Category: Technology

We have now without a doubt entered the Artificial Intelligence (AI) era of history. In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) and by January 2023, it had become the fastest-growing consumer software application in history with over 100 million users.

So what can people do with ChatGPT?

Just ask ChatGPT and it will tell you.

Content Generation:      Writing articles or blog posts.      Creating creative writing, including stories and poems.    Drafting emails or other written correspondence. Idea Generation:     Brainstorming ideas for projects.     Generating creative concepts for art or design. Learning Assistance:     Getting explanations and clarifications on various topics.     Studying and practicing languages. Programming Help:     Writing and debugging code.     Seeking advice on programming concepts. Problem Solving:     Generating solutions for problems or challenges.     Planning and strategizing. Conversation and Social Interaction:     Having casual conversations for entertainment.     Simulating characters for role-playing. Language Translation:     Translating text between languages. Entertainment:     Playing text-based games.     Creating and participating in interactive stories. Assistance with Tasks:     Creating to-do lists or drafting documents.     Getting help with decision-making. General Information:     Looking up general information on a wide range of topics. Therapeutic Conversations:     Engaging in therapeutic conversations or journaling.

Suppose you wanted to write an essay about the effect of the French Revolution on the world, a popular question I remember from high school history. There is a lot of information about the French Revolution easily available on the Internet. Here is lovely illustrated history but it would be quite a lot of work to distill this down to a well written one page essay. 

I asked ChatGPT to
  Write a one page essay on the effect of the French Revolution on the world.

After about 5 seconds this printed out on my screen.

The Global Ripple Effect of the French Revolution Introduction:   The French Revolution, which unfolded between 1789 and 1799, stands as one of the most influential events in world history. Its impact reverberated far beyond the borders of France, shaping political ideologies, inspiring movements for change, and redefining the global balance of power. The aftermath of the revolution left an indelible mark on the world, influencing social, political, and economic structures across continents. Political Ideals and Nationalism:   The French Revolution introduced a fervent call for liberty, equality, and fraternity, setting a precedent for the assertion of individual rights and the dismantling of traditional hierarchies. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen became a beacon for democratic aspirations, transcending borders and inspiring movements for independence and self-determination in colonies and nations worldwide. The revolutionary fervor paved the way for the rise of nationalism, as people sought to define their identity and destiny independent of monarchies or imperial rule. Napoleonic Code and Legal Reforms:   Napoleon Bonaparte, emerging from the chaos of the Revolution, consolidated power and implemented far-reaching legal reforms. The Napoleonic Code, a comprehensive legal system, spread across Europe and beyond, influencing legal structures and principles in diverse societies. The code emphasized equality before the law, property rights, and secularism, leaving an enduring legacy in legal systems around the world. Shift in Global Power Dynamics:   The French Revolution significantly altered the geopolitical landscape of Europe. The rise and fall of Napoleon led to a redrawing of borders and the reconfiguration of power dynamics. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 aimed to restore stability and maintain a balance of power, but the revolutionary ideals had already set in motion a trajectory towards nationalism and the eventual reshaping of empires. Social and Economic Transformations:   The revolutionary fervor extended beyond politics to encompass social and economic realms. Feudal structures crumbled, and new economic systems emerged. Industrialization, spurred by the Enlightenment ideas that fueled the Revolution, gained momentum, transforming societies and economies. The impact reached as far as the Americas, where the ideals of the French Revolution influenced independence movements and the formation of new nations. Legacy and Lessons:   The French Revolution left an enduring legacy, contributing to the evolution of modern political thought and the establishment of democratic ideals. It taught the world the power of collective action, the potential for radical change, and the need for a balance between stability and progress. While the revolution had its share of excesses and challenges, its enduring impact on the world underscores the complex interplay between revolutionary fervor and the quest for a just and equitable society. Conclusion:   In conclusion, the French Revolution’s effect on the world is immeasurable. Its ideals and principles echoed across continents, shaping the course of history and inspiring generations to come. From the rise of nationalism to the restructuring of legal and political systems, the French Revolution’s impact on the world is a testament to the transformative power of ideas and the indomitable spirit of those who dare to challenge the status quo.

From my vague memory of this history this seems like a pretty good answer, complete with a catchy title. However I don’t think the answer is nearly as good as the one given by a Chinese historian, a scholar of one of the oldest human civilizations, who is reputed to have said when asked about the importance of the French Revolution, 

“It’s too soon to tell.”

There were a lot of articles and videos about many different things that people were doing with ChatGPT. I thought that some of it was hype. In particular, I was dubious about the claims that ChatGPT could write anything much more than a very simple computer program. I was browsing an online introduction to an AI course from Harvard which used as an example of AI programming the problem of how to find a path through a maze.

Over a sequence of several lectures the course developed a Python program to solve such a maze. I then asked ChatGPT to write a Python program to solve a maze. I was amazed! 

ChatGPT produced an 80 line program that was quite different from the Harvard course and was pretty good code. I ran it against several different mazes to test it, and it did work.

Anything that’s hot gets copied pretty quickly. Besides the big players like Google, Facebook and Microsoft there are a whole host of chatbots now on the internet. Here’s one list of The best AI chatbots, but there are many other lists.

I have only tried a few of these. One that is listed as best “For fun”, character.ai allows you to converse with all kinds of characters from Socrates to Napoleon to Albert Einstein to Elon Musk.

The startup behind Pi, the one listed as best “For personal use”, believes that every website will be adding a chatbot which will enable visitors to their website to find information easily and quickly. For a company, this could streamline and extend the reach of their marketing and customer support. Pi also believes that their chatbox will be widely used by individuals as a personal assistant. Many people tried to use Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant as personal assistants but their “intelligence” and abilities were quite limited, at the level of a grade school child. Chatboxes based on the new AI will offer capabilities of a college graduate. Who would you choose to hire for a personal assistant?
How Siri, Alexa and Google lost the AI race

Another very popular application of the new AI is image generation. You provide a description (prompt) of what you want to draw and some parameters about the type of drawing and the AI program will pick images and elements from its training data to produce a result. Here’s a great article that shows many examples of what some of the leading image generators can do.
Image Generators Compared

Unlike most of the chatbots which seem to be free, many of the image generators require a subscription. I found a free image generator that I quite liked called Leonardo.AI, although I think I was partial to the name. By all accounts Leonardo da Vinci was one of the most brilliant and talented people to have ever lived. 

Leonardo has been very handy to quickly and easily make greeting cards and birthday cards for printing or email. Here’s the New Year’s card I made for 2024. I simply provided the following prompt. 

Happy New Year wishes encompassing the theme of peace on Earth and a healthy planet. 

It generated four different images in about 10 seconds and I picked the one that I liked the best.

You can see a current weakness of AI image generators on this card. They all have trouble incorporating text accurately. “Happy New Year” is legible but is followed by some gibberish; I really don’t have a clue what it says. This is still early days for the new AI.

I engaged Leonardo for another task, to design a logo for my theoretical AI Consulting business. Here’s the prompt that I gave:

Design a logo for my AI consulting business. It should be deep blue and have the letter D surrounded with interconnected nodes in a circle that reflect the neural networks of AI systems.

This looks like a really good logo to me. Maybe I should actually startup this business.

Of course there has been a lot of press about how ChatGPT makes it easy for students to cheat, how it will take over many jobs and lead to people getting fired, increase the threat and spread of fake news, and generally have disastrous effects on the economy and society.

A lot of people from many walks of life have become engaged in the debate about the dangers of AI. In 2014 Stephen Hawking warned about the growing power of Artificial Intelligence that would enable robots to replicate themselves and increase the rate at which they get smarter, leading to a tipping point or ‘technological singularity’ when they can outsmart humans.

Ray Kurzweil, one of the most prolific inventors alive and the author of five books on Artificial ­Intelligence, replied to Hawking and pointed out that the industry guidelines developed for DNA research have kept that field safe and the same can be done for AI.
Don’t Fear Artificial Intelligence

One of the people who was concerned about the direction of AI was Elon Musk. His concern was that the large companies would control the development of AI and keep the technology secret. To counter this, he and a group of other like minded tech people founded OpenAI. Their mission was to do advanced AI research but keep it in the public domain “to empower as many people as possible to have AI. If everyone has AI powers, then there’s not any one person or a small set of individuals who can have AI superpower.”

Fear of robots and computers taking over the world goes way back in science fiction. This was the theme in the film “2001: A Space Odyssey” that burst onto the big screen in 1968. It follows the evolution of intelligence, transcending from ape to caveman and then from modern man to the computer HAL. But then HAL goes rogue and causes one of the astronauts to drift away in space before the other astronaut is able to shut HAL down.

2001 was great entertainment but it was not great science. HAL would not have been a threat to the astronauts if it had been designed to follow the The Three Laws of Robotics. These were published by Isaac Asimov in 1942.
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

In 2023 the debate about the future of AI continued at a heated pace. In March more than 1,000 technology leaders and researchers published an open letter warning that AI tools present “profound risks to society and humanity” and urged AI labs to pause development of the most advanced systems.

In December 2023 the European Parliament passed a First Regulation on Artificial Intelligence. This is fairly broad legislation that establishes obligations on companies developing and using AI that depend on the level of risk.

Unacceptable risk AI systems are systems considered a threat to people and will be banned. – Cognitive behavioral manipulation of people –  Social scoring: classifying people based on behavior, socio-economic status or personal characteristics –  Biometric identification and categorisation of people High risk systems will have to be registered in an EU database. - Systems that negatively affect safety or fundamental rights General purpose and generative AI systems have to: –  Disclose that the content was generated by AI –  Design the model to prevent it from generating illegal content –  Publish summaries of copyrighted data used for trainingGeneral-purpose AI models that might pose systemic risk have to undergo thorough evaluations and any serious incidents have to be reported.

Canada and the U.S. are also preparing AI legislation.

My view is that many of the “experts” (physicists, philosophers, historians, journalists, politicians) who are sounding the alarm about AI do not have an in-depth knowledge of software/technology and the psychology/neuropsychology of human intelligence to fully comprehend how difficult the problem of advancing to general intelligence is. They underestimate how long it will take and amplify fears expressed by others.

The current AI boom is fueled by a breakthrough in deep learning which is fundamentally advanced pattern recognition. AI models today are not very strong in analysis, reasoning and logic which are key components of human intelligence. These critical characteristics of advanced general intelligence are more difficult to achieve than pattern recognition. The number of breakthroughs necessary to achieve general intelligence stretches far into the future. Climbing a tree can take a monkey nearer to the moon, but climbing taller and taller trees does not enable a simian astronaut to plant a flag on the moon.

Artificial Intelligence is not new. It began way back in the 1950s when the term was coined. There were a number of early dramatic successes, such as a program that played championship level checkers and a program that could prove many of the symbolic logic theorems in Principia Mathematica, the monumental classic on the foundations of mathematics. These successes convinced many in the field that AI was going to revolutionize the world and a boom in AI began. However the hype raced ahead of reality and the boom turned to bust in the 1970s.

A second AI boom occurred in the 1980s. The focus was on “Expert Systems” in which input from experts in a particular subject area was entered into a system which could then respond to user queries and provide expert answers. A number of such expert systems were successfully used, from hardware circuit design to medical diagnosis. But as in the first AI boom, many of the prototype systems failed to scale to real life applications and meet the hyped expectations so investment dried up and the boom was over.

Will the AI boom today escape AI’s past history?

The current boom in AI began in 2012 when a program to recognize images in a database containing more than 20,000 categories won the annual ImageNet competition. The software had been developed by Geoffrey Hinton and several graduate students at the University of Toronto using a technique that was called “Deep Learning”.  It achieved 85% accuracy, a very significant improvement over previous years.

Deep learning was a type of neural network that had been used as a model for AI research since it was first developed in 1960 by the psychologist Frank Rosenblatt. Anybody who took a psychology course at McGill University back in the day would be familiar with the idea of a neural net. It is based on D. O. Hebb’s neuropsychological theory of how learning occurs in the brain, which can be summarized by the pithy statement “Neurons that fire together wire together”.

The success of deep learning triggered a whole new wave of AI research. After decades of research and millions of dollars spent by IBM and others, progress in speech recognition had been slow. Applying deep learning resulted in a breakthrough and enabled computers to understand the spoken word in real time. This success was the basis for Siri and Alexa and the voice recognition used by telephone answering services. 

But a new era only occurs when a revolutionary development (based on prior breakthroughs) changes life for many people. So although the current AI boom began in 2012, the AI era didn’t really begin until 10 years later with ChatGPT.

In fact there have been 5 eras in the evolution of computers since the first early machines.

1951 First Commercial Computers —  after the first working computers were developed during World War II in government research labs and universities, general purpose computers became available from many different companies in the U.S., Europe and Japan. Their rapid growth was triggered by the invention of the transistor in 1947, an invention which many people have called the most important invention of the 20th century. The transistor, which functions as a switch, is at the heart of electronics design. It replaced vacuum tubes and made computers a lot smaller, faster, cheaper and more reliable.

1964 IBM Mainframe Era — the IBM System/360 family of compatible computers allowed customers to start with a small system and upgrade to larger computers as their computing needs grew. The success of System/360 drove many computer vendors out of the market and established IBM as a dominating force in the computer industry for the next 30 years.

1981 Microcomputer Era — Intel invented memory chips and CPU chips in 1970/71 which gave birth to microcomputers such as the Apple I. But the revolution in the widespread use of microcomputers that defined the era only started with the IBM Personal Computer (PC) in 1981.

1995 Internet Era — the Internet was first built in 1969 as a research project under a grant from the U.S. Department of Defense, but widespread use of the Internet did not occur until after the World Wide Web was developed in 1991 and Microsoft Windows 95 made it easy for non-technical users to access the Internet with simple point and click.

2007 Smartphone Era — the first smartphone was developed by IBM in 1994 and was followed by the BlackBerry in 2002. But the general Smartphone era really began with the revolutionary Apple iPhone in 2007 which led to widespread mobile computing for almost everyone .

2022 Artificial Intelligence Era — ChatGPT and other chatbots came out of the lab and into widespread use following the breakthrough successes of deep learning.

It seems there is a new era in technology on average every 14 years. 

What will the next era be 14 years from now in 2038?

I predict the next era will be Personal Robots (PR) or Personal Medicine (PM).

It is a natural extension of AI to herald a revolution in robots. Robots are not new. The first programmable robot was used in a General Motors plant in 1961. Robots are now in fairly wide use but they are generally designed for very specialized industrial jobs. There is a lot of research into making general purpose robots, especially in Japan, the largest exporter of robots in the world. Japan’s declining population has spurred the government to invest heavily in robot technology to provide their future workforce.
Japan’s robots are conquering the world

Personal Medicine is where medical decisions and interventions are tailored to an individual. Some of the breakthrough discoveries that are the foundation for this advance have already been made. 

The Human Genome Project that identified, mapped and sequenced almost all of the genes of the human genome was completed in 2003. This opened the way for gene therapy and genetic engineering.

CAR T cell therapy is a gene therapy in which T cells, one of the important components of the immune system, are taken from cancer patients, genetically modified to contain receptors that will attach to cancer cells and re-infused into patients. The modified T cells are then able to locate cancer cells and destroy them. The first CAR T cell therapy approved by the FDA was in 2017 for the treatment of childhood leukemia. Following this success, several more CAR T therapies were approved for other types of leukemia and other blood cancers.

In 2023 AlphaFold won the Lasker Award for solving a 50 year old problem in biology to accurately predict the shape of a protein molecule. In a very short time AlphaFold has proved to be an invaluable tool in many areas of medical research. The program and the database of 200 million structure predictions, amounting for nearly all the known human proteins, have been shared with the scientific community and more than 300,000 science researchers have used these resources. AlphaFold is one of the most significant achievements in the history of Artificial Intelligence. The story of this breakthrough was unfolded in an earlier blog article.

CRISPR is a revolutionary technique to edit genes that was discovered in 2012. Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier discovered that Cas9, a gene-cutting protein used by bacteria to kill viruses, can be re-engineered as a programmable gene editing tool. The CRISPR-Cas9 system is faster, more accurate and more efficient than previous gene editing methods. Doudna and Charpentier were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020. 

The following short video is a good demonstration of how CRISPR does “cut and paste” gene editing.
CRISPR Explained

In 2013 Charpentier co-founded a startup company called (surprise, surprise) CRISPR Therapeutics. They undertook developing treatments for several diseases and conducting them through clinical trials. In 2023 their treatment for sickle cell disease received FDA approval. This is the world’s first approved medicine based on CRISPR gene editing. Many people think this is a groundbreaking achievement opening the way for a lot of new CRISPR developed medicines.
CRISPR Gene Editing Breakthroughs

_____________________________________

So here are three possible scenarios for 2038. 

1. You order the PR (Personal Robot) that everybody is buying and an hour later it arrives from Amazon by drone delivery. After a friendly introduction, you ask it to do the laundry and then prepare a gourmet lunch while you get back to more important things in life.

2. After going to your doctor for a checkup, she informs you that the diagnostic tests that you took have identified a rare disorder. She has submitted all the test results and your medical history to the PM department (Personal Medicine) at the hospital. In three days you are notified that a drug has been made to treat your medical condition and that you need to come into the hospital for a three day initiation. Possible side effects cannot be completely predicted yet by Personal Medicine so you need to be under observation in case you need intervention.

3. Continuing scenario 3, you get ready to depart for the hospital for your new PM drug treatment program but there is a howling windstorm and torrential rain that make it impossible for anybody to travel. Because the world did not move quickly enough to meet the target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C by 2030, extreme weather events are happening frequently and continue for weeks. You are shut indoors while your health condition deteriorates and you wonder if you will get your new miracle drug on time.
(more on climate change in a future blog)

Most people have heard about chatGPT but not that many have heard about AlphaFold. But it is AlphaFold that is the most significant achievement of artificial intelligence (AI) by far that I have seen, and I have been following AI for more than 50 years. 

AlphaFold is considered by many to have solved the protein folding problem, or at least to have made very significant advances. How strings of amino acids fold to produce stable proteins has been an important question in biology for over 50 years. 

In September 2023, the Lasker Foundation announced that the winners of the Basic Medical Research Award were Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for the invention of Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold. In the past 20 years, 32 Lasker winners have received a Nobel prize. So an AI is in line for a Nobel for the first time.

Here’s a good video with dramatic animation that explains protein folding.
AlphaFold Solves Protein Folding

This is a more detailed explanation of protein folding, its implications and asks the question
Has Protein Folding Been Solved?

Watch this video for an exciting mini-documentary look behind the scenes of how the team at DeepMind raced to get results to submit to the CASP competition.
AlphaFold: The making of a scientific breakthrough

This article shows how AlphaFold is being used in several different research projects.
Case Studies Using AlphaFold

DeepMind published the method that AlphaFold uses, put the code in an open source repository and set up a database of 200 million structure predictions, amounting to nearly all the known human proteins.The program and the database have been shared with the scientific community and more than 300,000 investigators have used these resources. The catalog has been expanded to almost every known protein in organisms whose genomes have been sequenced, including viruses that pose epidemic threats and the World Health Organization’s high-priority pathogens.
Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold

In only two years, the impact of DeepMind’s published manuscript has vaulted over almost all of the 100,000 research articles that have been published in Nature since 1900. It ranks 50^th, having been cited in more than 7000 papers from top journals.
Lasker Foundation

You can run AlphaFold on your own computer. Using Google Colaboratory, a cloud based service, you don’t need to have a very powerful machine yourself. Here’s an example of a researcher running AlphaFold to analyze a protein.
How to predict a large protein structure with AlphaFold

The Internet was made “safe” for E-commerce back in 1995 when Netscape developed encryption for web traffic. However many people did not trust providing their credit card information for Internet purchases. But when the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns began in 2020, many more people started to make purchases over the Internet for such basic things as grocery delivery and take out food. Using credit card information on the Internet is fairly safe but there are a number of risks.

Almost all websites use a secure (encrypted) connection, denoted by https instead of http in the address line of a browser, often shown with a lock icon

This means that all the information being sent to the website is encrypted, including your credit card information. 

Breaking encryption is well beyond the capability of any hacker who is intent on stealing your credit card information as it travels over the Internet. However, the NSA (U.S. National Security Agency) is able to break encryption. But this is only after years of spending more than a billion dollars developing widespread network surveillance, large data bases, specialized supercomputers and collaboration with large American technology companies to siphon off Internet traffic (as revealed in documents released by Edward Snowden).
How US and UK spy agencies defeat internet security

A bigger risk is if you happen to have malware on your computer that monitors everything you type. This type of malware, called “spyware”, will record credit card information and send it back to a hacker’s computer. The protection for this is to make sure that you have antivirus software running on your computer that includes anti-spyware. If your antivirus does not include anti-spyware, you can add a separate anti-spyware package.

Another risk is your credit card information being stolen from the website long after you have made a purchase. Most websites store your credit card information. This makes it more convenient for you if you order from them again. But there have been many security breaches in which hackers have broken into the servers of some very large companies and stolen millions of credit cards.
Biggest credit card data breaches

This risk is something that you may be able to minimize. In Europe privacy laws make it illegal for websites to store credit card information without your express consent. But in North America, privacy laws are way behind and there is no such protection. Websites should really ask you if you want to save your information, but most of them do not. And they don’t provide an option for you to remove your credit card information from their servers. 

However, if you use PayPal instead of a credit card, you have more control over websites retaining your payment information. You can go into your PayPal account and look at all the websites that have “Automatic Payment” turned on and turn them off. In general you want to do that for all websites except those in which you have set up a monthly regular payment, such as Netflix which is a monthly subscription service, or services you use regularly such as Uber. When I went through my PayPal account, I found three Automatic Payments to TicketKing going back several years.

PayPal also provides more security for your payment credentials. When you use PayPal to make a purchase on a website, you are directed to PayPal to log into your account. The webserver does not see your password and so it cannot save it. If a hacker breaks into a webserver and steals PayPal account information, it cannot be used to make purchases or access your PayPal account. However there is one caveat here, which is that a hacker may try to break into your PayPal account by  guessing your password. As long as you guard your PayPal login information carefully you will be pretty safe.

Not many PayPal data breaches have been reported compared to credit card breaches but one was reported in 2022. Only personal information was stolen and there was no indication of any financial losses.
PayPal breach

In summary, what can you do to minimize your Internet payment information being compromised?

1. Make sure you have anti-spyware software protecting your computer (it may be part of your antivirus software).

2. Use PayPal whenever possible for online payments instead of credit cards. After completing the transaction, go into your PayPal account and turn off Automatic Payment for that website, unless it is a bona fide subscription service.

I had some funds that I wanted to invest but when I went into my RBC account, I discovered that my investing account had disappeared. I had not used it for a few years but I had never received a warning or a notice or that this was to happen. This is RBC Fault #1.

It looked like I had to create a new account. There was a link in my online RBC account to do this. After going through 10 screens entering all kinds of detailed information about myself and various investment options, I got to what looked like the last screen. I clicked on the button and received the following response:

This was incredible! I was dumbfounded that there could be such a catastrophic failure in such a critical application. RBC Fault #2.

Someone analyzing this may have estimated that RBC was losing 40 applications a day with an average portfolio value of $50,000. In other words $2,000,000 a day. Now this is really not a very thorough analysis, but it would not stop someone from posting headline news saying,

“Software failure causes Canada’s largest bank to lose $2 million a day”

I called the Direct Investing customer support number and was informed that there was a wait time of 1 hour and 45 minutes. I decided not to wait. I thought of calling outside of stock trading hours when the line might not be so busy, but I found out that the support line was only open from 8 am to 5 pm, weekdays only. For people managing an investment portfolio, where time is of the essence, this level of customer support is inadequate. Fault #3.

A few days later I was able to get to my local RBC bank branch. I asked if they could set up an RBC Direct Investing account for me. They said they were not able to do this at the branch. I would have thought that an investing account was a pretty important RBC product. Why aren’t branch banks able to help customers with it? Fault #4.

After about 10 days I thought that the web site error would be fixed, since the message said that RBC had its “best teams working hard to fix this error”. However, after painstakingly going through all the setup screens, I encountered the exact same error again. Clearly RBC’s “best teams” were not very good, or else they had never been informed that there was an error that needed to be fixed. Fault #5.

I decided I had to bite the bullet and call customer support. By now it was the December holiday season and things were slowing down. I had to wait “only” 45 minutes to get through to a support person. He could not understand how I was having such a problem. He put me on hold while he went to talk to a manager. They looked into my account and discovered that my Direct Investing account had not been deleted, it had been “hidden” from my view. They could not really understand how or why this had been done, but they were able to restore the account so I could carry on with my investment plans.

I don’t know if RBC ever fixed their web site. Clearly trying to create a new investing account when one already existed is a problem, but the error message never indicated this.

Whoever coined the phrase that the big banks are “too big to fail” clearly did not have any understanding of how software works, and does not work.

When the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in 2018, Facebook became a focal point for the failures in protecting people’s privacy. Facebook was pilloried in the press and hauled into U.S. Senate hearings. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/10/us/politics/zuckerberg-facebook-senate-hearing.html

I had just finished reading a book written by one of the early developers of Facebook’s advertising, “Chaos Monkeys” by Antonio Garcia Martinez. And I had experimented with Facebook advertising to promote my computer book. Much of what was being said and reported did not square with what I knew. The main culprits in the use and abuse of privacy information are a large number of companies known as data brokers. If you don’t know who they are and what they do this article describes the tip of a very large iceberg.
https://www.webfx.com/blog/internet/what-are-data-brokers-and-what-is-your-data-worth-infographic/

The first time most people ever heard of a data broker was when Equifax was hacked and personal records of 147 million people were stolen.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/10/opinion/equifax-breach-china-hacking.html

As information about the Cambridge Analytica surfaced, many people pointed fingers at Facebook or the other tech platforms like Google and Twitter. However, the only clear call that would really address serious privacy concerns came from Tim Cook. In 2019 he called for comprehensive federal privacy legislation that would establish a data-broker clearinghouse, requiring all data brokers to register, and enabling consumers to track the transactions that have bundled and sold their data, and giving users the power to delete their data on demand, freely and easily.
https://time.com/collection/davos-2019/5502591/tim-cook-data-privacy/

This call did not garner much uptake. The data brokers and advertising industry have a lot more influence in Washington than the tech companies. They are really happy to have Facebook and the other tech companies take the fall for failures in privacy information protection. By contrast, Europe has had an extensive privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GPDR) since 2018.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/08/opinion/sunday/privacy-congress-facebook-google.html

I finally came across an article that explains the role of data brokers and how they use Facebook advertising to help them reach their target audiences. It also reveals that there is an “industry of political data brokers”. While I don’t get overly concerned about companies using people’s identity information to target advertising, when data brokers are using this information to target and try to influence voting in elections, then I think there is a lot more cause for concern.

How politicians target you: 3,000 data points on every voter, including your phone number.

Our quest to find what politicians know about voters uncovered data troves with intimate information about income, debt, family, religion, gun ownership and a whole lot more.

By Geoffrey A. Fowler
Washington Post technology columnist based in San Francisco. He joined The Post in 2017 after 16 years with the Wall Street Journal writing about consumer technology, Silicon Valley, national affairs and China.
October 27, 2020

The campaign messages are coming fast and furious now.

“Hi Geoffrey, I’m Jess w/ People’s Action,” reads one. “Voter Alert for Geoffrey Fowler!” says another.

And the weirdest: “It’s Jonathan Del Arco, Hugh the Borg on Star Trek … Join a grass roots fundraiser with 19 cast members!”

Perhaps your text messages, Facebook feed or mailbox have also exploded with eerily personal political ads. Ever wonder: How’d they find me? I, for one, didn’t pass my digits to a campaign — much less tell them (or Hugh the Borg) I’m a Trekkie.

Blame the assault on the voter data economy, in which candidates, parties and nonprofits quietly collect, buy and exploit a ton of information about you.

Their files treat your contact details like a matter of public record and can be more intimate than credit applications, including your income, debt, family, ethnicity, religion, gym habits, whether you own a gun and what kind of car you drive. In 2020, campaigns use this data to microtarget us with record numbers of online ads, mailers, knocks on the door and text messages.

I’ve been on a crusade to find out what politicians know about me. So over the past few months, I’ve used California’s new data privacy law to force companies that specialize in collecting my personal information for campaigns to show me the data.

What I learned: Privacy may be a cornerstone of American liberty, but politicians on both sides of the aisle have zero problem invading it.

In fiercely competitive races, campaigns see our data as their edge. The Republican National Committee proudly told me it now has more than 3,000 data points on every voter. The Democratic National Committee said it acquires enough to understand you as a person, including unique identifiers from your phone that can be used to target ads across different apps.

Politicians have long had special access to voter registration and participation data, which they use to plot strategy, run polls and coordinate volunteers. But in recent years, they’ve also begun tapping into commercial data brokers and murkier social media and smartphone tracking techniques. The scandal that erupted around Cambridge Analytica, which scraped data from Facebook while working for Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, was just the tip of the iceberg.

Many Americans, like me, find targeted ads creepy when they come from businesses, especially when they use personal data we didn’t really consent to have tracked. But I found it downright unsettling to learn that my credit score — and so much else — was going to politicians who could use it to try to manipulate me. Online political ads are so potentially dangerous for democracy that Twitter banned them entirely and Google limited how campaigns can target them. (In September, Britain’s Channel 4 documented how Cambridge Analytica used voter data to specifically disenfranchise African American voters in 2016.)

I’m not saying politicians are breaking any laws; I’m saying there just aren’t many laws designed to protect our data from politicians. As an institution, Congress has shown little interest in regulating the digital tools its members use to get into office. (Even the California Consumer Privacy Act I used in my quest applies only to the for-profit part of this economy.) Citizens with a lot of free time can try to opt out of some political databases and communications, but for the most part, we have little control.

In my data crusade, I should have been an enigma for the politicians. As a journalist, I don’t donate, sign petitions or participate in surveys. I also avoid campaign communications, though I recently signed up for text messages from both the Trump and Biden campaigns as part of this reporting.

It turns out campaigns didn’t need me to volunteer information to build detailed profiles about me. I found five major sources of personal data that fuel the political machine. 

1. State voter files

Voter registration details and voting history are a matter of semipublic record in most places. I say semipublic because states generally restrict access to campaigns, parties, academics and journalists (and the companies that help them).

When I acquired my California voter data as a journalist, I discovered the state was sending campaigns my email address and phone number, along with my address and party affiliation. If I wanted to remove the email and phone number — technically voluntary information — I could re-register to vote. But, as I learned, campaigns have plenty of other sources for that data.

2. Commercial voter files

An industry of political data brokers collects the state voter files and enhances them. They sell these files to campaigns, political parties and academics. (The Washington Post also uses these kinds of files to help run its polls.)

Where do their “enhancements” come from? Largely from data brokers that also sell it to commercial marketers. Firms such as Experian and Acxiom gobble up records and buy personal data sold by banks, subscriptions, TV companies, apps, and more. Then the voter file firms use their own algorithms to make inferences about you, including how likely you are to vote and how much you’re likely to donate.

L2, one of the largest political data firms, sent me two files with more than 700 data points, including my phone number, estimated income and credit rating, and inferences about my politics and hobbies. A few categories were real head-scratchers, such as “home decor enthusiast.”

Another firm, Aristotle, had more than 150 data points on me, including the amount of my mortgage, whether I had insurance from my employer and its guess for my interest in immigration reform. A third, called Data Trust, had over 1,500 data points, including — I kid you not — scores for how much I care about privacy and how much I trust tech companies.

After the shock of finding so much personal data subsided, what struck me was how some of it was inaccurate. Several of the voter files had wrong information about my religious background, whether I’m married and whether I have children.

This isn’t the same as when companies put you in the wrong marketing segments, such as calling you a Prius driver instead of F-150 truck lover. This information is being used by politicians to judge how you might act, donate or vote — before you’ve even made up your mind.

California residents can, like me, use the CCPA law to force voter file companies and data brokers to disclose what they know and even stop selling it. But you have to make the requests one by one.

3. What we tell them (even unintentionally)

When you engage with a politician — signing up for news updates or donating — you’re adding to his or her data trove. You might not mind, if they’re a candidate you believe in.

Every move gets registered. When I signed up, as an experiment, to stream one of President Trump’s recent rallies, it kicked off a deluge of campaign text messages begging for money, with messages appearing three, four or five times per day. (At least replying “STOP” cuts off the messages. That works for Biden, too, though not for all campaigns.)

Even when you’re just poking around a campaign website for information, you’re passing along data. Campaign websites, including for both Trump and Biden, often contain hidden trackers that, for example, tell Facebook you were there and then allow campaigns to target ads to you in the future.

Smartphones also now allow campaigns to know where we go in the physical world. The Wall Street Journal reported that campaigns for both parties have used location-data brokers to target people who attend in-person rallies. It’s now even possible for campaigns to identify people who set foot in churches, and — based on the frequency of their visits — target them with specific ads.

Sometimes, your politically active friends can be a source. Campaign apps and volunteer texting campaigns often ask people to upload their contacts list.

4. Other politicians

When campaigns end, sometimes they pay the bills or help out a friendly campaign by selling their data. Contact information for donors is particularly valuable. (No wonder Congress is not eager to legislate.) The fine print in Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s privacy policy reads: “We may share information about you … with candidates, organizations, campaigns, groups or causes that we believe have similar political viewpoints.”

Political parties themselves have also become among the largest sources of data to campaigns, doling out access to campaigns they want to support — and starving the ones they don’t. (Campaign finance laws prohibit candidates and national parties from coordinating their data with outside groups that raise money from unlimited sources.)

RNC press secretary Mandi Merritt told me the committee’s data is taken from voter registration files, information collected by volunteers, and consumer data such as magazine subscriptions, what kind of car a voter drives and whether a voter has a gym subscription. (Voters who have gym memberships are more reliable voters, she said.)

“Our historic investment in building a robust data infrastructure has given us an unprecedented ability to target and engage with voters on the issues they care about,” Merritt said.

Nellwyn Thomas, the chief technology officer of the DNC, said her party acquires data from firms that use “ethical data practices,” though she declined to name them other than Experian. “There are absolutely times we have turned down data sets where we believe the collection methods do not live up to our standards,” she said.

Thomas also said combining data resources inside DNC systems, where it’s accessed by some 9,000 campaigns, helps to ensure our privacy by keeping it secure.

But once your data is in the hands of a political party or campaign, there’s little transparency about what happens to it, or what ethical rules apply to using it. For example, do campaigns need your consent to send you texts? My phone is chock-full of evidence some think they do not.

And unfortunately, California’s don’t-sell-my-data privacy law doesn’t apply to campaigns or parties. When I sent them data requests, they either ignored me or told me go stuff it. Neither the RNC or DNC would share my data with me when I asked as a journalist, either.

If you want some of the targeted ads to go away, the DNC’s Thomas suggests voting early — that will update party databases, and campaigns won’t want to waste money on you. 

5. Facebook

Even 3,000 data points on a voter pales in comparison to the gobs that Facebook collects about what its members share and do on and off the social network. Facebook is quick to say it doesn’t sell our data to anyone, but its ad-targeting abilities are extraordinarily valuable. That’s one reason the Trump and Biden campaigns have spent more than $210 million on the social network in 2020, according to OpenSecrets, far more than the $81 million Facebook says the Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigns spent in the 2016 race.

Facebook allows, for example, a campaign to upload a list of people it knows are responsive to a particular message and then use the social network’s algorithms to find a “look-alike audience” of new people to target. Facebook has acknowledged the power and peril of its microtargeting capabilities: For the week before Election Day, Facebook has paused allowing new political ads to be created (though existing ads will still be around).

In the name of transparency, Facebook now offers a button you can click labeled “Why You’re Seeing This Ad.” But I haven’t found it very useful, in part because it doesn’t explain how my experience — the ads I see — might be different from yours.

Remember my Hugh the Borg ad? Facebook’s disclosure said only the Biden campaign wanted to reach people in the United States who were 18 or older. I wasn’t convinced that was the only reason. Sure enough, digging through my Facebook advertising settings, I discovered from years of tracking my life that Facebook on its own had decided that Star Trek was one of my advertising “interests.”

After logging in to a website that needed a username and password, the screen just went blank. After a few tries, I resorted to the classical work around of trying the website in another browser. I usually work in Chrome but I also have Thunderbird and Microsoft Edge installed on my machine. 

I encountered the same problem with Thunderbird, so I concluded that this was not a browser problem. I contacted technical support for the website. After a long-winded online chat session I did get logged in. But later that day I found that logging in from the browser still failed with the blank screen. 

The next step is a Windows reboot. I had ruled this out because everything else on my computer was working normally.

When I clicked the Windows “Shut Down” options, I noticed that there was an entry there for “Update and restart”. 

This triggered some memories of unstable behavior in the past when software updates had been installed but were waiting for a final reboot. After I did the Update and restart, my browser could login to the website.

So what is the problem here? 

Earlier versions of Windows had an option to ask before doing a software update. But a lot of users were not installing software updates. Their machines were vulnerable to virus and other software attacks because they didn’t have the latest security patches. So Microsoft changed this policy and automatically updates Windows 10 machines.

A good way to see if your machine is in the middle of a software update is to look in the Shut Down menu. If there is the extra entry for “Update and restart” you should do this as soon as possible to avoid some very strange and unpredictable behavior.

I was working on my laptop in the kitchen instead of my office where I usually work. I noticed that the login to Windows was really slow. I was further from the router than normal, so my Internet connection was probably a little slower. Why should this affect a simple login?

I remembered that I set up Windows 10 with a Microsoft account. There were many recommendations to do this and it didn’t seem to be that easy to use an alternative.

I reviewed the “advantages” of using a Microsoft account, and didn’t really see any that were relevant to the way I use my PC, or to the way I suspect most other people use Windows. I don’t use many Microsoft apps and I didn’t see any value to synchronize my laptop with my Android phone or iPad (if Microsoft software even works very well with “foreign” machines).

I found that it is not that difficult to switch from a Microsoft account to a Local Account. Just go into Settings and search for Accounts/My info.

Once this was done, sure enough my Windows login was a lot faster. To see a noticeable speedup like this, a fair amount of data must have been transmitted (sent and/or received) between my computer and Microsoft servers.

So what was my PC sending to Microsoft?

I have no idea. I spent some time researching this question and I could not find any detailed explanations from Microsoft or third party tech experts.

Whatever data is being copied, I would rather none of it get stored on Microsoft servers. If you have similar concerns, switch your Windows user to a Local Account.

When I created this blog, I wanted it to include my earlier Virus Info email messages. So I simply copied and pasted each email into a blog post. They all looked good.

Then a reader informed me he was seeing image.png instead of images in one of the blogs.

I found that Firefox in Windows and Safari on my iPad had this problem. I had never seen any of these broken images because I always use Chrome.

For my blog I use the platform WordPress. I compose the blog message in a word processing type window. WordPress converts it to HTML so that it will display on a website. Clearly it was not generating the correct HTML for all browsers.

WordPress is big, really big.

“WordPress is the most popular web management system in the world and is used by nearly 75 million websites. According to WordPress, more than 409 million people view more than 23.6 billion pages each month and users produce 69.5 million new posts and 46.8 million new comments every month.”

So how could my simple copy and paste fail so badly?

Software bugs.

Trying to contact WordPress for help to correct this would have been a long, arduous process. So I did some experimentation and found a way to “fix” this myself. In each blog, I saved the images separately to my computer, deleted them from the blog message and then copied in the saved images.

When you signed up with an Internet Service Provider (ISP) you probably got a range of options for download speed, ranging from 10 Mbps (Megabits per second) up to 1 Gbps per second (1000 Mbps).

A byte is 8 bits, so 10 Mbps is 1.25 MB per second.

At 50 Mbps (40 MB/s), you will get good Internet access including HD (High-definition) streaming and online gaming. Plus you can share the connection with 3–4 other computers without noticing a slowdown. You can download high resolution photos in seconds and HD videos in just a few minutes.

Let’s suppose you have 50 Mbps service. Can you actually download data from the Internet this fast?

It depends on the Wi-Fi speed between your computer and the router. Here’s a typical home set up for your Internet connection. Anything using the Internet has to first send the data over the Wi-Fi network.

Wi-Fi is subject to a lot of noise interference (see the previous blog). Generally, the further your computer is from the router the slower your Wi-Fi connection is going to be because of interference from walls, ceilings and any other large objects in the path.

You can measure the speed of your Wi-Fi connection with this tool.
https://www.speedtest.net

The Wi-Fi is network is shared among all the computers in your house so you need to run this from each device that uses the Internet. If you find that some of your Wi-Fi speeds are low, you should see if you can move the router and/or the computer so they are closer together.

Then add up all the Wi-Fi download speeds to see if your Internet connection is fast enough when all computers are streaming video. If the Wi-Fi total is greater than your Internet speed on your plan, you might want to consider upgrading to a higher speed. But if the Wi-Fi total is less than your Internet plan, you may want to change your Internet plan so you are paying for only the speed you can use.

I was happily working on my computer in my home office the other day and suddenly most of the tabs in my browser reported a network error.

Like most home Internet setups, my computer uses a Wi-Fi wireless connection to connect to the router provided by my Internet Service Provider (ISP). The router connects to a modem that sends your request to the ISP network where it gets forwarded on to the Internet.

 
I went into the Wi-Fi settings on my Windows computer, disconnected the Wi-Fi and then reconnected it. You can find the Wi-Fi settings by using the Search on the Taskbar (magnifying glass icon).

I went back to work and for a time everything was fine. But then I lost the Wi-Fi again. I checked on my mobile phone and it still had a Wi-Fi connection. So there was no problem with the Wi-Fi router, it was strictly a local problem on my computer.

I looked along a line of sight from my computer to the router which was downstairs in the kitchen and tried to think of what might be blocking the signal. Well right front of me I saw that the door to my room was closed. Now I often work with the door closed but this time on a hunch I got up and opened the door. Now after I reset the Wi-Fi it worked for the rest of the day without any further outages.

Why did this happen?

Wi-Fi is a radio signal. As such, it is subject to all kinds of noise disruptions. If you have ever listened to an analog radio, you know that there is often interference and you get crackle and other noises. For a digital signal such as Wi-Fi, the tiniest little noise that you wouldn’t even notice on a radio is enough to signal an error. Internet data is sent in packets typically about 1,500 bytes long. Any error in the packet means that the whole packet is discarded and the sender has to transmit the whole packet again. So a small amount of interference or noise on your Wi-Fi connection can create a lot of retransmissions that result in long delays when you are trying to use the Internet.

A major source of interference in our house is the microwave oven. Microwave uses radio signals that are in the same frequency band as our Wi-Fi, the 2.4 GHz frequency band. Our Internet router is in the kitchen and whenever the microwave is on it effectively knocks out the Internet for everybody.

Cordless phones, baby monitors and garage door openers also use the 2.4 GHz frequency band, so they can also interfere with your Wi-Fi.

Some routers support another Wi-Fi frequency band, at 5 GHz. If your router has this option, you will see another Wi-Fi network name in your device’s WiFi settings. You might want to consider using it instead of 2.4 GHz.

5 GHz is faster and less prone to interference from other devices since fewer devices use this frequency. However 5 GHz may have a smaller coverage area and is less successful at penetrating solid objects.

So computers that aren’t too far from the router should use 5 GHz. But mobile phones which move around and may be farther away from the router should use 2.4 GHz.