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Hello and welcome back to TechTV. In today’s headto heads up, we’re going to start with a roundup of the news. Uh to begin with, there’s a big story that has just broken about Amazon’s Ring devices that apparently were sharing uh information with a surveillance company. Pete, what have they done in terms of access to Ring data? Essentially, it was a company in the US that it was being used as a promotional stunt, but um and the company in the US links together uh data from car number plate recognition and other
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surveillance systems and it was being used by this company Flock to show that you could actually track a missing dog or find a missing dog. However, it backfired quite spectacularly because uh people thought that this was a way that you could actually network all of the uh the Ring cameras on doorbells together and turn it into a huge surveillance network. um which people in the US do not like and it actually then bounced into the UK even though the system wasn’t being used here in so far as
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surveillance privacy experts like yourself Bill uh were saying hang on a minute we don’t like this idea but this just talks back to a lot of the issues that remain with a lot of these permanently on devices not only the sort of Ring devices that uh Amazon sell to us for our home protection. But there are other Amazon devices like the Alexa devices that are permanently listening to us. Um, and there are implications that people haven’t really thought through uh such as the fact that in America you’re meant to have Miranda
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rights uh where you have the right to be silent uh unless you choose to speak or unless you when you’re arrested um have a a lawyer or legal representation and you’re ready to speak. But unfortunately there have been um uh uh warrants served on Amazon and the information from Alexa and from security cameras has been served up served up to the authorities in order for them to prosecute cases. Now potentially there are some positive aspects here. If we have uh surveillance cameras they can show exactly what’s
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happening and we really want to know what’s happening if a crime is being committed on our premises. But also at the same time there’s things that we don’t want recorded where we want to preserve our right to silence. If I’m at home and in a a moment of frustration uh I I threaten the kids with some sort of draconian punishment then um I don’t want that held against me later in court. Um because it could have been said in jest or whatever. >> I think this is the big issue. It’s a
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huge issue. is something that I mentioned in the manifesto for uh my book AI on trial where it’s device sanctity and it this has created a really muddy area which is your device, your computer in your home, your phone, your doorbell. They should be loyal to you and you should be actually setting the permissions up on them to say what it is that you want them to do and what it is that you don’t want them to do. However, unfortunately, we haven’t actually managed to to to get that sorted out yet, Bill. Well,
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obviously I think that there are there are many privacy issues here and uh there’s a big concern not only about what the information that’s being captured, but what a lot of the online firms are doing at the same time. Um, and we’ve just heard from the uh UK prime minister that um uh feeling uh uh uh emblazened by the fact that he’s won a an argument against Elon Musk recently with the uh Grock AI um service that was threatening to um create uh mock nudes or or fake uh um nudes of uh innocent
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bystanders that people were going to share on the web. and he managed to get um Musk and Gro to back down on that fact. He though Star is now saying that he’s actually going to go to war with all of the chat bots. Um obviously there’s an enormous amount to be said for um having discipline and ethics in all that these companies do. But it it exposes the fact that to a large extent the UK is fairly powerless in many of the respects in terms of um taking the the the regulatory um hammer to a lot of
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the tech firms. Um uh obviously if he goes too far there’s a certain member of the um uh political establishment sat in the White House who’s very good friends with Elon Musk. >> Yeah. But I think the issue here is these are these things all come together. Okay. because it’s all to do with sovereignty. What we’re talking about is, you know, there’s an issue about individual sovereign data. That’s your individual sovereign position with your technology and with your own data.
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Now, what we’re also talking about here when what Karma is talking about with in relation to Grock and these other bots is saying, “Hang on a moment. We’re going to assert our ownership over our individual data and we’re also going to assert our ownership over our data territorially. And fine, I mean, Donald Trump can say and Elon Musk can say, “Hang on a minute, we’ll fight you.” But we’re seeing this battle that’s beginning already where Europe is asserting
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sovereignty. Europe is saying hang on a moment European data doesn’t go outside eur European borders. Uh and in a sense what we’re seeing is the individuals are being encouraged to say hang on my individual data doesn’t go out of these borders either. So all of these things are actually interrelated bill and >> and sovereignty is going so much further than that. I mean, we’ve seen that um uh Elon Musk again um has chosen to turn off um uh the satellite um uplinks for his um Starink service to all of the uh
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Russian um people on the front. Um putting them in a real position in terms of their um ability to communicate um in their efforts to um persecute the war against Ukraine. Now that kill switch could easily be applied to so many other technologies and in in a big exercise of data sovereignty the European Union have come together to say that they’re going to be looking towards developing their own payment system to rival Visa and Mastercard because again these are areas that are dominated by the Americans and
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in some of the sanctions that we saw against Russia their ability to use these payment services was switched off and The last thing that the Europeans want is for that to be held over their heads. And again, the UK is looking to do the same thing with a UK payment service, I believe. >> Yeah. And this is about being sovereign and being independent. You don’t want to be in a situation where somebody else can turn off your technology because it makes you look as though you are a satellite. It makes it look as though
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you are dependent on that country and it’s it’s well it’s infrastructure because it’s their technological infrastructure that you’re using. So this move by Europe a lot of people are actually saying oh no hang on this is breaking up the whole idea of the internet and this great wonderful experiment that was started so many years ago back in 1996. Yet, however, unfortunately, that breakup has been started by people starting to extrterritorially assert themselves because if you think
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about it, what the Americans are doing is saying, “Hang on, we can turn you off.” So, that means that what you’re doing is you’re asserting American power and it’s that that people are actually bucking against. So people are bucking against having technology interfering in your house coming into your house. They’re also bucking against having technology coming into your country interfering in your country or the geopolitical area that you’re in. And again, I think a lot of this comes
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down to trust. Um there has been a rather blaszeise attitude to a lot of these technology services and these big tech companies and and people are having a starting to have a little bit of a rethink about well do we really trust Elon Musk and all of these different companies or um maybe Facebook and and some of their various different entities and are they doing good for society? should they be held to account? And at the same time, can we trust the American government if they’re going to uh
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threaten NATO and threaten to invade Greenland? Um it’s not that much of a stretch of the imagination that they might turn off payment services and possibly even have a kill switch to armaments and other things that we have traditionally bought from them. Um and this is a matter of real concern. And I think it’s right that we should be asserting our independence and our sovereignty. And I think we’re going to see more of that. >> No, I think we’re going to see more of it because I think that what you’re
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seeing is the beginnings of an understanding of technology and how technology works. I think you’re beginning to see a bit of a backlash from people where people are actually saying, “Hang on a minute. I thought I could depend on this. I’m not sure how much I can depend on it.” There are people who are seeing that the police can grab hold of your hard drives and actually analyze them. Now, that’s a good thing because if the police are actually looking for evidence, however,
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people are saying, “I’m not sure that that gives me control.” And I think that that’s the issue. This is about taking control back. And that’s really what we’re talking about now. I I think you could probably say that we’re in the era when we took control back as individuals. And and there’s another area I think where there’s possibly not an enormous alignment uh between ourselves and our our American uh counterparts and this is in to do with energy. And this brings us
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on to the the next topic that we’re looking at here today and a real focus area for us here and now. There is a massive buildout of data centers and data center infrastructure worldwide largely to meet the demand for AI services which is going absolutely ballistic at this moment in time. Um indeed with there is an argument that the entire um economy certainly in the US and potentially globally is being supported by such a massive amount of demand and massive investment in AI and in these data centers and were it not
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for this we’d possibly be in recession. Um but there’s questions are being about how is it all going to be powered. Now, we’ve had conversations with um uh c certain players in the UK recently where we’ve discussed the the difficulties of powering some of the infrastructure and how we go about it. Uh there’s been a obviously in in the UK and Europe a big orientation towards greener sources of uh energy generation and in renewables. But uh our our our um uh URSTW president in the US has decided that this isn’t a
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good thing. It’s holding back the economy and he actually wants to have more of a focus on fossil fuels. Is it purely because um he has multi-billionaire friends who are in the fossil fuel industry or is there more to it? Uh well, I’m going to say that many of the people that we’ve interviewed and we are going to be making a program about this for TechTV and for Password. Many of those people that we’ve interviewed have said that this is about America wanting to actually go to a what’s
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called a sunk infrastructure. They a lot of people have invested huge amounts of money in fossil fuel technology and if you turn it off the you’re not going to get your money back basically. And what you need to do if you’re going to be moving into this new world of renewables is you have to come up with more infrastructure, a new infrastructure. That’s why they’re complaining about net zero. Um but there are so many other factors. One of the other factors that that has come out of all of this is that
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we’re still going to have to spend money on the infrastructure that the companies that have actually been involved. The electric sorry electricity utilities in the UK have not been investing in the infrastructure. We’ve still got very very old wiring in the ground in the uh UK that needs to be replaced. It’s one of the reasons why we’re getting all of the these new pylons that a lot of people are protesting against. We’ve got an infrastructure in which we are actually losing electricity because of
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the resistance in this old infrastructure. And there’s yet another factor. Just let me finish on this bit which these much hated electricity meters. Again, people are seeing this as a uh an incursion into their houses. However, if you want to be able to stop the blackouts that will occur because of the poor infrastructure that we have to replace, then you have to be able to switch the load about. The only way you can do that is by giving visibility to the new AI systems that the power companies will use and they get that
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data from the electricity meters, from the smart meters. Yes. And again, the what you talk about underinvestment here is a a massive problem in the UK and has led to the UK having some of the highest electricity charges and highest electricity costs in the whole developed world. Not only have we unin underinvested in many things like um uh nuclear power where it’s absolutely cost a fortune for the UK to do any major capital project. It also takes an enormous amount of time and we haven’t
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delivered a new major nuclear power station for a very long time. Thankfully, unlike uh Trump and certain of his acolytes, we are somewhat more enlightened in our attitude to some of the the greener um renewable energy sources. But the reality is that a lot of the wind farms, the potential wave farms and and a lot of the hydroelectric power is in remote areas of the country in Wales and Scotland, whereas much of the demand for the power is in the southeast and in major um urban areas. Um and this means that what you were
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talking about the actual transmission of the power has to be as efficient as possible and if it isn’t efficient then a lot of power loss will be uh uh occurring at our cost and on top of that um there is an enormous opportunity as you say with these smart meters for us actually to be a little bit smarter about the electricity and the way that we not only use it but potentially the way we contribute. And the UK is actually trying to encourage as many households as possible to invest in solar power. Now, the UK isn’t actually
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all that well known for its sun. It’s better known for the rain here in the UK, but there is massive potential for um uh people around the country to have a certain amount of um local generation. They may have a a local um wind generation. They may have a local solar generation and they are able to use local batteries within the house to actually moderate the demand that they have on the grid and also act as a source of potential contribution to the grid or at least reducing the amount that they draw down from the grid. And
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that will be to everyone’s benefit because we actually have to then generate less electricity and sort of shift less of it all the way around the country from remote regions down to the areas where it’s needed. So these smart meters will help us because it will tell us the best times for us either to be generating electricity, to be storing it, or to be feeding it back to the grid. And our level of smartness is actually going to put us in a far more powerful position to avoid the very sort
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of brownouts and blackouts that you were suggesting. And I think that’s the future. >> Yeah, it is the future. And that’s one of the really interesting things about this is people have traditionally seen themselves as the consumers of the power. However, what you can do if you have renewables, if you have solar on your uh roof and if you have a battery, then you can actually become a contributor to the net. You can also form small networks in the areas that you are. I live in a village in Death
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uh in the village here. you can actually make sure that the power doesn’t have to travel very far. You can store that power, supply your neighbors, and that becomes useful. You you become a small power station in in reality. You say that we’re not very good with solar. Uh well, no, it’s not the sunniest place in the world, the UK. However, it is the windiest place in the world, which is one of the reasons why we have so many wind farms. So, we shouldn’t really knock that. Um, and what we’re wanting
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to do is to set up these new data centers with renewable power sources around them so that we can actually make sure that the power that we will need and I mean let’s put that into perspective. The uh the calculations suggest we will need to five or six times more power than we currently consume by 2030. That’s a lot. And so we have to improve the infrastructure, new power stations. You mentioned Scotland and Wales. Well, Scotland and Wales, you can put data centers in and there are data
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centers being put in Scotland and Wales. Um, also Wales, a lot of people don’t know this to uh get use that that terrible phrase, that old comedy phrase, but there are two reservoirs in Wales that load balance the entire electrical system in the UK. The entire grid is load balanced by two reservoirs where they actually take power that isn’t being consumed. They from one reservoir, they they let it go down. that generates hydroelectric power when it’s needed. Then they use renewable energy to pump
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that water back up into the other reservoir so that they can actually release power when they need it. And that is an essential component of our grid. And not a lot of people know that. But obviously that form of energy storage and buffering that about when they’re pumping water backwards and forwards is actually all not all that efficient. the sorts of way the best way of storing energy nowadays is batteries because they’re becoming that much more efficient. And one of the the the strange realities is there are a lot of
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people who have chosen to um purchase great big batteries uh for their homes, most of which are on four wheels and parked in their driveway. And even if they’re not driving these large batteries, they could be taking energy from them during the day and putting energy back into them at night and providing an enormous store and a buffer of energy that could actually sort out of lots of our problems. So maybe those um large four-w wheeled batteries that a lot of people have chosen to uh purchase
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might come in handy when we start to get a little bit more smart about the way we use electricity. Well, I mean, that’s going to be the thing, isn’t it? You’re not going to say, “I’ve got a wonderful car.” You’re going to say, “I’ve got a wonderful battery.” Because one of the things that again people are not really that aware of is they only use their cars, according to the REC and EA, they only use them 6% of the time. So the other 94% of the time they could actually be
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storing power and then putting that back into the grid, putting it back into their local communities and most importantly reducing their bills. You could even probably get a car contract that allows you to actually pay off part of your uh bill for the car by actually offsetting it with electrical sorry electrical storage. So there there’s a whole new way of thinking about things that we just haven’t done up until now. And that’s because we’re in the 21st century. We’re going to have to start
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thinking in a 21st century way. And we’re not at the moment. We’re wedded to the 20th century. And and and some of the experts we’ve spoken to recently have pointed out that the current situation where we have a high tariff rate during the day and a low tariff rate at night. And just those two tariff rates is going to change. And the roll out of smart meters is going to enable us to have a large number of different tariff times throughout the day so that we can actually a little be a little bit
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smarter, a little bit more intelligent about our energy use, exactly when we use energy, when we store it, when we feed it back to the grid, and exactly how smart we can be with all of that. I’m looking forward to seeing some of the developments here because I think it’ll make a massive change and um hopefully we won’t be uh doing what the some of the Americans are doing and just simply sticking our head in the ground and ignoring the energy issues and it’s certainly ignoring a lot of the
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renewables because I think they’re going to have a big role to play here. >> I think you’re absolutely right. You think about it, we’re ripping up the 20th century. We’ve got remote working. A lot of people like remote working now and uh we’ve got the the rush hour which is one of the constituents of that t high tariff rates that you’re talking about. That’s when peak use of electricity was the alarm clocks went off, the kettles went on and people started making tea and breakfast. Now
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you’re not going to see that. So we’re going to change our patterns of usage and that’s quite inevitable. One other thing before we finish with this topic is that you yeah you can use your car to actually give yourself power at a point which would have been traditionally peak time and yet you’re not you’re actually taking that power that’s yours now. >> Absolutely. And interesting enough, this is going to be where it’s going require an enormous amount of investment and uh
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obviously coming from a position where we’ve underinvested for a long time, we’re not going to see cheaper energy anytime soon because the cost of energy will have to be um uh uh subsidizing that level of investment. But hopefully there are going to be a shiny horizon with uh cheaper, more plentiful energy eventually some point in in the distance. Well, talking about New Horizons brings us on to our next topic. And our next topic is all about exactly what’s happened in the arena of um uh
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top level domains. Now, there are various acronyms for global top level domains or whatever, and we don’t want to get sunk into those, but please Pete explain to people what tople domains are, some of the history here, and exactly what’s happening in the near future. Well, I mean, I hope everybody can remember back to those Houseian days. I mean, obviously I’m ancient, but uh when the internet first started off, everybody wanted an internet name that ended with com. And it also said very
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very clearly what it was that they did. And there was this massive competition to get relevant uh domain names. So something like power.com would have been very very valuable. Um and all of the people who were setting up websites were saying let you know come on you’ve got to get a relevant name and that was also important because the search engines were looking for things that were relevant to you. So that put a premium on these but suddenly it expanded. You had all of these other highlevel
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domains. The UK got its own domain.co.uk. We got biz for things that were to do with business. We had more and more of these that were being rolled out. Various different countries got these little domains that they could use. aguia sorry for example that is a highly sought after place to actually have a domain because it’s aai and if you’re down with the kids and in the modern age you want aai um ending on your domain now in April they’re going to be rolling out a whole lot more and so I mean that’s basically
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the background to it Bill but the there was also something which I’m sure you can tell us more about which is cyber squatting. One of the things that everybody hated. Well, obviously they’ve had a number of different domain names up until now. And obviously you could invest in the.co.uk name for your business. Let’s say you were um a car company with a a very famous brand. Then you could have the name of your brand followed by com or.co.uk UK or whatever the depending on the country you are based. Um but
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somebody might decide to squat on the same name. Biz or a whole load of different alternatives and we’ve seen certain people go and grab names that large brands haven’t thought of protecting and then threaten to either use them in an abusive way or it ransom them back to these companies for impossible sums. Now, this has happened already with a um a a cup person who squatted on the lame name Lambo, which is a a nickname for Lamborghini, and decided he was going to try and charge an enormous fortune to the the company
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behind Lamborghini to try and um make an enormous profit from it. But there’s going to be a whole load, something like 1,200 top level um uh domains that are going to be launched potentially in April. And this will mean that the uh potential for squatting on some of these could be immense. And uh where you once thought you could get your com and your.co.uk and maybe your.biz, you may have to go and look to get a whole load more depending on not only the different top level domains, but what the other
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nicknames like Lambo you need to consider. >> Well, yeah, but I mean the thing is great, isn’t it? Because everybody hated the cyber squatter because there you were, you’d got a business. You’d had that business for ages. You may not have thought about needing a website. Yet suddenly you go and look for your website and find that somebody’s sitting on it and they want to charge you some outrageous sum of money. The good news there is that the courts are beginning to say, “Okay, if you’ve got a limited
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company and you’ve been trading for a while and you’ve got that reputation, you should actually have a right to those domain names and they’re prizing them off these um people who are squatting on them because let’s face it, they bought them for a couple of pounds or something like that and they’ve then said, “Hey, you know, we want more. We we we want tens of thousands for these. I somebody bought the domain name IPS switch, believe it or not, for uh 20,000. Um some people in Ipsswitch might even
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say it wasn’t worth that. But it doesn’t matter that, you know, this is going to be in a sense good news that uh you can force people off, but you’ve got to be aware of what those nicknames are. Uh because one of the things that happens is it’s a traffic driving device. If you don’t have as many of those names as possible, then other people can set up, as you said, a competitive site and that could, you know, have a bad ramification on your reputation. Well, thankfully the the courts are
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stepping in and showing an element of common sense in all of this, but no doubt there will be an opportunity for any of you who want to uh uh do some uh uh prospecting or speculation on top level domains. Uh, April is going to be an opportunity for all of you to buy up enormous uh uh numbers of new domain names and uh top level uh uh uh uh domains and potentially there should could be an enormous fortune to be had from this either in uh marketing your services or potentially in selling these onto others. But there could also be an
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enormous financial loss because maybe people have got sick of so many different endings and they might not actually use some of the new new top level domains and it might be a complete damn damp squib. Who knows? We’re going to see. We’ll see what happens in April and we’ll all be sitting back watching um from the sidelines because I’m not sure we’ll be participating. But but we’ll see exactly what happens and we’ll be reporting it back to you Pete. That that brings us to an end. Thank you
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again for for joining me to discuss some of these topics. We’re focusing on a number of big issues in co programs that are coming up. We’ve touched on data sovereignty. We’ve touched on some of the power demands. We’re going to have big feature programs coming on those. So do tune in. Do join us again in the near future. Pete, I look forward to joining you again soon and to taking some of these topics and exploring them in more detail. >> Yeah, definitely. Absolutely. Definitely. And you know, we if anybody
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wants to get creative with these domain names, by all means, contact us and let us know what you thought of. >> I think we’ll see a lot of potentially amusing anecdotes coming out of all of this. We look forward hope hopefully to sharing some of the funny stories with you in the future. Thank you for tuning in. All the very best. Heat. Heat.
