15 June 2019 | New Scientist | 27now comparable to those of some
nations. But, as Douglas Heaven
points out, breaking them up
isn’t a good solution to their
dominance, as new giants
will spring up in their place.
If tech giants grew without
limits, a single corporation could
soon control your social media,
your transport and your ability
to earn money or pay for goods.
Eventually, you would have to
choose between being a citizen
of a nation state or a customer
of a corporation.
But the tech giants aren’t (yet)
intent on world domination, they
just want to make money, so they
don’t want to force this choice
on you.
“The Data Transfer Project”
and Mark Zuckerberg’s call for
more regulation aren’t examples
of altruism in action, they just
show that companies want
to avoid this kind of crisis.
To prevent such concentration
of power, the online world needs
to be divided into two layers – one
that holds all the data and is owned
by the consumers, and another
that is owned by the tech
corporations and provides
services but doesn’t store data
long-term. The division between
these two layers isn’t a natural
choice, from a software point of
view: it can only be defined and
enforced by regulation.
That said, this division isn’t
impossible – software is malleable.
The clue is in the name.
Methane emissions
should be a priority
27 April, p 20
From Bryn Glover, Kirkby
Malzeard, North Yorkshire, UK
Your point that methane has
less impact as a greenhouse
gas than carbon dioxide overall
may be true over a timescale
of centuries, but given that
humanity has only a couple of
decades to get its act in order,
I would have thought that
we need to pay much more
attention to the significantly
greater short-term effects of
the gas than the original
article implied.When user testing is
the only testing
Letters, 1 June
From Duncan Craig,
London, UK
Paul Bowden asks if every vital
software update is an admission
of poor design. Far more often,
software errors are a result of
inadequate testing.
In the early days of software,
testing typically took up 50 per
cent of a project’s budget. Now,
a lot of testing is left to users.
Everything is effectively in beta.
Testing picks up not only design
flaws, but also programming
errors, data errors and
specification errors. Any one
of these problems can require
an update.DNA could unmask
monsters in murky waters
18 May, p 8
From John Woodgate,
Rayleigh, Essex, UK
After reading your article
about detecting species from
free-floating DNA in river and lake
ecosystems, it seems to me that
the waters of Loch Ness should
be tested for unfamiliar DNA,
reptilian or otherwise. But I am
sure that there are people who
would object. ❚For the record
❚ Asimina Arvanitaki is the first
woman to hold a named research
chair at the Perimeter Institute
(1 June, p 46).Views From the archives
30 years ago, New Scientist
was looking at a digital technology
set to transform the worldTHERE are more than 2.5 billion
smartphone users in the world,
about a third of the planet’s
population. Most are taking
snapshots: over a trillion digital
photos will be taken this year.
Few will have the impact
of “Tank Man”. It is the name
given to a series of iconic
photographs taken in the Chinese
capital Beijing on 5 June 1989. All show a man defying
tanks heading down Cangan Boulevard towards
Tiananmen Square, a site of huge protests against the
Chinese regime. As New Scientist reported on 17 June
1989, this was the first major picture scoop to be sent
electronically to newspapers all over the world.
“Photographers are sending pictures out of China
down phone lines using some of the latest electronic
still picture techniques,” we explained. The technology
was so new that no one was yet sure of how best
to implement it. “Japanese newspapers are using
electronic still picture cameras, made by Canon and
Sony, while the American news agency, Associated
Press, prefers to use a new technique for transmitting
film images by telephone.” This used a machine that
scanned developed negatives with a beam of light,
the snag being that the film first had to be developed.
Our correspondent Barry Fox, reporting from the
Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, suspected
that the Japanese were ahead of the game. “Electronic
cameras come into their own, however, when time is
short, because it takes only about four minutes to send
a colour picture and there is no time lost developing
the photograph,” he wrote.
Storage was an issue: the go-to method for digital
storage was a magnetic floppy disc. Fuji was proposing
a different approach, “a camera which records picture
signals as digital code in solid state memory. This
development could eventually cut the cost and size
of the camera, because it does not need a disc drive.”
The beginnings of the innovations that would drive
the smartphone camera revolution two decades later
were already visible. But how history turns back on
itself. Smartphones allow us to alter images at the
touch of a screen, and concerns are being raised about
“deep fakes” – digital imaging technology that stitches
images together to make video footage that looks real,
but is anything but. The very technology that made
modern global news coverage possible is now,
it seems, rendering it unbelievable. Simon IngsTo find more from the archives, visit
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