt for facial recognition, knowing it is the least reliable of the biometrics. I sit down in front of another Panasonic device, a photo is taken, and my card is plugged into a reader. The operator turns her screen around to show me the picture from my card, with the reassuring word “Verified” in green underneath.

I am a valid human being, at least for the period of the trial.

Originally published in Out-law.com